The best theatre to see in Sydney this week

As I’m on my way to Sydney's Capitol Theatre for the new Australian production of The Book of Mormon, my friend tells me it’s the very first musical a lot of people see. Created by South Park duo Trey Parker and Matt Stone (with Robert Lopez), the show’s reputation for extremely irreverent jabs at religion draws a non-traditional theatre crowd. What I now realise my friend didn’t mean was, “it’s often the first musical kids see”. When I say the musical is extremely irreverent, I mean it. The humour is crass, verging on grotesque (some things I wouldn’t dare repeat). So it’s probably questionable that I’ve brought along my 13-year-old son with me. That said, he loves it.  Some of the humour is classic teen boy (i.e. a regular exclamation from one of the Ugandan characters that he has “maggots in my scrotum”). Very South Park. My son laughs loudly with the rest of the audience – and when the jokes go too far, he cringes, glancing around with a “should I be laughing at this?” look. Although the shock value is high, it’s nice seeing a Gen Alpha-ite who’s been raised on Youtube and other screen-based entertainment bopping along in his seat to the song and dance of a stage show.    What’s the premise of The Book of Mormon? The Book of Mormon tells the story of two young Mormon missionaries sent to a small village in Uganda. Although the story centres on Mormonism, Parker and Stone have been known to refer to the show as an “atheist’s love letter to religion” – a wink and a jab...

In musical theatre circles, Cats is the show that everyone loves to hate, dismissing it as “weird” and “uncool”. So let me begin this review by stating that I love Cats. I listened to the cast recording over and over as a child, I met my best friend on a Cats mailing list (remember those?) when I was sixteen, and there's probably still some old Cats fanfiction floating around out there that I wrote in my teens. This much maligned show doesn't deserve the hate it gets.  When Cats was first performed in the early 1980s, it was hailed as groundbreaking, bridging the gap between concept musicals and mega musicals in a way no show had done before. It won both Olivier and Tony awards for best musical, and ran for decades on the West End and Broadway. These days, it’s viewed more as a “guilty pleasure” – the show you secretly enjoy but are supposed to pretend you don’t, lest you be seen as uncultured. But why? Concept musicals based around a theme rather than a traditional narrative have existed since the 1950s, with notable examples including Cabaret, Hair and Company. Dance-heavy musicals are also not a unique concept. Cats isn't even the only show to combine these two elements. But while shows like A Chorus Line and Pippin are hailed as iconic, Cats – which is essentially A Chorus Line with tails – is not shown the same love.  Cats may not be too heavy on the plot, but it’s a show for people who love the little details Much of the criticism surrounding Cats comes from wanting...

Ed's Note: Hailed by Rolling Stone as “the best rock musical ever”, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is on now at Sydney’s Carriageworks (you can buy tickets over here). Time Out critic Guy Webster reviewed the production last month when it was on at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre. Read on for his five-star review... ***** Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That’s Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006. You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York’s punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called “the music of gay bashers”, and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell’s life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask’s work with the SqueezeBox band. It’s the closest I’ve come to calling a musical ‘punk’ without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago. This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place....

I have reviewed many shows at the Sydney Opera House, and never – never – before have I been so utterly flabbergasted at the lack of scrutiny and professionalism upheld by a creative team in the running of a production.  For starters, the immense buzz in the the Drama Theatre’s foyer was squashed before the audience had even entered the stalls, as a sign informed us that Hollywood star Tom Cruise would in fact not be appearing at this performance of The Murder at Haversham Manor. This was swiftly followed by the show’s operator, Trevor (Edmund (Eds) Eramiha), wandering up and down the aisles, followed in tow by the stage manager Annie (Olivia Charalambous) as they asked us, the audience, if we had seen a lost dog, Winston, who it appeared was to be a character in the show. Completely unprofessional! After this was resolved, the director of the The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society greeted us all, ensuring that this production would not follow the mishaps in their previous works, and that they finally have funding and a script that suits their society. It would not be another low budget production (such as their summer season of James, where is your Peach?) and that they do have a full cast, as to avoid a repeat of the debacle of their most recent musical, Cat. The cracks that began to appear even before the curtain lifted on The Murder at Haversham Manor only continued to widen as the show played on, the whole evening building up into a fiasco of disastrous heights – and,...