WHEN YOU WATCH a small child being exposed to the magic of theatre, you can believe in anything. Joyce Levinsohn, one of Johannesburg’s children’s theatre pioneers, understood this magic and this ability to believe, from the inside out. The founder of the city’s oldest traditional children’s theatre, she […]
THERE’S NOTHING QUITE like an errant cat, in a hat, to stir up a little madcap naughtiness when mother is out on a rainy day and there’s nothing else to do. The National Children’s Theatre hosts Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat for little kids, from the […]
WHAT DO YOU do when you’re tasked with the staging of modern children’s classic that burst into popularity in 1964 and did not stint in saying things that were hilariously rude, flying in the face of all refined convention with some chewed chewing gum stuck behind its proverbial […]
YOU MAY NOT think your three- or four-year-old is ready yet for lessons about the value of money, history and literature, but in the extremely able hands of director Daniel Geddes, your sproglet will be moved, taught and fascinated by the wiles of a silly bunny who cannot […]
WOULD YOU VOTE for a simple duck to be your national leader? This bizarre little question comes under the eyeglass in the National Children’s Theatre’s first production of the year. And it’s apt to get many a giggle and a squeal of delight. Duck for President, directed by […]
YOU MAY THINK of them as the creepy crawlies that make you scream when you see them by chance, the six-legged insects that populate the underbelly of our world but Gillian Katz has given life and love to a bunch of ‘goggas’ with their hard carapaces, their noisy […]
FORCING HILL-BILLY VALUES under the loupe and lasso of cowboy energy, Sam Shepard’s 1980s play, Fool for Love offers a raging and meaty reflection on broken love in a grubby world of lies, taboos and indiscretions. Director Janice Honeyman takes the project by its heart, and Kate Liquorish […]
UNEQUIVOCALLY DARK IN its condemnation of the hypocrisy and divide in society, the Pied Piper of Hamelin was penned by Robert Browning in 1842. Like Charles Dickens’s work, it holds a strange kind of magic which makes it understood to be for children, but the message is grim […]
IT’S EASY TO get emotionally entwined in the harsh finger-pointing that sees the elderly of a community abandoned. It makes for predictable storytelling and indictments on the callousness of the younger generation. What is more difficult is representing the other side of a story that is about rejection […]
WHAT DO YOU DO do if your mommy’s a work-from-home tax consultant who simply will not bend in the urgent and earnest quest to enhance the household with a pet? You can sing and you can dance. You can become furious and stamp your foot. You can cajole, […]
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