Peter Craven

Did he/didn’t he?

30 March 2024 9:00 am

Good witches and witches dubbed bad and born green. Wicked is one of those pieces of musical theatre that will…

What a strange thing

23 March 2024 9:00 am

It sounds irresistible, doesn’t it? A National Theatre Live version of a play by Jack Thorne (the magician who conjured…

Another popular feast

16 March 2024 9:00 am

Miriam Margolyes was not wrong – however intrepid she may have been – to remark to Her late Majesty the…

Moody shifts of tone

9 March 2024 9:00 am

It’s interesting to see a new production of The Sound of Music is on at the National Theatre (a somewhat…

Power beyond eloquence

2 March 2024 9:00 am

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

24 February 2024 9:00 am

Tennessee Williams is still looking like one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century and the plays he wrote…

A fey screeching parody

17 February 2024 9:00 am

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

10 February 2024 9:00 am

Why does Taylor Swift feel like such a force of nature? She transfigures the economy of wherever she lands and…

Artists behaving badly

3 February 2024 9:00 am

What a weird situation it is that the painter Donald Friend once treasured by Robert Hughes for the lyricism of…

A deeply elegiac work

27 January 2024 9:00 am

That superb poet Peter Porter who was also in love with music used to say there was no denying the…

Greek tragedies

20 January 2024 9:00 am

It’s the time of year when there’s a lot of talk about films and catching up with films. Along with…

Barbie’s bombshell

13 January 2024 9:00 am

Who would have thought the beery blokey jukebox musical The Choir of Man at Melbourne’s Playhouse would be such an…

Maestro Bernstein

6 January 2024 9:00 am

What do we know about Leonard Bernstein, who did everything to popularise classical music and wrote the Broadway classic West…

A very distinguished monster monarch

16 December 2023 9:00 am

So the Matthew Warchus/Jack Thorne A Christmas Carol opened again to just as rapturous a response as it did a…

Every kind of spectacular effect

9 December 2023 9:00 am

It’s starting to turn into the season to be jolly (or whatever variant you can manage) with the Melbourne Symphony…

The point of perdition

2 December 2023 9:00 am

What will history make of the superior crime stories we seem to be churning out? The late Peter Corris’ Cliff…

Eye-batting nonchalance

25 November 2023 9:00 am

What is it about the Egyptians that bewitches us? Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs opened at the Australian…

People of extraordinary glamour

18 November 2023 9:00 am

A refreshing and humbling prospect, in a world where we sometimes imagine cultural coverage gets better, is to revisit the…

Character acting without the character

11 November 2023 9:00 am

Miss Saigon may on the face of it seem like an odd choice of musical for Opera Australia to revive…

How the girls sighed

4 November 2023 9:00 am

You know the year is starting to come to an end when a new production of A Christmas Carol is…

A naive friend

28 October 2023 9:00 am

John le Carré was one of the more extraordinary popular writers of the last half-century (and more) and part of…

Astonishing mistress of song & dance

21 October 2023 9:00 am

The Newsreader has already caught a lot of attention for the way in which it weaves together a strong sense…

This earth-shattering work

14 October 2023 9:00 am

What a strange thing popular culture is. Back in the 1970s a lot of people might have affected to despise…

That extraordinary mutant masterpiece

7 October 2023 9:00 am

It’s been a long time coming, Patricia Cornelius’ My Sister Jill but she’s a playwright whose work demands to be…

His brilliant boggling career

30 September 2023 9:00 am

It’s interesting to see that Mel Gibson, no less, is in the blood and violence TV streamer The Continental which…