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35mm: A Musical Exhibition (Flight Path) ★★★★
35mm: A Musical Exhibition has the energy of noughties rock radio. So get ready for your girl-rock anthems, indie romance belters and quirky singer-songwriters all mixed with musical theatre storytelling.
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Track Works (Mortuary Station) ★★★1/2
Chances are you’ve driven, or caught a train past, Mortuary Station. You’ve probably caught a flash of the architecture as you sped past or maybe you’ve seen photoshoots for brands staged there. Well now you can hear some classic arie while gazing at the stonework in a new, site-specific show called Track Works.
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Looking Ahead to 2024 – Final Update!
Judging by the announced theatrical seasons, 2024 is looking pretty stacked with great stuff on our stages. I’ve done a bit of a dive into the seasons for Sydney Theatre Co., Belvoir, Ensemble, Griffin, Opera Australia, Hayes, Seymour Center and more to make some plans.
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The Seagull (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★1/2
A familiar, classic play, adapted by a familiar, acclaimed playwright, starring a lot of familiar, adored faces. This should be an end-of-year showstopper, but as good as it is The Seagull is a bit less than the sum of its exciting parts.
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Darwin’s Reptilia (Belvoir 25a) ★★1/2
Darwin’s Reptilia, closing out 2023’s Belvoir 25a season, is bonkers. Whether you think it’s “good bonkers” or “bad bonkers” is going to be entirely up to you, but at $25 a ticket it’s hardly a huge investment.
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The Master & Margarita (Belvoir) ★★★★★
When I read that Belvoir’s The Master & Margarita was “devised by the cast”, in addition to “duration: 3hrs” and adapted from a Russian novel… well my brain was prepared for a whole evening of pain. I should have known better.
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Oil (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★★★
May, the heroine of Oil, is timeless. She is both a storytelling tool, an archetype that spans hundreds of years, and a mother doing her best for her daughter. But ‘doing her best’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘doing good’. If nothing else, Oil is about the cycles of our lives and the loops humanity finds itself…
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Sibyl (Sydney Opera House) ★★★★
South African, multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge has an eye-opening Australian premiere to close out the Sydney Opera Houses’s 50th birthday celebrations. Sibyl demonstrates Kentridges “Gesamtkunstwerk”, his blend of forms to deliver a message. Encompassing hand-drawn animation, dance, song, shadow-play, physical comedy, sculpture and more, it is revelatory and truly expansive.
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The Dictionary of Lost Words (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★
Words and language are powerful signifiers of what we consider to be important. While in the internet age words are easy to disseminate (like one guy spouting his opinions about theatre for example), the history of how we organise and communicate information and the decisions made along the way, is a thorny one.
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The Memory of Water (Ensemble) ★★★★
The premise of Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water sounds like the set up to a farce. After the death of their mother Violet (Nicole Da Silva), three sisters converge on the family home for the funeral. They each deal with their grief in different ways. It’s a comedy that’ll make you cry.
Cultural Binge - Independent Theatre Reviews 