Review: Cats

CATS

"Give me the child until he is seven," goes the saying, "and I will give you the man." I fundamentally disagree with this, and not only because I think it's wrong to go around asking for other people's children. It's that if this were true, then I would now be surrounded by homemade robots and jetpack-wearing monkeys and would sleep in a bed shaped like a car. As it is, only one of those things turns out to be anything like my reality. Also, as a kid I was really revolted by the idea of Cats (the musical), whereas the adult me couldn't wait to see it.

Review: The Fate of Franklin and his Gallant Crew

THE FATE OF FRANKLIN AND HIS GALLANT CREW

By Four Larks Theatre.

If there's one thing we've learnt from history, by which I mean the movies, it's this: any group of men stranded in the wild for more than about an hour will inevitably start chowing down on each other as soon as they get peckish. The chances of this are raised greatly if they're sporting beards and/or uniforms, and if they're gourmands they'll remember the lesson imparted by that movie about the soccer team that got stuck in the Andes: Always Start With the Butt-Cheeks. It's gotten to the point where whenever I go camping with buddies I can sense them drawing dotted lines on my chubbier bits and contemplating whether a dijon or honey-mustard dressing will go better with liver. In short, cannibals are the new whatever-people-are-calling-new-these-days.

I'm not giving much away when I reveal that The Fate of Franklin and his Gallant Crew may involve some Soylent Green stuff. This is because the show isn't really about cannibalism but about the ways in which we construct history. In this case, it's the history of mid-nineteenth century explorer and his crew who get stuck trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage that would allow ships to travel through the Arctic above Canada.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason (is another Pink Floyd reference)

Of all the journalists pounding Melbourne's pavements in the quest for a good news story, surely the hardest working of all is my good colleague Staff Writer. 

Here's SW's latest offering - an emotionally-worded opinion piece on the current round of arts funding by the City of Melbourne:

An Interview with John Clancy

When I heard that Red Stitch were putting on a play by John Clancy I immediately went 110% frickin bananas before I realised that I had no idea who this John Clancy character was (is). I knew he wasn’t Tom Clancy, which dashed my hopes of finally watching some submarine-based intrigue on a Melbourne stage, but at least there was no danger of me repeating a Madagascar Moment and spending an hour wondering why the MTC had transformed a delightful animated romp about zoo animals into a completely lemur-free drama. So this is who John Clancy is: he lives in New York and writes and directs theatre and has won five Fringe Firsts in Edinburgh and lots of other awards too. He sounds a little bit like a younger Alan Alda. Let’s have a closer look.

Review: Madagascar

MADAGASCAR

By MTC.

Madagascar is a play that resists superlatives. It’s pretty familiar and pretty forgettable. It’s not very anything. I enjoyed it very much and would happily see it again.

An edited conversation with Jin Xing

[Jin Xing is China’s first officially recognised transsexual; a former army colonel; and the force behind the country’s largest and only independent dance company. Her Shanghai Beauty opens tonight at the Arts Centre - having visited Shanghai in December last year, we start by talking about the place.]

I always say that Shanghai is a three-F city: for the outsider it’s fascinating, for the insider it’s frustrating and for both it’s frightening. We don’t know what’s going to happen, what direction it’s going in. We’re so keen to develop the economy, financial development, that we’re losing a lot of our cultural heritage. Especially in education and art education. We did have a strong art education before. Now, the whole country seems so much into economic development and being a strong superpower. There’s so much focus on the numbers. 

We lose a lot at the same time. I mean the traditional morality and values, social issues, what the real idea of life is. The Chinese are good at that, because after thousands and thousands of years of culture we really understand what life is about. Not just numbers and economic achievement. Now we’re losing a lot of those details. The train has to stop speeding up, it’s too fast.

Review: Now with Feeling (part III)

NOW WITH FEELING

By Danelle Lee.

When we talk (or write, sometimes even think) about theatre we paint from a very limited palette. We call something ‘surreal’ when it ventures anywhere outside of the borders of a very small and badly policed domain of theatremaking; we haul out Shakespeare as a kind of witty shorthand (“sound and fury” gets the gong for most overused review cliché, with honourable mentions to “the play’s the thing”, “what’s in a name?”, and “something is rotten in the state of whatever I basically want to say is shit”); we call something ‘challenging’ or ‘difficult’ when we could be employing a lesser-employed Bardicism, “I am dying, Egypt, dying”; and so often we’re fatally tempted by the gorgon of art: “Good or bad?” That’ll turn you to stone, that one there.