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Skank Sinatra: The Name on Everybody’s Lips Presented by Jens Rada and Theatre TravelsThe Lark, Adelaide Fringe Some performers sing cabaret; Jens Rada’s Skank Sinatra devours it whole. Directed by Carly Fisher, this production once again demonstrates her instinct for good taste and focus. After years orbiting one another creatively, Jens Rada and Fisher’s paths finally collided in 2025 when Skank Sinatra  headlined Qtopia Sydney’s Pride Fest igniting what feels like a powerhouse partnership of theatrical flair and creative ambition. Several things are undeniable about the sensation that is Skank Sinatra. Skank is the creation of artist Jens Rada, and Rada is a formidable talent - actor, singer, drag artist and clown. With a clear strategy and a skilled team behind him, this is an artist who could easily fill major playhouses. Watching the show, I found myself wondering what the ideal role for Jens - or Skank - might be in a major musical or play. “Skank Sinatra: The Name on Everybody’s Lip”s  is a pastiche cabaret, accompanied by the charismatic pianist Josh Delperio who, Skank reminds us, proves that yes, they sing live. The repertoire spans from “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” to “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” while Rada loosely guides us through the “rules of cabaret,” peppered with anecdotes from his Danish, South African and Australian heritage. Like the great cabaret performers before them, Skank Sinatra understands that the form lives somewhere between confession, glamour and mischief. Because this is also a drag performance, costume changes are expected though these are tricky for a solo performer. To solve the problem, the show inserts recorded imagined dialogue between Skank and Judy Garland while the artist changes offstage. It’s the weakest device in the show. And really, Skank isn’t alone: why not let the excellent Delperio continue the entertainment from the keys? Still, this work springs from the imagination and craft of a major Australian artist with obvious audience appeal. What I want, however, is to feel more. When Skank launched into Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive , the evening suddenly opened. Here was the possibility of something deeper but the song was quickly tossed aside in service of lighter, capital-E Entertainment. Perhaps a truly original Sondheim interpretation belongs in another show. Yet the ingredients for that more searching work are already present here, flickering through Skank’s performance. I want this artist to dig deeper, to make the work matter. To let us glimpse the artist beneath the mask. For now, “ Skank Sinatra:The  Name on Everybody’s Lip”s  is a lively, glittering cabaret gem. The name may not be on everybody’s lips yet - but it will be. Go. Review By Kate Gaul

Look at the State of the Carpet – Old Fitz Theatre Created by Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low Peeling back the onion on life with grit, wonder and perhaps a cup of tea, Look At The State Of The Carpet , we are told in the blurb, is a searing four-act play from the minds of two self-proclaimed idiots. Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low return with a brand-new work about friendship, artistic difference and the strange contortions required to sustain both - including pushing their chins deep into their necks. Formed from more than thirty years of friendship and an unexpectedly deep reservoir of camaraderie, the work is both challenging and charming. Founding members of Throttle  and long-time collaborators with Frumpus , Hart and Low bring decades of devised performance experience, having previously appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Performance Space, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art. What emerges here is a living archive of a friendship forged through decades of experimental performance. The show leans into absurd clowning: dark, strange and consistently funny. Costumed like 19th-century troubadours in hitched calico skirts, waistcoats and top hats adorned with plumes and frilled collars, the pair also operate their own onstage tech - a decision that proves to be a constant source of hilarity and mild alarm (you really do have to be there). They take their time. They look us in the eye. Something is happening, though we’re not always sure exactly what. Watching them work, you sense the unspoken rhythms of long collaboration - the tiny shifts of breath and glance that keep a piece like this alive. Audience participation adds further unpredictability. On the night I attended, “Senior Bob” took a fall and blood was spilled - yet the show continued on its determinedly crooked trajectory, an example of the particular elasticity of live performance that Hart and Low understand so well. The performance unfolds through a series of memorable images: Lenny Ann Low hidden by, then emerging from beneath, a towel that briefly becomes a medieval mantle; a bird held carefully on a branch; Hart coughing up a dead bird; a pile of clothes accumulating like the sediment of shared years - and, of course, the much-referenced carpet itself, which does indeed eventually appear. There is something quietly radical in watching senior artists embrace nonsense with such commitment. In an era when so much theatre strives for polish and narrative clarity, Hart and Low remind us that the anarchic spirit of devised performance - messy, unpredictable and gloriously human - still has teeth. It also feels like a reminder of a lineage in Sydney performance: mischievous, handmade theatre that once thrived in small rooms and stubbornly refuses to disappear. Beneath the absurdity lies a quietly moving portrait of what it means to keep making work — and keep making each other laugh — over a lifetime. Cryptic, chaotic and frequently thigh-slappingly funny. Recommended. Review by Kate Gaul (I attended a preview performance.)

