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1 month ago | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
Matt Lucas as Monsieur Thénardier and Marina Prior as his wife. Photo / Daniel Boud Musical theatre fans: if you only see one show this year, make it this one. I saw the stage show, Les Misérables, some 35 years in London not long after it launched. Couldn’t say I was a fan.
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1 month ago | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
Vidya Makan, Christina O’Neill, Maria Mercedes, Eddie Muliaumaseali’I, Christie Whelan Browne, Evelyn Krape, John Waters, Slone Sudiro, Jackie Rees and John O’May in Sydney Theatre Company’s Bloom 2025. Photo: Daniel Boud © Written by comedian Tom Gleisner, ‘Bloom’ is a humorous, often moving slice of life in a retirement village.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
As soon as the jaunty, jazzy theme tune to ‘The Odd Couple’ movie and subsequent TV series started up on the stage of Sydney’s Theatre Royal, I was immediately in the mood for a good time. And judging from the Opening Night audience’s enthusiastic reaction to this classic comedy, they were of the same mind.
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Jun 24, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
Most Australians know about the Stolen Generation. The current Sydney Theatre Company production of the play Stolen shows very effectively how intergenerational trauma was felt not only by the children who were taken but by their parents, grandparents and wider kinship group, and how that pain and grief rarely subsided throughout a lifetime.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
In 1920s Chicago, the punishment for murder was often death by hanging. However, if the defendant happened to be a pretty young woman accused of murdering a man, she was liable to be turned into a kind of celebrity by the newspapers of the time and more often than not, walked free. The play Chicago, written in 1926 by Maurine Dallas Watkins, a female journalist who’d covered such trials, dealt with this legal phenomenon.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
It’s 1977 in Derry, Northern Ireland and friends Niamh, Deidre, Mary, Jimmy and Conor have just finished high school and are about to embark on adult life. Having shared their teen years, along with seemingly copious amounts of alcohol, cigarettes and ghost stories, the five of them step out of the safety of Deidre’s cosy family home into whatever future awaits them. Fast forward 10 years later and it’s Christmas Eve.
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May 23, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
“Attention must be paid.” The best-known line from the play Death of a Salesman is uttered by Brooklyn housewife Linda Loman to her two grown sons, Biff and Happy. Willy, their husband and father, is struggling to survive life on the road as a sixty-ish travelling salesman, and is showing signs of delirium and dementia. Linda is steadfast in her support, even as Willy lies to her about how much money he is making, meaning she must somehow find a way to pay their bills.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
I have never before been invited on stage to get ‘up close’ to a play’s main character before (in this case, actor Hugo Weaving). But this is exactly what happens at the conclusion of ‘The President’. Odd, to say the least. But this this whole play is rather unusual. The first act consists almost entirely of monologues by the First Lady of an unnamed, presumably European state who is concerned about terrorists and the safety of her husband, the President.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
‘No Pay? No Way!’ was written exactly 50 years ago by celebrated Italian husband-and-wife playwrights Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Back in 1974, Italy was in a period of social unrest, where inflation, unemployment and political scandals were rife, and their social comedy reflected this. Performing the play today in 21st century Australia, it is remarkable how similar the landscape is.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
mindfood.com | Gill Canning
The first time many of us encountered actress Kerry Armstrong was in the TV soap opera, Prisoner: Cell Block H, where she played innocent 21-year-old inmate Lynn Warner, falsely convicted of infanticide. After a stellar career of 40+ years, this award-winning actress is now making her debut on the Sydney Theatre Company stage as ‘Floss’, local nurse and wife of farmer ‘Ray’ (Colin Friels), both of them around retirement age.
