Rescued from the Comanches
Isn’t it extraordinary how the new-style, super-arty balletic circus has transformed the old child-delighting world of Heffalumps and daring young…
‘Damned spot’ of blood keeps appearing
People have always fiddled with Shakespeare. Nahum Tate did not give King Lear a happy ending because he was a…
A masterful magnificence
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? culminates the great stretch of American drama that runs from Tennessee Williams’ The…
No hint of vanity
The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria…
A weird, dark labyrinth
What a strange experience it is for an ageing innocent adult to find himself in the plush and state of…
Greatness written all over him
It was fascinating to see Patti LuPone that immense Broadway musical star interviewed with such palpable reverence by the ABC’s…
This shimmering desert haze
There’s something inspiring about getting an example of the national talent locking horns with the glory of traditional high culture,…
Phantom of her own career
Sunset Boulevard is one of the weirdest entertainment phenomena in the history of the world because it starts as a…
An imperfectly articulated plot
It seemed, on the face of it, a bizarre idea: opera at the Margaret Court arena. And Opera Australia was…
This distorting mirror of cruelty
Every so often a bit of streamer television comes along and makes you grateful for what the form can achieve…
Obscured by tattiness
A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her…
Dark and crooked byways
Isn’t it strange that the new television, the television of the streamers which has dominated our world since Covid, has…
Music as pasta
It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…
The barbarity of this man
It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of…
The music of their eloquence
It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done…
Somersaulting beauty of the songmaker
It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from…
A lithe brilliance
It figures that Australians should write great plays about sport because we are exceptionally – some people would say excessively…
Did he/didn’t he?
Good witches and witches dubbed bad and born green. Wicked is one of those pieces of musical theatre that will…
What a strange thing
It sounds irresistible, doesn’t it? A National Theatre Live version of a play by Jack Thorne (the magician who conjured…
Another popular feast
Miriam Margolyes was not wrong – however intrepid she may have been – to remark to Her late Majesty the…
Moody shifts of tone
It’s interesting to see a new production of The Sound of Music is on at the National Theatre (a somewhat…
Power beyond eloquence
It was fascinating to catch up with the Grammys the other night. There was the cheering sight of Miley Cyrus…
An all-but-lost treasure
Tennessee Williams is still looking like one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century and the plays he wrote…
A fey screeching parody
Is it a necessary declension, the descent from histrionic splendour to self-parody and worse? For years now Ryan Murphy has…
Ophelia in her madness
Why does Taylor Swift feel like such a force of nature? She transfigures the economy of wherever she lands and…
