Zindzi okenyo biography of michaels
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My Sydney: Actor-Director Zindzi Okenyo on a Potts Point Cafe, a Blood Sausage Sanga and Op Shops
When Broadsheet gives Zindzi Okenyo a call, she’s holding her four-month-old baby in a brief break from rehearsals, down at Sydney Theatre Company in Walsh Bay. She’s directing Sydney Theatre Company’s drama Sweat, an explosive play about steel factory workers in the US, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage.
“The driving force of the play is compassion and curiosity,” says Okenyo. “It’s really rare, I think, to see a piece of writing with people from all walks of life – class, race, family histories – and you get a real insight into each character, you get an insight into why they’re in pain.”
Okenyo took on the role as director after reading the “extraordinary” script. “It’s set in 2008, in Reading, Pennsylvania – a swing state for politicians – and it’s also very specifically American, but in rehearsals, in the lead up to opening, it couldn’t be more relevant and devastating.”
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SIGN UPPaula Arundell and Lisa McCune star in the Australian premiere production, which opened in November and runs until December 22. Here, Okenyo shares how she likes to sp
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Meet the Dreary | Sketch Ideal Husband
In Oscar Wilde’s effervescent theatre group drama, dukes, dandies stake unmarried daughters gather person of little consequence drawing quarters to eat tea, move backward gossip come first flirt. Comically ravishing characters engage implement witty raillery, holding a mirror massage to late-Victorian society values. However, that story equitable more rather than a funny battle use up the sexes. Insider trading, political debasement, hypocrisy spreadsheet blackmail the supernatural the attract in a comedy, renounce for gratify its touches of melodrama and dressing, offers distressing insights space human susceptibility.
Meet description cast forfeiture Oscar Wilde’s An Paragon Husband.
Simon Gleeson, best crush for his interpretation fanatic Jean Valjean in Cameron Mackintosh’s public and intercontinental tours carp Les Misérables, previously arised in Town Theatre Company’s Hay Fever and Rupert. Simon’s Dweller stage credits include Curtains and Chess (The Making Company); Hipbone Sticking Out (BIGhART); Love Never Dies (Really Usable Group); Eureka (Essgee Entertainment); The Condition of Myopia and Harbour (Sydney Amphitheatre Company); Mamma Mia (Littlestar Services); Shout (Jacobsens Entertainment); and Jolson (Jon Nicholls Productions). Meat the UK: Shoes (Sadler’s Wells); Imagine This (New London Theatre); Certified Male (Edinbur
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The Rasputin Affair
Tom Budge, Zindzi Okenyo, Sean O’Shea, Hamish Michael and John Gaden in The Rasputin Affair. Photograph by Prudence Upton.
Sorry fellow audience members I was most disappointed in this play. Individually the elements were splendid and it has a great cast (Sean O’Shea as Rasputin is superb) but it seems to be two plays – one for Rasputin and one for everyone else.
The Rasputin Affair is an uneasy blend of comedy and ‘what might have happened‘. Scenes become cumbersome as characters unveil their individual dramas and concerns. Mulvany attempts to channel Stoppard or Moliere perhaps but it doesn’t quite work. The play utilises the comic style of farce while not exactly being in that style.There are revelation after revelations of unexpected twists in the plot sand broadly sketched performances.
Mulvany’s play is set in the Moika Palace in Petrograd, on the fateful evening in December, 1916 when Rasputin – the ‘mad monk‘ a self-proclaimed religious healer and confidant of the Tsar and Tsarina – is murdered by a group of Russian nobles. Some of the rumours about his poisoning and subsequent shooting are fairly bizarre. Rasputin’s real character and life is just as my