Reviews

The last time I saw Renée Geyer live was at the Narooma Blues Festival, with a packed-out enthusiastic crowd. This time, I simply paid $12 shortly before lights up at the Memo Music Hall in Melbourne and clicked the link on my iPad.

Renée and her band were set up as usual, but there was no crowded dance floor; no diehard “Renéegades” crammed in front of the stage. This seemed to make no difference to Ms Geyer and her tight band – they revved up the intro and played with every ounce of energy that a live gig requires.

In this contemporary set production of one of Shakespeare’s late and most complex, layered and contradictory plays, Ralph Fiennes plays Antony as an already fading playboy.  The erstwhile war hero, in his mind responsible for young Caesar’s power, teeters on the brink of over the hill, trading on his past glories, drinks too much, getting a little porky, silver threads in beard and hair – and sexually obsessed with Sophie Okonedo’s quicksilver Cleopatra.  She is skittish, imperious, girlish, peremptory, sensual, cold, impulsive, calculating, uninhi

Director and choreographer Andy Blankenbauehler won a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award and the Chita Rivera Award for his choreography for Bandstand, and it’s the thing that sweeps and elevates you away with this musical.

Set in the post-war period after World War 2, it’s about returned vets trying to re-establish their lives as civilians.

Whilst we may have bemoaned in the past the lack of access to some of the West End’s most challenging offerings, London’s National Theatre goes a long way to rectifying the problem with its series of filmed plays.