Reviews

It's here! It was 12 years in the planning (and re-planning and rescheduling) but it's here! Wyong Shire has her very own multi-purpose performance arts space. Pulling up in front of the former Memorial Hall site now feels totally surreal. With it's streamlined, glass visage, through to the spacious foyer, very high ceilings and the 500 seat theatre (with balcony seating!) you could be forgiven for mumbling to yourself “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Wyong anymore”.

Ninna Tersmann began working on her play about asylum seekers in Sweden ten years ago.  She interviewed refugees and asylum speakers with traumatic experiences whose stories were nevertheless not believed.  She interviewed frustrated lawyers, police officers, doctors, nurses, interpreters and politicians.  Ten years ago, she says in a program note, the situation was already difficult. 

There is a new voice in Australian musical theatre – and like the Broadway sensation Hamilton, it is set to the rhythm of rap, but with a jazz music score.

One theatre veteran in the foyer described it as the best lyrics to a new locally written work in decades. Here is a taste.

"We went to arrest him, carefully planned it,

caught him red-handed - his confession was candid

but when the man took the stand he recanted,

You understand what duty demanded:

The world of Burlesque and the thirties is all but dead and buried, and so Beane’s play, The Nance, is as much a historical document as a dramatic work (with a bit of musical thrown in). For people of my age, it brings back memories of our youth (even though we were part of the first re-telling of the history, and not around in the thirties themselves). For the young, it is a quaint history lesson of an era that is rarely covered even on Screen (The Night They Raided Minsky’s) or stage (Gypsy, Little Me).