Art Smitten

Lifetime Guarantee is a new theatre production written by Ross Mueller.    It follows the lives of a group of people living in perhaps Melbourne,in perhaps the present. The two principle charters are Charlie, a young architect and property developer, and Dan, an slightly older news reader. Dan has just left his wife and children to be with Charlie. Charlie has just hired a personal assis...

Andrew, Hamish and Gill chat to Padraic Fisher, director of the National Wool Museum in Geelong (the city he left New York for!) about the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibiton, on loan from the Natural History Museum in London, which they will be hosting until May 14. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Finley chats to actor Charles Purcell from the cast of Theatre Works' production of Ross Mueller's play,  Lifetime Guarantee , about the politics of putting on a conservative work that features queer characters. Click here to listen to Finley's review of the show. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew, Gill and Hamish chat to folk rock musician William Crighton about his first time performing performing on a paddle steamer and returning to the place of his childhood, the Murray River, for the Riverboats Music Festival in Echuca-Moama. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew, Hamish and Gill talk to 18-year-old violinist Lily Hidgson-Spence, Stonnington Symphony Orchestra's Emerging Artist of the Year, about her upcoming performance in The Classics series in Malvern gardens at 7pm, Saturday February 25. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew, Gillian and Hamish chat to actor Alice Qin about her Australian theatrical debut,  Little Emperors , on at The Malthouse until February 26. Click here for Matthew Toohey's review See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hamish, Gillian and Smithers chat to actor, writer and director Camilla Blunden about her new solo show  All This Living , on at The Butterfly Club from February 22 to 26. Click here to listen to Smithers' review. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gill chats to sculptor and ceramic artist Penny Byrne about  Brutal , her politically charged exhibition that's on at the Linden New Art Gallery in St Kilda until March 8. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Smithers reviews Simon J Green's horror short film  The Darkness . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Privatisation of Ward 9B follows a desperate psychiatrist, Doctor Craven (played by David McCrae) in his efforts to supplement diminishing public funding by dragging his patients into the merciless world of economic enterprise. Written in 1991 at a time when the Hawke-Keating government was privatising public services such as airports, airlines, telecommunications and banks, Bill Marshall&rsqu...

Faith is a difficult concept to explain to non-believers. I was never raised religiously, or even with any sort of a belief in a god. As such, I generally struggle to connect to stories of faith and to characters who so strongly experience faith, and it takes something special to make me truly understand what these people are going through. But Martin Scorsese, with his latest film Silence , has m...

The only time I ever went to the circus was easily ten years ago, somewhere in Melbourne where I remember only feeling a little bad for the animals on display there. My second outing to the circus being this, I must say, that no animals were harmed in Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza; apart from if you count the man dressed as a dog who urinated on an audience member at one stage. I go into Kooza ha...

Hamish and Christian chat to New York triple threat Lisa Ramey from the cast of Cirque du Soleil: Kooza, performing in Melbourne until March 26. Click here to listen to Hamish's review See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hamish, Gill and Smithers chat to Peter Blackburn about what it's like to direct a re-imagining of a classic Chekhov play, in this case  Stupid F**king Bird , Aaron Posner's 'remix' of  The Seagull , on at Metanoia Theatre until February 26. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Theatre has been my thing for a few years now, easily being my best subject in high school alongside Media. Thus, I’ve been a lot of theatre, both good, bad, amateur and professional, yet I’ve never seen a La Mama production until now. Todd in Venice is a Midsumma Festival show on display at La Mama from February 1st-5th. Written by Sofia Chapman, a musician and writer who has previously had plays...

Hamish, Gillian and Smithers chat to actor Peter Houghton about his latest role (or rather, roles) in the Victorian premier of Aidan Fennessey's  The Way Things Work , on at Red Stitch Actor's Theatre until March 5. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christian chats to Kent Morris, CEO of the Torch Project about Confined 8 , an exhibiton on at The Gallery in St Kilda Town Hall that features 140 artworks by 130 Indigenous artists in or released from Victoria prisons. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Molly talks to Arts House Artistic Director Angharad Wynne-Jones about their participation in the 2017 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts with Kok  Bunny by Luke George and Daniel Kok, Times Journey Through A Room by chelfitsch and  Kagerou - Study of Translating Performance by the Hamanaka Company. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Review transcript: You’re listening to Art Smitten on SYN. I’m Rebecca Houlihan, and today I’m going to be talking to you about a National Theatre Live production of No Man’s Land , written by Harold Pinter, and this version is directed by Sean Mathias. So this play was originally produced in 1975, which is where it’s set. The big draw card of this version is the two...

Toni Erdmann is a German-Austrian comedy directed, written, and co-produced by Maren Ade. It centres on the relationship between the eccentric prankster father, Winfried Conradi (played by Peter Simonischek), and his stressed, work-a-holic daughter, Ines (played by Sandra Hüller). Spurred by the death of his dog, and the loss of his piano students, Winifried decides to spontaneously visit Ine...

For me personally, reality television is not something that I’m a fan of; I don’t like the staged humour, staged love, and staged drama, as I could get all that from an actual written episode of fictional television, such as Fargo or The Fall . However, Phil Keoghan's The Amazing Race , alongside some other American reality shows, stand out among others, for either its ridiculousness,...

Hamish and Christian chat to  The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan about his new documentary,  Le Ride , now playing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until February 12, 2017. Click here for Hamish's review of the film See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hamish, Smithers and Gillian speak to Senior Curator Stephen Zagala about  Life Aquatic , his exhibiton that's currently showing at the Monash Gallery of Art until February 26, 2017. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There always seems to be something unsatisfying about these personal depictions of major historical events. Human dramas with a historical "backdrop" work well enough, but if the huge scale history is in the foreground it can really upset the balance. Jackie , the first English Language film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassinatio...

Special guests Mike Loder and Charles Terrier stay around to tell Andrew and Christian what they admired about Amy Adams' two big releases of 2016 and how they might influence their own future cinematic work. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.