Reviews

The songs of Joni Mitchell are complex lyrically and complicated musically, so it was refreshing that this show’s production was kept simple. A stark stage with a simple round table containing candles, incense and a pot of tea, and a portrait of Joni’s lower face, half hidden by a huge hat, propped on an easel upstage, are all the dressing this 70 minute cabaret needs.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s timeless classic The King and I is portrayed most effortlessly on the Gold Coast Little Theatre stage. With beautiful costumes and cheeky children, it is a great way to round out GCLT’s playbill for 2019.

The setting for this 1966 play by American great Edward Albee, 4 years after the iconic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, reads as follows: “The living room of a large and well-appointed suburban home”. Which is very difficult to achieve when you’ve only got two cents to rub together. Director/designer Victor Kalka has to make do with a row of boxed-in succulents and a well-stocked drinks trolley on his very wide stage. There’s no sign of a chair for anyone to sit on, or a small side-table, for the whole long evening. 

Nadine Garner transforms herself into Rosalind Franklin, X-ray crystallographer and one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.  ‘Photograph 51’ is an X-ray diffraction image taken by Franklin’s assistant, Raymond Gosling, under her direction, in May 1952 and it provided the key, the evidence for how DNA ‘works’ - the secret of Life.