Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter,
adapted by Carolyn Burns.

State Theatre Company ,
The Playhouse Adelaide Festival Centre.

It’s High Society time again. By the MGM musical out of The Philadelphia Story, the State Theatre Company’s joint production (with MTC, RQTC and Sue Farrelly) has not only added nine Cole Porter songs it has restored some of the zip from Philip Barry’s original text.

Carolyn Burns’ adaptation is an interesting one. She has clarified the plotline, given more depth …

High Society

Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter
Adapted by Carolyn Burns
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It began when Philip Barry’s acerbic hit play became the acerbic hit film, The Philadelphia Story. Then some fifteen years later, the play was reworked, ten Cole Porter songs sung to great effect by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly and Louis Armstrong were added and it became the MGM hit musical, High Society. Now, in the State Theatre Company’s …

1992

Diving for Pearls

by Katherine Thomson

State Theatre Company

Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is much to admire about Diving for Pearls. Katherine Thomson’s play about the destruction of restructuring gets beyond the programmatic formulae of most current theatre dealing with contemporary issues. The cost of work to the working class in Australia has long been a theme in our naturalistic theatre- not least in Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeeth Doll. But more recently the pace of …