The iconic American fairytale with its catalogue of strange symbols and puzzling metaphors proves to be fertile ground for a musical extravaganza.

This 2010 Australian comedy-drama continues the year's mini-trend of realist, real-time shows, writes Janet McAllister.

The magic of Indian Ink returns after a period of international touring with a new work that has the shrewdness of fable combined with the sweetness of a pop song.

New show a grandiose spectacle, says Barney McDonald.

William Golding's 1954 masterpiece is lodged within the psyche of generations who encountered it as a favoured school text.

Meeting great apes is a dream realised, writes Colin Mathura-Jeffree.

With its Swedish mix of sex, class and mind games, August Strindberg's naturalist (almost real-time) drama Miss Julie has sticking power.

The poetic cynic Quentin Crisp was wonderfully quotable - a latter-day Oscar Wilde, made of more stoic, less squashable stuff.

Live television, comedy and doing good come together next Friday night on TV3.

Playwright April Phillips has created a finely crafted script that serves up four vignettes.

Taki Rua presents a boldly experimental piece of theatre that is as intriguing and idiosyncratic as the title.

Writer Stephen Ballantyne admits he didn't pay much attention when his late father David Ballantyne's novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down was published in 1968.

Convicted double murderer David Wayne Tamihere has been lending a hand in a local production of hit Broadway musical Chicago.

The interactive theatre experience is given a thorough workout in a wildly energetic production that drops us right into the throbbing heart of an illicit high school after-ball.

Participation in 20th century international conflicts is a recurring topic in Maori theatre.

British playwright Richard Bean brings razor-sharp wit and an amusing sense of the absurd to this high-spirited romp through the fractious terrain of climate change science.

Forget about Australians appropriating our cultural icons; the Scots are getting in on the act.

I first saw this clowning classic several years ago, and remembered it fondly enough to want to take the resident 8-year-old this time around.

Sir Humphrey Appleby, the consummate civil servant with a patrician disdain for the delusions of democratic government, is an almost perfect comic creation.

The multi award-winning international sensation 'SLAVA'S SNOWSHOW' has stormed into New Zealand for a limited season playing in Auckland from July 10-14. Since its creation by renowned Russian clown Slava Polunin in 1993, Slava's Snowshow has played to millions of people in more than 30 countries and 120 cities including New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and Moscow. The show brilliantly creates a world of wonderment and fantasy that transports the audience to a joyous dream-like place, where a bed becomes a boat in a storm-tossed sea; a woman is wrapped in cellophane and becomes flowers in a vase; a child walks in amazement inside a bubble; Slava boards a train and then becomes the train, his chimney-pot hat billowing smoke; and a web of unspun cotton envelopes the audience.