Barry Lenny - Page 62

State Theatre once again have another successful piece of theatre on their hands, with nods and words of approval flowing as the audience left the Dunstan Playhouse at the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Giuseppe Verdi's opera, filled with powerful emotions, has not been seen in Adelaide for over forty years, and this stupendous production leaves one wondering why that is so.

We rarely have a chance to see somebody as exceptionally skilled and talented in physical theatre as Gavin Robertson and, as with the other three performances so far, everybody should be fighting for tickets.

This gem from Nicholas Collett has now been played many, many times, in many, many locations and, it is safe to say, will continue to be played for a long time to come. It is pure gold.

Bond! An Unauthorised Parody, finds the man with all the technical gadgets, the smart answers, and a string of girls with extraordinary names passing through his bed, facing the greatest challenge of his career as he hunts for a super-villain and a bomb.

This s a master-class in how to write, direct, and perform a one man show, playing a number of very different characters, from varied regional backgrounds and social classes.

The latest offering from the University of Adelaide Theatre Guild is the multi-award winning Adelaide playwright and screenplay writer, Andrew Bovell's Holy Day (The Red Sea).

It was clear that bringing this group back for a return season was a very good move on the part of the Festival Director, Jacinta Thompson, with the audience leaving the performance with big smiles on their faces.

The Light Surgeons, from London, join with Ng Chor Guan, Hands Percussion, and Rhythm in Bronze to create an audio-visual work, SuperEverything, that looks at, well, just about everything Malaysian.

David Mealor directed Angela Betzien's The Dark Room, set in a room in a three star motel in an unnamed location in Australia's Northern Territory, for Flying Penguin Productions. This was made possible with the help of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, through their Umbrella programme.

Punk cabaret star, Amanda Palmer, formerly one half of the duo, The Dresden Dolls, performed in Adelaide for one night only, with two great support acts.

Heart to Heart was a concert of two very different cycles of love songs by Adelaide composer, David Kotlowy. The first was for guitar and tenor, whilst the other was for a small Javanese gamelan group, tenor, and soprano.

Ute Lemper first visited Australia two decades ago and, for her 20th Anniversary tour, she has brought something new, a set of songs that she has composed in collaboration with Argentinean bandoneonist, Marcelo Nisinman, setting the love poems of Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda

The sixth concert in the Evenings at Elder Hall series features the three choirs from the Elder Conservatorium in a feast of music by the supremely talented Benjamin Britten.

Not According to Plan, brings together an extremely creative group of people, resulting in a phenomenal production. Central to the work is the life of Xiao-Xiong Zhang, who also appears as a dancer singer and actor.

The T'ang Quartet, comprising Ng Yu-Ying, first violin, Ang Chek Meng, second violin, Lionel Tan, viola, and Leslie Tan, cello, presented a very varied concert of six pieces by four contemporary composers.

Her Majesty's Theatre's stage is turned into an intimate theatre in the round, with a maze of bamboo to be traversed by the incoming audience, the arrival in the centre revealing a large round table at which sit three young ladies in panda outfits, shuffling decks of cards.

The audience was totally enthralled by this interpretation of the story of Nyai Ontosoroh; her life journey from childhood, gaining strength through adversity, to eventually achieve independence and control of her own destiny.

Each year the Adelaide Festival Centre presents the unique and exciting OzAsia Festival, and the opening performance this year was this remarkable work, Meeting With Bodhisattva, from U-Theatre of Taiwan.

This is the tale of Laura Jesson, who gets a speck of coal dust in her eye whilst standing on the railway platform, and Alec Harvey, the handsome young doctor who administers first aid