TONY SHELDON! O FRABJOUS DAY!

February 9th 2010 3:20 pm | Theatre | News - By Diana Simmonds

OLIVIER award nominations for 2010 have just been announced and Sydney scores two: Tony Sheldon for Best Actor in a Musical and Priscilla Queen of the Desert for Best New Musical.

Our Tony is up against Rowan Atkinson, for Oliver!; Aneurin Barnard, Spring Awakening; Bob Golding, Morecambe and Alexander Hanson, A Little Night Music but you can bet your life none of them look as glamorous while driving an old bus to the Alice. Priscilla's rivals are Dreamboats and Petticoats, Spring Awakening and Sister Act.

Hollywood type Rachel Weisz was extremely lucky to have played Blanche Dubois in London - which means she didn't have to endure comparisons with Our Cate in A Streetcar Named Desire. The rest of the nominations are longer than Ol Man River so you can Google them yourself. The winners will be announced in London on March 21.

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AN EVENING WITH MARIANNE FAITHFULL

February 4th 2010 4:39 pm | Music | Review - By Diana Simmonds

Marianne Faithfull Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, February 3, 2010

THIRTY years ago, or thereabouts, advance copies of a new album were being hawked around London's groove meisters; and suspicion and lukewarm enthusiasm greeted it. It was apparently a comeback effort by a singer whose track record as a sort of folkie, so-called groupie, gorgeously pretty girl, lost cause and bit of a joke meant that few were prepared to take her seriously or give the recording a chance.

I was chucked the album because nobody else in the office was much interested and the very thought of doing anything on (roll eyes knowingly at this point) Marianne was so not cool. That's how I got to hear Broken English for the first time. It was an electrifying and never-to-be-forgotten experience. The pounding intro, so infectious and so sexy; then that voice, omigod, that voice. The fey, little girl tones that took As Tears Go By to the top of the charts was gone. In its place was something primeval, dangerous, womanly, world weary and utterly appealing.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL – OEDIPUS REX & SYMPHONY OF PSALMS

February 1st 2010 9:52 pm | Music | Review - By Diana Simmonds

Oedipus Rex & Symphony of Psalms, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House; January 28-30, 2010

HE CAME, he spoke, he conquered. Like a Holy Roller old time preacher, Peter Sellars is mesmerizing. A Pied Piper whose Hamelin is his next artistic project. It's a presence worth having - whatever he's up to. He was inspiring as the closing speaker in the Keynote Address on Hope and, in this instance it was his work in what was tagged a "rarely-performed double bill of Stravinsky masterworks", being Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms.

It was an extravagant concoction: semi-staged in a somewhat reconfigured Concert Hall, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra augmented from the bass end plus 120 members of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, men and women. The soloists were equally wondrously augmented: Yvonne Kenny at her regal and vocal best in purple gown and dreadlocks; American visitor Rodrick Dixon equally magnificent as her ill-fated son-husband. Two more Americans - all three from the LA production - Ryan McKinny (Creon and Tiresias) and Daniel Montenegro (shepherd) rounded out the singing roles with the unexpected and riveting presence of actor Paula Arundell as Antigone and the Narrator; and dancer Elma Kris as Ismene.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL - RUHE

January 30th 2010 3:28 pm | Music | Review - By Diana Simmonds

RUHE Muziektheater Transparant, The Great Hall, Sydney University, January 25-29, 2010

ABSENCE of sound, silence, quiet - ruhe - can be interpreted in many ways. Silence may be benevolent, it may also be malevolent: being silent in the face of wrongdoing or cruelty, for instance. Silence can also be revealing: I recalled the sweet, soft quiet of a spring morning in rural Germany, sun shining, green meadows lush and benign, somewhere nearby a dog barks and chimes mark the hour, they somehow enhance the experience of profound quiet. The small everyday sounds are from Bergen, the village visible from the memorial ruins of the Belsen death camp. The rest is silence as realization dawns that the people of Bergen must have known, could hardly have "not known", of what went on at Belsen during WW2. Banal or profound thought: the worst of human experience can be both

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL – SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

January 21st 2010 6:34 pm | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

Six Characters in Search of an Author Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, January 9-31, 2010.

GERTRUDE STEIN, on her death bed, asked Alice B Toklas, "What is the answer?" Toklas was unable to respond and Stein then said, "In that case, what is the question?" In essence, it's what Pirandello was asking in 1921 with this most modernist of plays (subtitled "a comedy in the making"); and what his adaptive-collaborators Rupert Goold and Ben Power continue to grapple with in the 21st century.

Their company Headlong scored a critical and popular triumph with the production, which began at the Chichester Festival Theatre and transferred to the West End and now to the Sydney Festival, where it is one of the intellectual and dramatic centrepieces, despite the players' facetious reference to "the Ostermeier Hamlet" scooping all available funding and preventing them going to festivals.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL – SMOKE & MIRRORS

January 20th 2010 2:53 pm | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

SMOKE & MIRRORS The Famous Spiegeltent, Hyde Park, Sydney; January 13-31. Photos: Jamie Williams.

ONE OF the silliest things I've heard, this Festival, is a couple of people solemnly warning, "It's not La Clique you know." Well no, it isn't, and aside from the discrete attraction of the Famous (and gorgeous) Spiegeltent itself, the main reason for being excited about Smoke and Mirrors is that it isn't the visiting circus-acrobatic-fun troupe. It had become a bit weary by last year and now, is doing a new show in the UK. So maybe we'll see that next year. But anyway: Smoke & Mirrors is definitely not that other mob and potentially it's way more interesting.

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