Tag Archives: Joanna Weinberg

Musical Theatre

THE SECRET SINGER. FEMALE VOICES RAISED IN LOVE.

Production Photos: Stephen Reinhardt

I cried.  That’s it really.   Except perhaps to add that the younger woman sitting in front of me did too, and the elder lady beside me was quietly mopping herself off as the house lights came up.  THE SECRET SINGER is a story of women.  It has a huge heart and it has secrets of the heart to share.  It’s a new work and might undergo changes after this first outing but what we see playing at the Eternity Theatre now is sweet, moving and empowering.

We meet Emjay.  Teaching singing in a church hall with a cheap, beaten up, tinny, electric keyboard is not what gets her out of bed each day.  Making a living, getting paid for this half-life of no engagement, that’s why she’s there.  Rent looming and cancellations escalating, she needs to get her tish together in a myriad of ways.  On the other hand Jenny is a woman on a mission.  Cat obsessed and timid despite her colourful exterior display, she wants to sing in seven choirs on seven days a week and she has a night predator’s focus on Emjay as the person who can release her secret voice.   Continue reading THE SECRET SINGER. FEMALE VOICES RAISED IN LOVE. →

Musical Theatre

THE SECRET SINGER – SAG HAS A SNEAK PEEK AT THE NEW MUSICAL

Kate Mannix and Joanna Weinberg share songs from THE SECRET SINGER. Event images by Hannah-Rayne Creative.

THE SECRET SINGER is in all of us perhaps.  After all, an engineer will tell you that bathrooms really do have better acoustics than the rest of the house.  But only rarely does the secret inside burst into public spaces.  On Sunday I got to meet Jenny.  A woman whose persistence and determination to sing has not just flowered into a choral life but whose story germinated in the fertile mind of her teacher to bud and grow into a new musical for the Australian stage.

Joanna Weinberg has written and will direct THE SECRET SINGER to play at the Eternity Theatre in August and SAG was there to get a sneak peek.  The story begins with a jaded, cynical musician (Not me! insists Weinberg) who is being pestered by a student wanting to learn to sing. Genevieve Lemon and Kate Mannix play teacher and student respectively.  And the work begins with the interior complexity of Emjay who really thought she would be a star by now and to whom teaching holds little appeal. Continue reading THE SECRET SINGER – SAG HAS A SNEAK PEEK AT THE NEW MUSICAL →

Theatre

Man Of La Mancha @ The Reginald

Stephen Anderson, Glenn Hill and Courtney Glass in MAN OF LA MANCHA
Inset Pic- Stephen Anderson, Glenn Hill and Courtney Glass. Featured Pic- Marika Aubrey, Ross Chisari and Tony Sheldon in MAN OF LA MANCHA

When MAN OF LA MANCHA opened on Broadway 50 years ago, it was in an era where Martin Luther King was espousing I Had A Dream and the Kennedy’s were quoting George Bernard Shaw You see things and you say “Why?” I dream things that never were, and I say “Why not.”

No wonder then the linchpin lyric of this endearing and enduring show is The Impossible Dream, the musical mantra of Don Quixote, the knight errant tiller of windmills, who sees life as it should be, noble and elevated, not as it is, vulgar and base.

Independent music theatre company, Squabbalogic’s fiftieth anniversary staging of MAN OF LA MANCHA has an impossible dream realised – the securing of Tony Sheldon, lauded local Broadway star now domiciled in the United States, to play the poet paladin. Continue reading Man Of La Mancha @ The Reginald →