Ben Francis. Adelaide Town Hall. 7 Dec 2025
It is impossible not to rave about this group.
The 60 Four is/was/will be one of the star turns of this country.
Its Christmas Proms special had the crowds massed and jammed really early at the Adelaide Town Hall. Come on down every Baby Boomer in town.
And the four Adelaide boys, fresh home from intensive touring—five countries and several states in the last month, cruise ships, concerts, you name it—gave the crowds just what they craved. It was yet another five-star, high-energy two hours of good spirit. Christmas spirit in this case. They jazzed up all manner of Christmas songs but scratched the old fans’ itch with some Frankie Valli and Beachboys, even Beatles old hits. And the crowd tapped feet, clapped along and whooped for more.
The secret to The 60 Four’s ever-growing popularity is not just pure talent but, significantly, consistency of high discipline. Indeed, these one-time school mates have honed their act with immense professional discipline. They are rehearsed to perfection.
Their manager is Ben Francis, of the wild falsetto, and he has had the business nous to make the boys into hot property.
And, the energy never lets up. They give, give, give. They work, work, work. They just get better, better, best.
It is not just the vocals of Jack Conroy, Lachlan Williams, Finnigen Green and Ben Francis but also it is the slick choreography and their flawless co-ordination as a group.
They really know how to “sell” a song. And, how to present as a quartet while also delivering an endearing sense of who is who. Together in identical stage outfits they are “the four” but through solos and chats, they are likeable individuals and one feels their friendship. Cheeky, fun asides pass between them. A warm intimacy is conveyed.
Of course, their demographic is interesting. Their fan base is grey-haired. The young in the audience were largely grandchildren. And, how deliciously The 60 Four merch reflects their understanding of this. Fabulous shirts may have flown off the merch table, but not as fast as the tea towels. Yes, tea towels are star souvenirs and way more useful than t-shirts when you think about it. Good quality, too. We bought one of everything. Oh, and the Christmas special was 2026 calendars.
Ben Francis has created a brand and these spectaculars of The 60 Four are not the only goodie on the menu. His Elton John tribute show was a wow. There are more fan thrills to come on the entrepreneurial front.
He announced their Fringe program, too, once more, spreading the cheer around from Fringe core in the parklands to the Shedley and Hopgood.
Oh, and one more thing.
The boys are all grown up. They are men now. a harmony of wonderful, brilliant, dazzling men.
Samela Harris
When: 7 Dec
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Book now for their Fringe shows: adelaidefringe.com.au
Peter Goërs/Holden Street Theatres. 21 Nov 2025
Mary Chase’s Harvey is better known for the 1950s film adaptation of the play starring James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd.
It’s fondly remembered for its impeccable comedy involving a delightfully genteel gentleman and invisible best friend Harvey, a six-foot rabbit with whom he travels the bars of New York making friends everywhere.
This greatly displeases his sister and niece with whom he resides, given his reputation may harm his niece’s marriage prospects, not to mention the struggle of coping with an invisible guest for whom a place at table must always be set.
His sister decides, in agreement with her daughter, that shipping Elwood off to a Sanitarium for the insane, then having power of attorney to sell the house Elwood actually owns, will solve everything,
No. It does not play out that way.
Elwood (Peter Goërs) outsmarts everyone. He drifts in and out of snares, accompanied by Harvey, happily dispensing compliments and kindness wherever he goes. Instead, it’s his sister Veta (Rebecca Kemp) committed to the Sanitarium by mistake. After his escape, his niece, Myrtle May’s (Dora Stamos) putting the house on the market comes unstuck. Sanitarium head psychiatrist Doctor Chumley (Ron Hoenig) has everything he knows professionally, completely challenged, alongside his new assistant, Doctor Sanderson (Christopher Cordeaux.)
Harvey is a comedy of errors as much it is a sweet reflection on what really matters in life, being oneself, making the best of relations with others.
Director Rosie Aust’s production goes for a performance stye close to the era of the play’s origins. Working to highlight absurdities and physical comedy eliciting a happy go lucky popcorn feel to the production.
This partly works, but overall has a cookie cutter feel to it, limiting what the ensemble can bring to their characters. They work at it though.