Brand New Dress The Loading Dock At Qtopia Sydney, Andy Freeborn’s “ Brand New Dress”  arrives as both confessional and quest narrative: a cabaret tracing their non-binary journey through a fantasy landscape of knights, kings and dragons. Dungeons & Dragons reveals itself as a kind of frame; it provides a dramaturgical scaffold for transformation - armour donned and shed, monsters named and battled, sovereignty reclaimed. It’s a clever metaphorical engine, even if not every quest lands with equal force. Freeborn is, first and foremost, a formidable vocalist. The instrument is thrilling - elastic across registers, emotionally articulate, and capable of moving from crystalline musical-theatre lyricism to a rougher, confessional belt. Musically, the show leans unapologetically into Broadway idiom. I don’t claim scholarly fluency in the canon, but there are clear echoes of Stephen Sondheimand at times the lush, romantic sweep of Rufus Wainwright hovers in the melodic architecture - praise that is not lightly given. There is also a streak of theatrical bravura that suggests a future kinship with Tim Minchin: piano-led, intellectually agile, capable of holding a large audience in thrall. Yet for all its musical sophistication, “ Brand New Dress”  is most compelling when it strips back. Freeborn’s earlier rock cabaret, “ Everything is Sh t! *”, earned attention for its unflinching excavation of family trauma and queer becoming; that same appetite for candour is present here. A graduate of the Australian Institute of Music (Music Theatre), Freeborn has also worked as a composer and musical director across independent productions, building a reputation as a multi-hyphenate creator rather than a singular performer. That breadth shows in the structural ambition of this work: motifs recur, narrative threads braid, and the dramaturgy strives for cohesion rather than mere anecdote. A usual at Qtopia Sydney when the show relies on (thankfully few) recorded accompaniments the show flattens.  Without more time in the theatre the sound balance just isn’t achieved. For an artist of this calibre, the choice reads as pragmatic rather than aesthetic and it diminishes the immediacy the material deserves. There is no denying the scale of the talent on display. Hailing from Adelaide, Freeborn feels destined for platforms beyond the black-box cabaret circuit - one imagines a future berth at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival as a serious musical storyteller. More than that, one can plausibly envisage them fronting an orchestra, piano centre-stage, commanding a festival house with the assurance of a seasoned auteur. “Brand New Dress”  is not a perfect work. It is, however, an urgent and generous one - a show that situates queer self-fashioning within epic narrative and insists that the act of putting on a dress can be as mythic as slaying a dragon. The question is less whether Andy Freeborn has arrived than how expansively they will be allowed to grow. The raw materials - voice, intellect, theatrical instinct - are indisputably there. Review by Kate Gaul

The Performers The Loading Dock   In the small black box that is The Loading Dock Theatre, cabaret duo Dolly Diamond and Skank Sinatra arrive like seasoned vaudevillians who have seen every backstage corridor and survived them all. “The Performers”  is less a tightly structured show than a rolling, gloriously unruly conversation between two entertainers who understand that the art of cabaret lies as much in timing and temperature as in repertoire. They loosely frame the evening around the inevitable debt accrued from surviving the Edinburgh Fringe - will they or won’t they ever clear it? There’s a wink to “ The Producers” , of course: the delicious theatrical fantasy that failure might somehow be more lucrative than success. It’s a knowing conceit that gives shape to the chaos without ever pinning it down. From the outset, the format is intimate - the audience close, the lighting warm and forgiving. The proximity suits the pair’s chosen style for “The Performers”.  Dolly Diamond, all arch poise and razor timing, works the room with the assurance of someone who has long since mastered the power of a raised eyebrow. Skank Sinatra, a polished diva with a taste for mischief, counters with a looseness that feels dangerous in the best way. Their chemistry is less duet than duel: affectionate, competitive, conspiratorial. Yet beneath the barbs is unmistakable respect - two colleagues who clearly admire each other’s craft and know exactly how to set the other up for a punchline or a high note. The patter is the engine. Generational jokes ricochet between them - references pinging from pre-digital nostalgia to TikTok-era absurdity. There’s a running undercurrent about ageing, relevance and the indignities of staying fabulous. Dolly leans into the grande dame persona, tossing off lines with studied disdain; Skank punctures pomposity before it can fully inflate. The audience isa cross-section of queer elders, allies and bright-eyed newcomers:  all become witness and accomplice, drawn into the rhythm of tease and retort. Where the evening falters is in its technical execution. The amplified sound production does the material few favours. Lyrics frequently blur into muffled syllables, particularly during duets when harmonies and text should land with clarity and punch. In cabaret, text is everything. At times, the performers appear to compensate physically, pushing expression and gesture to ensure meaning cuts through where amplification does not. It is a testament to their skill that so much still lands. There’s an