Latest news with #Coriolanus
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
ABC star's son tackles the haters of his very sweary podcast
And those haters will be delighted to hear the podcast has changed the young men's lives. They are now making a modest living off monetisation deals with Spotify and YouTube as well as their own individual sponsorships. Patricians v plebeians Shakespeare's Coriolanus tells the story of Roman soldier/tyrant Coriolanus, who when spurned by his own electorate marches on Rome seeking vengeance. The Bell Shakespeare production has come up with a cunning wheeze, dividing the audience up into noble patricians and common plebeians, in keeping with the play's themes of politics and class conflict. Who'd be attracted to such a play about a supreme egotist? Well, at the Arts Centre Melbourne premiere on Friday, the audience was thick with politicians and lawyers. Thus, Liberal senator Jane Hume, in Roman republic burgundy, found herself among the plebeians, as did rich lister and University of Melbourne chancellor Jane Hansen, and president of the council of trustees for the National Gallery of Victoria Janet Whiting, who joked that surely some mistake had been made. After the show, Bell Shakespeare chair Philip Crutchfield, KC, asked how Hume had gone sitting among the common people. She joked she could handle being the People's Princess. Having come from a federal parliament sitting week, Hume, no doubt having had her fill of sociopaths in warring factions, watched the Roman Republic events unfold with a wry smile and gave it a standing ovation. A case of she knows, she's been there? Unlimited has its limits Inching ever closer is the Women Unlimited Leadership Summit, starring Hillary Rodham Clinton, Leigh Sales, 'some of the nation's most senior women in the Australian Public Service' and others 'leading the pursuit of progress'. Regular readers will recall this is the summit at which former prime minister Julia Gillard will be beamed on stage via hologram. Talk about boldly going where none have gone before for PM27. First her very own stage play – now this. Certain journalists have been invited to attend the event, held in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and other capitals over September 30 and October 1. Also going around: speakers including Indigenous leader and advocate Lil Gordon, Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate Rachel Noble and co-creator of the 'glass cliff' concept, Australian National University professor Michelle Ryan. We reported earlier that the starting price to attend the two-day summit varies from state to state. Ticket prices in the ACT start from $3199, in NSW $2899, and Victoria and other states $2699 – all plus GST, of course. Loading But media access to the star attraction is not proving as unlimited as we hoped. CBD has learnt that the former US secretary of state, US senator (and spouse of former president Bill Clinton) has a contract that stipulates no interviews and no media in her session. Nor, it seems, are any photos or videos allowed. Lock up those smartphones, influencers. CBD is getting strong vibes of 1956's closed session of the 20th Soviet Congress when communist party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech denouncing Joseph Stalin. Or more recently, Liz Hurley 's infamous 2024 Melbourne Cup appearance, where she refused interviews apart from one brief one with rights holder Nine. As one witness reported: 'She literally grimaced in disgust when asked to speak to media on the red carpet.' Been and gone After our item last week pointed out that the Greens still had ex-leader Adam Bandt emblazoned on their website months after he lost his seat in the May election, we wondered how long it would take the party to haul the former MP off the site. The answer: sometime before midday but not before 8am, which was three hours after our column hit the internet. Even in the online age, wheels can sometimes turn slowly.