Most successful at getting beyond this constraint is Goërs, whose Elwood P. Dowd is a delightful creation. Perfectly paced, wonderfully clever and completely wise and heart warming. His counterpart. Rebecca Kemp as sister Veta Louise Simmons, is a rich, completely earthy being at whom one can laugh and yet sympathise with simultaneously.
Dora Stamos as her daughter Myrtle May gives an outstanding, carefully measured comic performance you just have to love. Leighton Vogt goes for it as Sanatarium guard Wilson, the only silly hard arse in the show.
There are actors whose work suits that in context, namely Amanda James’ fabulous Mrs Chumley, Antoinette Cirocco’s perfect, romantic sweetheart Nurse Kelly and Christopher Cordeaux’s know-it-all, smart-arse Doctor Sanderson, along with Brian Wellington’s Judge Omar.
Overall, this is a satisfying production. However, allowing the cast greater freedom to find immediacy in their work, rather than over focusing on style might increase its pace and add gumption to the comedy given the length of the work.
David O’Brien
When: 4 to 22 Nov
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: Closed
Harvey
Peter Goërs/Holden Street Theatres. 21 Nov 2025
Mary Chase’s Harvey is better known for the 1950s film adaptation of the play starring James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd.
It’s fondly remembered for its impeccable comedy involving a delightfully genteel gentleman and invisible best friend Harvey, a six-foot rabbit with whom he travels the bars of New York making friends everywhere.
This greatly displeases his sister and niece with whom he resides, given his reputation may harm his niece’s marriage prospects, not to mention the struggle of coping with an invisible guest for whom a place at table must always be set.
His sister decides, in agreement with her daughter, that shipping Elwood off to a Sanitarium for the insane, then having power of attorney to sell the house Elwood actually owns, will solve everything,
No. It does not play out that way.
Elwood (Peter Goërs) outsmarts everyone. He drifts in and out of snares, accompanied by Harvey, happily dispensing compliments and kindness wherever he goes. Instead, it’s his sister Veta (Rebecca Kemp) committed to the Sanitarium by mistake. After his escape, his niece, Myrtle May’s (Dora Stamos) putting the house on the market comes unstuck. Sanitarium head psychiatrist Doctor Chumley (Ron Hoenig) has everything he knows professionally, completely challenged, alongside his new assistant, Doctor Sanderson (Christopher Cordeaux.)
Harvey is a comedy of errors as much it is a sweet reflection on what really matters in life, being oneself, making the best of relations with others.
Director Rosie Aust’s production goes for a performance stye close to the era of the play’s origins. Working to highlight absurdities and physical comedy eliciting a happy go lucky popcorn feel to the production.
This partly works, but overall has a cookie cutter feel to it, limiting what the ensemble can bring to their characters. They work at it though.
Most successful at getting beyond this constraint is Goërs, whose Elwood P. Dowd is a delightful creation. Perfectly paced, wonderfully clever and completely wise and heart warming. His counterpart. Rebecca Kemp as sister Veta Louise Simmons, is a rich, completely earthy being at whom one can laugh and yet sympathise with simultaneously.
Dora Stamos as her daughter Myrtle May gives an outstanding, carefully measured comic performance you just have to love. Leighton Vogt goes for it as Sanatarium guard Wilson, the only silly hard arse in the show.
There are actors whose work suits that in context, namely Amanda James’ fabulous Mrs Chumley, Antoinette Cirocco’s perfect, romantic sweetheart Nurse Kelly and Christopher Cordeaux’s know-it-all, smart-arse Doctor Sanderson, along with Brian Wellington’s Judge Omar.
Overall, this is a satisfying production. However, allowing the cast greater freedom to find immediacy in their work, rather than over focusing on style might increase its pace and add gumption to the comedy given the length of the work.
David O’Brien
When: 4 to 22 Nov
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: Closed
The Odeon. State Theatre Company South Australia. 19 Nov 2025
The old is new again and yet it is still old. So it feels with State Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie.
It is wildly unconventional while holding the play's emotional integrity fiercely in place.
Pleasingly, it showcases yet again the remarkable versatility of the Odeon Theatre in Norwood which most recently was stripped bare to a multimedia hall for Oz Asia and now is reborn with a mega set of dense multi-level complexity reaching from the lighting rigs right to the toes of the front row.