undeniable sense that both artists are simultaneously celebrating and skewering the musical canon they inhabit. The intimacy of The Loading Dock Theatre both elevates and constrains the show. There is genuine pleasure in seeing performers of this calibre at such close quarters: the raised eyebrow, the whispered aside, the quicksilver shift from sincerity to satire all land with conspiratorial thrill. Yet there is also the sense that the stage is simply too small for the ambition at play. These personas - so fiercely drawn, so theatrically expansive - yearn for a larger canvas. If the sound were sharper and the space grander, the evening would ascend from delightful to dazzling. But there is something refreshingly unvarnished about “ The Performers” . It resists slickness. The show feels alive, responsive, occasionally chaotic - which in cabaret is often a virtue rather than a flaw. This time around, Dolly and Skank understand that the audience is not there for perfection; they are there for presence. And presence they deliver in abundance.    Review by Kate Gaul

Es & Flow The Old Fitz Theatre At this year’s Mardi Gras season, the Old Fitz Theatre continues its welcome habit of programming intimate queer storytelling. Jennifer Lunn’s Es & Flo  sits squarely in that lineage – an ensemble work about devotion, ideology, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive time. Set in Cardiff, Es and Flo have secretly been in a relationship since they met at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s. Now 71, Es’s memory is fading, and her unseen son Peter is attempting to separate the couple - first by introducing an unannounced carer, with the longer-term goal of moving his mother into residential care. Around this central relationship orbit Es’s daughter-in-law Catherine, the home help Beata, and Beata’s daughter Kasia, performed by Annie Byron, Eloise Snape, Fay Du Chateau, Erika Ndibe, Charlotte Salusinszky and Georgina Warren-Nwokol. Each character operates within some form of protective fiction - romantic, ideological, medical or social - and the drama emerges as those fictions begin to fracture. Though Es and Flo are fictional, the historical movement that binds them is very real. On 5 September 1981, 36 Welsh women marched from Cardiff as “Women for Life on Earth” in protest against the British government’s decision to store cruise missiles on UK soil. They arrived at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire and established what became the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Within a year, more than 30,000 women had camped and demonstrated on site, creating one of the most significant feminist protest movements of the twentieth century. The play gestures toward that radicalism - women creating autonomous space, rejecting patriarchal authority, and forging community outside the state. The production’s white box (Designer Soham Apte) set briefly springs to life during scene transitions with blurred archival footage of the era, reminding us of the scale of that collective action. Yet Es & Flo  is less interested in reconstructing protest than in examining what happens after revolution - how ideals age inside ordinary domestic life. The question haunting the play is quietly devastating: what becomes of political certainty when memory itself becomes unreliable? Deceptively sweet, this domestic drama hits many of the painful beats of dementia storytelling. As Flo struggles to accept outside help, it becomes clear there is no right answer or easy option even without financial strain even being a factor. We recognise how hard it can be to watch a loved one slip away, and how powerful the desire not to become a burden can be. I found the thread of story supplied by Beata the Polish home care worker and her 9 year old daughter striking.  Neither Beata or Kasia invests in preserving Greenham’s mythology. Kasia shifts the drama from memory to continuity - from what these women once changed to what simply endures. Beata anchors it in material reality. As the migrant carer whose labour sustains their independence, she lives inside the systems they once resisted; her politeness and efficiency reads less as personality than necessity. Through her, the play reframes its politics: the legacy of revolution is not only the freedom to love openly, but the quiet reliance on others whose care makes that freedom liveable. Directed by Emma Canalese, the production at its best captures the intimacy of two people negotiating history in real time - a negotiation as emotional as it is factual. However, an uneven approach to accents distracts from emotional continuity; voices drift in and out of region and age, occasionally pulling the audience out of the world just as it begins to settle. Similarly, the tempo rarely shifts gear. Scenes accumulate at a comparable rhythm, and, without sharper dynamic variation, the play’s structural revelations lose impact. What should feel like ruptures barely arrive. There is also an uneasy tension in the portrayal of diminished capacity. Watching an actor in their seventies embody a character losing agency raises complicated questions - not about ability, but about how vulnerability is staged. At times the depiction leans toward representational shorthand, creating moments where the audience becomes aware of performance rather than personhood. The play invites empathy; occasionally the staging prompts distance. Lunn writes with a gentle wit that never entirely leaves her characters, even in decline. The play’s central idea - that memory is both sanctuary and distortion - feels particularly resonant in