Guy Webster

Depending on who you ask, Evan Hansen, the neurotic heart of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s 2015 smash-hit musical Dear Evan Hansen, is either a manipulative megalomaniac or a stumbling spokesperson for mental health with the edgy appeal of an anti-hero. Following nine years as the go-to for theatre kids looking for an easy Halloween costume – chuck on a blue-striped polo and an arm cast – the divisive teen arrives at Melbourne’s Arts Centre in a beautiful production of an imperfect show. A stellar cast backed by creative technical design lands every tear-jerking ballad and pop-rock anthem with a skill sure to both thrill long-time fans and convert newcomers. But the elephant in the room is Evan (Beau Woodbridge), or rather it’s the show’s tonal problem that he represents. It’s a macabre story. Evan is that brand of socially anxious and self-deprecating anyone who grew up on Tumblr will immediately recognise. On the first day of his senior year he has an affirming letter he wrote to himself at the direction of his therapist stolen by resident high school loner with an incel vibe, Connor Murphy (Harry Targett). When Connor takes his own life soon after, the letter is found in his pocket, leading his family to believe that Evan was his friend. Cornered by the grief-stricken Murphys and craving connection, Evan leans into the lie. It's all very morally dubious, and the show works best when it leans into the darker, more cynical themes raised by Evan’s deceit. ‘Sincerely, Me’, a sh

This dazzling production of Yentl opens with a command: “Once you say ‘A’, you must say ‘B’”. It’s not said by our eponymous lead (the effervescent Amy Hack as Yentl), but maybe it should be. They are the bookish one, after all. Forbidden to study the Talmud as a woman, they’ve spent years prying the occasional theology lesson out of their father and reading the Torah on the sly. They know the near-divine power of language more than most; the way it obliges us to participate in it to understand and express ourselves, to worship, or to love.  The Yentl we encounter in this mystical adaptation at Sydney Opera House from Kadmiah Yiddish Theatre (presented with Monstrous Theatre and Neil Gooding Productions) seeks out a new language, or rather finds something new in an old language; a way of understanding Jewishness and Jewish womanhood that embraces the liminal, the inexpressible, and the ancient. And they begin by giving themselves a new name, a male name that will allow them to become a scholar of the Talmud: Anshl.  What they’ve accomplished is nothing short of magic – an explicitly queer retelling of a story made famous by a Barbara Streisand-led 1983 film Rather than overstate the novelty of these ideas, co-writers Gary Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas show just how deeply rooted they already are in Jewish lore, theology and myth. What they’ve accomplished is nothing short of magic – an explicitly queer retelling of a story made famous by a Barbara Streisand-le

Early on in Martyna Majok’s quietly devastating and Pulitzer Prize-winning Cost Of Living, a character stands on the threshold of a small apartment in New Jersey to offer his ex-wife some unsolicited advice. After his wife Ani (Rachel Edmonds) was paralysed in an accident, Eddie (Aaron Pedersen) quickly left her. But here he is in an open-buttoned flannel to tell her one way she might recover some feeling in her body – by listening to music. Ani, never one to shy away from calling Eddie a prick, tears him a new one, thank god. But eventually she concedes that there is some truth to his advice. “You listen,” she says, tapping her finger on the toggle of her motorised wheelchair like she’s playing piano, “and… your body tries to imitate the… sense for the things it’s missing. The broken things. The shit that’s disconnected. And it tries to bring everything back together.” It’s as good a metaphor as any for Majok’s show, which arrives in Melbourne after much-lauded seasons in Brisbane and Sydney. This is a work about connection: what we do to seek it out and why we might deny it. Brought to the Sumner Theatre by director Anthea Williams, it’s a challenging and life-affirming watch, both expertly acted and beautifully rendered. The play’s two-hour run time is split between two storylines. There’s Eddie and Ani: two exes trying to reconnect while navigating ongoing caregiving and the long-held resentments reserved for the recently separated. And Jess (Mabel Li) and John (Oli Pizze

