Theatre

The Australian Ballet opens its milestone 50th year with a bold statement about the future of dance. Infinity sees the world premiere of three specially commissioned Australian works by Graeme Murphy, Gideon Obarzanek and Stephen Page. It’s the first time in the company’s history that a triple bill of three new Australian works has been presented. Murphy breaks away from his established narrative style with an abstract work, The Narrative of Nothing; Obarzanek provides a fresh look at classical ballet with a post-modern twist in There’s Definitely a Prince Involved; and Page combines Western ballet with the spirituality of Indigenous dance to forge new frontiers of storytelling in Warumuk - in the dark night.

Aida is the stuff of operatic legend. Gold-clad warriors and lithe dancers traverse the stage. Pyramids loom from the shadows. And Verdi’s moving songs tell of two peoples at war. Graeme Murphy’s production of Verdi’s Aida is back to fill the stage of the Sydney Opera House with soaring voices and glittering pageantry. This is grand opera, writ large, brought to the stage by a master of spectacle. Arvo Volmer, conducts a cast of blazing voices, led by the powerful soprano of Norma Fantini, making her Australian debut. Radamès is an Egyptian warrior, Aida is an Ethiopian princess, and the two are on opposite sides of a bitter war. When they fall for each other Aida must choose between her love for Radamès, and love for her country.

The Forest of Arden: Orlando loves Rosalind. Rosalind is disguised as a boy called Ganymede. Phebe loves Ganymede. Silvius loves Phebe. Rosalind loves Orlando back. Oliver is hunting Orlando. Celia loves Oliver. Celia is disguised as Aliena. The Duke is hunting Celia. The other Duke is hunting deer. Jaques loves the deer. Touchstone is freaked out by Jaques. Audrey loves Touchstone. Touchstone loves words … It turns out to be quite a hard play to describe. In the end there’s a wedding and they all go home. As You Like It is breadth of life as only Shakespeare knows how. This is the tale of a mixed bag of ordinary human beings on a tremendous voyage of discovery. At its heart is a heroically foolhardy attempt to begin society all over again, which makes this a perfect end to the first year of the new Belvoir.

Time for a comedy, a mad, gorgeous, bittersweet comedy about how good it is not to be dead yet. A group of more or less ordinary Sydneysiders go about their lives: Anna makes toast, Henry dresses for work, Milla catches the train to school, Moses deals drugs, that kind of thing. But hovering above this unholy parade of life is the sobering fact that Milla will die before her 15th birthday. Rita Kalnejais is a young playwright of uncommon genius. She looks at the humdrum world around us and sees something radically alive. Dogs, Paganini, figs, an eight-year-old Vietnamese violin prodigy, morphine, clear skies and a Latvian immigrant are amongst the magnificent conflagration of ingredients which make up this wonderful, funny play. Written specially for Belvoir, its theme is what Rita calls the violent sweetness of life.

Palm Island. An Aboriginal man is arrested, allegedly for insulting a police officer. Within 90 minutes, he lies dead on the watchhouse floor, his liver cleaved in two. The community protests, the police station is torched. A Senior Sergeant stands trial for manslaughter but is acquitted. Questions are raised about manipulation of evidence and a court suppression order. A protestor, jailed for inciting a riot, is out on parole on condition that he speaks to no-one. Beautiful One Day is a theatrical documentary made by a group of Australians (black and white) seeking to interpret these events against the full sweep of the island’s history. It seeks to grasp the ordinariness of brutality, charting the course of repression, resistance and racism but also the astonishing resilience of the people who call Palm Island home.

Belvoir and the acclaimed Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) have joined forces for this big-picture show about a city and society redefining itself. Late one night in the gutted façade of a building primed for redevelopment, a group of security workers, labourers, and a local teenager find themselves haunting the same territory. One by one they rule a line in the sand, and by dawn they’re set for a showdown over who builds the future and who gets to own it. Buried City is an ambitious new work about ever-changing cities like, well, Sydney where waves of immigrants make new lives on old land. Director Alicia Talbot’s investigation of real-time action and filmic panorama continues in this special collaboration between Belvoir and Bankstown-based UTP.

Celebrity Autobiography is the international smash-hit comedy where the unintentionally hilarious real-life stories of the A-list are presented verbatim, live on stage by a rotating, ensemble cast of local stars. The show, created by Emmy Award-nominated writer/ performer Eugene Pack and Dayle Rafael, has been recast and reworked for its Australian premiere and promises an evening of hilarious and hard-to-believe vignettes torn straight from the pages of celebrities’ tell-all books. Sydney audiences will finally discover the truth behind what actually happens backstage at a Justin Bieber concert, marvel at the ‘private’ moments revealed in Britney Spears’ diary, find out how Sylvester Stallone feels about his muscles and just how much Tiger Woods loves his ‘putter’. Celebrity Autobiography has played sell out seasons in New York since 2008. It began its tour in 2010 with acclaimed performances across America as well as playing to packed houses at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and London’s West End, where the show opened to rave reviews. Celebrity Autobiography is directed by Wayne Harrison and the local cast includes Georgie Parker, Jeremy Sims, Daniel MacPherson, Fiona O’Loughlin, Mikey Robins and James O’Loghlin.

