Renowned HIV+ theatre maker and queer arts producer Jeremy Goldstein surveys Sydney WorldPride Arts for The Queer Review, and finds a radically inclusive multi-artform festival of gender, identity, and sexuality. Beyond the Mardi Gras and the usual circuit parties, WorldPride Arts reinvents the harbour city as one of the world’s greatest LGBTQIA+ cultural destinations. I... Continue Reading →
Dance Review: King (Seymour Centre, Sydney) ★★★★★
There is magic here. Choreographer Shaun Parker’s collaboration with composer and vocalist Ivo Dimchev has produced something truly luscious to behold in King, newly relaunched work at Sydney’s Seymour Centre. The group dynamics of men, sexuality and masculinity are illustrated and deconstructed in Parker’s kinetic and humorous piece. With a company made up of a... Continue Reading →
Theatre Review: Briefs – Dirty Laundry (Seymour Centre, Sydney) ★★★1/2
Briefs are back! After an enforced hiatus and a UK tour, their new show Dirty Laundry has toured Australia and finally come to land at Sydney WorldPride. It’s everything you know and love about the cabaret/circus/burlesque/drag/comedy troupe in a new production. You’ll laugh, you’ll scream, you’ll get a bit horny, and you’ll have a lot... Continue Reading →
Theatre Review: Sex Magick (Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney) ★★★★
Sex Magick lives up to its title with a lot of flavours of sex and seemingly endless amounts of magic (both the practical, theatrical kind and the more ephemeral). Funny, frisky, and confronting, Sex Magick leaves you spent but very satisfied. Ard Panicker (Raj Labade) is a former elite physiotherapist that’s been reduced to seeking... Continue Reading →
Theatre Review: Opera Up Late (Sydney Opera House, Sydney) ★★★★
Opera Up Late takes opera's biggest hits and sprinkles them with some late night fairy dust. Stars of the Sydney Opera House's Dame Joan Sutherland theatre are dragging up, getting down and belting the high notes for an evening of delights that’s making an early claim to be the real highlight of Sydney WorldPride’s cultural... Continue Reading →
Mardi Gras Film Festival 2023 Review: The Origin of Evil (L’origine du mal) ★★★★
Situations spiral out of control and the classes clash in the juicy lesbian drama, The Origin of Evil (L'origine du mal). Money, murder, and the design choices of the nouveau riche fill the screen in this darkly comic-thriller. Stéphane (a wonderful performance by Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy) works in a factory, packaging anchovies all... Continue Reading →
Theatre Review: CAMP (Seymour Centre, Sydney) ★★★1/2
CAMP, a new play by Elias Jamieson Brown, chronicles the rise of the Australian Pride movement through the women who fought through their pain and losses to win us the freedoms we enjoy today. It’s a decades spanning tale, elevating Australia’s own Gay Liberation story, just in time for Sydney WorldPride 2023. Sydney, in the... Continue Reading →
Theatre Review: Big Screen, Small Queen (Everything I Didn’t Learn at Film School) (KXT Kings Cross, Sydney) ★★★★
Sydney’s glamour bug, Etcetera Etcetera, is expanding her field of drag with a new one-woman show that gets down to the humanity behind the mask in Big Screen, Small Queen (Everything I Didn’t Learn at Film School), presented during Sydney WorldPride. The night starts like an old school Sydney drag show, lip-syncing to classic film... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: Australian drag superstar Etcetera Etcetera on her Sydney WorldPride one-woman show “Big Screen, Small Queen (Everything I Didn’t Learn at Film School)”
Already loved in Australia for her glamour and quick wit, non-binary drag and visual artist Etcetera Etcetera leapt onto the international stage thanks to her appearance on the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under. Since then she's toured the nation and sashayed down fashion week runways, while her activism has seen her become... Continue Reading →
Theatre Review: Hubris & Humiliation (Sydney Theatre Company) ★★★★
Lewis Treston’s new comedy, Hubris & Humiliation, takes Jane Austen and gives her a very Australian injection of camp, just in time for Mardi Gras season. The boys are sexy, the jokes are gloriously stupid, and the story is outrageous. Is it too much to call it “WorldPride & SocioeconomicPrejudice”? Elliot Delany (Roman Delo) is... Continue Reading →