Reviews

Both being married to other partners, it was just a brief affair in the Mexican summer of 1937 between the political revolutionary, Leon Trotsky​, and the artistic revolutionary, Frida​ Kahlo​.  So, what if they had a love-child? Natalie Gamsu​ is the fictitious Carmen Frida​ Leon Davidovich​, a hermaphrodite (or as she reminds us, intersex) who is the central character in Carmen Live or Dead, seeker of love in a world that does not understand what it is to be both male and female.

The Melbourne Cabaret Festival returns for its ninth year. The Opening Gala kicked things off with a bang, hosted by second-time Artistic Director, Dolly Diamond. Dolly certainly knows how to work a crowd, getting everyone laughing, cheering and singing along in no time. No one does sarcasm sharper than Dolly.

‘All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’  So goes Tolstoy’s oft-quoted dictum.  But the indigenous Darwin family in Jada Alberts’ play is worse than unhappy: they are shattered by the suicide of a family member - and their lives are shaped and defined by their indigenous past and present.  (Is it incidental that there is no father figure here?)  The play begins with the discovery of that suicide – a flashback to the main action.  Joey, whom we never see, has hung himself with fishing nets

Maggie Dence plays two characters in this touching drama about memory and aging: Marjorie and Prime Marjorie. In the first she is 85 and fast failing, lost in her past playing the violin, missing her husband dead for 10 years. In the second she is revived, her face is freshly painted, her attention centred on giving comfort to her fraught daughter Tess. Such are the wonders provided by Senior Serenity, the company who serve Primes to this futuristic Philip K. Dickian world.