The show must go on: Belvoir & Sisters Grimm’s La Traviata

Billed as “part opera, part protest, part drag show,” Sisters Grimm’s La Traviata – co-produced with Belvoir, and playing in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre – is a curious mash-up of Verdi’s opera (which was recently playing in Sydney), protest against the recent cuts to arts funding, and awkwardly gratuitous breaking of the fourth wall. Unlike Sisters Grimm’s other shows – Summertime in the Garden of Eden in particular – their customary verve for “queer DIY drag-theatre” does not quite shine here, and I’m not sure if this production is as powerful yet as it could be, as it is intended to be.

Spectacular Spectacular: STC & Malthouse’s Calpurnia Descending

Melbourne theatre-duo Sisters Grimm are a force to be reckoned with. Having built a name for themselves with their rambunctious theatrical genre mash-ups (last seen in Sydney with Summertime in the Garden of Eden), they return to the Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse stages for their second mainstage production, Calpurnia Descending. While remaining true to Sisters Grimm’s ethos of gay DIY drag-theatre productions gloriously played to the hilt but never to excess, Calpurnia plays with all the resources, support and panache of one (rather, two) of Australia’s leading theater companies and the result is every bit as astounding and audacious as it is entertaining and vicious.

Debauched with the wind: Griffin Independent & Sisters Grimm’s Summertime in the Garden of Eden

Imagine Gone With The Wind. Now add hanging baskets of flowers, biblical allusions to Eden, a dash of gender-blind casting. Throw caution to the wind, stir, and perform. Only then might you come close to Sisters Grimm’s Summertime in the Garden of Eden, currently playing at Griffin Theatre. It’s gloriously colourful, a riot of stereotypes and clichés, a relentless assault on the Southern (as opposed to the Western), and it’s an absolute treat.

Written by Ash Flanders and Declan Greene (the Sisters Grimm), Summertime in the Garden of Eden is a melodrama in the fullest sense of the genre, gloriously played to the hilt but never to excess. Performed in their home-cultivated brand of “queer DIY drag-theatre” (as perfected in their previous shows), the Sisters Grimm are a pair of cult theatre-makers with imaginations that would make Lewis Carroll blush. A bit like a pantomime and a gender-blind costume drama, it is a ridiculous amount of fun, even if beneath its ludicrously homemade aesthetic lies the uncomfortable an unavoidable reality of the gender, race, sexuality, and cultural-political issues of the Southern. Skewing and perhaps ridiculing them whilst simultaneously drawing attention to them makes for unsettling viewing, but the relish and delight with which the cast play out the story is enough to make you forget the sting of the play’s subject.