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A few stats, for fun, as I close the book on 2022.

2022 in programmes 💜❤💚💛🧡💙 I'm returning to the online world after an unintended, but refreshing, month away. The new year is well underway, but I'm squeezing in last year's wrap-up first.

This month, Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble performed Macbeth for the first time in the company’s 21-year history, presented in the intimate performance space at the Fringe Brisbane Hub in South Brisbane.

We attended the final performance of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit in late October, presented by @thexcollectiveoz, and saw Amanda McErlean and Terry Hansen each tackle this experimental work by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, having never read the script or seen the play before they stepped onstage to perform it. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit explored themes of obedience, authority, and social conditioning, among other things, and was an engaging piece of avant-garde theatre (even if I did just about die of stage fright during audience participation). You can read my review online now ⚪🔴 thanks to Wayne and The X Collective for inviting us.

One final jacaranda picture for this year, while a summer storm passes outside ⛅🌸💜

Last Saturday afternoon @hkfuller and I attended the launch of Southern Cross Soloists (SXS)'s 2023 Concert Series at the @judithwrightcentre. Artistic Director Tania Frazer announced three concerts for next year, inspired by travel and journeying through Paris, Central Europe, and the Americas. We also heard a few pieces performed from the upcoming programme, which will showcase the SXS artists alongside national and international guest artists. SXS have also announced a new Sunset Soiree Recital Series for Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and tickets are now on sale for all 2023 concerts.

Last night we attended the world premiere of First Casualty at the Bille Brown Theatre: a debut play by Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Johnston, a serving soldier and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. Closing @qld_theatre 's 2022 season, it's a high-adrenaline drama following four Australian soldiers stationed at a remote outpost in 2011 Afghanistan over 48 hours. The staging is excellent, a work of impressive scale unfolding on the corner stage thanks to innovative and well-integrated design elements, and it's a story I haven't seen onstage, told from a unique perspective that invites empathy but also raises questions for the Australian public about our nation’s military involvement in Afghanistan.

'Tis the season 💜🌸🌿 doesn't get much more Brisbane than ibises (ibii?) nesting in the jacaranda trees.

At Metro Arts with @ann13grace on Friday night for the world premiere of BUNKER, a high-intensity dance theatre work co-created by choreographer Lisa Wilson and video designer Nathan Sibthorpe.

A couple of weeks ago, we rolled out our picnic blankets in Musgrave Park to experience a brand new musical under the stars (or, appropriately atmospheric, the clouds🌫🌙). Written and directed by local creative Anina-Marie van Wyk and produced by Observatory Theatre, Destiny Doomed is a contemporary reimagining of an Irish legend. With a unique outdoor performance venue, a committed cast, and a catchy original score, this new work saw a tragic heroine wrenching back control of her destiny, reborn from Deirdre of the Sorrows into Deirdre Dragonheart ⚔ my full review of the performance is online now.

A couple of weeks ago, at the opening night of @savoyardstheatrebrisbane Mamma Mia! 🌊☀️ a colourful and ABBA-solutely entertaining night out, with more than 50 community theatre performers onstage at Iona Performing Arts Centre. My full review is online now ✨

September is done and dusted, Brisbane Festival is over for another year, and I can see this shade of fuschia on the back of my eyelids 💖 I wrote in my final August newsletter that I expected to finish September in a neon-pink coma, covered in confetti, and I'm pretty much there.

At the opening night of The Human Voice & The Call on Tuesday night ✨ It's a compelling, moving double bill of one-act, one-woman operas, including the world premiere of new Australian work The Call, sung in English. Sopranos Alexandra Flood and Ali McGregor were brilliant. Although musically and stylistically different, the two works complemented each other thematically, each centred around a life-altering phone call and emphasising the power of connection, kindness, and hope.

