It's probably around the two-hour mark of this big, bloated, bombastic spectacle of a sequel that you might start thinking to yourself, why are we doing this again?

Beethoven, as everyone knows, sells seats. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Beethoven: The Symphonies proved just that four times over.

If you're one of those people with a weakness for laughing in the wrong place then it might be best you don't watch War News, writes Colin Hogg.

Playwright Elizabeth Easther won the 2014 Adam Play Award with this sophisticated, witty and very contemporary meditation on the timeless processes of procreation.

In this superb Auckland Theatre Company production of the Gallipoli play, twelve angry men fill the stage with presence and charisma, increasing the under-fire excitement of a battlefield tragedy.

In an age of diminished expectations Annie offers an unabashed celebration of the irrepressible optimism that fuels the American Dream.

Loud. Spontaneous. Free. These aren't attributes normally associated with Linkin Park, a band that spends so much time on studio tinkering their albums should come with stickers warning of over-production.

DJ-turned-record shop and record-label owner Terri Hooley (Dormer) was responsible for championing punk music and ignited the scene in Belfast during the 1970s.

Given the battery of foot pedals and phalanx of guitars some rock musicians have available on stage, you'd conclude a single six-string must be an instrument of limited musical language .

Machine-made smoke danced in the beams of light in the Concert Chamber as a packed house waited for the musicians to take the stage.