Reviews

Tonight was the 50th performance of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Opening in Oxford in 1862, this balletic adaptation of the famous novel sticks closely to its original text. Alice, played by Principal Artist Ako Kondo and her sisters (Jill Ogai and Karen Nanasca) are being entertained by Lewis Carrol himself (Adam Bull). One by one the guests arrive for a party most played by Principal Artists.  It’s beautiful to be sure and promising of some wonderful dance to come.

This feat of theatre is epic and audiences are ‘loving it’.   It is exquisitely staged, clever and entrancing.

Tim Winton’s story is about two young families, the Pickles and the Lambs, who share a ramshackle house, as their children grow and lives change in the decades after WWII.  Some aspects of each family develop and some disintegrate.  It is a much-loved work and a favorite Australian novel of many.

Taxithi is an enthralling homage to the wave of Greek migrants who arrived in Australia in the 1950’s and 60’s, in particular to those strong women who sailed here with heavy hearts and spent a lifetime yearning for their homeland, their loved ones and their Hellenic identity.

Helen Yotis Patterson has skilfully written a heartfelt piece of verbatim theatre and fused it with moving pieces of Greek folk music, or rebetika, which was popularised during the period that the Greek migrants become an indelible part of our Australian society. 

In this intimate, beautifully acted production, Arthur Miller tells his story of 1947 America through a mid-Western family, the Kellers, and their neighbours.  Set two years after the end of WWII, it tells of individualism versus community, of the ruthless ethos of ‘winning and ‘success’ at any cost, of idealism versus hard-headed pragmatism, of the big lie in plain sight and of the rationale of the of ‘family’.  You might go to see this because it’s a venerable if ‘old’ play, or because it stars Sally Field, Bill Pullman and Jenna C