ABR Arts
The Lady in the Van may be a great comic character, but she is one of the unlikelier Britons ever to earn a blue plaque in her honour. Yet one now adorns the façade of 23 Gloucester Crescent, the London address that she besieged for fifteen years. Alan Bennett – her landlord of sorts ...
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In this era of the jukebox musical, it is not surprising that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalent, the pasticcio opera, should be undergoing a revival. A couple of seasons ago, New York's Metropolitan Opera created a version, The Enchanted Island, which received a mainly ...
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The gestation of some of Giuseppe Verdi's operas was more tumultuous than his often twisted plots. Luisa Miller – which is now being seen in Sydney prior to a shorter season in Melbourne – was as fraught as any of them? Salvatore Cammarano owed the Teatro San Carlo in Naples a libretto ...
... (read more)The Update - March 8, 2016
Monday, 22 February 2016
The return of Olivier Messiaen, La Mama seeks submissions from patrons and performers, Green Room Awards nominees announced, Porter Prize ceremony ...
... (read more)The Update - March 22, 2016
Monday, 22 February 2016
Why is bad singing so funny? Why do missed high notes induce such hilarity? Is it all vaudeville or a case of Schadenfreude? Curiously, we have two new films about the egregious soprano par excellence, Florence Foster Jenkins (whose awful recordings are legendary and who died soon after ...
... (read more)The Update - February 23, 2016
Monday, 22 February 2016
Sydney Symphony Orchestra flash sale, States of Poetry, Winner of the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award announced, fortyfivedownstairs's new season, Cancellation of the ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Award, Newcastle Writers' Festival ...
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As a not-quite-indefatigable cultural itinerant, my memories of Perth are all of festival time. Usually, my arrival is the signal for the temperature to leap into the mid-forties, imbuing the experience with a patina of sweat and a dose of climatic paranoia. PIAF 2016, artistic director Wendy ...
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In 1950 a number of Hollywood screenwriters, including Dalton Trumbo, were sentenced to almost a year's imprisonment for contempt of Congress. Their 'crime' was a failure to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee about their involvement with the Communist ...
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Many wonderful things have been written about this sprawling gem of a play since it was first staged in 1993. Two decades later, it still bamboozles, delights, and moves its audience in its uncompromising search for meaning in love and science. This was a production in genuine homage to one ...
... (read more)The Update - February 9, 2016
Monday, 08 February 2016
On the unanimity of arts critics,Want to work at Australian Book Review?, Two indigenous scholarships from the Melbourne Theatre Company, and Bruckner galore ...
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