queer history, where personal testimony often substitutes for institutional record. Eloise Snape anchors this conceptual terrain effectively, with a particularly strong performance. She navigates a character defined by class awareness and economic authority, constructing a careful social mask: measured voice, managerial composure, the confidence of someone accustomed to control. As the play progresses, that composure thins. Snape allows tiny cracks to appear - hesitation before a name, a laugh held half a beat too long - until it becomes clear the authority, she wields is also a defence as she faces the truth about her own life and marriage. Her eventual recognition that she too is living inside a constructed narrative lands as the production’s most affecting moment. Still, Es & Flo  remains a thoughtful inclusion in the Mardi Gras program: a work less about queer identity as declaration than queer history as memory - fragile, revisable and shared. By the final moments, the play suggests that love may be the only truth surviving the collapse of all others - not factual truth, not ideological truth, but relational truth: the story two people agree to keep telling together, even when one may no longer remember how it began. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Robert Catto

Possession The Substation   Another astute and gorgeously calibrated piece of programming from The Substation, Possession arrives like a flare in the dark: an operatic salon that is intimate in scale yet thunderous in ambition. Already sold out across its two-performance premiere, this second collaboration from mezzo-soprano Ruth Strutt, director Adam Player and pianist Michael Curtain makes a compelling case for a return season. The premise is electrifying. Three legendary queer historical figures are conjured through music: the blazing martyrdom of Joan in Rossini’s Giovanna d’Arco , the aching lyricism of Donizetti’s Saffo , and the defiant militancy of Dame Ethel Smyth, whose compositions fuelled the British Suffragette movement. What could have been a recital becomes instead a dramaturgically shaped odyssey - a searing meditation on womanhood, agency, art and rebellion. The Substation’s bunker-like architecture proves an inspired setting. The space holds sound with a kind of muscular containment; it feels both subterranean and sacred. The audience enters to find Strutt already present - utterly still, draped in a rich red cloth. She is icon and offering, monument and question mark. As Possession  unfolds, the cloth gives way to a full sequinned gown: glamour revealed from austerity, spectacle born of sacrifice. It is a simple visual transformation, but in Player’s restrained direction it resonates powerfully. Design elements are spare yet considered. A box functions as stage, altar, dock and barricade. Behind Strutt, the venue’s video wall projects imagery and surtitles, lending a contemporary edge that offsets the historical material. The use of projection never overwhelms; rather, it frames and contextualises. We are reminded that these women’s voices echo forward into our own moment. What elevates Possession is its architecture of sound. Recorded spoken text threads between the arias - fragments of biography, declarations, reflections - creating a polyphonic texture in which music and memory collide. The spoken word is not explanatory filler; it operates as rupture and release, allowing Strutt to pivot from narrator to embodiment in an instant.  She is a terrific actor! Vocally, Strutt is formidable. On the big stage she commands; up close she calibrates. There is no excess gesture, no indulgence. In Rossini’s Joan, the voice cuts bright and urgent, carrying a tensile steel that suggests faith weaponised. Donizetti’s Sappho brings a different colour: molten, bruised, suspended between ecstasy and annihilation. And in Smyth, Strutt unleashes something altogether more insurgent - rhythm sharpened, consonants biting, the music propelled by a political pulse. Crucially, Michael Curtain is not mere accompanist but co-conspirator. His playing is muscular and alert, capable of swelling into orchestral grandeur before receding to a conspiratorial hush. The partnership between voice and piano feels lived-in and elastic, each responding to the other’s breath. Director Adam Player resists operatic bombast in favour of clarity. The staging trusts the music, trusts the audience, and - most importantly - trusts Strutt. The result is a work that feels both distilled and expansive. In a time when opera can struggle to reconcile scale with intimacy, Possession  offers a persuasive answer: shrink the orchestra, sharpen the dramaturgy, and let the voice blaze. The evening becomes less a recital of arias than a reclamation. Joan, Sappho, Smyth - women historically mythologised, marginalised or misunderstood - are gathered not as relics but as living provocations. The title proves apt. These figures possess the stage; Strutt is possessed by them; and, by the final note, the audience feels possessed too - by music, by history, by the fierce insistence that art and rebellion are inseparable. Sold out already, Possession  deserves a longer life. In The Substation’s concrete cavern, opera finds not only resonance but revolution. Review by Kate Gaul

