Oz Asia Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 31 Oct 2025
It was an epic autobiographical spectacular and it was for one night only.
What a night.
The Town Hall was packed to the proverbial.
The stage was loaded with fabulous musicians beneath a giant screen.
The audience was braced and expectant. Love was in the air. Lots of love.
The subject of this mass attendance and cherishing spirit was one William Yang.
A simple photographer.
A Chinese Australian from the flyspeck town of Dimbulah on Queensland’s Atherton Tableland.
But how this gentle gay man has carved a swathe of respect and admiration throughout his country, something which perchance amazed even he, not to mention the conservative few of his remote home-town where he learned from the schoolyard that he was a “Ching Chong Chinaman”. His older brother confirmed that this was indeed so, and he had to “get used to it”.
Yang, now celebrating 80 years of life, tells of his childhood movement to the big smoke, the worst time of his life at high school in Cairns, of his wonderful Aunt Bessie and the uncle who was murdered. Of his discovery of the camera as the passport to social inclusion in the years which followed. Therein was the discovery of his own homosexuality and the gay world of Sydney, the homoerotic visages of lifesavers and Bondi Beach, the fun gay saunas and of Sydney’s drag world and the evolution of the Mardi Gras. He snapped it all.
As he did here. Many Adelaideans will recall William Yang's presence creating an on-the-spot photo record in Adelaide for lively Arts Festivals of the 80s - which sadly he did not mention. What he did cover, however, was the raucous self-identification of the Sydney gay scene back in the day. He also was part of the boho cultural world of Martin Sharpe, in whose affluent domicile he lived and worked for years. He had a darkroom at Sharp's place. He recorded everyone on film, mostly black and white. Photographing people became a raison d’etre and showing the beauty of the young male form.
He adopted Taoism and went to China where he finally felt a sense of second home, despite never having mastered the language.
He had a vibrant artistic circle—among them Brett Whiteley, Jenny Kee and the out-there chic folk. And he photographed them.
He was there for the gruelling passage to death of a dear one during the AIDS epidemic. He learned of the grace of death.
He studied himself, as well as others, and a series of self-portraits track this sense of self—sometimes in the vast dry inland, and finally, arms outstretched beneath a stormy seascape sky.
It has been an interesting life with substance enough to fill a series of photo diary performances, a genre he may call his own. Not everyone is gratified by homoerotic portraiture, but no one any longer finds it surprising.
This particular Australian gay man has quietly delivered it as a form of human essence with images profound, incidental and exuberant.
As his works displayed on the screen in the Town Hall, Ensemble Lumen played an array of extremely agreeable compositions by Elena Kats-Chernin. They complemented and oft highlighted the images, evoking moods and sometimes a sense of place. Periodic percussive use of coconut shells imparted a lovely light quasi-Oriental touch. In itself the music was an engrossing pleasure very interestingly enhanced by the Auslan interpreters who translated not only Yang’s words but the spirit and tempo of the music.
And so it was, a sentimental voyage for Oz Asia from a beloved artist, an Asian Aussie, perchance the apotheosis of the festival itself.
Samela Harris
When: 31 Oct
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 30 Oct 2025
What a pleasure to see a comic actress really hitting her straps in her prime.
Helen Geoffreys has always enjoyed a respected reputation for reliable quality performances across the boards of Adelaide theatre. She’s been nominated for and has won awards for her work - and if ever there was cause for her name to sparkle yet again it is in this performance as Ann, the banker's wife and hapless mother of the groom-to-be. This is her night.
The vehicle in which she does this rib-cracking bedazzlement is a really quaint confection from Britain’s actor/playwright Robin Hawden, creator of The Mating Game, Perfect Wedding, and Birthday Suite among other romantic comedies. It is not the greatest of his many plays but a piece of implausible fluff which makes a fun diversion here under the seasoned direction of Sue Wylie.
It portrays a snooty stockbroker-belt family whose weekend of wedding plans and family introductions turns into a folly of utter bemusement as the bride-to-be falls into a dither of impetuous indecision.
The wonderful Jess Corrie, fresh from a distinguishing performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf at Holden Street, shows sturdy versatility swinging into the character of the vacillating romantic lead. ’Tis a performance of quite stunned perplexity. Around her are the three adoring males led by Paul Pancillo who is a singularly dashing comic performer. Keep an eye out for him. Stephen Bills stands forever tall as manipulative Geoff while Tom Tassone as the outsider is as personable onstage as we have come to expect of him. From Pelican Productions and Deadset Theatre comes the fresh face and promising presence of Laura Lines who has excelled in one of those legendary last-minute performances replacing an ill cast-member. And thus does the diligent cast of six thrive on a really terrific Don Oswald affluenza set under the perceptive lighting of Harry Ferguson.
