Reviews

Even a fire alarm and evacuation on opening night at the Hayes could only briefly pause the energy and enthusiasm. Raw and vibrant, Rent returns joyously to it’s Off-Broadway roots at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre Co.

Rent borrows its plot from La Boheme, transporting the bohemian characters to New York’s East Village in the early 1990s, where the artistic community is being ravaged by HIV/AIDS and threatened by gentrification, re-setting the operatic plot with a rock musical theatre score.

Josh McConville unfortunately was too ill to perform his lead as Hamlet on the opening night I attended. Understudy Scott Sheridan put in a magnificent performance in McConville’s place. If you didn’t know Sheridan was the understudy, you’d never guess. His performance is a psychological case study, moving from maddened with the loss of his father through to flagrantly insane, and there are moments when his mood changes instantaneously. He papers over his misery with humour bordering on hysteria—his clowning is darkly funny, but also alarming.

April de Angelis’ historical/feminist play is set in the late17th Century when Charles II was restored to the English throne after the rigid ‘rule’ of Oliver Cromwell.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a tall, slim, rangy woman.  Hers is the body of an athlete, perhaps from Somalia or the Sudan.  She stands turned away in the corner of the performance space.  (There is no stage, just a space, surrounded by translucent curtains.)  She is moving, but we can’t see her face.  She shakes, she quivers, she undulates, she trembles, she shivers.  Sometimes her bare feet stomp and her knees almost buckle.  Almost.  Her long beautiful arms reach out, making fleeting gestures that seems for mere moments to suggest so many things: an