Reviews

A thought provoking, sensory experience.

When I agreed to review The Q’s Frankenstein, I was intrigued by the show’s description of a cross-disciplinary performance, using a live musical score, text from Mary Shelley’s original novel and parts of the classic film to retell a tale of doom and destruction.

Not having had a lot of exposure to contemporary theatre (I am more of a musical kind of gal), I didn’t know what to expect and wondered if I would find it weird or if I would even understand it.

Holland St Productions is known for producing quirky, original work, so Gutenberg the Musical, developed by Scott Brown and Anthony King, which had a solid Off-Broadway run, is a departure from their usual fare in many ways. Stylistically though, this show could have been written by Tyler Jones and Robert Woods, Holland St’s usual musical collaborators - a wild and unusual, small cast musical, irreverent and clever, with an off-beat charm.

The World Without Birds is a wry lament for a woman’s life.  The title is both metaphor and play on words.  The show could easily slip into a long whinge, but here any bitterness or rage is mitigated by rueful wit, humour, the incredulity of hindsight  (‘Did I really do that?’) and the philosophical shrug. 

The best thing about Bell Shakespeare’s Othello is Ray Chong Nee.

He brings strength and charisma to the warrior Moor but also an unusual humanizing lyricism of manner (perhaps from his Islander background), which helps makes true Othello’s impossibly fast slide into jealous obsession.   

Chong Nee in fact unravels too much, by the end dwindling into an epileptic animal shuffling off to strangle Desdemona.