With Milk and Blood Benjamin Nichol solidifies his place as one of our most pre-eminent playwrights, returning to a question that has been at the heart of his work to date: what does care in the face of violence look like? In 2021’s Kerosene, this question prompted the already accomplished actor to examine domestic violence and the ties that bind long-term friendship. In 2022’s Sirens, he turned to the evangelical church and queerness in regional Victoria to explore the violence of internalised prejudice. With these two acclaimed solo shows, and in just three short years, Nichol has managed something most playwrights spend years trying to accomplish: he’s created a signature style.  Walk into a Nichol play and you expect a 60-minute character-driven monodrama set on an empty stage that follows the material impact of a contemporary issue – queerness, incarceration, domestic violence, class – with deep empathy and wit. There’ll be an acapella song, countless moments of dance-like movement and there’ll definitely be tears. Nichol is the naturalistic counterpoint to local legend Patricia Cornelius, sharing Cornelius’s interest in class politics but trading in her formalist tendencies for a more minimalistic social realism, forgoing her post-dramatics for earnest sentimentality. Milk and Blood signals the halfway point for Nichol’s planned eight-part anthology series of one-person shows. Together, they offer a two-hour showcase of these Nichols-ian tropes honed to a sharp and deva

I remember the first time I saw a Bloomshed show. It was Paradise Lost at Northcote Town Hall back in 2022. John Milton was God in an oversized Pope hat and a robe painted a dazzling green. Adam was a ditzy himbo and Eve a ditsier bimbo in ’80s jazzercise gear.  It was my first glimpse into what has become a famous formula for the acclaimed Melbourne-based troupe: take a canonical text and tear it apart with razor sharp satire and camp spectacle. Since 2012, the company has been reimagining classics with productions as absurdly entertaining as they are thought-provoking. You’re throwing dodgeballs at Blanche DuBois in A Dodgeball Named Desire to rethink the age-old beef between sport and art. You’re watching a pig from George Orwell’s Animal Farm face a senate enquiry. You’re laughing your way to a deeper understanding of art as much as these specific pieces of art.  The Importance of Being Earnest is a surprising misstep from the audacious troupe, but it’s an ambitious one. The lights come up on Oscar Wilde (a suitably droll James Jackson) asleep in a decadent Victorian chambre with an erection threatening to pull the roof off fortyfivedownstairs. It’s typical Bloomshed: deliciously dumb and bawdy satire supported by simple yet magical stagecraft. It’s also a knowing wink to an audience who’d expect nothing less from the bombastic company tackling our most famous hedonist. The show soon takes aim at these very expectations, becoming something like an anti-Bloomshed Bloomshed

Blanche DuBois is the fragile heart of Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire and the easiest character in the Western canon to do an impression of. Chuck on some pearls, a white debutante-like fit and throw back a whiskey before you try your hand at a Southern drawl and you’ve got her, or at least some of her. If a classic, as the Italian writer Italo Calvino once defined, is a text that ‘has never finished saying what it has to say’ then Williams’ DuBois says more eighty years on with a string of pearls and a Mississippi accent than most of our classics ever could.  Such is the enduring power of Williams’ poetic realism, and the reason why this superficial revival from Melbourne Theatre Company feels so frustrating: for all the expectations or stereotypes we might have going in, the best productions and performances of this theatrical classic will rise above them all. A few sterling performances and technically impressive design cannot erase the fact that this production simply doesn’t know what William’s classic isn’t finished telling us.  Nikki Shiels is our Blanche, entering with a cat-like elegance in a long sheer dress and her iconic mop of curls. She truly is one of our best, commanding the stage with an ease and charisma few could replicate. Impressive vocal acrobatics (and an equally impressive Mississippi accent) show her signalling the complex play of insecurity and entitlement that defines Blanche with quick movements between her crystallin

