Reviews

A heroine, a loyal sidekick, a villain, love, sacrifice and a happy ending are some of the key ingredients of a Disney movie, but when you put that on a stage, add stunning costumes and sets, strong vocals and an impressive orchestra, you have a fantastic show. Birdie’s production of the Little Mermaid is all this and more.

About four months ago, I was talking to Executive Producer, Rodney Bertram about his crew’s plans for the show and he told me how they wanted to bring the “Disney magic” to the stage. They certainly achieved this!

Kitty Flanagan’s sharp wit and astute cultural observations are finely tuned in this ‘smashing’ show. Flanagan mocks everything from fashionable words, personal relationships, and intimacy to our contemporary internet obsessed life. She leaves no stone unturned when it comes to highlighting bizarre and often less than graceful behaviour in our society, and Flanagan mimics this with incredible precision. Her energy and vibrancy produce non-stop hilarious humour which is intelligent and biting.

Opening night of Cock was refreshingly ready for an audience.  There was no evidence of a lack of time spent in the rehearsal room in this superbly directed (Beng Oh) 2009 work by British playwright Mike Bartlett. 

Cock is about relationships, sexual identity, romantic relationships, and performed identity.  At its heart is the suggestion that the act of sex can be isolated from gender and feelings of love, and, an individual’s behaviour can be controlled by social expectations and the coercion of others.

With a style like a movie thriller, Peter Evans’ Antony and Cleopatra is fast-paced, witty and exciting, and its tight, lean edit makes it fresh and comprehensible to a modern relatively lay audience. Every production of Shakespeare needs to decide to whom to pitch, and here, Evans seems to have aimed at a broader, more youthful group. Purists hanging out to hear each line of the sacred text for the richness of meaning and poetry probably consider it butchery, but I like the way each scene drives forward.