Reviews

Having encountered the Young Australian Broadway Chorus before, I was keen to see another production, and it was amazing! Once again it showcased a young, energetic cast with tight choreography and strong singing.

The feature that particularly impressed me was the wealth of spectacular costumes. It seemed that no sooner had the ensemble gone off stage at the end of one frenetic number, than they were back on in a completely different costume for another.

Performers can be stars without having extraordinary talent; and some can have extraordinary talent without ever becoming stars. It’s quite rare for a performer to combine both without being a household name, but then Trevor Ashley is a rarity in so many ways. Most recently seen stunning audiences as M.

First performed at last year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival and now in Melbourne for Midsumma, Cole is a cabaret show on the life and songs of Cole Porter as performed by singer-pianist Michael Griffiths. The clever script by Anna Goldsworthy weaves together a generous selection of timeless Porter tunes with anecdotes taken from his personal life, peppered with plenty of those bon mots he was known for knocking off.

Louis Nowra’s 1985 classic The Golden Age sprang from a decade when our playwrights  wrote not domestic snapshots but big picture, big cast, thematically ambitious epics.

Nowra’s ironically titled play follows the discovery after nearly a century of a lost tribe of convicts in the wilds of Tasmania, but also trips through the collapse of civilisations from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany.  This is no less than the clash of culture and nature, of classes, of settler and indigenous histories, and what’s forging our national identity.