Reviews

Cy Coleman’s score for City of Angels, a fusion of Broadway and jazz, is a real treat. Splendid voices and band do great justice to the music of this rarely performed musical at Rockdale Musical Society. Very occasionally the Matthew Reid’s bold, brassy and thoroughly enjoyable orchestra overwhelms the voices, though it’s basically only an issue where music underscores spoken passages (some of it seemingly pre-recorded, and spoken too quickly).

This universal Shakespearean tale, generally classed as one of Shakespeare’s comedies, has a strong element of emotional seriousness that challenges acting ability every bit as much as its comedic moments do.  Light moments certainly exist in profusion; but jolly camaraderie between superior and inferior officers holds an uneasy truce with military requirements of obedience, and lovers’ suspension of disbelief in magic easily yields to mistaken jealousy and rash response.  The balance between levity and gravity is a challenge; adversity easily becomes melodr

Anyone who has had the misfortune—excuse me,  blessing—of having a baby will relate to this wry, funny and poignant cabaret about the sheer horror—sorry, joys, challenges and disillusions—of marriage and parenthood. It's possibly the world's worse kept secret that having kids sucks sometimes. Yet still we persist in procreating, and this is the subject of Amity Dry's  musical Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life. The story is familiar, and that’s because the experience is almost universal.

Jennifer Marcus (Tegan Jones) is 22, a scientific genius, an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder sufferer, an agoraphobic, Chinese born but adopted by an American couple and living in California.  She yearns to meet her biological mother, the mother whom she thinks must have rejected her.  But how can she find this mother when the woman is somewhere in China and Jennifer cannot leave the house – not even to take out the garbage?  Such is the dilemma which provides the narrative impetus for this family drama meets sci-fi play.  The play’s primary problem is that it