Take a Hamlet. Flavour it with Stranger Things. Simmer in Twin Peaks with a dash of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and serve as a kind of walk-through role-playing computer game.
Malthouse Theatre's big production for 2021, an immersive…

Malthouse blends Hamlet with Twin Peaks in 'immersive' new show

Fun fact: if we were in New York, Los Angeles or London, it'd be easier for us to get home to Melbourne. Expensive, difficult, yes. But legal.
But instead we're in far off, remote and COVID-plagued Sydney. And right now there is, as far as we can…

Stuck in Sydney with no realistic way home: A Melburnian's lament

Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman 1984, had one main direction she gave to the woman she calls “The Gal”, aka Gal Gadot, aka Wonder Woman. It was about an expression Gadot sometimes got on her face when playing fight scenes. The Gal looked too…

Who's that Gal? Wonder Woman returns, just don't call her a feminist

My dad worked for IBM in the 1970s and they gave him an orange plastic sign to put on his desk that said “THINK”.
This all-caps company slogan dated back to a sales meeting in 1911, when the man who would later be IBM’s chief executive complained…

The (really) true story of how I made Oxford rewrite a dictionary

Ross Mollison has just about had enough. For more than a decade the showbiz producer from Mount Waverley has made America his home and found huge success. At the beginning of the year he had three circus shows running in Vegas.
And now he has just…

'We can bring Vegas to Australia': US acts eye international stages

Paul McCartney often joked that he ruined his wife's career.
Before he met her, Linda Eastman was an award-winning photographer whose talent was capturing pop stars in those character-revealing moments in between poses. She made her name in 1966 as…

'A massive coup': Rare Linda McCartney retrospective to show at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale

Hit show Come From Away is due to be the first major musical to reopen its doors in Melbourne, with a nine-week season to begin at the Comedy Theatre on January 19.
It will likely be – by a whisker – the first big commercial show to reappear from…

Coming back from away: hit musical announces January return

For most of the year, Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Brett Sheehy has been phoning people with the gutting, heartbreaking news that their show can’t go on.
Just recently, it’s been the opposite. He’s cried more than once, anyway. “I’m…

After a year of uncrowded houses, MTC to present new Tim Finn musical

There was a back-to-school vibe for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra players as they arrived at Hamer Hall, ready to rehearse together for the first time in many, many months.
They queued, patient but brimming with nervous energy at the doors,…

With help from Tina, MSO reclaims its Hamer arena

"Every year we try to reinvent ourselves," says Brian Ritchie, ex Violent Femmes, for more than a decade the curator of Tasmania's quirky, cool contemporary art festival Mona Foma.
This year there's had to be more reinvention than usual. The pandemic…