Captain Broughton: The old men remember

The Dunera News is a photocopied magazine of news and reminiscences of the Dunera boys who were shipped to Australia in World War Two (and who included my father). The latest edition contains a reproduction of an Age story that I missed at the time about Captain Broughton his picture is above, being held by Dunera Boy Mike Sondheim.

The cast of the Marvelous Wonderettes have a chat, in character, about their upcoming prom and what a fantastic night it's going to be. Also, with a little coaxing, they gave the program a little of what you can expect…

Tuhaka takes Manaia to Melbourne festival (Thursday, August 16, 2012) GISBORNE actor Te Kohe Tuhaka is off to Australia . . . for a short while, at least. Theatre company Taki Rua has confirmed that its acclaimed production of John…

See the review in its original context here.

Michael Dalley is the real deal when it comes to the Melbourne cabaret scene; he is a sophisticated pisstaker extraordinaire who delights once more with his new work, Mademoiselle, an exercise in supreme nastiness. Very funny and rude. We last saw his talent comically tarring and feathering the world of real estate in Urban Display Suite.

Here Dalley and co-deviser/performer Paul McCarthy present in song the most professional pair of bitchy queens you will ever meet, sad little men with evil minds and a penchant for going through other people’s rubbish. The best thing about this show is how it has a go at two of Australia’s wealthiest, most famous and least civic minded ladies. Recognition brings glee. Music is provided by John Thorn; the songs are co-written by him and Dalley.

Liza Power
The Age
28/07/2012

AS A satirist, Michael Dalley has made a career of taking the mickey. Middle-class values, real estate agents, the nouveau riche, his closest friends and acquaintances – nothing is out of bounds. ”I could make a cabaret about the Labor Party or Family First,” he jokes over coffee, ”but it would be too easy and pointless. It’s more interesting to pick apart what you’re supposed to hold sacred.” Better still to do it in a slick, mordant, wildly witty way, which is of course precisely what Dalley is renowned for.

Tessa Hayward
02/08/2012
City Weekly

Michael Dalley is a self-confessed control freak. He has written, stars in, produces and directs the upcoming gothic music theatre revue, Mademoiselle.

Dalley (pictured above right) and Paul McCarthy (above left) play two valets, or butlers, who are left alone for the evening when their boss unexpectedly goes out. “They decide to use it as a chance to let out all the oppression that has been holding them in,’’ Dalley says. ‘‘They don’t like each other very much. They feed off each other and end up ridiculing each other and putting each other down quite a lot.’’

Raymond Gill
Life & Style, The Saturday Age
30/06/2012

DOUG Fields, 55, works night shifts managing an outer-Melbourne supermarket, so he would seem to have scant connection with a fascinating chapter in Australia’s theatre history.

Fields is the eldest of six children of the late Jim McNeil, who is known in the theatre industry as a playwright whose talent burnt bright and fast in his small output of plays from the early 1970s, including The Chocolate Frog and The Old Familiar Juice, both of which are having a rare production at fortyfivedownstairs from next week.

Rosemary Neill
The Australian
23/06/2012

THE Melbourne media christened Jim McNeil the laughing bandit because he was often amused at how easy it was to hold up a TAB or pub at gunpoint.

The serial offender would chuckle to himself, even as he was carrying out his weapon and a bag of loot.

McNeil was many things: armed robber and cop shooter; husband, wife basher and father; raconteur, recidivist and violent alcoholic; underage lover of a brothel madam, prison homosexual and charismatic womaniser. He was an unlikely arts sensation, but that’s precisely what he became after he started writing plays behind the high sandstone walls of Sydney’s Parramatta jail in the early 1970s.

See the review in its original context here.

Finucane & Smith’s GLORY BOX is the latest incarnation of The Burlesque Hour, the Australian cabaret that has gone on to redefine – defy even – the genre around the world.

Sexy, twisted, and at times very moving, I find myself requiring multiple adjectives to capture the essence of this show. I could add funny, confronting and slightly un-hinged, and I’d still only describe a portion of what happens when this GLORY BOX is opened.

In an underground salon of red lanterns and intimate tables, co-creator Moira Finucane’s opening act sets the tone as she devours an apple so ferociously that I might still be removing pieces from my hair. For the uninitiated this might be the moment where any expectation of a traditional burlesque experience is also demolished. And from here the delights unfold!

The Age
Mark Ellis
11/6/2012

Christos Tsiolkas enjoys the serious and playful sides of burlesque.

THE Queen of Burlesque, Moira Finucane, is also the Queen of Adjectives. As she enthuses about her new show, a tumbling cascade of P.T. Barnum superlatives collect at our feet.

Sian Prior reviews Far Away for Culture Club, 774 Drive, ABC Radio

See the review in its original context here.

If…you want to be surprised, even a bit disturbed by a visit to the theatre – try ‘Far Away’, a play that’s on at 45 Downstairs in Flinders Lane, written by the award-winning English playwright Caryl Churchill. I’ve been thinking about this play ever since I saw it last weekend. Churchhill is known for her non-naturalistic approach to theatre – she’s a political playwright…politics in the broader sense of power and the uses and abuses of it. The play is divided into three different scenes and as the first one opens, we see a child who has woken up in the middle of the night approaching a woman in a kitchen. We learn the woman is her aunt and the child gradually reveals that she’s just witnessed a deeply disturbing scene outside in the garden. There’s been violence and blood and the child is trying to make sense of it all. And the aunt is trying to first of all explain what the child has seen, but then – we realize – she’s trying to cover up what’s been happening. We see the world from the child’s perspective as she tries to understand adult behaviour that, on the face of it, is simply terrifying. We’re in moral quicksand as the aunt keeps changing her story. What IS going on out there in the garden shed? – we never really find out.