The play itself is famously a “memory play”, being melancholy evocations of the playwright's family experiences. The principal character is Tom, Thomas having been Williams’ born first name. The characters of the overbearing and thwarted mother, Amanda, and the disabled lonely Laura bearing no little resemblance to his own family. It is even set in St Louis, wherein the playwright had lived.
If ever there was a sublimely written and piquantly indelible play, this is it, considered by many to be a foundational work of American theatre.
Coincidentally, it was pipped for the 1945 Pulitzer by Mary Chase’s play Harvey, which is about to close in Adelaide after running to full houses at Holden Street Theatres.
Spookily, both plays are about a fading socialite mother desperate to find a match for her unmarried daughter.
The Glass Menagerie mother, Amanda Wingfield, is the more tragic by far. Hers is a character part coveted and relished by senior actresses and it is a little surprising to find that State director Shannon Rush has cast and bewigged a decidedly youthful-looking beauty, Ksenja Logos, in the role. She is a brave choice, especially in the brittleness of her delivery. Not for her the languid vowels of the American South. Then again, director Rush breaks all sorts of traditions in this production and allows that poor ambitious mother to return to her southern-belle persona almost caricatured as a painted doll with the arrival of the gentleman caller.
Mark Thompson’s mega set enables risks. It is a world of myriad moods, a depth of field of fire stairs creating a claustrophobic sense of crowded tenement living. There is a shadowy downstairs street wherein strangers lurk. There is the fire-escape landing for smoking and moon-gazing, a huge door frame which speaks to the disappointment of the characters who go through it - down into their reliquary of southern grace which is Amanda’s world. The set also respects the early design concept of screens with an astounding painted drop bearing the image of the absent father, alongside an empty Trumpian gilded frame. Darkly transparent, the face drop becomes the characters’ path into their domestic world while the dining room dominates and is to deliver, with Gavin Norris’s artful lighting, one of several scenes of utter theatrical magic. There is yet another level dressed for the living room and yet another for Laura’s gramophone and, oh, yes, the glass menagerie itself which, many-stranded, hangs dreamily from aloft, occasionally illuminated. Hence, the action is layered upon a literal world and flawed reminiscence.
There is a lot to take in. A lot to ponder. And yet therein remains the purity of Tennessee Williams’s first great hit play.
Poor Tom, who is both narrator and character in the story, is portrayed most perceptively as hen-pecked son and sweet brother by Laurence Boxhall; good accent, too. Kathryn (Kitty) Adams makes the heart ache as poor Laura. She captures succinctly Laura’s vulnerability albeit, again, as a director’s choice one assumes, far from the club foot with which Laura is afflicted in many productions, she suffers but an occasional limp, not necessarily the same one.
The Gentleman Caller is played by one Jono Darby. He is positively thrilling. The stage is alive with his presence. Marvellous voice. Light on his feet. Astute in emotional inflection. He is a “find” in the Adelaide theatre.
Jamie Hornsby has composed for this piece some theme music which with Andrew Howard’s sound, at first overstates itself but, as the play evolves, finds a level which then blends. Costumes are splendid, right down to Amanda’s seamed stockings.
As a whole this State Theatre production is imperfect and at the same time, really quite wondrous.
And Mark Thompson may take a bow.
Samela Harris
When: 19 Nov to 7 Dec
Where: The Odeon
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
OzAsia Festival. Omar Musa and Mariel Roberts Musa. Nexus Arts. 6 Nov 2025
The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio) is as powerfully modern event, as its form has roots in ancient arts of mythic, poetic storytelling shared by cultures western and Asian.
Renowned Queanbeyan essayist, poet, visual artist, novelist and rapper Omar Musa and globally renowned cellist (and Omar’s wife) Mariel Roberts Musa, deliver a profoundly searing biographical tale of Musa’s family origins in Borneo in a manner that is cutting, unapologetically upfront, shocking yet profound as readers of Homer’s Illyiad would have taken it in its time.
Musa’s savagely beautiful story goes beyond individual human stories to encompass the wider one of ecological destruction, colonial capitalism, and enforced poverty as a consequence of industrial development.
