Quick hits ~ theatre notes

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Quick hits

Sometimes a gal just has to do the bullet-point thang, even if I'm not quite sure how to get a bullet point on blogger and have to settle for an asterix instead. Here's a catch-up list of interesting stuff that I've been noticing around the FaceTubes:

* Fringe: As y'all know, Melbourne has donned its party hats for the Fringe. Ms TN has done her share of reviewing, with more to come, but (praise the Lord!), despite rumours to the contrary, she is not the entire Internetz! For more reviews of more shows, check out my blogger colleagues John Bailey at Capital Idea, Neandellus, Crikey's Curtain Call, The Groggy Squirrel or Drew Review. And feel free to post other links, if you know of them, in the comments.

* Did I tell you that Edward Albee is coming to Melbourne? One of the major figures of contemporary American drama, Edward Albee will be discussing his half century of working in the theatre at the Melbourne Theatre Company at 3pm on October 17. Expect sparks - Albee often delivers them. The event is free, but bookings are essential.

* The SMH's Jason Blake offers up an interesting analysis of the Sydney Fringe, which made its debut this month to a mixed reception. The comments are also worth reading.

* Don't miss George Hunka's moving tribute to one of my own favourite critics, Jan Kott, on Superfluities Redux:

There are a lot of walks in Kott’s more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott’s thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre...

* From the sublime to... well, other critics, anyway. Those who don't start twitching at the mere whisper of "internet v print" might be interested in checking out Chris Wilkinson's latest response to the Woodhead/Croggon wrangle on the Guardian Theatre Blog. (They might be even more interested when they read the headline - "Why Sex Is Better In The Theatre"... though sadly it's not as exciting as it sounds). Meanwhile, the Thread That Will Never Die: The Sequel continues on TN... though there are far more interesting conversations elsewhere.

* Among these conversations are those sparked by a recent Blogging Unconference hosted by the Wheeler Centre (check for report and follow-up links), a follow-up to the Wheeler Centre's Critical Failure series, which started the whole damn thing. Best of all, the busy pencil of Crikey's Culture Mulcher, W.H. Chong, captured us all in glorious black and white; which, we all agreed, the interwebs most certainly are not.

* And finally, the social pages: Angela Meyer of Literary Minded reports on the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, where your humble blogger was hobnobbing as an instamatic hipster on Tuesday night.

3 comments:

J-Lo said...

Sheesh - I'm tired just thinking about this list of recommendations - thanks for pulling them together - permission to state the bleeding obvious, but really is an mindspinningly large amount of interesting, and _new_, stuff on the web.

Will read a few when I've recovered from the initial sense of overwhelming-edness [insert better choice of word here]

seema said...

Will read a few when I've recovered from the initial sense of overwhelming-edness

Alison Croggon said...

Sorry for the information overload! I'll try to do the link thing more frequently, so it comes in shorter bytes.