Reviews

Ray Cooney’s farce Run for Your Wife belongs in the trouser-dropping tradition of Carry On movies with lots of broad sexual innuendo and characters that include vacuous bimbos, bumbling police-officers and stereotypical gays.

Hapless taxi-driver John Smith has two wives, two flats, and a split-second timing schedule as he juggles both. It all unravels one night when he gets mugged and ends up in hospital. That’s the premise of this comedy that ran 9 years in the West End.

Nestled into the base of the Dandenong Mountains, The Basin Theatre is exquisitely surrounded by bushland, just outside of suburbia.

Their second production for 2017 is the English farce, Forget-Me-Knot, a tricky script to tackle due to multiple twists and turns in the storyline, which is unfortunately riddled with inconsistencies. The Basin Theatre has performed quite well under the constraints provided by this awkward piece of writing.

When a young man graduates from Princeton he has to move to Avenue Q to live while he tries to find his purpose in life. This is a rundown, poor area of New York where he meets friends, finds love and then loses it for a while. What is different in this musical is that the majority of characters are puppets, not the pure innocent ones of Sesame Street which was the inspiration of the idea, but rather ones showing the full range of human strengths and weaknesses. There are only three human characters in the play.

Trevor Ashley (Hairspray and Priscilla) has created a magnificent show that celebrates the career and life of Dame Shirley Bassey. His tribute to the iconic Welsh singer goes well beyond impersonation. Ashley inhabits the persona, and her power and flamboyance are remembered with great irony and humour.