Selene The Substation From the internationally award-winning team behind ORPHEUS  and sibling to the acclaimed HELIOS , comes SELENE  - unmistakably a work from the fertile imagination of Wright & Grainger, this time written with and placed - gloriously - in the hands of Megan Drury. The title gestures toward the Greek goddess of the moon, but like so much in this piece, it is a beautiful feint. The story centres instead on Selene’s daughter, Pandia - goddess of the full moon - though any expectation of a tidy mythology lesson is swiftly dissolved. As with previous Wright & Grainger works, antiquity is merely the launchpad. We are catapulted into the modern world: a young girl obsessively replaying the moon landing; teenagers swimming beneath a lunar eclipse; a mismatched couple at a drive-in horror screening. Myth fractures and refracts through the prism of contemporary adolescence. (Confession: I too grew up obsessed with the first lunar landing and can confidently bore a room about Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins and the Eagle. This show understands that particular, slightly feral lunar fixation.) Drury is our guide through this orbiting constellation of images. Alone on stage - save for glowing, moon-like orbs - she conjures an entire universe. Her storytelling is rich, muscular and emotionally precise. Confidently stage in the round, Megan Drury shifts between relationships with ease - family members living and dead, friends and frenemies, lovers and almost-lovers - crafting a community around Pandia that feels utterly lived in. At key moments, audience members are invited to read lines aloud, becoming the chorus of characters, wild dogs and wolves. It is a simple device, but it deepens the sense of collective mythmaking; we are not just witnesses but participants in the tale. The narrative is lyrical yet grounded. Pandia grows up in a small English village near an ancient white chalk horse carved into the hillside - an image that anchors the show in landscape and folklore. From there, we plunge into lakes, race mopeds across dark countryside roads, dance wildly at raves, howl at the night sky, and ultimately step onto the lunar surface itself. Transitions between these worlds are aided by a propulsive, cinematic score that pulses beneath the storytelling like a heartbeat. But SELENE  is not simply an ode to youthful abandon. It is a meditation on what it means to grow up inside a body - and what happens when that body changes. Puberty, identity, desire, shame and grief swirl through the piece like tidal pull. The moon becomes both metaphor and mirror: constant yet shifting, luminous yet shadowed. Pandia is defined by orbit - family expectations, friendship hierarchies, gendered assumptions, the gravitational force of first love. The show asks quietly but insistently: what are we stuck circling? And what would it take to break free? Humour threads throughout. It is sharp, self-aware and often deliciously irreverent. Drury’s timing is impeccable. She allows moments to land, then tilts them sideways; she builds tension and releases it with a glance or perfectly weighted pause. The audience is held close, and we recognise ourselves in Pandia’s awkwardness, her yearning, her wildness. Visually and sonically, the production leans into simplicity, trusting story and performer above spectacle. It is a wise choice. Drury’s performance is magnetic - luminous without sentimentality, fierce without sacrificing vulnerability. She makes the cosmic feel intimate and the intimate feel epic. In just around an hour, SELENE achieves something quietly remarkable: we witness a girl transform into a goddess - and, in doing so, recognise the mythic proportions of our own coming-of-age stories. It is joyous, funny, heartfelt and deeply life-affirming. A radical exploding of ancient myth, yes - but also a tender excavation of the wildness inside us. Go for the mythology and moon landing. Stay for Megan Drury. Leave contemplating your own light and dark sides - and what you are still orbiting. Review by Kate Gaul Image Tenae Elise Photography

They Will Be Kings The Loading Dock   Werewolf’s remount of They Will Be Kings  at The Loading Dock arrives not as a simple reprise of its 2025 premiere, but as a work that has deepened, tightened and found new voltage in front of an audience. There is something potent about a second life in theatre - the chance to refine intention, to sharpen rhythm, to listen to what the work has become. Under the direction of Kaz Therese, this is a production that understands itself more fully and dares to go further. At its heart, They Will Be Kings  is a work about drag kings - artists who inhabit, exaggerate and interrogate masculinity - and through that transformation claim authorship over power, lineage and identity on their own fiercely constructed terms forged in dressing rooms, on dance floors, in queer community, in defiance. Therese’s direction is, as ever, incisive. They have a remarkable capacity to sculpt performance - to allow contradiction, humour and vulnerability to sit side by side. The quartet - Danica Lani, Chris McAlister, Angel Tan and Becs Blake  – here, are a tight ensemble that pulses with collective energy. Each brings a distinct texture to the stage: Lani’s grounded presence and emotional clarity, McAlister’s sharp comic timing edged with steel, Blake’s muscular theatricality, and Tan’s magnetic volatility. Together, they move as both individuals and collective. This isa community negotiating power in real time. The production’s tonal shifts are handled with confidence. One moment we are in the riotous glow of queer joy; the next, we are confronted with the quieter ache beneath it. The script resists sentimentality. It refuses to package trauma. Instead, it honours the mess: masculinity unravelled and reassembled, performance as survival strategy, as both shield and weapon. A standout performance comes from Angel Tan as Fine China. Tan