Reviews

This is surely the best week to spend a night with Paul Keating.  Jonathan Biggins’ masterful rendering of Australia’s 24th Prime Minister, with its witty cuts and tug to the values of true leadership, packs up and leaves us all to it on the day we must vote.

After two decades honing his Keating impersonation in the Wharf Revues, Biggins delivers a fully satisfying 90 minute autobiography of the man and the politician, from his own gilded, faintly Napoleonic sitting room (designer Mark Thompson).

A group of senior women in a care facility are trapped by rising floodwaters. All hopes for rescue seem dashed, when help appears in the form of a young woman called Hope. In preparing to evacuate, the women fight off a looter, challenge one another’s beliefs and reveal some of their darkest regrets.

Bare is not your usual musical. Sure, it’s about love and trust, but its also looks at them in a very different setting and through a much broader, more inclusive eye. Bare is the love story of two schoolboys in a catholic boarding school in America or anywhere. There are whimsical moments, very touching moments and some amusing moments – all told in thirty-six musical numbers that vary in pace and style. Singing a story isn’t ever easy. Singing it when it involves such poignantly contemporary themes is even more challenging.

Set in Georgia in the Caucasus, this epic play is one of the many plays and poems written by Bertolt Brecht and is a reflection of his thinking and, in some ways, his political beliefs. He brings to the storyline a reflection of his own life in the time of political instability, war and carnage as he developed his skills in various countries before returning to Berlin with many Marxist beliefs. He uses a baby to represent what is in dispute – the land and the people - and this becomes the symbol of unreason, disorder and injustice.