1994
Jim Rose Circus Sideshow
Old Lion
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
O Rose, thou art sick. Blake didn’t know the half of it. From Seattle, Washington, grunge mecca of the New World, the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow returned to Sunday night Adelaide to bring worms visible and invisible from his garden of unearthly delights. Too big for Heaven this time, Jim packed us into the Old Lion for the gawp of our lives. Looking around we looked normal enough. People …
Continue Reading Back to topAlan Posselt
and Aneesh Pradhan
Elder Hall
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Derived from the Persian “seh-tar” meaning three stringed, the sitar- multi-stringed, long-necked lute from Northern India- has been a featured instrument of the classical Hindustani tradition since at least the sixteenth century. Apart from musicologists and Indianists, Western audiences only began turning ears to its ineffable cadences in the late 1950s when Ravi Shankar gave his first recitals in London and New York.
By the early sixties folkies like …
Continue Reading Back to topAvailable as PDF: Paul Kelly and his songs.pdf
Murray Bramwell
Look around you; we’re living in amazing times
They are not so important-your little crimes
‘Keep it to Yourself’
Things sometimes have a habit of going full circle. Take Paul Kelly for instance. In Adelaide, his home town, he began writing in his teens, poetry at first and then prose. For a time in the late 70s he coedited the magazine Another One For Mary. Now he has a book …
Continue Reading Back to topMurray Bramwell
Further details have been announced for the Honda Adelaide Music Festival which opens on September 10 – 26. The classical program has already been released and word is that tickets for headliners Roger Woodward and the Australian Chamber Orchestra are already moving fast.
But Fiesta is nothing if not diverse as the just-released Dance and Country programs indicate. The dancers of the Australian Ballet will present a mixed offering of well-known favourites with new work from the younger …
Continue Reading Back to topMurray Bramwell
From September 10 -26 Adelaide and environs will be alive with the sound of fiesta. The Honda Adelaide Music Fiesta will be getting into gear on a number of fronts- jazz, country, popular, rock, dance, choral and a broad classical program. There will be a variety of international and interstate performers but the focus for Fiesta is also in showcasing and promoting local talent.
The Music Fiesta originated in 1991 with a festival of more than 140 events …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Jim Rose Circus Sideshow
Heaven
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
A Rose is a ruse is a total freakout -as the packed and ogling house in Newmarket Heaven discovered when the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow made its only- shall we say- appearance in Adelaide. Out of Seattle, the Weimar of the New World, and late of the Lollapalooza road show in the US, Mr Rose and his associates do their very best to keep their audiences entirely captivated. We are …
Continue Reading Back to topAin’t Misbehavin’
The Fats Waller Musical Show
Festival Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
While it is one of the great twentienth century art forms and an instance of American culture at its most inventive and vigorous, the blues sometimes gets the blues itself. With a shift to an African aesthetic many Black Americans no longer warm to the music of oppression, some would say defeat. And the shift in sexual politics in the past twenty years has left the blues …
Continue Reading Back to topAin’t Misbehavin’
The Fats Waller Musical Show
Festival Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
While it is one of the great twentienth century art forms and an instance of American culture at its most inventive and vigorous, the blues sometimes gets the blues itself. With a shift to an African aesthetic many Black Americans no longer warm to the music of oppression, some would say defeat. And the shift in sexual politics in the past twenty years has left the blues …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Blues Brothers Band
Thebarton Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
There is a scene in the Blues Brothers movie when the eponymous Jake and Ellwood are putting The Band back together. They go to an empty dinner club to find a remnant of the group in musical purgatory -dressed in mulberry velour playing easy listening kitsch nobody wants to hear. Billed as Murph and the Magictones they epitomise the fate of all has-beens and nevers-were. Sadly, they also prefigure the …
Continue Reading Back to topHair
By Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt McDermott
Thebarton Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
By the time Hair opened at the Biltmore Theatre in New York in April 1968 many of the major happenings of Hippie history had already… happened. More than a year earlier in January 1967, twenty thousand turned up (and on) for the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. That was the year of the Summer of Love, photogenically documented with lots of groovy …
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