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…
A peculiar backwards mutation
It’s not hard to sympathise with Christopher Allen’s recent column in the Review section of the Australian decrying the juxtaposition…
A remarkable film that gleams with mastery
What a relief it was to see Parallel Mothers the new film by Pedro Almodóvar. There was the tediousness and…
Archangel of Italian film
Like yesterday, there’s the memory of William Weaver, the great translator from the Italian of Umberto Eco’s The Name of…
Mighty and majestic
There is nothing like a ghastly war, an inscrutable election and a great rush of entertainment high and low to…
A darkened stage lights up
An American in Paris was always a stage musical waiting to happen even though it is immemorially associated with Gene…
Not worth the price of admission
There are moments when you wish the theatre would just be swallowed up and be as if it had never…
Great musicals
It’s strange how literature finds its way into other mediums. The current French film festival includes a film of Balzac’s…
Tinkling irrevelancies?
So Opera Australia is in quest of a new artistic director to replace Lyndon Terracini. It’s a good moment to…
Richard Roxburgh
It’s not often that you get such a rapturous reception for a new show as Fun Home received and the…
Die Walküre
Chesterton said – and the poet Peter Porter loved to repeat – that if a thing was worth doing it…
Grace
Does anyone know where we are in the world of arts and entertainment as Omicron advances, boosters abound, RATS are…
Moulin Rouge
It seems an aeon ago, the press night of Moulin Rouge, on 26 November. Since then, there has been illness,…
Don’t Look Up
How strange it is to be in a supposedly opened-up world, even as the Omicron variety of the virus shuts…
Jeremy Irons in House of Gucci
Any attempt to fictionalise the Gucci story runs into the same difficulties as Ridley Scott’s handsome and absorbing film, House…
West Side Story
How strange to revisit the Nova in Lygon Street, Carlton, where a lifetime of films have been experienced, after an…
The Cardinal’s books
There are a thousand overtly artistic things to talk about at this summer moment including the new Sidney Nolan exhibition…