commands the stage in a monologue - accompanied by live electric violin - landing as the emotional fulcrum of the evening. It is a meditation on self-construction: on carving beauty from fracture, on claiming visibility when invisibility once felt safer. The violin does not sentimentalise the moment; instead, it heightens its rawness. The effect is quietly shattering. Design plays a crucial role in this remount’s impact. Lighting designer Frankie Clark delivers a sophisticated, sculptural design that elevates the work in this modest black-box. Light here is not decorative; it crowns, exposes, sanctifies. A wash can feel like a nightclub; a single shaft can evoke a cathedral. All reinforcing the production’s interrogation of spectacle and sanctity. The sonic world is shaped by composer Gail Priest, whose score threads through the work with both pulse and restraint expanding the emotional register without overwhelming the performers’ voices. The soundscape feels alive, responsive, integral. What distinguishes this remount most powerfully is its sense of communal offering. The audience is not passive. There is a palpable exchange in the room - laughter that feels earned, silence that feels shared. In a cultural moment where queer narratives are both celebrated and contested, They Will Be Kings  feels urgent without becoming didactic. It is celebratory without ignoring precarity. Importantly, the production understands that queer joy is political. That claiming space, light, narrative - claiming kingship - is itself an act of resistance. But it also understands that such claims are fragile, hard-won and ongoing. Werewolf have not simply restaged a success; they have allowed the work to mature. Under Kaz Therese’s precise and generous direction, and in the hands of Lani, McAlister, Tan and Blake, They Will Be Kings  stands taller in its second iteration - more assured, more layered, more resonant. It is a reminder that theatre can be both rallying cry and refuge. And in this case, it is gloriously, unapologetically both. Go see this show!!! Review by Kate Gaul Image: Tanja Brukner

Perfect Arrangement The New Theatre   “Perfect Arrangement”,  written by Topher Payne in 2014 and set in 1950s America, is a play that looks backwards in order to ask contemporary questions. This production, directed and designed by Patrick Kennedy at the New Theatre, leans into that tension between period polish and present-day unease, delivering a thoughtful and well-crafted staging within the realities of community theatre. Kennedy’s direction foregrounds restraint. The play opens in the familiar idiom of mid-century domestic comedy: neighbourly dinners, clipped pleasantries, and carefully managed social rituals. The audience is invited into a world of apparent order and ease. Yet beneath this composure lie marriages built on concealment, and lives shaped by fear of exposure. Kennedy allows this tension to accumulate gradually, resisting melodrama in favour of slow, accumulating pressure. The result is a production that trusts both its material and its audience. Design plays a particularly important role in articulating the production’s ideas. Also designed by Kennedy, the set is an ingenious response to budgetary constraints. Within the limitations of a community theatre context, it looks assured and purposeful. The domestic stylised box set - neat, symmetrical, and reassuringly ‘correct’ - subtly shifts during the action, moving downstage as the play progresses. This simple but effective mechanic does more than solve spatial challenges: it becomes a conceptual gesture, reminding us that although the story is set in the past, its implications are uncomfortably close. The world of enforced conformity presses toward us, refusing to remain safely historical. Lighting design is clean and economical, supporting the action without drawing attention to itself. Sound is similarly unobtrusive, but for those attuned to it, a ticking clock underscores the action. Barely noticeable at first, it grows in significance as the stakes rise, becoming a quiet but insistent reminder of time running out - not only for the characters’ arrangements, but for the fragile equilibrium they are struggling to maintain. Amongst the actors, Brock Crammond stands out as Jim Baxter, delivering a performance of particular clarity and specificity. He fully embodies the character’s internal conflict, capturing both the warmth of Jim’s affections and the rigidity imposed by social expectation. His work grounds the play emotionally, offering a sense of what is at risk beneath the surface civility. Patrick Kennedy is a director whose work I greatly admire, particularly with his own company, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine, where his productions often pulse with urgency and theatrical vim. This production does not quite reach the same level of kinetic intensity, but that feels less a failure than a consequence of the material itself. “ Perfect Arrangement”  is a quieter, more mannered play, and Kennedy approaches it with appropriate care. It is an interesting and worthwhile work to have seen, especially in the context of ongoing conversations about visibility, safety, and the cost of assimilation. Though written in 2014, the play’s examination of private compromise and public performance resonates today. Kennedy’s production does not overstate these parallels, but allows them to emerge naturally, through design, pacing, and performance. What lingers is not outrage, but recognition - and the unsettling sense that the distance between then and now is far narrower than we might like to believe. Review by Kate Gaul Image: Bob Seary

