Reviews

This show features 15 iconic First Nations songs, reworked by smooth singer Adam James, backed by a 13-piece jazz orchestra – and it is one of the most enjoyable evenings of Australian music you will ever experience. I absolutely loved every minute of it. Having made his mark as a country singer, Adam James is getting back to his childhood roots and reinventing himself as ‘The Quandamooka Crooner’, revisiting the African-American swing, soul, jazz and blues that he and his family grew up singing and dancing to.

IF EVER there was a case of a reviewer’s reservations being swept away in one fell swoop then this is it.

I had always considered this to be a lesser work from the pen of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and when the announcement was made that this company was going to mount this work, I admittedly had some doubts as to the wisdom of the choice.  I need not have worried.

Playwright and novelist Jeff Baron has many plays to his credit, none more performed worldwide than Galleon’s latest production, Visiting Mr Green. Experienced director Vicky Horwood took on the task of breathing new life into this two-hander. A story told by co-protagonists, takes place in the Upper West Side Manhattan apartment of Mr Green – an elderly Jewish gentleman with a cantankerous nature, who is still mourning the loss of his wife, Yetta.

The Summer of the Seventeeth Doll is a truly great play. This production, the first since the recent death of Ray Lawler aged 93, never allows the audience to forget that fact. Dominating the stage, a large photograph of Lawler is suspended.

Robert Jarman has eschewed the standard box set. Whilst beautifully dressed, the stage blacks frame the action like the dusty swags of a studio portrait. There is a piano and a table and the clutter of seventeen years, but none of it is as real as Olive would like to think it is.