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…
Artists behaving badly
What a weird situation it is that the painter Donald Friend once treasured by Robert Hughes for the lyricism of…
A deeply elegiac work
That superb poet Peter Porter who was also in love with music used to say there was no denying the…
Greek tragedies
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
Who would have thought the beery blokey jukebox musical The Choir of Man at Melbourne’s Playhouse would be such an…
Maestro Bernstein
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
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
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
What will history make of the superior crime stories we seem to be churning out? The late Peter Corris’ Cliff…
Eye-batting nonchalance
What is it about the Egyptians that bewitches us? Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs opened at the Australian…
People of extraordinary glamour
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
Miss Saigon may on the face of it seem like an odd choice of musical for Opera Australia to revive…
How the girls sighed
You know the year is starting to come to an end when a new production of A Christmas Carol is…
A naive friend
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
The Newsreader has already caught a lot of attention for the way in which it weaves together a strong sense…
This earth-shattering work
What a strange thing popular culture is. Back in the 1970s a lot of people might have affected to despise…
That extraordinary mutant masterpiece
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
It’s interesting to see that Mel Gibson, no less, is in the blood and violence TV streamer The Continental which…
Diamond-bright hoot
Oh to be in London with Barrie Kosky calling the shots in the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle Das…
