AUDITORIUM

✮✮ LKY Marina Bay Sands | Singapore music Dick Lee lyrics Stephen Clark book Tony Petito directed by Steven Dexter Propaganda involves the telling of lies, usually by governments, to influence a population toward its own conception of an endorsed attitude. Aside from the always contentious nature of that sense of an approved and absolute outcome, what constitutes the nature of lies, and truth, are always ambiguous. There is no doubt that the achievements of Singapore’s legend

✮✮✮ Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Bayreuth Festival Katharina Wagner | Christian Thielemann King Marke has a mean collection of bicycle stands. Kurvenal grasps their sinister implications, and trembles in a corner. Marke and his men watch from above, helped by spot-lights, as Tristan and Isolde build themselves a cubby-house with a blanket and a bunch of clip-on, battery-operated stars which they happen to have with them. Later they use the edge of one of the bicycle stands

✮✮✮✮✮ Andrew Upton's The Present after Anton Chekhov's Platonov Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by John Crowley What is now known to be Anton Chekhov’s Platonov, was an unpublished manuscript discovered a decade after the playwright’s 1904 death. His sister had called it “a long play without a title”, and it remains an obscure component of the master’s oeuvre. Andrew Upton’s The Present is an adaptation of the aforementioned work by the young Chekhov, and is signific

✮✮✮ 1/2 La Sylphide Bournonville | Peter Schaufuss Queensland Ballet | London Coliseum Peter Schaufuss’ La Sylphide is very much a family affair: Schaufuss’ parents, principals with the Royal Danish Ballet, appeared in the Bournonville classic when he was a child, and he later took on the leading role of James during his own career with RDB. In 1979 Schaufuss produced the ballet for London Festival Ballet (now ENB), and come 2015 his own son and daughter are guest dancing wit

✮✮✮ Matthew Whittet's Seventeen Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Anne-Louise Sarks It is the last day of school, and five seventeen year-olds are celebrating the milestone with great happiness and too much booze. Performed by actors in their seventies, the play promises to offer refreshing perspectives of a rite of passage that most of us are familiar with. Matthew Whittet’s script for Seventeen explores teenage life at its later stages, when adolescents begin to think