Image by Steve Lee
In Maestro Lee Bracegirdle’s inaugural program since being appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Woollahra Philharmonic Orchestra, the spring program was a bold welcome to the new season with some beautiful classics played wonderfully by the full orchestra. Equally exciting was the accompaniment by two internationally renowned soloists to the concert’s proceedings.
Image by Clare Hawley
The modern world is shifting and changing, becoming ever more unstable with increased house prices and rental numbers, the casualisation of the work force, and an overall rough globe politically. The Humans takes an honest look at how these changes are affecting a middle-class American family where everyone’s goals and dreams seem to be moving out of reach. Everything spills out over the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Cheap Noods is about growing up queer in Australia and still managing to turn out alright: happy and funny. Ally Cockrell and Kim Greaves are a couple who put together this show to show off their relationship and celebrate Aussie queerness.
The Acacia Quartet comes together with Matt Withers on classical guitar to share a program of emerging and established Australian composers including some brand new pieces from prize-winners from the 2018 Australian Music Composition Competition. Fusing a classical guitar with their inventive and unorthodox tone and technique brings another dimension to this string quartet. Sharing a thematic link of landscape inspiration, Imaginations also plays with the relationship between music and painting as artistic representations of space both real and imaginary.
If you’ve ever had a tyrant boss, you’ve probably fantasised about something horrible happening to them, maybe on accident or maybe on purpose. For Claire and Solange, imagining the death of their domineering Madame and recreating it in detail has become a daily ritual of release and reclamation. This Jean Genet classic is about power and dominance in the luxury and suffocation of a woman’s dressing room.
Image by Stephen Reinhardt
After a stellar start and a bumpy descent in her music career, Emjay has become disenchanted with music, her once true joy. Now she teaches singing to all sorts of characters looking to find a way to tell their story in song. One day a special student arrives and re-awakens the love Emjay thought she’d lost.
Image by Nick Gilbert
With the 2018 programming the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra wanted to explore melodies and their third program of the year focuses on Poetical Melodies. The relationship between poets and composers began to change in the 19th-century when the passionate and soul-exposing words of the poets infiltrated the musical sphere. Composers of the time turned to string instruments to fully express this soulful and emotional new style.
Image by James Balian
Mental illness can strike anyone at any time but for those who are regularly put in traumatic or dangerous situations, like soldiers, the chances of mental ill-health are much higher. Rob is one of those soldiers. Deployed to Afghanistan as a medic, Rob saves lives everyday but the high-stress and unpredictability of war take its tole and he’s sent home early with a post traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.
Image by Dawn Pugh
They look like any other normal family: a father as breadwinner, a mother as caretaker, a deadbeat son, and an overachieving daughter. But this family is working hard to hide their grief and gain control over their mother’s spiralling mental health. Next to Normal is a musical about coming to terms with the past and finding a middle ground everyone can feel steady on.
Comedy cabaret duo Alice Tovey and Ned Dixon bring their show Mansplaining to Sydney to tackle that issue bigger than most: the patriarchy. In equal parts sincerity and irony, this show is about laughing while men interrupt you and finding the reasoning within internet trolls.
Night Writes 