The Age
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
ABC star's son tackles the haters of his very sweary podcast
And those haters will be delighted to hear the podcast has changed the young men's lives. They are now making a modest living off monetisation deals with Spotify and YouTube as well as their own individual sponsorships. Patricians v plebeians Shakespeare's Coriolanus tells the story of Roman soldier/tyrant Coriolanus, who when spurned by his own electorate marches on Rome seeking vengeance. The Bell Shakespeare production has come up with a cunning wheeze, dividing the audience up into noble patricians and common plebeians, in keeping with the play's themes of politics and class conflict. Who'd be attracted to such a play about a supreme egotist? Well, at the Arts Centre Melbourne premiere on Friday, the audience was thick with politicians and lawyers. Thus, Liberal senator Jane Hume, in Roman republic burgundy, found herself among the plebeians, as did rich lister and University of Melbourne chancellor Jane Hansen, and president of the council of trustees for the National Gallery of Victoria Janet Whiting, who joked that surely some mistake had been made. After the show, Bell Shakespeare chair Philip Crutchfield, KC, asked how Hume had gone sitting among the common people. She joked she could handle being the People's Princess. Having come from a federal parliament sitting week, Hume, no doubt having had her fill of sociopaths in warring factions, watched the Roman Republic events unfold with a wry smile and gave it a standing ovation. A case of she knows, she's been there? Unlimited has its limits Inching ever closer is the Women Unlimited Leadership Summit, starring Hillary Rodham Clinton, Leigh Sales, 'some of the nation's most senior women in the Australian Public Service' and others 'leading the pursuit of progress'. Regular readers will recall this is the summit at which former prime minister Julia Gillard will be beamed on stage via hologram. Talk about boldly going where none have gone before for PM27. First her very own stage play – now this. Certain journalists have been invited to attend the event, held in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and other capitals over September 30 and October 1. Also going around: speakers including Indigenous leader and advocate Lil Gordon, Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate Rachel Noble and co-creator of the 'glass cliff' concept, Australian National University professor Michelle Ryan. We reported earlier that the starting price to attend the two-day summit varies from state to state. Ticket prices in the ACT start from $3199, in NSW $2899, and Victoria and other states $2699 – all plus GST, of course. Loading But media access to the star attraction is not proving as unlimited as we hoped. CBD has learnt that the former US secretary of state, US senator (and spouse of former president Bill Clinton) has a contract that stipulates no interviews and no media in her session. Nor, it seems, are any photos or videos allowed. Lock up those smartphones, influencers. CBD is getting strong vibes of 1956's closed session of the 20th Soviet Congress when communist party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech denouncing Joseph Stalin. Or more recently, Liz Hurley 's infamous 2024 Melbourne Cup appearance, where she refused interviews apart from one brief one with rights holder Nine. As one witness reported: 'She literally grimaced in disgust when asked to speak to media on the red carpet.' Been and gone After our item last week pointed out that the Greens still had ex-leader Adam Bandt emblazoned on their website months after he lost his seat in the May election, we wondered how long it would take the party to haul the former MP off the site. The answer: sometime before midday but not before 8am, which was three hours after our column hit the internet. Even in the online age, wheels can sometimes turn slowly.
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Full-blooded and steeped in machismo, this is a Coriolanus to remember
Infamously, the matriarch takes ghoulish delight in her son's warlike exploits and his injuries (wounds take on an almost totemic significance in the play), and at least some of the tragedy lies in the way that Volumnia's extreme embrace of patriarchal values comes to warp the life of her child. Some of the finest acting is between Coriolanus and Volumnia. Any temptation to fault Shammas' Coriolanus as too abrasive and unformed dies in the throat in these scenes, and the character makes perfect sense when you see what his mother is like. Loading There are some quibbles with this production. Editing a child's physical presence out of the play isn't an improvement; the bromance (or whatever it is) between Coriolanus and his nemesis Aufidius (Anthony Taufa) was so awkwardly handled that the audience sniggered at it. Hardly an ideal response to homoerotic subtext. Still, Shammas at his best gives a dangerous, darkly charged performance. With several remarkable supporting actors in the ensemble, it should be a Coriolanus to remember. