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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.
In Washington, DC, Peter Rose and regular ABR theatre critic Ian Dickson discuss the career and legacy of Edward Albee, the great American playwright who died on Friday 16 September, aged 88.
Melbourne's long Indian summer coincided with Opera Australia's 2016 autumn season. It began with a revival of La Bohème and the new production of The Pearlfishers (first seen in Sydney earlier this year). The much-anticipated Luisa Miller with Nicole Car will follow next week ...
... (read more)The speed with which Gaetano Donizetti wrote his operas almost defies belief, especially in our more leisurely age of composition. Don Pasquale (1843), as we know, was written in eleven days. When Donizetti, newly contracted to Teatro San Carlo, fetched ...
In this bonus episode of Poem of the Week Peter Rose interviews two judges of the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize – Lisa Gorton and Luke Davies – about the judging of the prize and honouring the legacy of Peter Porter.
... (read more)The Lady in the Van may be a great comic character, but she is one of the unlikelier Britons ever to earn a blue plaque in her honour. Yet one now adorns the façade of 23 Gloucester Crescent, the London address that she besieged for fifteen years. Alan Bennett – her landlord of sorts ...
... (read more)Brian Johns, who died in Sydney on New Year's Day, was a remarkable man, a great friend to many, and a great enabler. His family came to Sydney from Queensland in 1947, and at the age of sixteen Brian entered St Columba's Seminary. After three years he left and went to Canberra to become a journalist. It was the start of a career marked by his passion for providing ...
In this bonus episode of Poem of the Week Peter Rose interviews two past winners of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize – husband and wife Stephen Edgar and Judith Beveridge – about what it is like being poets in a marriage.
... (read more)It opens with a deep black-walled stage devoid of props, but for a spotlit microphone. Instead of the feared cast change or sponsorial fealty, on walks Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden, with her sequined dress and curvaceous glamour. We recognise Robyn Nevin, defying the years. Funny as Blossom Dearie, she sings 'Happy Birthday' to 'Nuncle Majesty' before yan ...
Opera Australia's short spring season in Melbourne began with the first revival of David McVicars's highly resuscitable production of Le nozze di Figaro , first seen in Sydney in August this year. It follows the British director's Don Giovanni