Reviews

Cherish is a play centred around two gay couples who, in their efforts to achieve a comfortable ideal, only succeed in creating a mass of complications. Set in an unnamed location, the characters’ long-standing relationships are tested by love, loyalty and self-interest.

The two females are Jess and Maeve, who in turn have each had a child by Tom. However, Tom, who is in a long-running relationship with the older William, would like a child of his own, with Jess willing to be the surrogate mother. Surrogate motherhood, however, can have its own challenges.

The Disappearing Act is a fabulous one-woman comedy show by Maria Angelico, who has recently acted on Australian screens in the ABC series The Newsreader and New Golden Mountain on SBS. Angelico delves deep into her life resources and pulls more than your average white rabbit out of her hat. This is a hilarious all smoke and mirrors true story.

In the world of music, a ‘Toy Symphony’ is a piece played on children’s toy instruments, resulting in a juvenile cacophony of dings and squeaks backing a melody with an underlying strain of sadness. You could say the same of Michael Gow’s Helpmann award-winning play Toy Symphony ­– written in 2007 after a writing break of nearly a decade while working as Artistic Director at Queensland Theatre. It is about a writer (Roland Henning) struggling with writers’ block.

When the Pink Flamingo opened in 2019, it brought back a style and mode of entertainment which hadn’t been seen in more than 50 years. Swanky, sophisticated and classy, it showed us a glimpse of the nightclubs of old, when people dressed in their finest clothes, drank the finest bubbles, and watched cabaret whose excellence was never in question. It was a bold move by Susan Porret and her business partner Tony Rigas, and some questioned whether this kind of entertainment, once the domain of the casinos and supper-clubs, had any place in the 21st Century.