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead THEATRE Blood Wedding ★★★ Theatre Works until August 2 It's a tale as old as time – thwarted love, unrequited desire, inherited enmities. In Tashmadada's adaptation of Blood Wedding, it's a tale at least as old as 1932, when Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca wrote Bodas de Sangre, the first of three rural tragedies. Janis Joplin's jaunty Piece of My Heart, playing on loop, greets audiences as they walk into the auditorium, with cast members frolicking about on stage and engaging with the front rows. It's a light-hearted prelude to what is anything but a blithe play. As the house lights dim, six of the seven cast members stand in a row, blindfolded, oblivious to what is about to transpire, powerless to stop it. Harry Gill's set is demarcated into different spheres, each symbolising the competing intentions and contrary factions of a mountainside town. To the left is the domain of Mother (Tess Lynch Steele), confined to the kitchen as she despairs over her son (Jonathan Pindiura) falling in love with Bride (Teresa Giansiracusa) and leaving her, all while lamenting the death of her husband and eldest son at the hands of the Felixes. Perched atop the set is Bride, the subject of Groom's affections, who goes through the motions of her day while harbouring feelings for Leonardo Felix (Dion Zapantis) and living a cloistered life beneath Father's (Connor Raselli) watchful eyes. Below her is Leonardo's Wife (Mia Cannolo), who suffers through an unhappy marriage – her baleful singing the haunting melody that backdrops much of the unfolding action leading up to the cataclysmic wedding. The wedding, as so many do, tiptoes between decorum and mayhem, expanding beyond its Spanish source material to evoke the revelry of Middle Eastern, Greek, Jewish and Eastern European celebratory customs. Jessamine Moffett's garbing of everyone in black lends it a befitting sombreness as the characters (metaphorically and physically) dance around one another, unable to express their true feelings outside the binary of their age-old feuds with one another. Images are projected on a screen backdropping the stage – some more successfully than others. The magnifying of Bride and Groom as they circle one another before the wedding is affecting, less so the persistent imagery of horses, which harks back to Lorca's original text but feels out of place in this adaptation. And for all the play's excellent sound design – Irma Thomas' Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) bookends the play, an especially astute choice – the actors struggle to project their voices without the aid of mics. Mohamed Al Ziady – who oscillates between playing an impish devil on the shoulder and an omniscient narrator – is skilled at the former, less so at possessing the gravitas required for the latter. Loading Deborah Leiser-Moore's adaptation honours the surrealism of the source material, with beautifully choreographed formations of intimacy, ardour and anger suffusing the script. The climactic fight scene is especially well-enacted, with 'blood' making its presence known in fresh and unusual ways. A play with as weighty a sense of fatalism and obsolescence as Blood Wedding can feel lugubrious at times, but there's still much to love about this artfully staged adaptation. Reviewed by Sonia Nair MUSIC Cousin Tony's Brand New Firebird ★★★ Corner Hotel, July 25 Cousin Tony's Brand New Firebird enter the stage to the sound of Take Me To the River by Talking Heads, which is uplifting, even if inviting the comparison isn't especially wise. 'I've got all the time in the world / Time until the river ends,' singer/songwriter Lachlan Rose croons on opening number Rosewater. Tonight they're launching their fourth album, Rosewater Crocodile, a smooth and enthusiastically received slice of soft rock. Cousin Tony's records are a bit smooth and frictionless for my liking. They're playing in a very specific field of early '80s sophistipop, always in danger of veering into pastiche. Even their name evokes a cosy nostalgia for something long discontinued. But live, some of that smoothness gets roughened up. Live looks good on them. Francesca Gonzales on keytar and backing vocals, and Oliver Whitehead on sax, especially add colour. The sax on Bluestone and Every Morning, it Breaks, in particular, are sweet and jagged in just the right ways. Cousin Tony's have been at it for a decade. Their knees are giving way, they tell the audience. They no longer they excited about pedals, they get excited about gear storage solutions. 'Maybe people behind the Corner's famous pole [a structural quirk that blocks the view of a small portion of the audience at any given time] are glad not to have to look at this old mug,' says singer/songwriter Lachlan Rose. Nonsense. He looks like a Melbourne sharehouse Paul Mescal, with his tousled hair and moustache, and sings like Bryan Ferry. He's a dreamboat, and he writes dreamboat songs, and the crowd loves him. Rose is a great songwriter, as proven on Mango Season and My Ghost & Its Crawling. I like Cousin Tony's best when they break away from the smoothness on songs like Joy, and Rose's solo performance of Head Home ('What, pray tell, would you have me do? Short of shootin' my way through / There's a killer on the loose'). 'I'm gonna go get a beer,' says Rose before wandering off like we're chatting at a house party, and the band build something funky for floor filler Mercury Rising, bringing the set back round to the Talking Heads song that welcomed them to the stage. It's infectious and for a moment, they lose themselves in it. There's not a shred of irony to it, just six people under a groove. Encore Love is Heartbreak is alive with synth and some beautiful bass. It's a hit, it's smooth and wise with a hint of swagger. It might be Cousin Tony's at their peak. Reviewed by Will Cox MUSIC Moonlite ★★★★ Homophonic! and The Consort of Melbourne, Fitzroy Town Hall, July 26 Bushranger Andrew George Scott, aka 'Captain Moonlite' has long captivated Australia's popular imagination, inspiring works from a 1906 stage play through to a 2019 musical. Part of Moonlite's appeal is his devotion to James Nesbitt, whom he met in Pentridge prison. 