Dinner with a view 🌏 we got to admire the Gaia installation before seeing Mistero Buffo at @metroarts last Thursday night. Julian Spooner delivered a masterful physical theatre performance in this tightly-packed one-man show, conjuring dozens of characters and locations with remarkable energy. First performed in 1969, Dario Fo's controversial work centred on the life and miracles of Jesus Christ, and still resonates in the modern world as it speaks to truth, power, justice, and inequality.

Last Tuesday night, we saw @restless_dance_theatre's neon-bright, entertaining, and thought-provoking dance theatre piece Guttered at the @kingpin_play bowling alley in Chermside. Performed in Brisbane as part of @brisbanefestival, the choreography of this site-specific work made full use of its unusual performance location as it explored life, love, and the dignity of risk through the lens of disability. The work was full of playful and whimsical moments, but clearly articulated its message and gave the audience ample opportunity to reflect and reconsider their own ideas of, and approach to, people with a disability. My review is online now 💃💕

While the rest of the city is lit up neon-pink this month, October has come early to La Boite with the lilac blush of jacarandas in Tiddas 💜 Adapted for the stage by Anita Heiss, from her 2014 book, Tiddas follows a group of five best friends as they navigate life, love, and literature together at their monthly book club.

With @bonniemaryliston at the world premiere of Holding Achilles at QPAC last Friday night, which was also the official opening night of @brisbanefestival 2022. If you haven't already heard me raving about it in person, Holding Achilles is an awe-inspiring collaboration between @deadpuppetsociety and @legsonthewall, presenting one of the Western literary canon's oldest narratives and most well-known mythological heroes through a queer lens. In writing a review, I struggled to find words that really captured the incredible achievement and scale of it, and I’m still not convinced that I managed to do so. So much of my first draft was just strong adjectives - majestic? Epic? Otherworldly? Breathtaking? Ambitious? Heartbreaking? All of this, and more. I'm seeing it for a third and final time tonight, and I feel like I'm still processing the visceral emotional reaction I had to that first performance last Friday. There is so much to take in - Montaigne's haunting vocals, the artistry and physical prowess of the ensemble, the technical wizardry and rich visual language of the work. And underlying all of that, never overpowered by the (considerable) spectacle, is the raw emotion and strength of the storytelling. This production has raised the bar, for me personally, in terms of what is possible in live performance.

First show of Brisbane Festival 2022! 💖🎉 Although the festival officially opens tonight, we were in the Cremorne Theatre last night to see the @shakeandstir adaptation of Shannon Molloy's 2020 memoir, Fourteen, about his experiences as a gay teenager in Yeppoon in 1999. It's gut-wrenching, and joyful, and the cast do a really outstanding job. Although I felt that the play stumbled in balancing cheery 90s nostalgia and affording the story’s trauma appropriate gravity and pause, the rendering of regional life in central Queensland is pitch perfect and there are some magnificent moments of humour and emotion. My full review is online now at @limelightartsau ✨

The Almighty Sometimes finishes at Queensland Theatre this week - I saw it recently, and it’s a heartbreaker. Directed by Daniel Evans (which is enough reason to see it, in my opinion) and written by Kendall Feaver, I’d say this is the best QT production of 2022. It’s sweet and funny and resonant and it holds the messy and complicated parts of the story without fighting to solve them. Wonderful performances by the cast, and some really interesting staging and sound design - I left the theatre with an ache in my chest, and the urge to call my mum 💙🧡

Last Sunday we attended the @villanova_players matinee of Letters to Lindy. The play draws on a collection of more than 20,000 letters that were sent to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, from support to abuse and everything in between, while she was on trial and imprisoned, accused of murdering her nine-week-old daughter, before finally being exonerated after more than 30 years in one of Australia’s most high-profile and hotly debated cases. It was a moving performance, filled with a surprising warmth and wry humour as it dissected assumptions and accusations to reveal the woman and mother at the heart of the media circus.

Backstreet Brisbane was founded and continues on the unceded land and waterways of the Jagera and Turrbal people.

I acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land where I live and work, to their Elders past and present, and to all First Nations peoples.

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