Arts and culture
Bridgerton
Who would have thought that Netflix would score so sumptuously with a Regency soap that flaunts colourblind casting like a…
Banks, the new biography of Joseph Banks by Grantlee Kieza reviewed
One of the most eligible bachelors in England, he was strong, handsome, well-educated, adventurous and a fabulously rich young man.…
New year pleasures
There are things to bring us pleasure in this new year. The opera has opened The Merry Widow (until 16…
Orson Welles
It seems on the face of it the oddest proposition on earth. David Fincher, the famous Hollywood director of Fight…
The Australian Ballet
It is indeed a new era. The Australian Ballet announced its 2021 season under the new artistic direction of David…
Ned Kelly
All the young millennials I know were raging in Melbourne the other Saturday night and so were some of their…
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
Time to look to the future; performing arts companies are encouraging us to do so through their subscription seasons now…
Gary Garrels
Let me take you down the strange rabbit hole of contemporary art museum culture. The senior curator of painting and…
Richard Tognetti
There’s no doubt about the Australian Chamber Orchestra; full of confidence it is sailing into 2021 with its most ambitious…
The Queen’s Gambit
As the Covid virus recedes even from Victoria – and the South Australian scare proves less serious than it looked…
Eryn Jean Norvill
Normality is returning, bit by bit, to public entertainment.Apparently fifty thousand people can go to a football match, yelling themselves…
Here come the judge
1968 was a year of recurring turbulence for the United States, all of it witnessed in American living rooms, courtesy…
Billy Wilder
Slowly the world of the arts starts to take a timid step forward in plague-torn Australia. Just as alarming new…
Ernani at Teatro all Scala
The Opera is coming back! Unable to perform for nine months, the company has suffered great financial loss, forcing substantial…
The Undoing
It’s a strange prospect for strange times, the young violinist Freya Franzen on the stage of Melbourne’s Concert Hall playing…
Arthur Streeton Land of the Golden Fleece 1926
In February 1922, Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, was married in the first…
Sean Connery
Sean Connery outlived all of them, those great British actors who came to such prominence in the early Sixties: Richard…
Simon Fieldhouse Mozart Statue, Vienna
Simon Fieldhouse is a Sydney- based artist who has developed a very particular area of expression. Typically, he uses watercolour…
Rebecca
Imagine daring to make another version of Rebecca. Hitchcock’s 1940 film is the version that is bound to overshadow any…
Neil Armfield’s Dream
Benjamin Britten’s setting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an outstanding achievement. In Australia, we have experienced two exceptional…
Orson Welles
The journals of the plague year from the point of view of culture are getting weirder and weirder from Daniel…
Opera Australia’s Attila before shutdown in March
Attila the Hun might have been hard to stop but Verdi’s opera Attila was stopped in its tracks at the…
Too much of nothing
In the world of the arts, some things keep on even in this time of impossibility which the virus has…
Josh Frydenberg
There has been a fair bit of bleating from sectors claiming to have been ignored in the Budget; in fact…
Lockdown
What a strange phase the world of theatre – the world of artistic activity – is going through at the…