The play itself would be pleasantly amusing were it not for Geoffreys as the hysterical and ever-blindsided English-counties mother and wedding planner. Her every reaction, her wild gesticulations and her impeccable timing delivers the play to scenes of glorious, chaotic hilarity. Applause, applause.
Samela Harris
When: 30 Oct to Nov 8
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Flying Penguin Productions. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. 30 Oct 2025
American Song was written nine years ago. Its relevance remains as powerful now as then.
Justice. Peace. The ‘on track’ good life. The American Dream complete.
Andy (Renato Musolino) presents to us, an audience in the round, as a man halfway between sure and deeply unsure about these things.
There’s a foreboding sadness as he tells his life’s tale while building a rock wall, stone by stone. Something in life went wrong. Something we’re not up to speed with. Yet.
As Andy outlines his sense of moments of life significance; the wonderful wife, the career, the wonderful son, he’s also questioning their very validity.
Joanna Murray-Smith’s text is as delicate as it is boisterous in exploring and celebrating the ‘American Dream’ as it is dreamed and lived. The soap opera element is there, yet it is delivered with an insightfulness that is critically aware of the cracks within American culture.
Quentin Grant’s careful, graceful score, with hints of bird life, banjo, and guitar underscores the true depths of Andy’s musings on the pain within Murray-Smith’s text.
Beneath it all, there’s something different. Andy and Amy’s son Robbie is a powerful force in their lives. He’s there—but are they there with him?
That’s the slow burn powering Andy’s musings, desperately trying to create a safe place within himself. Good people, good children, get killed by guns. Why?
Who is at fault? What is it that causes it? What America is this?
Director David Mealor’s production is a masterpiece, letting Murray-Smith’s writing live and breathe at its own, sparse, deeply introspective, gentle pace. In Renato Musolino, is an actor who can, with patient precision and gentle calm, develop and grow Andy as a character who is as charming as he is hopeful, vain, remorseful and ultimately, lost.
Andy is without anchor. He is a mass of memory, introspection and awareness seeking new roots, new ‘answers’. He is America untethered from fantastical idealism, thrust into a dark and brutal reality that is playing out now in 2025.
Kathryn Sproul’s set is as deceptively simple as it is powerful. Her ‘wall’ works as a profound metaphor for insecurity bolstered by hope. Nic Mollison’s lighting perfectly supports Sproul’s careful, slowly darkening projection of gathering clouds, subtly guiding the audience to the point of dramatic shock.
David O’Brien
When: 24 Oct to 2 Nov
Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios
Bookings: Sold Out
OzAsia Festival/The Human Expression (T.H.E) Dance Company. 23 Oct 2505
Heard the aphorism, ‘be like water.?
It perfectly sums up the delights and challenges of experiencing Director Kuik Swee Boon’s Searching Blue.
The work takes place throughout the spaces of Festival Plaza with a company of five dancers, a musician and Joel Manuel Fernandez’s portable amp playing much of the techno focused score.
This is a travelling piece, a guided journey, one with choices.
The audience arrives to a space near King William road. They find dancers in blue costume, arms, faces and legs covered with blue ochre chalk draped over benches, leaning against the building or stories poles.
The audience sits. Waits. Slowly, the work begins ever so gently as these dancers begin to awaken, stand, move. They’re accompanied by the sounds of solo human song and astonishing notes from a zither by Kent Lee.
A world within a world. One in which these dancers invite you take their hands, follow them. Walk or run. There’s a remarkable relationship unfolding between audience and dancers, indeed, an inner world is being created within the real one. That inner world directly challenges the one of sounds and people around us demanding its space,
so, like water, this moving production flows and ebbs in, around, and through the real world.
To take the dancers hands and follow them is to accept this new world of peace, seeking and wonderment.
The audience is constantly juggling this performance world and the real one. Perceptions of the two are extremely heightened by the fact we have accepted the dancer’s world. It’s moments of the dancers seeking something of each other, then offering their gift in warmth to us. From the King William Road corner, to Riverbannk, and across the footbridge.
At times, the troupe explodes into phrases of ensemble acrobatics and tableaux. The only moments they become like a conventional dance company in any sense of the term. That only makes ever more beguiling the mystery of choreography entangling audience members. It makes more profound the find and seek moments between dancers themselves.
Searching Blue is a remarkable waking dream experience. One that really makes you think about the realities you live in, physical, human, emotional, spiritual.
