Cassie Tongue

The new Australian musical Bloom is a warm, funny and occasionally sentimental look at very real problems in aged care.

Marion Potts’s staging of Henry 5 for Bell Shakespeare is a study of its beautiful language, and the breathtaking cruelty that resonates today.

Amy Herzog’s acclaimed drama 4000 Miles opens the season for the Sydney Theatre Company with powerful performances that recall the hopeful era of the play’s debut.

Sydney Festival again lacks a cohesive through line, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it provocations amid longer-running crowd-pleasers.

Almost a decade after its Broadway premiere, a slick production of the hit musical Dear Evan Hansen lays bare its flaws.

Thomas Bernhard’s play The President, now on at Sydney Theatre Company, fails to hit home – perhaps because what seemed shocking in 1975 is now part of our everyday reality.

Drawing on the harsh realities of drought and flood, STC’s production of Angus Cerini’s Into the Shimmering World  is an exploration of silent shame and suffering.

Frame Narrative is New Ghosts Theatre Company’s first production as artistic directors at Sydney’s venerable Old Fitz, and its central theme is the labour of theatremaking.

Sam Mendes’s epic Wall Street production, The Lehman Trilogy, is a stunningly well-crafted family saga – and that’s its problem.

This year’s Sydney Festival sees too many artists timidly dancing around the implications of their own ideas.

Andrew Upton’s thoughtful and affecting adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull traverses ideas of art, ambition, passion and change.

Both honouring and expanding its legacy, the 40th Liveworks brought the ghosts of past performance to startling life.

An electro-pop musical based on part of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a joyful, messy ride that gets its audience dancing in the aisles.

The double reality staged in Do Not Go Gentle, Patricia Cornelius’s poetic exploration of ageing and dementia, brings the lives of the disenfranchised into sharp focus.

Chalkface’s use of humour and well-placed barbs contributes to an understanding of the difficulties facing teachers, but the payoff lacks emotional power.

It’s an indictment that it has taken more than 60 years to see A Raisin in the Sun – one of the great plays of the English-speaking canon – on the Australian stage.

Michelle Law’s body-swap play, Top Coat, is a fun ride – but don’t look for any real profundities.

A new Sydney production of Sarah Kane’s iconic play Cleansed reveals the love that persists beneath the world’s brutality.

Caryl Churchill’s radical dramatic language captures the complexities of moments rich with change.

Aided by the spectacular backdrop of Sydney Harbour, this production of The Phantom of the Opera is easy to love.

Carissa Licciardello’s adaptation of John Cassavetes’ Opening Night at Belvoir offers teasing glimpses of what might have been.

Material aspiration clashes with true romance in Glace Chase’s open-hearted play Triple X.

The Sydney Festival opens with work that pushes against structures of promise and oppression.

This year’s Liveworks at Sydney’s Carriageworks considered what performance might be if we’re not present to make or share it.

The STC’s Australian premiere brings a sense of compassion to the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic novel Fun Home.

John Bell’s solo show One Man in His Time reveals his mastery of Shakespeare’s language – and the limitations of the classic English writer’s claims to universality.

Although Covid-19 restrictions enforce a lack of spontaneity, this year’s Sydney Festival feels like spiritual healing.

Returning to the stage after almost two decades, Alma De Groen’s Wicked Sisters now reads like a study of the generational failures of white feminism.