After more than two decades away from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Katrina Mathers has returned with her brand new show Anything But The Dyson and Other Excellent Monologues. On long-service leave from her current day job, she tells the audience she wanted to spend it putting on a Comedy Festival show. Currently running at the Black Box theatre at Transcendence in Collingwood, the show leans into the topics of midlife, memory, menopause and the strange emotional weight of everyday objects including, yes, a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the frustrations that go with operating this beast. Mathers moves between a raft of…
Author: Caroline Duncan
There’s no easing into Body Worlds:The Anatomy of Happiness, the world-famous exhibition that opened at the District Docklands last week. From the moment you step inside the exhibition, you’re face-to-face with real human bodies, peeled back, preserved and posed in ways that feel equal parts scientific and theatrical. It’s a lot. But that’s also the point. Created using plastination, a process that replaces bodily fluids with polymers, the specimens are dry, odourless and eerily lifelike. Muscles are exposed mid-stride, organs suspended in place, entire systems laid bare with a level of detail most people will never otherwise see. It’s less…
I laughed and, I’m not ashamed to admit it, cried during Spoons – Damian Callinan’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival show that’s currently playing at the Arts Centre Melbourne. The tender and heartwarming – yet very funny – story of Stan Coates, an 84-year old widower facing the slow push towards moving in to residential aged care has a simple premise as we witness his resistance to moving from the home he loves, that he shared with his deceased wife, filled with memories and close to friends and his beloved community in Spotswood. Stan could be anyone’s wise-cracking and quick-witted Dad…
Tom Holloway’s play, Beyond the Neck, based on real accounts connected to the Port Arthur massacre is an uneasy watch, even as we approach the 30th anniversary of the tragedy: some things sitting below the surface still feel newly raw. There’s a kind of silence that settles throughout the room during its current run at Theatre Works in St Kilda, as we explore the the trauma and grief of four strangers. The audience is drawn in slowly, with the weight of characters’ trauma building in its own time. Directed by Suzanne Chaundy, the piece unfolds like a musical quartet rather than…
There’s something a little bit different about Is This Thing On? – the new film from Bradley Cooper starring Will Arnett (Arrested Development). On paper, it sounds like a story we’ve seen before. Middle aged guy. Failing marriage. Existential wobble. But in the hands of Cooper and Arnett, it turns into something far more personal and unexpectedly moving. Arnett plays Alex Novak, a suburban dad whose marriage ends not with fireworks but with a quiet, painful conversation. His wife Tess, played with steady warmth by Laura Dern, isn’t cruel or dramatic. She’s just done. That low key realism sets the…
I still can’t shake the thrill of seeing and hearing the Hoodoo Gurus with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play together under the stars at Melbourne’s iconic Sidney Myer Music Bowl on Thursday 29 January 2026. It was one of those performances you end up telling people about long after the encore fades: a rare collision of classic Aussie rock grit with orchestral splendour that felt perfectly suited to a summer evening in Melbourne. From the moment the lights dimmed and the first sweeping strings opened the show, I knew this wasn’t going to be your standard rock gig. The MSO…
Lady Gaga’s return to Melbourne has been a long time coming. Eleven years since she last set foot on a local stage, she arrived at Marvel Stadium over two huge nights on Friday and Saturday with the Mayhem Ball, a show built to overwhelm, provoke and entertain in equal measure. With a reported 60,000 people filling the venue, each night, the scale matched the occasion, and Gaga delivered a concert designed to pull focus from the first cue to the last blackout. From the opening moments when she arrived atop of a large red birdcage-like structure, the tone was set…
Iconic Australian comedian, singer and drag cabaret performer Reuben Kaye held court on the stage of the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Saturday 29 November, as he delivered night two of his much-hyped show enGORGEd. Backed by an 18-piece orchestra, the performance was larger, louder and more daring than probably anything else the prestigious hall has hosted in recent years From the moment he stepped on stage for a hometown crowd, Kaye owned the room with his razor-sharp wit, glittering glamour and a voice as powerful as his stage presence. The night moved seamlessly between big-band…
It’s been four decades since Australia first fell in love with Bob Downe – Prince of Polyester, the Lounge Room Lothario, the human sequin himself. And in his new show 40 Ridiculous Years, which played a sold-out night at Memo Music Hall in St Kilda, Mark Trevorrow’s alter ego proves that time, like taste, means absolutely nothing when you’re this gloriously camp. From the moment Bob sashayed onto the stage wearing white pants, hush puppies and a t-shirt emblazoned with CHOOSE BOB, as well as his trademark perma-grin, the audience was his. The show was a love letter to variety, kitsch…
The Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne is pulsing with pure 1960s spirit as the Australian Shakespeare Company’s revival of Hair the Musical has landed in a swirl of fringe, protest anthems and communal energy. Directed by Glenn Elston, this reimagined version offers a fresh yet familiar take on the original rock musical while spotlighting a remarkably vibrant young cast. The story remains grounded in its original essence: a “tribe” of free-spirited hippies defy convention and celebrate love, peace and self-expression during the tumultuous era of the Vietnam War. Act I introduces the colourful commune, dancing barefoot and singing of Aquarius, and Hair. Act II brings…
Fiasco: A Burke & Wills Musical has kicked off at the Trades Hall this week – probably one of the most hotly anticipated shows of this year’s Melbourne Fringe festival. It turns one of Australia’s most infamous expeditions into comic theatre with a band, theatrical absurdity and some moments that are unexpectedly moving. Created by comedian Sammy J, this song-driven take on the 1860 expedition reframes the disaster as a chaotic, ego-fuelled journey filled with both laughs and sharp critique. The plot follows Burke, Wills and their small team as they leave Melbourne and push into the harsh interior (or, as…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a bold, sprawling film that dares to blend satire, action and emotional drama in a way few mainstream blockbusters attempt. Drawing from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Anderson brings to screen a modern-day fable of resistance, identity and generational legacy. At its core, the plot follows Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up former revolutionary living off the grid with his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). For 16 years he has kept a low profile. But when Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces and Willa is kidnapped, Bob is forced back into a dangerous world he once abandoned.…