I felt happy in a sad sort of way on hearing that experiments had once again started to bring back to life that great dinosaur of the television age, the variety show.

Four months ago, the New Zealand String Quartet enthralled a town hall audience playing Mozart and Brahms quintets with Canadian clarinetist James Campbell.

The fraudulent world of high finance has furnished plenty of high-stakes drama in recent years.

It was a quartet with a difference at Chamber Music New Zealand's Rhythm & Resonance concert - two pianists and two percussionists in a programme roving from Mozart to Lutoslawski.

A knock at the door sounds like hammering with an anvil in this Silo Theatre production, but clever, compelling Belleville is really only playing dress-up as a thriller.

The music theatre of Gian Carlo Menotti fits in well with the strengths of Auckland's Opera Factory, as its new production of The Medium revealed.

The party fun starts even before you enter the theatre for this Importance of Being Earnest, fabulously reimagined as an all-male dandy revel.

As the gaming world rages over the lack of playable female characters, Sucker Punch has quietly gone about finding its own solution.

It is difficult to be too disdainful of the earlier work, a real glitterfest that does not allow a slow movement to dampen its merry fun.

I'm increasingly concerned about what might be the next household task to be celebrated by a nationwide television contest, writes Colin Hogg.