Reviews

With the Sydney Opera House starting long renovations on its opera theatre, Opera Australia now moves to the smaller playhouse with a modest experiment to match.

Two Weddings, One Bride is a hit collage of European operetta from more than a century ago, a juke-box of ancient show tunes but with new lyrics and the bedding of a new story by operetta expert, Robert Andrew Greene. 

With no orchestra, it’s all up to Greene on grand as music director with just violinist Yuhki Mayne. 

Shake & Stir's production of Dracula, an adaptation by cast members Nelle Lee and Nick Skubij that won it two Matilda awards in 2016, is touring for the majority of the year, including an unfortunately short season in Canberra.

Due to the company’s name and its church hall venue, some people may wrongly believe that St Jude’s Players is aligned to the church. They may also therefore think it unlikely the company would risk producing plays with content that may shock, such as nudity or sexually explicit dialogue. The company’s current production of David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly dispels all such misapprehension; St. Jude’s has demonstrated that, like all fine and independent theatre companies, they will never shy away from a good script.

For those, like me, who come to Dorothy Hewett's work for the first time it is necessary to take a deep breath before writing a Stage Whispers review of perhaps her greatest play. How could I have missed her scope, her grandeur, her quest for freedom in a nation uncertain of its standards?