Reviews

Wild Dreamer Productions is a recent addition to the Gold Coast Theatre scene and their production of Void tells a story of the loss of an abducted child from both the mother and father’s points of view.

The scene is a local park where the mother used to take her 4-year-old daughter to play and on the child’s 4th birthday the little girl was kidnapped while her mother was checking her phone messages.

Presented as an ensemble piece in the style of La Boite's 2020 The Neighbourhood, The Time is Now is a 70-minute one-act show, with a cast of 10 young people aged 13 to 17, from a diverse mix of backgrounds: 8 young women and 2 young men.

Australian-born, but Paris-based, conductor Alexander Briger quipped it had taken him 50 years to finally conduct the QSO and then proceeded to show what we had been missing. He’s conducted all of the Australian state orchestras, but this was his Queensland debut. And what a showcase it was, two pieces from the central repertoire that never fail to please, Mozart’s Oboe Concerto in C, and Brahms’ Symphony No.2 in D.

Surveys tell us that more and more kids suffer from anxiety – and that the pandemic and its associated problems haven’t helped. When co-writer Oliver Kokai-Means was 9 he suffered so badly from anxiety that he couldn’t go to school. No one, including his teachers, understood how sad and alone he felt. He, and his playwright mother, Jennifer Kokai, decided to write a play to try and help people understand what it feels like to be so anxious when you are young – and to suggest some ways to cope with that feeling.