David O’Brien
When: 23 to 25 Oct
Where: Festival Plaza
Bookings: Closed
State Opera South Australia. Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 30 Aug 2025
At last night’s performance by State Opera South Australia (SOSA) of Mozart’s much loved and much performed The Magic Flute, Dan Lam addressed the audience. Whether it’s grand opera or a grunge band, pre-show announcements from centre stage can be terrifying. They usually signal some disaster has befallen the event, such as a principal actor or singer is indisposed and won’t be performing and there will be an understudy. (Mind you, this reviewer prayed for that very thing to happen at a performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Sunset Boulevard Sunset Boulevard earlier this year in the Sydney Opera House, but, dammit, Sarah Brightman soldiered on despite the fierce headwind of damning reviews.) As Lam paused for breath, we were all wondering whether he was going to announce that Sofia Troncoso (who plays the important role of Princess Tamina) was still indisposed. (Troncoso was replaced on opening night by Stacey Alleaume who was flown in at very short notice to fill in.) Or worse still, had someone else in the cast succumbed to ‘the dreaded lurgy’? Lam, announced that young Ethan Zhang, one of the child performers, was suffering from a winter illness and although he would take to the stage and act his heart out, his vocal line would be sung by a member of the State Opera Chorus from the wings. Phew!!
The Opera gods were smiling.
Lam, who is SOSA’s new Artistic Director (and the conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for this production), also asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they were at their very first opera or production by SOSA. He was taken aback that so many hands went up in the air! This bodes well for the future, but it’s also a ringing endorsement of Lam’s plans for SOSA. This is the first season he’s programmed for SOSA, and it embodies his vision of “opera without borders” and a return to the not-so-distant past when SOSA was known and celebrated internationally for its many ‘firsts’. (State Government – please take note! SOSA deservedly merits the support you provide it, and more!). This production of The Magic Flute is the first collaboration between an Australian opera company and leading Chinese partners, namely Opera Hong Kong, the Beijing Musical Festival, and China National Opera House. It is also supported by Australia’s National Foundation for Australia-China Relations.
This production, which premiered recently in Hong Kong, and travels to China later in the year, is directed by Chinese theatre, film and opera director Shuang Zou, and it is stunningly brilliant in every respect.
Zou reimagines The Magic Flute into a world and time far removed from its original. It couldn’t be any further. There is always a risk in doing this, especially with an opera that is one of the mainstays of the repertoire. There have been some classic faux pas in modernising operas – setting Strauss’ Salome in a slaughterhouse, and Verdi’s Otello on an aircraft carrier very quickly come to mind – and Zou’s setting of The Magic Flute in a busy Hong Kong subway might seem the recipe for a fall, but nothing could be further from the truth. It works. Its conception is intelligent, and almost every aspect of the original story line – the adventure, the pantomime and melodrama, and the allegory – remain evident, alive, and believable (in a strange sort of way!).
As the overture plays, an animé scene plays out on a gigantic projection screen that forms the upstage wall of the set. (Zou brings her training in film to the fore.) We see a young man waking up and going through his morning routine as he prepares for the day. We even observe him on his ‘porcelain throne’ which is greeted by howls of laughter from the large Her Majesty’s Theatre audience. Suddenly they know they are in for an operatic experience of an entirely different kind, and they are not disappointed. The young man eventually enters a busy subway, and the curtain rises to reveal just that: throngs of people getting on and off trains that whizz past on the screen. A young man (perhaps it could be the same one as in the animé clip) is seen in heated discussion with a young woman, who abruptly leaves him and gets on a train. It looks like they are breaking up and he is so distressed that he imagines the next train morphs into a terrifying dragon, and he collapses on the station platform. An impassioned mind can play tricks. From this point on we are in a fantasy and in the milieu of Mozart’s opera, with a prince, a princess, a wicked Queen, scheming ladies in waiting, strange animals, high and not so high priests, guards, musical instruments with magical powers. It’s a wild ride.
Zou essentially acknowledges that the original story line of The Magic Flute either needs to be played out ‘as written’ and as intended by librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, one of Mozart’s collaborators and an entrepreneur specialising in ‘low art’ entertainment for the masses, or it needs to be interpreted in a way that retains the integrity of the story but speaks to a modern audience. As Lam puts it in his program notes, Zou’s reimagination “…helps us listen more intently – to beauty, to each other, to deeper truths”, and he’s right. Zou’s brilliant interpretation removes the need to suspend disbelief so much that it hurts, squarely faces up to the fantastical fairy tale that the opera really is, and finds a way to expose the underlying themes without being ‘preachy’.
