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Death becomes her: A Brief List Of Everyone Who Died @finborough

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For a natural process, death is not a topic that comes up naturally for people. We ask how people are doing but expect the response to be “I’m great”, not “I’m not dead yet”. And so for the main character in A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Graciela has a death issue. Starting with when she was five and found out only after the matter that her parents had her beloved dog euthanised. So Graciela decides that nobody she loves will die from then on. And so this piece becomes a fruitless attempt at how she spends her life trying to avoid death while it is all around her. It’s currently having its world premiere  at the Finborough Theatre . As the play title suggests, it is a brief list of life moments where death and life intervene for the main character, from the passing of relatives, cancer, suicides, accidents and the loss of parents. Playwright Jacob Marx Rice plots the critical moments of the lives of these characters through their passing or the passing of those around them. Howeve

Soundtracks: Hairspray

After Friday night's jet-lag cure I had to go and pick up the Hairspray soundtrack on Saturday. Movie soundtracks used to be crap compared to original cast albums (I believe this is the correct terminology for afficianados out there) but Hairspray follows the more recent tradition of being pretty darn good. It was refreshing to be back in a music shop that didn't just offer Michael Buble as its specialities.

Mind you I did raise the point that the shop did not stock a lot of the new Australian musical titles that I heard while I was down under. After describing songs about shaving your balls and a musical about a gay love triangle set in a fun fair there was general concensus that some CDs are best left in the antipodes (or to be more accurate, in Melbourne)...

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