Few bad films have received such prolonged adoration and exposure as The Room. The story of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), an ‘All-American guy’, and his fiancée, the ‘devious’ Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who cheats on him with his handsome best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), has been screening in cinemas worldwide since its initial ...

The four solo survey exhibitions currently staged at NGV Australia as its Summer 2017–18 program emphatically delineate the institution’s position on contemporary art. While the juxtaposition is headily abrasive, the aggregate speaks plainly of certain attributes that it is keen to foreground. Contemporary art, embodied by this ...

The political and sexual machinations on the stage at Angel Place in Sydney, ostensibly depicting an event during the inglorious reign of Emperor Nero in 54–68 CE, might be interpreted in a very contemporary light in terms of politics and society. An opera that represents ruthless political ambition allied to lust, cruelty, corruption ...

On Monday night I attended a performance of the Australian Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty where the audience gasped in wonder as the curtains parted on the final act: three massive chandeliers were lit then raised above a cream and gold confection of a set which put Versailles to shame. On Thursday night, I was at Muriel’s ...

Opera is not a small artform. It is labyrinthine, multi-faceted, fraught with things that can go disastrously wrong (Wagner, especially), and it can be dreadfully expensive, formidably divisive, and astonishingly complicated. At the same time, opera is so necessarily crucial to culture as a reflection of history, thought, and ...

The original French version of Waiting for Godot was written in Paris between October 1948 and January 1949. This was a time of mass migration in Europe, when a flood of displaced humanity washed across the continent. It was a time of refugees, exiles, immigrants, fugitives, and transients. France settled more than 38,000 ...

This exhibition has a clear aim – to prove that Robert Mapplethorpe ‘is among the most significant artist of his time’. The evidence marshalled by the curators at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum is substantial. They have conducted extensive research, sourced outstanding vintage prints ...

In this fortnight's Update: Mapplethorpe at AGNSW, NGV exhibitions, Musicians from the Shanghai Orchestra Academy, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Barbican, Charles and Barbara Blackman, Heide Musem of Modern Art, fortyfivedownstairs, Copyright Agency and Viscopy merger, and giveaways from Queensland Theatre and Studio Canal ...

Famous couples from literature – from Romeo and Juliette to Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy – have enacted storylines built around rituals of courtship and the obstacles they face on the way to marrying. While the ‘marriage plot’ has never gone out of fashion – kept alive, in good part, by Hollywood’s penchant for the rom-com ...

The year of J.S. Bach’s death, 1750, is usually considered to mark the end of the Baroque era in music. It only makes sense that the Classical period should start directly thereafter. But is that really so? Art and its history does not necessarily follow clear borderlines, and compositions written around the middle of the eighteenth ...