theatre

HOT: Shamelessly Glitzy Work, Arts House, 521 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

August 15, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

In my experience, fringe theatre can go two ways – quirky and interesting or really really bad. After the fiasco that was Spectacular last week, I was a bit scared about what the Arts House‘s second week of Green Saturday Matinees would bring me. The stage for Shamelessly Glitzy Work was decked out in a [...]

NOT: Spectacular, Arts House, 521 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

August 8, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

The second of the Green Saturday Matinees presented by Arts House was a performance by UK group Forced Entertainment entitled ‘Spectacular‘. Well. I’m not sure how to describe what was possibly one of the worst theatre performances I’ve ever been unlucky enough to attend. I think the play was supposed to be a rumination on [...]

HOT: Once and for all…, Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne

August 8, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Arts House, a contemporary arts organisation in North Melbourne, is presenting a series of contemporary performances called Look Out, with the first events happening in August. As part of the organisation’s commitment to offset its carbon footprint, it’s offering free tickets to Saturday matinee performances if you arrive at the venue by an emission-free mode [...]

HOT: Mayumana, The Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Rd, Southbank

July 22, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Mayumana is a 85 minutes of all-singing, all-dancing, slapstick energy and it’s inevitable that it will be compared to the last all-singing, all-dancing , slapstick show that Melbourne hosted, Cirque de Soleil. The difference with Mayumana is that the thumping rhythm of the show is provided by the acoustic properties of the body and a [...]

HOT OR NOT? Mayumana, State Theatre, Southbank

July 20, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

To celebrate the new home of MEL: HOT OR NOT, I’ve decided to test trial a little interactivity on the blog. Basically, I have a double pass to see Mayumana at the Arts Centre for 8pm Wednesday 22 July and I would like to take one of my readers as my date! Movement creates music [...]

HOT: August: Osage County, Playhouse Theatre, Southbank

June 13, 2009 ⋅ One comment

Every single one of my London theatre buddies went to see the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s multi-award winning August: Osage County at the National Theatre, so I was excited to discover that I wouldn’t miss out after all as it was included in the 2009 repertory of the Melbourne Theatre Company. Tracy Lett’s darkly funny story [...]

NOT: Optimism, Malthouse Theatre, 113 Sturt St, Southbank

May 23, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Optimism is the Malthouse Theatre‘s new reworking of Voltaire’s seminal satiral work, Candide. A quick read-up on wikipedia at least gave us a bit of a framework as to what to expect, but the production failed to turn the famously ludicrous story into something that make it easy for me to discern the deeper messages [...]