So, the scenic design is inspired and fits Zou’s vision like a well-crafted glove. Dan Potra is the set and costume designer, and it’s just dazzling without resorting to unnecessary gimmicks. Glen D’Haenens lighting design emphasises and immerses us in fantasy when necessary, and snaps us out of it when the story line is best suited to the listener having a clear mind. It’s so thoughtfully designed.
Dane Lam has the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra sounding exquisite. Mozart’s gorgeous score is in good hands. (The flute and (uncredited) percussion that create the sounds of the “magic flute” and “magic bells” could have been amplified a little – they get a bit lost in the pit.)
Anthony Hunt’s command of the State Opera Chorus has never been better. They sounded superb and sang with superb balance.
The cast of principals are world class. This can be a dangerous thing to say – it is easy to get caught up in the moment and direct a spray of superlatives at them – but is deserved. Australian tenor Nicholas Jones, who is currently a principal artist with the Paris Opera, sings Tamino, and the tessitura of Tamino’s arias fits Jones’ voice beautifully. He’s sung on the SOSA stage before, but this performance eclipses all before it.
Sofia Troncoso makes a brilliant Pamina: she gives the role sass, sadness as well as unbridled joy. Her soprano voice is truly a fine instrument, with evenness and musicality across the range.
David Greco sings the comic bird catcher role of Papageno and rightly stops short of making the character ridiculous. Refreshingly, Greco plays the character almost straight, which makes it all the funnier. He has timing, and his tenor voice is strong and true. His difficult duet with Jessica Dean in the cameo role of Papagena, his newly found sweetheart, is tight and very entertaining. The precision of Mozart’s challenging music and Schikaneder’s tongue-twisting text are superbly navigated by both, with the ever-watchful Lam in the pit keeping finely balanced control.
New Yorker Danielle Bavli plays the menacing Queen of the Night. Her costume is striking, and she uses it to style menace as well as grace. Although a little quiet, she sings beautifully and her signature aria Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen is a high point of the opera. It's a bit cliché, but this is the ‘pot boiler’ aria that everyone looks forward to in The Magic Flute, and Bavli sings it strikingly.
Teddy Tahu Rhodes sings the role of Sarastro and imbues him with wisdom and benevolence. Rhodes' bass voice is truly world class, with clarity and musicalness across even the lowest notes. His costume is an eye opener, and the symbolism built into its construction is not missed. He inhabits the costume; he doesn’t merely wear it.
Sopranos Helena Dix, Catriona Barr and Fiona McArdle play First, Second and Third ladies respectively – they are servants of the Queen – and they initially take to the stage by magically coming to life as they emerge from a giant airline company poster in the subway. Zou’s directorial concepts are just so imaginative! Their trios are just so much fun. Dix has a gloriously strong voice, and she makes First Lady larger than life, and lusty! Barr and McArdle build on Dix’s vamping humour, and the trio of ladies is an absolute hoot. McArdle continues to rapidly develop into a fine artist.
Mark Oates sings the evil Monostatos with a comfortably surety. His costume deliberately distracts from the garb that is traditionally worn by the character, who, in the original script is described as a ‘blackamoor’. Like Rhodes, Oates uses his costume as an extension of his character and manages to have the audience laugh heartily at him as he struts his stuff as a would-be seducer of women (but he is quite delusional!).
Pelham Andrews sings the role of Speaker, and his fine bass voice is well suited to this opera. He sings with evenness of tone and imparts humility to the role. A fine performance.
Rounding out the cast are Phillip Cheng, Ethan Zhang and Celine Yuan as the three children. They are just fabulous. They begin as triplets in a children’s pram, then become young men, then older men and finally very old men who take an almost unhealthy interest in the final romantic outcome between Tamino and Pamina. This is another of Zou’s directorial coups! The ageing of the children serves to illustrate that the The Magic Flute is as much about life’s journey as it is about the ultimate triumph of good over bad, love over hate, and compassion over animosity. Chorus members Callum McGing, Jamie Moffatt, Andrew Turner, and Nick Cannon play minor roles but do it with conviction. McGing, in particular, demonstrated the depth of musical talent that is alive in the State Opera Chorus.
So, there it is. State Opera South Australia’s production of The Magic Flute, under the farsighted eyes and musical baton of Dane Lam, produced in collaboration with international partners, and directed by young visionary director Shuang Zou, is a revelation. It has all the sumptuousness of grand opera and all the easy appeal of a lighter musical. It is a joy to watch, and to listen to, and there are two more performances left. It is a perfect introduction to the world of opera, that most magnificent and mysterious of all artforms. This is a show for everyone.
Kym Clayton
When: 28 Aug to 6 Sep
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au