Lost and Found Orchestra, presented at the Sydney Festival by highly regarded British theatrical music company, The Stomp Company, is as joyful as it is inventive, as accessible as it is complex and as entertaining as it is original.
Written by its stars, Kate Smith and Drew Fairley it’s a farce in which a lovelorn crippled cop and a pert, determined sidekick provide the hook on which to hang a tenuous thriller where love conquers all.
Redheads follows the melodramatic lives of Ruth(Beth Champion) and Joanna(Emily Weare), two wannabe ‘twenty something’ spinsters who just want to feel loved.
Take an astute selection of top-drawer talents, mix with intelligence, fresh energy, an eye to the future and it's not surprising the results are better than pleasing.
Red Stitch’s Hellbent is an adaptation of the seventeenth century play The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. It’s a revenge tragedy, a hysterical melodrama of Shakespearean proportions served up with an extra dollop of nastiness and it’s wonderful.
Steeped in meta-theatricality, A Mirror prompts us to reflect on the status of storytelling, of its place in creating a culture, its manipulation into myth, its power to prick and to prod.
Young, O’Neill, Ionis, and indeed every member of the orchestra understood how to let this music crack open the psyche, yet hold us there in ways that can transfigure our souls.
Iolanthe and Janet Anderson work in cosmic, comedic accord, characterisation charismatic, timing impeccable, delivery precise, together a tour de force that ascends the cliché.