Viral Youtube star and English sketch comedian, Adrian Bliss sprints out onto the Beckett stage at Malthouse Theatre in a giant orange inflatable ball and light-up undies. He is ‘Little Atom’; literally a tiny atom that we’ll be following across time and space as he searches for meaning. So goes the plot of Bliss’s first live show, Inside Everyone. For any one of the millions of followers across Bliss’s Instagram and YouTube accounts, it’ll seem like a pretty typical gambit for the comedian. Bliss has carved out a unique little corner of the internet for himself with a brand of historical and fact-based sketches delivered in the driest deadpan you’ve ever heard. Think of any common idiom or turn of phrase and Bliss has likely made a sketch out of it, thrown it into a specific period of history or made a part of the body sing it. It’s part dad joke, part absurdist sketch comedy, and part history lesson – for that reason it has a certain adorkable charm. Like any good dad joke, there’s an earnestness behind the intelligent wordplay that is incredibly endearing. It was this combination that made Bliss soar to fame during the pandemic, propelled by our collective desire for easy escapism. It’s also why much of his material seems to have aged. Inside Everyone is Bliss’s attempt to transition from online star to onstage comedian. For one hour we follow this ‘Little Atom’ as he stumbles through iconic moments of history; from the extinction of the dinosaurs and Shakespeare’s rise to

Only Australia’s resident cabaret king, Reuben Kaye, could turn an existential crisis into an hour and a half of uproarious comedy. Fresh off the runaway success of last year’s Live and Intimidating, Kaye returns to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with the apocalypse on his mind and some family history to unpack. He begins Apocalipstik, as all kings must, on a golden throne surrounded by towering portraits of himself. The Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre has been transformed into a political caucus, throne room and personal shrine in one with Kaye’s signature bold lash and red lippy splashed across two hanging banners on either side of the stage. He’s gathered us to celebrate, mourn and rally against the end of the world; a nihilist in six-inch heels, strutting from double entendre to biting social commentary with the elegance and narcissistic cheek we’ve come to expect from him. But a Reuben Kaye show is the yardstick one uses to evaluate a Reuben Kaye show. And unfortunately, Apocalipstik does not quite live up to the high bar he’s established for himself. In between soaring ballads and whip-smart improv, Kaye tells us the story of his Uncle Helmut, an enigmatic man he met only once as a child. None of our weird uncles could hold a candle to Helmut; a charismatic man, wanted criminal and semi-successful connoisseur of amateur sex tapes in 1990s West Berlin.  Kaye revels in the bawdy details of this camp figure. He’s a magnetic storyteller and the show is at its unruly

In Patrick Hamilton’s now eighty-year-old tale of deceit there’s nothing scarier than a maid walking around a cluttered Victorian living room lighting gaslights for the evening.  Gaslight’s simple approach to Gothic melodrama made it a runaway success when it premiered in 1938. And after Ingrid Bergman’s iconic 1944 film adaptation, ‘gaslight’ became a shorthand for attempting to convince someone that their reality is wrong. Now, there’s not a ‘gaslight, girlboss, gatekeep’ said that doesn’t implicitly recall Hamilton’s classic tale. And as this arresting new adaptation from writers Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson shows, Hamilton’s script still has much to offer, and plenty to fear. Bella (Geraldine Hakewill) is our girlboss. Mourning her mother and father, she meets the charismatic Jack Manningham (Toby Schmitz) who she quickly marries. But soon after the pair move to London Bella is haunted by bumps in the night and flickering gaslights. “Unfortunate delusions”, her husband calls them. But, despite his attempts to convince her of her madness, Bella eventually finds the source of these nightly horrors; more monstrous for having an intimate, and very real source. Hamilton’s script is balanced on a knife’s edge between emotions and styles; switching from humour to horror. Daphne Du Maurier-like Gothic melodrama is interspersed with Hitchcock whodunnit, and pulpy horror with careful precision. Like turning on that gaslight, it takes a steady hand to balance these complex affin