'Nesbitt and I were united by every tie which could bind,' Scott said. Released from jail, the pair led a doomed existence. Prevented from working and hounded from society, desperation led them to hold up a homestead in Wantabadgery, New South Wales. In a gunfight with police, Nesbitt died in Scott's arms. Scott was arrested for the death of an officer and went to the gallows wearing a ring of Nesbitt's hair. Moonlite, a 90-minute oratorio for voices, percussion and viola composed by Wally Gunn with a libretto by Maria Zajkowski, explores this intriguing same-sex love story in an imaginative contemporary idiom. Spoken excerpts from Scott's death-cell letters are married to Zajkowski's sung poetic reflections. These scenes are punctuated by interludes for solo viola that mark the passing of time, expressively delivered by Phoebe Green. Loading Singers Katherine Norman, Elspeth Bawden, Kristy Biber, Jack Jordan, Timothy Reynolds and Lachlan McDonald from The Consort of Melbourne are empathetic communicators: cohering beautifully in chorale-like passages and vividly evoking Gunn's many vocal effects, including birdsong, murmuring and audible exhalations. Percussionists Louise Devenish, Kaylie Melville, Zela Papageorgiou and Hamish Upton impress with razor-sharp precision as they contribute tellingly to the work's dramatic ebb and flow. Surtitles become helpful, especially in quietly uttered sections or densely textured passages where voices and percussion vie for attention. Enthusiastically overseen by artistic directors Steven Hodgson and Miranda Hill, the Australian premiere of Moonlite (a winner of the prestigious Albert Maggs composition prize) allows the colours of the rainbow to illuminate the often sepia-tinted world of our colonial past.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Full-blooded and steeped in machismo, this is a Coriolanus to remember
Infamously, the matriarch takes ghoulish delight in her son's warlike exploits and his injuries (wounds take on an almost totemic significance in the play), and at least some of the tragedy lies in the way that Volumnia's extreme embrace of patriarchal values comes to warp the life of her child. Some of the finest acting is between Coriolanus and Volumnia. Any temptation to fault Shammas' Coriolanus as too abrasive and unformed dies in the throat in these scenes, and the character makes perfect sense when you see what his mother is like. Loading There are some quibbles with this production. Editing a child's physical presence out of the play isn't an improvement; the bromance (or whatever it is) between Coriolanus and his nemesis Aufidius (Anthony Taufa) was so awkwardly handled that the audience sniggered at it. Hardly an ideal response to homoerotic subtext. Still, Shammas at his best gives a dangerous, darkly charged performance. With several remarkable supporting actors in the ensemble, it should be a Coriolanus to remember. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead THEATRE Blood Wedding ★★★ Theatre Works until August 2 It's a tale as old as time – thwarted love, unrequited desire, inherited enmities. In Tashmadada's adaptation of Blood Wedding, it's a tale at least as old as 1932, when Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca wrote Bodas de Sangre, the first of three rural tragedies. Janis Joplin's jaunty Piece of My Heart, playing on loop, greets audiences as they walk into the auditorium, with cast members frolicking about on stage and engaging with the front rows. It's a light-hearted prelude to what is anything but a blithe play. As the house lights dim, six of the seven cast members stand in a row, blindfolded, oblivious to what is about to transpire, powerless to stop it. Harry Gill's set is demarcated into different spheres, each symbolising the competing intentions and contrary factions of a mountainside town. To the left is the domain of Mother (Tess Lynch Steele), confined to the kitchen as she despairs over her son (Jonathan Pindiura) falling in love with Bride (Teresa Giansiracusa) and leaving her, all while lamenting the death of her husband and eldest son at the hands of the Felixes. Perched atop the set is Bride, the subject of Groom's affections, who goes through the motions of her day while harbouring feelings for Leonardo Felix (Dion Zapantis) and living a cloistered life beneath Father's (Connor Raselli) watchful eyes. Below her is Leonardo's Wife (Mia Cannolo), who suffers through an unhappy marriage – her baleful singing the haunting melody that backdrops much of the unfolding action leading up to the cataclysmic wedding. The wedding, as so many do, tiptoes between decorum and mayhem, expanding beyond its Spanish source material to evoke the revelry of Middle Eastern, Greek, Jewish and Eastern European celebratory customs. Jessamine Moffett's garbing of everyone in black lends it a befitting sombreness as the characters (metaphorically and physically) dance around one another, unable to express their true feelings outside the binary of their age-old feuds with one another. Images are projected on a screen backdropping the stage – some more successfully than others. The magnifying of Bride and Groom as they circle one another before the wedding is affecting, less so the persistent imagery of horses, which harks back to Lorca's original text but feels out of place in this adaptation. And for all the play's excellent sound design – Irma Thomas' Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) bookends the play, an especially astute choice – the actors struggle to project their voices without the aid of mics. Mohamed Al Ziady – who oscillates