Australian Ballet 2016 season

There’s no more rehearsing. In fact, there was none to begin with. Not a single cast member of ECHO: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen knows the part by heart. Welcome to a spectacle that is deliberately unprepared, unorthodox and unpredictable.  Nassim Soleimanpour is the most performed playwright in the history of Iranian theatre. You may know him for his acclaimed works like White Rabbit, Red Rabbit or NASSIM. This July, he’s joining audiences at Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre all the way from Berlin for a spectacle that plays with technology and tricks of the trade to redefine the idea of ‘home’.  One of the key characteristics of Soleimanpour’s style is fastracking unrehearsed cold reads to showtime, and Italian-Palestinian director Omar Elerian is bringing his work to life in Melbourne. Each night Soleimanpour will guide a new guest through the script for a performance that quite literally no one has seen before.  Household Australian names taking on the challenge include everyone from journalists Stan Grant and Jan Fran to musician and presenter David Campbell and comedian Michelle Brasier, plus actors Ben Lawson, Pia Miranda and Nadine Garner. Watch them star in what Soleimanpour calls a “long-distance magic show”. ECHO: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen plays at Malthouse Theatre from July 14 to 19. To find out when each performer takes the stage and book your tickets, head here.

Way back when Tim Burton was a much weirder filmmaker, my wee brother and I were unreasonably thrilled by the chaos engine of awfully bad behaviour that was Michael Keaton’s unhinged and unwashed demon, Betelgeuse.  The grotty stripe-suited monster ate up the 1988 film of not quite the same name – the studio figured folks would stay away unless the title was simplified to Beetlejuice. Named after the red supergiant star blazing ferociously in the constellation of Orion, some 600 light years from our solar system, Betelgeuse is an outcast from the hilariously bureaucratic afterlife, aka the Netherworld. Which leaves him preying on the naïve recently deceased, like sweet young couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), in an attempt to crowbar open the sort of ridiculous loophole the Greek gods are fond of. Say his – apparently too complex – name three times and he’ll be unleashed on the mortal coil once more.  But Betelgeuse’s sleazy attentions are soon distracted by Winona Ryder’s goth child Lydia, when she reluctantly moves into Adam and Barbara’s now-empty house with her dad, Charles (disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones), and his new squeeze, OTT sculptor Delia (fabulously demented goddess Catherine O’Hara). A smash hit, Beetlejuice is a wild and unruly thing writhing with unhinged ideas, from its stop-animated black and white sand worms to characters shrunk into a model of sleepy town Winter River, and on to the hilariously-depicted dead of the surreal...