Critics' choice theatre shows in Melbourne

Melbourne’s stages have seen a slew of jukebox musicals tread the boards over the past few years. They’ve ranged from the powerful (Tina – The Tina Turner Musical) to the cheesy-yet-crowd-pleasing (Mamma Mia! The Musical) and the glossed-over tributes (MJ the Musical). Thankfully, at a time when it feels more important than ever to encourage people to get out and support the local arts industry, A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical arrives at the Princess Theatre full of razzle-dazzle, an abundance of infectious energy and a stacked setlist guaranteed to appeal to the masses. What is A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical about?  Written by Anthony McCarten, directed by Michael Mayer and created in collaboration with Neil Diamond himself, A Beautiful Noise opens on a dour therapy session between an older Diamond (played with commanding gravitas by Terence Crawford) and his doctor (Monica Sayers). It’s an unflinchingly sharp first introduction to the musical legend – all the more surprising given the heavy involvement of Diamond and his wife Katie – who is being particularly stubborn about revealing anything about the “clouds” that darken his demeanour. Enter the doc whipping out a book of all his lyrics, and suddenly, in true musical theatre fashion, the songs are quite literally spilling onto the stage in the form of the ensemble singing a teasing medley of hits to come.   From there we’re transported back in time as a young Diamond (Will Swenson) gets his big...

Do you ever look around at the increasingly disastrous times we find ourselves in and wonder how we got here? Or who got us here?  When we think of folks who act like a god only to fall victim to hubristic overreach and despair, we leap to Mary Shelley’s fictional Frankenstein and his spurned, rightfully furious ‘monster’ in fiction, or to real life and J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, the man who infamously quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” There’s another: Dr Joseph Weizenbaum, the subject of Eliza, MTC’s riveting new work by celebrated Melbourne playwright Tom Holloway, directed by Paige Rattray. I know Frankenstein and Oppenheimer, but who are Weizenbaum (and Eliza)? Forget Claude and ChatGPT, Eliza is the original AI ‘chatbot’, created by Weizenbaum in 1966. He was a computer whizz at MIT whose family escaped Nazi Germany thirty years earlier, fleeing to the US when he was still a kid.  Far from birthing an intelligent new lifeform – AI isn’t that – Weizenbaum was being a bit of a smart arse, purposefully creating Eliza as a software program designed to mimic the question-reframing language of therapists. Not because he wanted to make therapy easier and cheaper to access, but because unlike sci-fi authors including Asimov, he wanted to prove there was nothing close to human about AI. Eliza was a mimic, faking its way through the Turing test, yet easily out-sentience-d by a parrot.  Intriguing! So who’s involved...