Reviews

Primadonna Productions’ Song Contest. The Almost Eurovision Experience starts in the foyer, with lovely ‘European’ people welcoming the audience to Minsk in Belarus, presenting them with “clackers” (“Is gift from Belarus government to you”, assigning you to a country and lending you a flag to wave. The atmosphere is joyous - which continues into the production.

Josh Mensch is a local artist who as a 17-year-old boy had a dream. As a self-professed drama kid, he always wanted to put on a Fringe show. It seems that stacking lettuces at a well-known supermarket was offering no stimulation, so he sat down to pen his one-man rhetoric.

Judy’s is a small venue within Holden Street Theatres. It only seats 20 people and on the night, I attended it was almost full. It is a small space made for an intimate show and this worked well with Mensch’s delivery.

While you shouldn’t anticipate the cinematic bells and whistles of MGM’s 1952 classic film musical Singin’ In The Rain, Rockdale Musical Society’s production of the stage version has technical bells and whistles all its own, along with plentiful lashings of charm.

The stage show sticks incredibly close to the rom-com script of the movie, set against a background of Hollywood transitioning from silent flicks to talkies and early musicals.

This event is such a fascinating union of classical music, dance and the art of choreography. We hear three different renditions of the same piece of music by Beethoven and watch three diverse works by female choreographers first programmed together by the Lyon Opera Ballet at the instigation of Artistic Director Yorgos Loukos in 2016. 

Maguy Marin, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Lucinda Childs are the creators, Childs’ work the only one commissioned whereas De Keersmaeker made her interpretation in 1992, and Marin hers in 2001.