The Mrs Carter Show World Tour

Sydney: 2 November 2013

These spectacular arena shows are to me this day Ringling Brothers – ‘greatest show on earth’, a super sensory overload of colour, light and sound held together with magic and a dash of smoke and mirrors.  And so it was with this the fifth concert tour by American recording artist Beyoncé Knowles.

This show was one of the most expensive productions I’ve seen – in the same class as a Madonna or Michael Jackson world tour shows. It contained the use of every stage effect you could possibly have, the video element was huge and I mean a huge screen that covered the whole front of stage area at times, truly pretty lighting and many many wonderful costumes. 

Beyoncé and cast used a running theme referencing the look of Marie Antoinette and Queen Elizabeth throughout the show most notably in beautiful photos and graphics shown on the video screens - the ermine capes, sceptre, gilded ruffs, ‘caged’ skirts, tiaras and jewels.

This was cleverly blurred as the video came to life in dance and suddenly Beyoncé arrived in white and just stood there for several seconds as the whole arena stood as one to welcome the queen! ‘Run the World’ was the first of many of the hits from her last album 4; ‘End of Time’ and ‘If I Were a Boy’. It’s fair to say, at this show, that her voice for the first few songs was showing the signs of ‘fourth night in a row’ syndrome but once off and running we were treated to all of the bells and whistles of her amazing talent.

 

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

photo kurt sneddon

I went along to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which has recently opened at Sydney’s Theatre Royal, because it’s starring Tony Sheldon, making his return home after great success as Bernadette in Priscilla on the West End and Broadway, but what I got was a whole lot of fun and a very surprising night in the theatre. 

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is based on a 1988 film of the same name, which I’ve never seen, so I didn’t know the story beforehand and was delighted with this clever, entertaining and very funny kind of old Hollywood comedy that took me on hilarious turns I couldn’t see coming – this script is the fantastic base on which this show is created.      

Music and lyrics by David Yazbek and book by Jeffrey Lane, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels centres on two con men on the French Riviera. The first is the suave, sophisticated and successful Lawrence Jameson, Tony Sheldon, the other, a small-time crook named Freddy Benson played with great gusto by Matt Hetherington, who was on team Delta on the first series of the voice and won the Helpmann Award as Best Actor in the musical production of The Full Monty.