Malthouse Theatre’s dazzling production of Yentl opens with a command: “Once you say ‘A’, you must say ‘B’”. It’s not said by our eponymous lead (the effervescent Amy Hack), but maybe it should be. They are the bookish one, after all. Forbidden to study the Talmud as a woman, they’ve spent years prying the occasional theology lesson out of their father and reading the Torah on the sly. They know the near-divine power of language more than most; the way it obliges us to participate in it to understand and express ourselves, to worship, or to love.  The Yentl we encounter in this mystical adaptation from Kadmiah Yiddish Theatre seeks out a new language, or rather finds something new in an old language; a way of understanding Jewishness and Jewish womanhood that embraces the liminal, the inexpressible and the ancient. And they begin by giving themselves a new name, a male name that will allow them to become a scholar of the Talmud: Anshl.  Rather than overstate the novelty of these ideas, co-writers Gary Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas show just how deeply rooted they already are in Jewish lore, theology and myth. What they’ve accomplished is nothing short of magic: an explicitly queer retelling of a story made famous by a Barbara Streisand-led 1983 film that brings to light the transness implicit to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s original text and makes it an essential part of Yiddishkayt (Jewishness). It would be heady and potentially boring, were it not for the gorgeous

When we first meet the star of The Dictionary of Lost Words, Esme Nicoll, it’s 1886 and she is under her father’s desk learning new words. She tries them on for size, testing out their definitions in sentences and quotes – “bondmaid”, “fashionable”, “Lily”. She’s curious and questioning, bright-eyed in a red Shirly Temple wig and Victorian smock.  An adaptation of Pip Williams’ best-selling 2020 novel of the same name, The Dictionary of Lost Words is a three-hour epic spanning decades and covering everything from the Great War to the early suffrage movement. Two things pull us through the show’s century-long timeline: the construction of the Oxford dictionary, and Esme, who comes of age while constructing a dictionary of her own from the words discarded and deemed unsuitable in the process. Yet we never quite lose sight of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Esme escaping under a wooden desk, child-like as she collects these ‘unseemly’ words and learns more of their meanings, uses and origins.  Verity Laughton’s adaptation had a middling reception when it premiered last year at Sydney Theatre Company. Critics applauded the show’s impressive design and at times affecting dialogue but took issue with its exposition-heavy script and crowded plot. Upon its arrival at Arts Centre Melbourne, many of these criticisms still stand.  Jonathon Oxlade’s design remains as impressive as ever, surrounding Esme in a grid-work of luminescent pigeonholes overlooked by a rectangular screen that di

It’s about time theatre and sport resolve their differences. The long-warring pair have more in common than they realise. If they can’t bury the hatchet, Bloomshed’s uproarious new show, A Dodgeball Named Desire, has a recommendation: they could lob some red balls at one another/ Bloomshed has quickly distinguished itself as one of Melbourne’s premier independent companies with its radical reimaginings of various literary classics – earlier this year, its high-octane production of Animal Farm proved a runaway success. This time, the creative crew have set their sights on Tennessee Williams' 1947 classic A Streetcar Named Desire, moving from their usual home in Northcote Town Hall to convert fortyfivedownstairs into an Olympic-style stadium. It’s soliloquies versus sweat and grand slams versus spotlights in this bombastic battle royale destined to make you laugh and occasionally flinch. Williams (Tom Molyneux) himself is our umpire, emerging from a bedazzled bathtub to describe the rules of the game. It’s a dodgeball tournament like no other. The reward? Bragging rights and an Arts Australia grant. In one corner there’s Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. Her skills include having a tragic backstory, haunted eyes and a white gown pulled from "the bargain bin of Opera Australia" (the costumes by Samantha Hastings, who doubles as the on-site medic, are beautifully rendered). Played by three performers (Elizabeth Brennan, Laura Aldous and Anna Louey) with an exaggerated Southern dra