Australian Arts
Swerves of warmth and coolness
One of the great things about the Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet is that the kids love it. Even the…
A sapphic rom-com not to be missed
What a relief it is that Virginia Gay’s adaptation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac should finally have opened in Sarah…
Footy versus ballet?
All the different aspects of a culture collide and interconnect. Melbourne is the undisputed capital of Australian rules football (which…
Eye of a genius
In a week dominated by the death of the Queen it’s a strange thing that Jean-Luc Godard, the man who…
A god of fury and destruction
David Hare is the most eminent British dramatist of the generation that includes the man we have to learn to…
Just yesterday
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev last week transcended politics because it was a reminder of how the culture of the…
Where art and pleasure collide
The morality of art always seems like such a simple thing. The Greeks want back the so-called Elgin Marbles pilfered…
His lightning art
The combinations and permutations of different forms of artistic activity are always weird. Stacks of people will want to see…
Don’t be routine
It’s a marvellous thing that the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta will be wielding the baton for that illustrious group…
Trash and treasure
It’s cheering to see that the new head of Melbourne’s Arts Centre is Karen Quinlan. For years now, she has…
Primeval Voice
So, Archie Roach is dead at 66. It’s hard to read of the artistic triumphs and the personal catastrophes without…
Neighbours no more
It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…
Call of the wild
It’s fascinating to hear that Warwick Thornton––who took the world by storm some years ago with that knockout indigenous film…
Genesis of a Dreamcoat
Just the other day came the announcement that a new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was to…
Enthralled
The news that Germaine Greer had put herself into a retirement home in sight of the Queensland forest she had…
A very polished performance
Sam Neill is one of those Kiwis we want to claim as we do everyone from Russell Crowe to Neill’s…
Time takes a cigarette
June 16 was Bloomsday, the day we celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it was a special Bloomsday because 2022 is…
Tinkering with the masters
It was sad to see Ray Liotta, that magnificent actor, had died the other week. He was most famous for…
Sheer erotic pulsation
Anyone whose extreme youth was graced by the experience of watching the Nederlands Dans Theater is liable to be astonished…
Big glass slippers to fill
It sounds like a wet dream of musical theatre, doesn’t it? A Cinderella by Rodgers & Hammerstein in a visually…
Wizardly wham-bam
It’s an extraordinary thing in its way to revisit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child three years after its triumphant…
Great Tenor, shame about the bric-a-brac
Lohengrin is early, just after Tannhäuser in the cavalcade of Wagner’s masterpieces, with a swan-drawn Arthurian hero in thrall to…
A dramatic dream of Australia
1922 is the wonder year of twentieth century literature, the so-called annus mirabilis: T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James…
Life from both sides now
It’s a strange thing the way we keep interpreting and re-interpreting the different aspects of our culture that have become…
Anatomy of a forgettable scandal
An evening of shorts, courtesy of Flickerfest, even at a lustrous cinema like the Kino in the Sofitel complex off…
