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Bell Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet

Arts

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. To read ABR Arts articles in full, subscribe to ABR or take out an ABR Arts subscription. Both packages give full access to our arts reviews the moment they are published online and to our extensive arts archive.

Meanwhile, the ABR Arts e-newsletter, published every second Tuesday, will keep you up-to-date as to our recent arts reviews.

 

Recent reviews

Ngapa William Cooper 

Adelaide Festival
by •
09 March 2023
Lou Bennett and muscians performing at Ukaria (photographer Adam Forte)
For anyone who encountered Compassion, the profoundly moving and beautiful song cycle by Lior and Nigel Westlake from a decade ago, the prospect of hearing another work from them was always going to arouse interest. Would their newest collaboration rise to the same magical level as their first, or perhaps even surpass it? Would it be entirely different? ... (read more)

The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? 

Sydney Theatre Company
by •
06 March 2023
Claudia Karvan, Mark Saturno and Nathan Page (photograph by Prudence Upton)
In a tastefully designed, beautifully arranged living room, a couple are engaging in the sort of mildly erotic verbal jousting in which long and happily married couples might indulge. They are Martin Gray, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, just turned fifty, who has been chosen to design a futuristic, two-hundred-billion-dollar World City and his, in his words, bright, resourceful, intrepid wife, Stevie. ... (read more)

Macbeth 

Bell Shakespeare
by •
03 March 2023
Hazem Shammas as Macbeth and Jessica Tovey as Lady Macbeth (Photograph by Brett Boardman)
There is a moment often conveyed in romantic films (and it was certainly the case with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet) when fresh eyes meet across a crowded room and become fixated, unable to stop ‘looking’, searching for more and more of the alchemical fire that triggered an intense magnetism. ... (read more)

A Deep Black Sleep 

IHOS
by •
28 February 2023
A Deep Black Sleep (photograph by Mona/Jesse Hunniford)
In 1990, composer and artistic director Konstantin Koukias and production director Werner Ihlenfeld founded IHOS Opera in Tasmania. Audiences were excited and astonished by the scale and ambition of the director’s vision when they attended his earlier, spectacular productions such as Days and Nights of Christ, To Traverse Water, and Tesla. ... (read more)

Sydney Modern

Art Gallery of New South Wales
by •
April 2023, no. 452
Art Gallery of New South Wales (photograph by Iwan Baan)
Nearly three months have passed since the new building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) opened (3 December 2022). This summer, Sydney Modern, as the new North building by Japanese architectural firm SAANA is popularly known, has been Sydney’s main attraction and topic of conversation. ... (read more)

Zenith of Life 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by •
28 February 2023
Siobhan Stagg and MSO (photograph by Laura Manariti)
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has a new sponsor – Ryman Healthcare. Perhaps inevitably, the gala concert that opened MSO’s 2023 season on Friday evening was titled ‘Zenith of Life’. Goodness knows we all need more healthcare – not to mention sponsors. ... (read more)

Aftersun 

Kismet
by •
21 February 2023
Calum (Paul Mescal) smiles across the dinner table at Sophie (Frankie Corio)

Not much appears to happen in Aftersun, the first feature film of young Scottish director Charlotte Wells – unless you count the snooker games, scuba diving, mud baths, and other holiday activities. But don’t be fooled. Like the water polo players in one of the many watery scenes, all the grunt work takes place below the surface. All you have to do, as spectator, is sit back and look for the clues.

... (read more)

Adriana Lecouvreur 

Opera Australia
by •
21 February 2023
Michael Fabiano as Maurizio and Natalie Aroyan as Adriana Lecouvreur (photograph by Keith Saunders)
Francesco Cilea’s (1866–1950) most successful opera, Adriana Lecouvreur (1902), is a work steeped in melodrama and the theatrical, but there was perhaps a little too much ‘drama’ at the première of Opera Australia’s production on Monday night. ... (read more)

Nosferatu 

Malthouse Theatre
by •
20 February 2023
L-R Shamita Siva and Jacob Collins-Levy (photograph by Pia Johnson)
‘What do vampires mean?’, asks playwright Keziah Warner in the writer’s notes for her new show, Nosferatu. It’s not a rhetorical question, Warner has already provided some options: ‘Love, death, sex, money, power.’ Her iteration of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic at Malthouse Theatre has all options in mind. While ambitious and technically spectacular, it is a show that struggles to get a read on its source material. ... (read more)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed 

Madman Entertainment
by •
14 February 2023
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (courtesy Madman Entertainment)
In February 2019, artist Nan Goldin and the activist group she founded staged a ‘die-in’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The group demanded that the Museum refuse further funding from the super-wealthy art-patron Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical arm, Purdue, produced and aggressively marketed the highly addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin. ... (read more)
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St John the Ambulance Cat
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is now open
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