Reviews

When Avenue Q won Broadway’s Tony Awards triple crown in 2003, some people were surprised. This deceptively simple musical (more a series of vignettes) which features “full frontal puppet nudity and other vulgarities” wasn’t the usual stuff that hit musicals were made of, but Robert Lopez and Jeff Mars channelled their inner kids to give us an Adults Only Sesame Street, and turned expectations upside down. Thirteen years later this new production proves that a good show is a good show, regardless of style or fashion.

Following a complicated and at times painful genesis, Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker has endured since the mid 1950’s and has also resulted in its well-known stage and screen offspring, the musical Hello Dolly!

The Matchmaker is an unlikely blend of comedy of manners and farce, which Adelaide’s Independent Theatre makes the most of with a very good current production directed by the company’s Artistic Director Rob Croser.

Broken is not the play you imagine it might be. The story concerns a woman who rolls her car on a highway in the Northern Territory, and the bond she forms with a mine worker who saves her life. But this sharply written and unusually staged production goes much deeper, capturing a profound sense of what it’s like to live in the remote outback and how three isolated characters struggle for a sense of connection and meaning.

Excellence is on show at the Playhouse. Once again the Queensland Ballet has shown how far they have come in five short years under the artistic leadership on Li Cunxin. Dancing better than ever, this young company’s talent was put to the test time and time again in their latest program Lest We Forget, a triple bill of dance works themed on the effects of war.