Reviews

Ross Wilson has been a part of the music industry for over 50 years, starting in a blues band called The Pink Finks when he was in school, then going on to have commercial success with bands such as Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock.

The 2017 Adelaide Fringe audience were lucky enough to experience a selection of his back catalogue for 60 minutes and although the venue resembled a sauna in Adelaide’s century heat, it did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd.

FURΦES is a piece of avant-garde physical theatre that concentrates on the relationship between Orestes and the FurΦes, the personification of his guilt and madness after he killed his mother Clytemnestra. It is part of the ancient Greek saga The Oresteia involving the House of Atreus.

The ‘script’ for this devised work by Liam Ormsby is rather good, clear, concise and dramatic. There is also some rather clever and effective staging by Craig McArdle and excellent Sound Design and Music by Jakub Jankowski.

AMANDA PALMER is a major American chanteuse. Her songs are like a cross between Tom Lehrer and Kurt Weill. The emphasis, however, is on the lyrics, which (by her own admission) are ‘morose’ – endlessly ‘morose’.

She performed for over 2.5hrs to a devoted audience, mostly women, some of whom (a little annoying at times) sang along with her. I was a novice, and frankly, I started to become less interested in the songs but more in what she had to say about recent experiences, including her own artistic freedom as well as being a new mother.

American Idiot is the most exciting new rock-opera to appear on a Brisbane stage in over a decade. Shake and Stir’s launch into the big-time with this Australian premiere takes musical theatre on a blistering no-holds-barred journey that’s visceral and anarchic.