Turandot Sydney Opera House   Opera Australia’s new production of Turandot arrives with the kind of visual ambition and vocal firepower audiences hope for from Puccini’s final, extravagant opera - and, while not without its inconsistencies, ultimately delivers a stirring, often thrilling theatrical experience. Most notably, this staging marks a welcome addition to Opera Australia’s roster of directors, with Ann Yee bringing a fresh, choreographic intelligence to the work. Yee’s background in movement and visual storytelling lends the production a fluidity and symbolic resonance that elevates many of the opera’s most familiar moments. Rather than relying solely on grand spectacle, she finds ways to embody the emotional architecture of the story through physical language - an approach that feels contemporary, thoughtful and often deeply poetic. This is most striking in the production’s opening image. As the curtain rises in silence on featured dancer Hoyori Maruo, the atmosphere immediately shifts into something more abstract and mythic. Maruo’s movement threads the emotional and narrative spine of the work, offering a powerful, wordless counterpoint to Puccini’s score. It is a contribution that not only enriches the storytelling but reframes Turandot as a psychological and symbolic journey rather than simply a lavish fairy tale - and one of the production’s most inspired choices. Vocally, the evening is anchored by a truly outstanding Calaf in Young Woo Kim. Possessing extraordinary volume, clarity and presence, Kim’s tenor cuts through Puccini’s dense orchestration with gold-plated brilliance. His performance combines heroic power with emotional nuance, making Calaf’s determination feel both thrilling and human. Rebecca Nash meets him with formidable strength as Turandot, bringing steely authority and dramatic intensity to the icy princess. Great to see her back with Opera Australia! Their duets crackle with tension and heat, alive with both vocal force and theatrical chemistry. Together they form the dramatic engine of the production. The supporting trio of Ping, Pang and Pong are strongly sung and energetically performed - Simon Meadows ably covering Ping on the night attended, alongside the ever-divine Michael Petruccelli as Pang and the reliably expressive John Longmuir as Pong. Vocally and individually they impress, though the conception of their characters and the staging of their extended scene proves one of the production’s weaker elements. The tonal shift here feels awkwardly handled, and the scenic setting momentarily disrupts the opera’s dramatic momentum. Visually, the production benefits greatly from Elizabeth Gadsby’s intelligent set design, making clever use of a revolve and a moving central piece, framed by walls that become canvases for Andrew Thomas Huang’s beautiful projected imagery. Genuinely, this collaboration works - the projections deepening atmosphere and emotional texture without overwhelming the performers. It is a sophisticated visual language that supports Yee’s abstract impulses while retaining narrative clarity. Costumes by David Fleischer, however, are more of a mixed bag. Some designs effectively echo the production’s mythic grandeur, while others feel conspicuously “make do” - a reminder of the financial realities facing large-scale opera in Australia today. One of the production’s great pleasures is the children’s chorus - always a treat in opera - who bring freshness, brightness and emotional resonance to the stage. While functioning beautifully as a unified ensemble, it is delightful to see flashes of individuality shine through, lending humanity and warmth to the larger spectacle. The Opera Australia adult chorus, too, is outstanding. From the opening scenes to the opera’s monumental climaxes, they perform with power, precision and emotional depth, creating a living, breathing world around the principal characters and grounding the drama in communal urgency. Overall, this Turandot may be uneven in places, but its strengths are considerable. Ann Yee’s fresh choreographic vision signals an exciting evolution in Opera Australia’s directorial landscape, while the vocal performances - particularly Young Woo Kim’s exceptional Calaf - offer moments of genuine operatic exhilaration. With its bold abstraction, stirring musicality and flashes of visual poetry, this production reminds us that even in constrained times, opera can still aim high, take risks and, more often than not, soar.   Review by Kate Gaul

Lacrima Ros Packer Theatre   Lacrima  arrives at Sydney Festival as a true festival work of scale: expansive, technically complex, politically alert, and emotionally devastating. It is theatre that understands ceremony as a surface, and labour as the truth beneath it. Conceived and directed by French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Lacrima  asks a deceptively simple question: what labour lies beneath ceremony?  