13 Results

Blak intertwines stories of modern Aboriginal youth with traditional vistas to explore the life of boys and men. It’s arresting in its choreography and design.

Rudolf Nureyev came to Australia to create one of the world’s greatest ever productions of Don Quixote. Some 40 years later a couple of Australian dancers bring it back to brilliant life.

Music is one of Melbourne Theatre Company’s more tuneful endeavours this year. Playwright Barry Oakley is welcomed back to the stage with warm applause.

This is one big broken promise. Melbourne’s Production Company vows to do more with less in musical theatre, but its adaptation of the Burt Bacharach tuner falls flat.

The story of Yevgeny (Eugene) Onegin started, of course, with master-poet Alexander Pushkin’s verse-novel (389 stanzas, no less of iambic tetrameter; so-called Onegin stanzas, or Pushkin sonnet), a classic of Russian literature which began to be serialised in 1825. Onegin, the character, has since served as a ‘role model’ for numerous Russian men of fiction. [...]

by Matthew Raggatt Coming immediately after the more sombre remembrance of Anzac Day, Jonathan Biggins’ Australia Day – a Melbourne Theatre Company/Sydney Theatre Company co-production — challenges audiences to consider what in fact, beyond our soldiers, it is that brings us all together. We are thrown into the Coriole Shire’s committee meeting for the country town’s upcoming January [...]

A difficult opera calls for a strong and disciplined vision. The Rake’s Progress is certainly an unusual piece with quite peculiar parentage, but in Victorian Opera’s production it loses its way. A collaboration between a Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, and two poets, the British W.H. Auden and the American Chester Kallman, it was first performed [...]

It should have been a cracker. A sharp and deeply personal script. A talented and experienced cast. Sadly for the audience, The Seed is more a damp squib. The story is promising. Three generations of the Maloney family — daughter, father and grandfather — come together to celebrate their collective birthday in a living room [...]

Opera Australia presents something old and something quite radically new in Melbourne for its Summer season. Don Giovanni offers a captivating performance from Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Mozart’s dangerously charming lothario, while Bruce Beresford directs John Steinbeck’s all-American classic Of Mice And Men as a sweeping and deeply affecting operatic experience. Sharing the State Theatre with the Verdi [...]

It all looked strangely familiar. And it was. I’d seen this Trav before; on the Lyric Theatre stage in Brisbane in 2009, an Opera Australia import by Opera Queensland. The same sumptuous costumes. The same grand sets. The same sublime Russian soprano. Opera-goers live in a perpetual state of déjà vu. It is environmentally friendly [...]