Reviews

Setting aside some musical theatre productions, it is a rare thing to assemble singers, actors and contemporary dancers on stage in a dramatic, meaningful form that genuinely succeeds.  Wudjang: Not The Past flawlessly integrates these elements in an ambitious and very personal work for choreographer/Artistic Director Stephen Page.  It is also his last work for Bangarra as he prepares to hand over the directorial mantle to colleague Frances Rings.  The work premiered at the Sydney Festival in January and has been greeted with standing ovations here in Adelai

Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is a form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted - created spontaneously by the performers. In the case of the tightly performed 60 minutes of Letters To The Editor, the audience, using a random ‘marker pen voting model’ (possibly useful for the slew of upcoming elections across the country), choose a letter from the day’s local paper. In our case the theme and heading was, ‘Truth Telling’ done with a political flavour.

We were lucky to see the QSO perform in their studio for the first time in 2022 – given that their instruments were stuck in a storage room and couldn't be accessed due to the recent flooding in Brisbane. So, the musicians had to beg, borrow and steal replacements and fast-track their rehearsal time to only one week! That did not alter the top notch musicianship on display in the intimate space of the studio in the ABC's building on South Bank – which rises up an incline just enough to have missed the damage caused by the rising river.

On a large graffiti wall that punches out from the otherwise simple set, coarse one-word insults and tribal sports team tributes dominate a more poignant scrawl: ‘I adored you. You left me behind’.  It’s one of the recurring themes of Brothers, a new play by Kerry Drumm, premiering here at the Adelaide Fringe, before touring to its Edinburgh older sibling.