Theatre
Cameron Lukey is an Australian producer whose credits include acclaimed productions of 33 Variations at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 2019 (starring Ellen Burstyn) and Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017. He began his career as an opera singer and joined the team at fortyfivedownstairs in 2016. He was appointed Artistic Director of the theatre in 2023.
... (read more)Carol Middleton reviews ‘Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent’ by Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea
In 1957, Michael Benthall, a director at the Old Vic, took a chance on a young woman straight out of drama school, casting her as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet starring John Neville and Coral Browne. I was lucky enough to be in the audience with my mother when Judi Dench, a velvet-voiced cherub in virginal white, made her début. An infinite variety of stage and film performances have gone by since then, but none has erased the memory of her stage presence that night.
... (read more)Paul Kildea reviews 'Masquerade: The lives of Noël Coward' by Oliver Soden
You could hardly ask for a better tour guide through the artistic travails and triumphs of the twentieth century. Born as the previous century was closing its shutters, Noël Coward dominated the London stage in the interwar years, butted heads with the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, before wrenching victory from the jaws of disfavour in his final years in a series of stunning revivals.
... (read more)Michael Shmith reviews 'I Will Be Cleopatra: An actress’s journey' by Zoë Caldwell
'I knew I was bright, but not special’, writes Zoë Caldwell early on in her pithy, telling memoir. Still earlier (indeed, in the first paragraph), she says that she knew, even from an early age, she was destined to perform: ‘ … to stand in front of people, keeping them awake and in their seats, by telling other people’s stories and using other people’s words. I knew this because it was the only thing I could do.’ There is a bit of self-deprecation in these words that is at loggerheads with what we have come to expect from actors’ memoirs, which are, more often than not, scribbled sentences rather than thoughtful paragraphs, and which tell us more about vanity, greed, self-indulgence, and the patience of the haunted ghost-writer than they do about the actor as a professional or a person. Actually, such books are like sets on some early television shows: bricks-and-mortar, but really canvas and plaster with wooden backing, which wobble every time somebody walks past. What they are not is true autobiography.
... (read more)Helen Thomson reviews 'The Pram Factory: The Australian Performing Group recollected' by Tim Robertson
At last a history, thirty-two years after the event, of the Australian Performing Group (APG), albeit in the form of highly personal ‘recollections’ from Tim Robertson, one of the group’s stalwarts. The Pram Factory is a handsome, large-format book, containing many wonderful photographs recording the young radicals of the 1970s who created Australian theatre history.
... (read more)Myra Roper reviews 'The Performing Arts in Contemporary China' by Colin Mackerras
Here is all you ever wanted to know about Chinese theatre and didn’t know whom to ask! Who better anywhere to ask than Professor Colin Mackerras? A distinguished sinologist, Chairman of the School of Modem Asian Studies at Griffith University, he speaks Chinese fluently, taught English in Shanghai from 1964–66, and has visited China regularly since then totting up a remarkable miscellany of visits – to theatres, academies, conservatoria, cinemas, commune, and factory performances and talks with dramatists, critics, composers and ‘the masses’.
... (read more)Andrew Fuhrmann reviews 'Australia in 50 Plays' by Julian Meyrick
For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920).
... (read more)Jonathan Dunk reviews 'Patrick White’s Theatre: Australian modernism on stage, 1960–2018' by Denise Varney
Patrick White’s plays are conventionally assigned a marginal place in the landscape of his writing. Historically, they have either been regarded as poetic but unconvincing extensions of the performative dimensions of his prose, or as fundamentally misconceived exercises in contempt. Tim Winton spoke for the latter camp when, writing in the London Review of Books (22 June 1995), he dismissed White’s dramatic work as a ‘long and wasteful engagement with the theatre and its poisonous hangers-on’. Winton’s judgement is informed by a solitary model of authorship that can be applied to the rural metaphysics of White’s Castle Hill novels but that is increasingly inapplicable to the urbane satires his work became following his move to inner-Sydney in 1964.
... (read more)Michael Morley reviews 'David Williamson: Behind the scenes' by Kristin Williamson
There seems to be an ever-growing – I almost wrote market, but think I mean obsession – these days for the family history, the personal memoir, the parading of how I spent my childhood/adolescence/ protest years/personal and economic growth decades, before-finally-contributing-to-the-joy-of-past-and-future-generations-by-listing-my-achievements. Many of these are self-published. Kristin Williamson’s biography of her playwright husband is not, but perhaps should have been.
... (read more)Gillian Wills reviews 'The Australian Musical from the Beginning' by Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston
What is the musical’s appeal? Performing arts venues in Australia’s capital cities stage them year after year; a lucrative box office seems to be virtually guaranteed. The feel-good mix of song, melodrama, and vibrant dance – not forgetting the bonus of a happy ending – can lift the spirits and entertain the entire family. Recently, Chicago (Melbourne, Brisbane), West Side Story, and Billy Elliot (Adelaide) secured packed houses.
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