between playing an impish devil on the shoulder and an omniscient narrator – is skilled at the former, less so at possessing the gravitas required for the latter. Loading Deborah Leiser-Moore's adaptation honours the surrealism of the source material, with beautifully choreographed formations of intimacy, ardour and anger suffusing the script. The climactic fight scene is especially well-enacted, with 'blood' making its presence known in fresh and unusual ways. A play with as weighty a sense of fatalism and obsolescence as Blood Wedding can feel lugubrious at times, but there's still much to love about this artfully staged adaptation. Reviewed by Sonia Nair MUSIC Cousin Tony's Brand New Firebird ★★★ Corner Hotel, July 25 Cousin Tony's Brand New Firebird enter the stage to the sound of Take Me To the River by Talking Heads, which is uplifting, even if inviting the comparison isn't especially wise. 'I've got all the time in the world / Time until the river ends,' singer/songwriter Lachlan Rose croons on opening number Rosewater. Tonight they're launching their fourth album, Rosewater Crocodile, a smooth and enthusiastically received slice of soft rock. Cousin Tony's records are a bit smooth and frictionless for my liking. They're playing in a very specific field of early '80s sophistipop, always in danger of veering into pastiche. Even their name evokes a cosy nostalgia for something long discontinued. But live, some of that smoothness gets roughened up. Live looks good on them. Francesca Gonzales on keytar and backing vocals, and Oliver Whitehead on sax, especially add colour. The sax on Bluestone and Every Morning, it Breaks, in particular, are sweet and jagged in just the right ways. Cousin Tony's have been at it for a decade. Their knees are giving way, they tell the audience. They no longer they excited about pedals, they get excited about gear storage solutions. 'Maybe people behind the Corner's famous pole [a structural quirk that blocks the view of a small portion of the audience at any given time] are glad not to have to look at this old mug,' says singer/songwriter Lachlan Rose. Nonsense. He looks like a Melbourne sharehouse Paul Mescal, with his tousled hair and moustache, and sings like Bryan Ferry. He's a dreamboat, and he writes dreamboat songs, and the crowd loves him. Rose is a great songwriter, as proven on Mango Season and My Ghost & Its Crawling. I like Cousin Tony's best when they break away from the smoothness on songs like Joy, and Rose's solo performance of Head Home ('What, pray tell, would you have me do? Short of shootin' my way through / There's a killer on the loose'). 'I'm gonna go get a beer,' says Rose before wandering off like we're chatting at a house party, and the band build something funky for floor filler Mercury Rising, bringing the set back round to the Talking Heads song that welcomed them to the stage. It's infectious and for a moment, they lose themselves in it. There's not a shred of irony to it, just six people under a groove. Encore Love is Heartbreak is alive with synth and some beautiful bass. It's a hit, it's smooth and wise with a hint of swagger. It might be Cousin Tony's at their peak. Reviewed by Will Cox MUSIC Moonlite ★★★★ Homophonic! and The Consort of Melbourne, Fitzroy Town Hall, July 26 Bushranger Andrew George Scott, aka 'Captain Moonlite' has long captivated Australia's popular imagination, inspiring works from a 1906 stage play through to a 2019 musical. Part of Moonlite's appeal is his devotion to James Nesbitt, whom he met in Pentridge prison. 'Nesbitt and I were united by every tie which could bind,' Scott said. Released from jail, the pair led a doomed existence. Prevented from working and hounded from society, desperation led them to hold up a homestead in Wantabadgery, New South Wales. In a gunfight with police, Nesbitt died in Scott's arms. Scott was arrested for the death of an officer and went to the gallows wearing a ring of Nesbitt's hair. Moonlite, a 90-minute oratorio for voices, percussion and viola composed by Wally Gunn with a libretto by Maria Zajkowski, explores this intriguing same-sex love story in an imaginative contemporary idiom. Spoken excerpts from Scott's death-cell letters are married to Zajkowski's sung poetic reflections. These scenes are punctuated by interludes for solo viola that mark the passing of time, expressively delivered by Phoebe Green. Loading Singers Katherine Norman, Elspeth Bawden, Kristy Biber, Jack Jordan, Timothy Reynolds and Lachlan McDonald from The Consort of Melbourne are empathetic communicators: cohering beautifully in chorale-like passages and vividly evoking Gunn's many vocal effects, including birdsong, murmuring and audible exhalations. Percussionists Louise Devenish, Kaylie Melville, Zela Papageorgiou and Hamish Upton impress with razor-sharp precision as they contribute tellingly to the work's dramatic ebb and flow. Surtitles become helpful, especially in quietly uttered sections or densely textured passages where voices and percussion vie for attention. Enthusiastically overseen by artistic directors Steven Hodgson and Miranda Hill, the Australian premiere of Moonlite (a winner of the prestigious Albert Maggs composition prize) allows the colours of the rainbow to illuminate the often sepia-tinted world of our colonial past.
AU Financial Review
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- AU Financial Review
Nicholas Moore among politicians at Bell Shakespeare's Coriolanus
Of all of William Shakespeare 's works, Coriolanus is his most political. So when Bell Shakespeare set up a run of the play they must have known how well-heeled the audience would end up being.
