Reviews

SPIN is an astounding educational dance experience devised, directed and performed by the contemporary deaf dance artist Anna Seymour and her deaf team creatives.

Seymour’s dance residencies took her across the Americas and through Europe but her time spent at the International Deaf Dance Festival in San Francisco galvanized her experiences, to devise a ‘similar’ show with her fellow creatives in Melbourne, who are committed to raising deafness and music connection awareness.

The title tells you what this 2015 one-act play is about.  We’ve got John, Paul, George and Ringo in a room.  We don’t know where – or even why - but it seems they might be on tour – although a single bottle of Scotch in a dressing room seems meagre for such huge stars.  We don’t know when, but the dialogue refers to ‘films’ – plural – so that’s after A Hard Day’s Night and Help!  It’s probably 1965 and – although he’s not named – it’s after they’ve met

Rentis the 1996 Tony Award winning Best Musical. Set in a Bohemian Alphabet City in the 90s, a group of friends struggle with their careers, love lives and the effects of the AIDS epidemic on their community.

Written by Jonathan Larson as a “rock opera for the MTV generation”, the story captures the Bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village in a rock musical score loosely based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme. Its success as one of the longest running musicals on Broadway also transformed the direction and style of rock music theatre.

Cambridge University, 1896.  Women are permitted to attend, they can pass their courses, but they cannot graduate, no matter how brilliant or, at the very least, as equally brilliant as the male undergraduates.  They struggle for their rights against prejudice, condescension, virulent misogyny and sheer gobsmacking nonsense - such as the claim that if women overtax their brains, it will affect their ‘vital organs’.  The play covers a year in the lives of four highly talented, committed women, each prepared – as if it’s an either/or choice – to sa