Reviews

Koorliny Arts Centre’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe might easily be described as ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – Spectacular’. This lavish, large scale production - featuring a large ensemble, puppet magic and strong visuals - is a sensory delight.

A strongly written new work, crafted by Scott McArdle, this edgy and moving coming of age story follows a pair of teenagers as they help each other deal with trauma.

Late one afternoon, young teens wander through the bush in an outer suburb. Lucy says, with some excitement, that there is a dying kangaroo bleeding badly from its guts. Arnold follows.

While it sounds rather disturbing, and deals with a slew of confronting issues, this beautifully told story is one of the best new works of the year, and a wonder to watch.

It seems only a minute ago that Chicago was in town, but in actual fact it’s been ten years since this vaudeville valentine played QPAC. In that time it has become the longest-running revival in Broadway history, and the longest-running American musical on Broadway, only surpassed by the Andrew Lloyd Webber behometh The Phantom of the Opera. It’s the musical for our age - big, brassy and vulgar with buckets of cynicism. Its satire of the ‘celebrity criminal’ hasn’t dated and seems even more relevant in this day and age of YouTube posts.

Sitting in the theatre next to a former psychiatric nurse, she was struck by how accurate the illnesses portrayed in the play were to real life. One “patient” in the drama was suffering from depression, another was bipolar, one suffered from an eating disorder, there is also drug addiction, pyromania, a patient afflicted by obsessive compulsive behaviour and another with a chronic shyness and social anxiety disorder. Any closer to home and my companion might have hopped onto the stage and completed a pill round.