In this exquisite cabaret of the senses, a diva melts into a rope suspended high above the ground, muscle bound gents defy the laws of gravity, balloons disappear strangely, bubble wrap discovers its artistic soul, while hoops spin and bodies twist, fly and tumble.  World renowned for making the seemingly impossible possible, the troupe of seven will delight audiences this summer with a sexy, funny and explosive display. 

In every show we strive to be breathtakingly original. Choreographer Lucy Guerin’s new show for Belvoir takes this to an extreme by striving to be breathtakingly original every night. A group of actors and dancers meet on stage and begin the show with a short conversation about… Well, we don’t know yet. Each night it will be a different conversation, just an ordinary preshow chat like you might have yourselves, and this short conversation will form the basis of the rather surprising performance that follows. It sounds like it shouldn’t work. But in the hands of Guerin and her remarkable cast it does. The project began as a simple experiment: what happens when you put three dancers and three actors together in a room? The result is both a mesmerising cultural encounter between two art forms, and a kind of x-ray of the surprising hugeness that lies beneath our daily chitchat.

A Sydney summer of Mozart draws to a close with a bittersweet portrayal of young love, Così fan tutte. This is Mozart at his most romantic, most intimate, most exquisite. This is music that gets to the heart of what it is to love. Jim Sharman’s production showcases a new generation of theatrical wizards. Ralph Myers is set designer, Gabriela Tylesova has created the fabulous frocks and video artist Mic Gruchy takes the live action into another dimension. With a young cast and a fresh English translation, this is a playful and surprising production. Don Alfonso bets his two young friends that their girlfriends will cheat on them, given half a chance. They are confident their lovers will stay true. But there’s no harm in playing a little game to test them out. Or is there?

Willy Loman is feeling his age. He and his wife Linda are struggling to make their mortgage repayments. The company he works for is branching out in new directions and it looks like he’s about to be left behind. When his university drop-out son, Biff, moves back home after years of drifting, old tensions rise to the surface. Arguably the greatest play of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about a man refusing to let go of the false dreams we were all once promised. Returning to our corner stage after an absence of 30 years, Colin Friels tackles the role of a lifetime in Simon Stone’s take on this timeless masterpiece.

Photographs, paintings, a lock of hair. Paul clings to the memory of his dead wife, caught between a happy past and an uncertain future. Can Mariette, who bears an uncanny likeness to his dead wife, help him leave the shadowlands? Or is it a journey he must make all by himself? Opera Australia presents the Australian premiere of Die tote Stadt, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Stefan Vinke as Paul and Cheryl Barker in the dual roles of Marie and Mariette. Korngold is best known as one of Hollywood’s first film composers, with classics such as The Sea Hawk, starring Errol Flynn, to his name. But before film came opera. Die tote Stadt, ‘The Dead City’, is a masterpiece of the twentieth century, full of soaring vocal writing and lush orchestration, reminiscent of Puccini and Richard Strauss.

Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town is one of Australia’s great and abiding books. Everything and nothing happens, from the small to the absolute, from the simple to the diabolical. Spanning most of the last century, from Coonabarabran to Surry Hills, it is the chronicle of a life. And Ruby’s is one hell of a life. Leah Purcell directs this one-woman show which attempts something a little bit glorious: to relive Ruby’s big and soulful 70-something years in an evening. Don’t Take Your Love to Town is about a lot of things, love, childhood, struggle, humour, family, work, but most of all it is a homage to Black Australia’s extraordinary spirit of endurance.

No-one would doubt that Benedict Andrews has a vivid imagination. As a director he has taken some of our most revered classics and turned them on their heads. The Seagull, Measure for Measure, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sydney Theatre Company’s The War of the Roses and The Season at Sarsparilla thrilled and scandalised audiences with their audacity, clarity and theatrical chutzpah. Now Andrews has turned his hand to playwriting. A family under threat from what, we don’t know hires a young security guard, Chris. He spends long hours, day and night, by the pool, watching. One by one, in their private universes of plate glass and good food, each family member is drawn to Chris. A dangerous game of fantasy and privilege begins. Every Breath is an extraordinary debut written by a theatre-maker at the top of his game. Darkly funny, sweetly eerie, and strangely familiar, this is about what happens when prosperity gives us the licence to see the world as we want to see it.

You will laugh out loud with this musical comedy about four parents whose only common ground is the football field where their kids play Every Single Saturday.This production is being staged at the Glen Street Theatre on Sydney’s lower north shore at Belrose.The story revolves around Neil, an aloof orchestra conductor, unaccustomed to the pressures of being a father to his estranged son; Sandy, a hard-driven working class fitness freak trying to avoid her struggles at home; Liz, a well-educated North Shore mum trying to rebuild her life as a single parent and the team’s coach, Carlo, an Italian soccer dad reliving his days as a former sports hero. You will follow their sideline dramas as the junior team goes nowhere fast until Neil’s son, the talented Becks, arrives.

A country highway. A greasy takeaway joint. Two sisters. One of them left, one stayed behind. One chose chaos, the other control. One chose sex, the other, food. Enter Hakan Leventoglu, aka Hassan the Beautiful. Kate Champion is riding the wave of a decade of brilliant work across theatre, opera and dance, notably with her celebrated company Force Majeure.Steve Rodgers is a theatrical marvel who writes and acts with equal aplomb. Their work meets here within the classic architecture of great drama: feuding sisters, a charming man and the possibility of transformation. The sisters battle it out, trying to make sense of who they were, who they are and whether they can ever allow each other to be something else.