This is a postcolonial tale from inside the world of haute couture. The production traces the making of a single wedding dress for British royalty, following the delicate threading of pearls, the painstaking embroidery, and the relentless pursuit of perfection demanded by power that never shows its face. The dress becomes a dramaturgical vessel - at once an object of beauty, continuity, and national symbolism, and a site of extraction, pressure, and quiet harm. In a white robed room with a dominant screen amongst others, at its centre and workbenches lining the walls, the play lifts the veil on the true cost of fashion. Nguyen’s great skill is to refuse a single point of view. Instead, the stage becomes a living chorus: multiple screens, live camera feeds offering intimate close-ups of hands at work - fabric, thread, pearls - while faces hover in fragile, human proximity. There are demands, impossible deadlines, insistence on excellence. Power is everywhere and nowhere. The production spans ateliers in Paris and Alençon, and workshops in Mumbai, creating a clear geopolitical map of the global North and global South. Luxury is consumed in one hemisphere, while pressure, exhaustion, and risk accumulate in another. Lacrima never simplifies this into a binary morality tale. Instead, it allows ambition, pride, devotion, and desire to coexist with exploitation. The system endures precisely because people care about the work. Threaded through the epic scale of the dress’s creation is a domestic story of anger, emotional abuse, and breakdown. This is not framed as an aberration but as a mirror: the same logics of pressure, silence, and endurance play out in private as in global systems of labour. Stakes rise quietly. Damage accrues not through spectacle but through repetition, proximity, and the inability to step away. Language sits at the heart of this work. Lacrima moves between French, English and Tamil, and it doesn’t smooth those differences over or translate everything for comfort. The use of multiple languages isn’t about ticking an inclusivity box; it’s how the piece is built. As Caroline Guiela Nguyen suggests, the space is shaped by the people who are present. Onstage and in the audience, people hear their own languages spoken clearly and with respect. Communities rarely centred in theatre aren’t just talked about here - they are physically present, and they actively shape the world of the play It is sometime hard to keep up – what and where to look.  It is sophisticated theatre-making that trusts its audience deeply. The cast - brilliantly, and refreshingly - is largely composed of older actors. Their presence brings gravity, history, and a sense of lived experience. These performances are restrained, exacting, and devastating in their understatement. No one is performing “victimhood”; instead, we witness competence under strain, pride under pressure, and dignity stretched thin. Ultimately, Lacrima is a searing meditation on ambition, continuity, and exploitation -on how systems persist by rendering labour invisible while fetishising its results. It is intellectually rigorous, emotionally precise, and formally bold. As festival theatre goes, this is complex, humane, and uncompromising: a work that insists we look closely at what we celebrate, and who pays for the beauty we consume.   Review by Kate Gaul

All the Fraudulent Horse Girls Old Fitz “All the Fraudulent Horse Girls” is a 60-minute equine fantasia through young girl horse culture; a fairly un-profound exploration of human loneliness and a not-so-subtle queer subtext which gives this lovely play its fizz.  Written by the ever-accomplished Michael Louis Kennedy who makes references to everything form “Black Beauty”, “Never Ending Story” and “Saddle Club” to name three … and then there’s Cormac McCarthy. I liked what he said here in an interview about the play: “It is camp in the best way imaginable; in that it's supposed to be tonally serious and doesn't quite execute it. Effectively, we wanted to tell a story of a weird, lonely girl on the autobahn to queer womanhood. To create a tone that was queer and reflective of the inner life of a pre-teen we decided we would go ham on the cultural references to build her character and demonstrate her interior life. And what better way to discuss the pain of not having physical friends than through the prism of an infinite capacity for telepathic friendships with other international weird kids.” I’m not going to recount the story but suffice to say this is a piece in 3 sections performed by three incredible actors – the beyond fabulous Janet Anderson, Shirong Wu and Caitlin A Kearney.  It is pacy and deftly directed by Jess Arthur on a makeshift stage in front of a droopy curtain. You just remember what it was to be 11 and to believe in magic powers of telepathy.  Audrey does and so she communicates with every other horse girl in the world – even those who don’t speak English. The three women take turns in playing aspects of Audrey complete with kooky hand gestures, over the top horse girl hats. The performances are skilled, the characterisation knowing.  I loved the check pastel matching costumes and inventive low-tech and low-cost fringed denim (set and costumes by Paris Bell). Memorable is the campy, surreal, hallmark opening scene, which is an interview with a writer who, as a horse girl herself, has written a book about the “divinity of horses”. It is completely outrageous, and we never return to it or the writer – superbly played by the actors with very fruity French accents. It is delicious and entirely sets the tone for the show.  I loved its confidence. To yearn for a horse girl companion, be shunned, and then attempt to steal a police horse on a school trip as a way of proving the legitimacy of her horsey obsession, she is kicked in the head and wakes to find herself in an American desert and from there she must find her way back to Australian suburbia. It is nicely subversive in that all this horse ridin’ and whip crackin’ is female centred and we never meet the big Wild West male of horse myth. This is a chaotic kaleidoscopic play that defies expectations and does so in the nicest way. Grab a drink from the bar and prepare for a fine ride on this priceless pony. Giddy-up! Kate Gaul image: Robert Catto