Category: Arts Festival

Of Schubert and the guts to hang in there

“SHE’S A HARD taskmaster,” says career performer Andrew Warburton (60), with a half a smile, of his piano. He started playing as a three-year-old and has a long, varied and wonderful trajectory of playing, learning and teaching arguably the king of musical instruments. Above all, he’s an affable […]

Laugh: Things could be kakker

WITH HIS DISTINCTIVE white streak down the middle of his verdant Afro, his rubbery smile and his straight talk and complicated yarns, Marc Lottering is truly one of South Africa’s greatest treasures. His show, So I wrote that musical is performing at the Hilton Arts Festival in Pietermaritzburg, […]

A ribald tango down memory lane

STRIP THINGS DOWN to their bare basics. What do you really need to make a production that sings while it reaches boldly into the interstices of everyone’s heart? The Old and the Beautiful with Tony Bentel and Fiona Ramsay is a show that has seen many summers and […]

No safe space for women

SPORT IS ONE of South Africa’s religions. It’s also been a cute metaphorical way of dealing with other concerns of a political ilk, in popular culture. Whistleblowers, created by the cast and directed by Rob Murray and Quintijn Relouw, takes things much deeper: it’s a scary, relevant and […]

Figure 8s and the passage of love

AGAINST THE BACKDROP of many ‘alwayses’ and lots of ‘forevers’ every relationship goes through a sequence of uncertainties and bumps in the road. Jason Robert Brown’s intimate musical The Last Five Years takes a relatively ordinary story and gives it shards of brilliance with turnabouts in the sequence […]

Remarkably Eva

WITH A TOUCH of Janis Joplin, a bow to Ella Fitzgerald and a nod to Satchmo, a notorious stubbornness and an in-born sense of what art is really and how it digresses from the business of money, Eva Cassidy was a once-off. Kerry Hiles gives her story immortality […]