Reviews

Frankie McNair presents her first solo show at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. The comedian has been working hard, appearing around the country in the award-winning duo Sweaty Pits with Miriam Slater. Her performance of Frantasia sold-out in her hometown of Canberra.

While Sweaty Pits was fully sketch comedy, Frantasia is more stand-up, with a good seasoning of sketch. Her vision is to remind us of “the joy in play and the ridiculousness of life”. She harnesses this with hilarious and creative stories, enhanced with props and pop songs.

John takes me back to a time when plays in three acts (and two intervals) lasted four hours, and to settings of interiors that seem so complete you could move in for the night. Recently at the Reginald Theatre I’ve seen a single table stand as the setting for six generations of a family: not here. John is played on a set as complete, as polished and as real as anything I’ve seen in Sydney theatre for many years.

Opening night was the 118th performance of Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker and there really is nothing new here. Having said that, it’s a must see whenever it comes to town because The Nutcracker is a delightful narrative ballet telling the story of a young ballet students, Clara and her Christmas eve journey to wonderous lands where she will eventually be transformed into the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Few World War II stories are more touching than schoolgirl Anne Frank’s naïve description of the three years she and her family spent hiding with others from Nazi occupation above her father’s factory in Amsterdam.

Her guileless words tell the story of eight people crowded together in a makeshift hideout, keeping silent by day lest the factory hands grow suspicious. How they shared meagre rations scrounged on the black market by two trusted friends. How they lived in fear every moment of being informed upon by ruthless Nazi sympathisers.