He is the water sprite seeking to become human again. The sprite encountering the pollution of the seas. The young man observing his Grandparent’s jungle livelihood being obliterated. Considering Musa’s own life as an immigrant to Queensland.
Musa’s writing is beautiful, yet hard in its succinct symbolism without a drop of sentimentality in it. He delivers it with an authority of an ancient storyteller who is yet, so very young. The work is so carefully paced, assisted by the most beautiful projected back drops of sea, and of jungle.
Roberts Musa’s composition for cello blended with electronics and effects is stunning in the range of emotion, place, and experience it expresses, from human breathing to the violence of the sea and volcano. You will never hear like of it from any other cellist.
Musa’s use of rap is easily the most seismic element of the production’s impact on the audience. It hits so hard, these vicious yet accurate words of truth telling, exposing environmental destruction, human displacement, economic abuse.
This work is indeed an offering, of hope in a future beyond the travails of the present. An understanding of a historical reality—as Musa noted to the audience, “bet you didn’t think you’d be getting a history lesson.” A reckoning with what a pathway to something better might be.
David O’Brien
When: 6 and 7 Nov
Where: Nexus Arts Centre
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 6 Nov 2025
The new Australian dream is never moving out
Asian Aussies grow up in an environment of cross-cultural, bi-cultural domesticity wherein the question of when one leaves home has higher degrees of ambivalence than for this true-blue Aussie's counterparts.
When said dilemma is parsed by their peers of the comedy persuasion, oh, it is of bittersweet hilarity - especially when delivered with barbs and exposes of fierce opposition.
OzAsia’s idea of pitting Aussie-born Asians, AKA Asian Australians, into this fearless challenge is nothing less than brilliant.
For us old Aussies, it is a cultural education with laughing bells on.
These six debaters, bravely moderated by the ABC’s Jason Chong, were of differing Asian stock, but would seem to agree that the racial identification requested on official forms makes the identification of “European ancestry” suggest something “extra white”. And listening to the six debaters pit themselves and each other against racial stereotypes makes one sit and ponder one’s own position in the gene pool. How white are we “Europeans”?
Europeans descend from a mixture of four West-Eurasian ancestral components, of which only the Nords and Celts are truly white. I, for one, am not “white”. I am “olive”, no doubt due to admixtures of other ethnic groups from Persia and the Levant.
Yes, Mr Chong et al, there’s a quirky racial debate subject for next OzAsia.
By then, we may have stopped chuckling at this one.
Michael Hing on the affirmative team was a treat. He’s had a varied career on television and radio, and even politics as the one member of the One Asian Party. Teammate Kushi Ventkatesh is only 20, a student and TikTokker. She insisted her youth made her the only genuine “New Australian" and, after giving diabolical advice as how to stop your Asian parents stalking you via electronic media, announced that her parents were in the house. Oops. Funny girl.
Lawrence Leung completed the affirmatives. He’s a Melbourne magician and Rubik’s-cube nerd as well as a comedian and the senior of the onstage teams.
On the negative side, Perth lawyer turned Melbourne comedian and memoir-writer, Sashi Perera, of Sri Lankan descent, noted the Aussie quest for individuality versus Asian community. Most everyone found that notable, except perhaps mixed-race comedian and drag artiste and TikTokker, Sydney-based Londoner CJ Lamarque, who had a lovely line on xenophobia. Alex Lee, captain of the negative team, is a journalist, actress and comedian - a triple threat with Asian genes.
The moderator “paid” everyone in bubble tea which he drank if they ran over their time allocations.
And, through a QR code onscreen, he accepted questions from the audience.
We learned a lot about Asian parenting: hot water is the cure for everything; mother can never collect too many plastic containers; homes must be near Aldis and private schools. Complex home lives are good for comic content, happy people are boring, Asian families never suffer loneliness syndrome and moving back with the parents is worth it for the babysitting. In the end of the day, after a madness of point-making and finger-pointing and some really naughty jokes, the audience was asked to vote and it did so very rowdily for the negative. Which means the dream of the yellow picket fence is alive, but for the cost. Or something like that.
Samela Harris
a
When: 6 Nov
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed