Reviews

Flaws and All – the Musical is a dichotomy – a new Australian musical played with American accents, yet there’s nothing intrinsically American about the concept – the unrealistic dating expectations of modern women. Conceived and written by 30-something marketing professional Angela Monteagle (who also wrote the lyrics), this vanity production comes direct from a season at the Adelaide Festival Fringe. All creatives are Brisbane based including the cast who have been culled from performers who usually work for Savoyards and Prima.

Ken Ludwig’s American farce Leading Ladies is Mordialloc Theatre Company’s final season of the year.

Taking place over a month in the Spring of 1952, the plot revolves around two British actors in York, Pennsylvania who are down on their luck. After reading about a dying heiress who is searching for long-lost relatives from England, they decide to impersonate the men, only to frantically discover that the missing nephews… are actually nieces!

Is it just synchronicity that five musical legends all died (mostly by their own hand) at the age of 27? Is that the age at which we have to own who we are and quit hiding behind the mask of being a “kid”? For some that transition to adulthood, seriousness, responsibility, is just too hard to make. On the ‘plus’ side, an early death brings a kind of immortality to performers who might otherwise have been swept up in the juggernaut of fame and ultimately replaced and forgotten.

The Carnival of Lost Souls is a macabre yet rather engaging piece of ‘circus theatre’ in the spirit, if not scale of Cirque du Soliel. The setting for the rather loose narrative that involves desire, betrayal and revenge, is an old gothic 19th Century Music Hall.