Reviews

New Voices is a new project in which 3rd Year Actors from WAAPA are given the opportunity to devise and perform their own works. This is the second season, the first being in March, and each showcases different members of this final year cohort.

This part features six short works that are original, varied, sharp and exciting. All very well acted, the variety is good and the performance felt much shorter than it actually was - credit to good pace and nicely curated performances.

National Musical Theatre tours may not have been touring Western Australia lately, but we certainly haven’t been starved for large-scale musical theatre. The latest show to hit our stages, brought to us from new company Arise Productions, is Kinky Boots, which delighted a very vocal opening night audience.

Tons of enthusiasm on stage was clearly contagious, as the audience response showed that they were rapt in this fun and vibrant show.

As its name suggests, the Flight Path Theatre building in Marrickville sits right under the flight path into Sydney’s airport. Regular hard-to-ignore landing noise requires actors to raise their voices often. But it’s amazing how a collective concentration between performers and a small (20-plus) audience can shut out excess noise, as happened during the performance of Yielding by Emma Workman, the first of the two short plays that constituted the evening.

“You can’t go back”, the Woman says in the final moments of 7 Stages of Grieving.

Yet Sydney Theatre Company has gone back mount a fourth production. What is it about this play that makes a company “go back” to it again, and again? STC Artistic Director Kip Williams explains some of the reasons:

“It is a formally revolutionary landmark of Aboriginal theatre.”

“It has left an indelible mark on the arts landscape.”