Reviews

What do you get when you take 6 women (in varying stages of their personal journeys), an isolated bush hut, alcohol and 4 days at the mercy of the elements and wild life? A hilarious piece of theatre!

Helen Maden has taken this play and talented cast and created a memorable piece of theatrical magic. The séance scene (pictured) is a fine example.

The ensemble cast bounce of each other (and everything that they bump into) with flare and take the audience along for the experience.

On a huge screen, across the whole upstage wall of the tiny Brunswick Arts Space, twenty women – wildly different in life experience, attitude, age, ethnicity, profession and appearance – answer questions about life, work, happiness, love and children.  This is filmmaker Carol Cumming’s contribution to the piece.  The women are (mostly) unself-conscious, engaging and ponder the questions seriously.

In reviving Big River, Ballina has presented a seldom seen musical and what a joy it is.

Paul’s staging of the story based on Mark Twain’s loveable characters including Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, is full of wit interwoven with Roger Miller’s music, a fabulous set including the raft “floating” down the mighty Mississippi is certainly a force to be reckoned with: so much so it has received 3 short list nomination’s for this years Gold Coast Area Theatre Awards to be announced next month.

Steadily unravelling the secrets that have lain in wait for up to 54 years in the memories of three survivors of World War II, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and escape from war-sundered Budapest for eventual arrival in Melbourne, this multidimensional piece reveals the desperate responses that desperate circumstances wrought of good people simply trying to get by.  And it skilfully sets about revealing the way in which those living with these memories of loss and compromise can contain complexities of gentleness and vehemence, of perspicuity and blindness, of deep humanity an