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Tag Archives: Roy Hukari

Blood Brothers

08 Jul

There is an awful lot of speculation out there about the bonds between twins. Whether it’s about finishing each others’ sentences or remotely sensing trouble in each other’s lives, twins arouse a lot of speculation about whether certain behaviours are innate or acquired. Such speculations, I suspect, were part of the inspiration for Blood Brothers, now playing at The Q in Queanbeyan…

The rest of this post is published on Australian Stage.

 
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Posted by on Friday, 8 July 2011 in Australian Stage, Canberra Theatre, Musical Theatre, The Q, Theatre

 

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Chess

30 Jul
I really must come up with a good reason why I don’t like follow spots and smoke. Normally my dislike of them doesn’t matter, but in the case of Chess, they use them right at the beginning, and they use them well! Why is this a problem? Well, if you don’t like follow spots and you don’t like smoke, but the first thing in the show is a follow spot and smoke, it distracts you from the show. It’s not a problem with a poor show, but unfortunately, The Q’s production of Chess is not a poor show, so I feel I need to justify my dislike of follow spots and smoke. One day, my prejudice will have a justification, but this is not that day. Chessis just too good.

Chess is, in many ways, poles apart from Krapp’s Last Tape, which I gushed about the night before, but it shares two important characteristics: it tells a remarkably human story, and allows an audience to engage in some depth with its central characters. That said, I think I missed some elements of that story, due to some distortion of Tim Rice’s lyrics. I am unsure whether this was a problem with enunciation or amplification, but I suspect the latter. Of course, putting such complicated sentence structures into lyrics was probably a bad idea in the first place, but in this instance it was not a fatal one, probably due to the talents of this magnificent cast.
The ensemble gathered for this production must be one of the best I have seen in Canberra, but they were not a patch on the magnificent talents of principals Stephen Pike, Christine Forbes and Lexi Sekuless. Even an old cynic like me felt goosebumps!
 
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Posted by on Thursday, 30 July 2009 in Canberra Theatre, Musical Theatre, The Q, Theatre

 

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All Shook Up

23 May

All Shook Up is a take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in case you didn’t know. I knew, and I think I missed half the show trying to figure out which characters corresponded to which Twelfth Night characters. Why did I do that?
As we have come to expect from Supa, All Shook Up is a great show that doesn’t ask a lot of its audience. We joined the blue rinse set for today’s matinee. It’s not normally a good idea to go to a matinee, the audiences are usually a bit flat, and the performers suffer for it. This was probably true today, and yet what struck me was the technical precision displayed by the cast. Under the musical direction of Garrick Smith, the principal cast gave stunning performances of many of Elvis Presley’s most popular songs, supported by an equally impressive ensemble.
It was a great show, although not a patch on Supa’s recent productions of Buddy. It could have something to do with the music, but I think maybe I’m just a little too young to appreciate it the way the rest of the audience, who were mostly twice my age, did. It’s a good show, but for my tastes it needed a little less sugar.
 
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Posted by on Saturday, 23 May 2009 in ANU Arts Centre, Canberra Theatre, Theatre

 

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