American Psycho: The Musical, BB Arts & Two Doors Productions, Hayes Theatre

Brett Easton Ellis' novel has done the transfer to film and now to musical - and while, certainly, psychopathy isn't entirely unknown to musicals (hi, "Sweeney Todd", greetings, "Silence!: The Musical"), the unique tone of 80's satire and murder gives this a pretty unique edge. It's a piece that requires immaculate surfaces and immense style, with the brutality hovering beneath, just waiting to burst out at surprising moments. Duncan Shiek's score is largely dissasociated electronica (with a couple of ring-ins of 80's pop hits, including the inevitable "Hip to be Square"), as the financial whiz kids wage passive agressive war on each other expressed through well-cut clothes, tight muscular bodies and perfectly designed business cards. Our guide is the dissociated Patrick Bateman, so invested in the surface details that the only human detail he has left is rabid jealousy of anybody who may possibly be slightly above him in the social strata.

Ben Gerrard's Bateman carefully avoids the trap of in any way glamourising Bateman, or playing him for sympathy - he's shallow, disengaged and petty, sometimes hilariously so, and, of course, in other places, terrifyingly so. The highlights of the cast around him are Blake Appelqvist as his chief rival, the blase Paul Owen, Shannon Dooley as his equally vapid fiance, Evelyn, and Loren Hunter as his somewhat more engaged secretary, Jean - but in essence this is a massively tight ensemble. Played on Isabel Hudson's immaculate shining set, continuously revolving, this is a weird case of an musical that uses the immaculate surface to undermine everything about its characters, to carefully pick them apart, as the tensions build to a rather shocking act one finale. Act two suffers a little from the material not quite knowing what comes next (there's not quite anything standing in Patrick's way, and the events slightly dribble away, albiet with a reasonably chilling finale as Bateman has to face himself) - but Alexander Berlarge's production is constantly intriguing (it's a rare case where a lighting designer becomes a director, but Berlarge's ability to pinpoint exactly the right action and know how to draw focus turns out to be exactly what this show needs). Costume design by Isabel Hudson gives us a wide range of stylish looks, and Yvette Lee's choreography takes us from hard corparate edges to creative club kid dances.

I tend to think that the basic material is about 50% of a great show (basically, it's got act 2 problems), but after directing one of my favourite shows of 2018 with "Cry-Baby", Alexander Berlarge goes two-for-two and makes me think he's a director I want to see as much from as possible.

Wicked Sisters, papermoon theatre, Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre

Alma DeGroen's 2002 play is a contained, "well-made-play" type piece, played out in real time as four friends come together after the death of the husband of one of them, to talk, drink, commiserate and uncover a few secrets along the way. It's an entertaining example of the genre, with a mixture of humour, rage, and with a fair range of ideas going on - looking at what happened to the women who fought for equality and liberation during the 80s, at fundamental questions about human nature, about aging, about contemporary society and about the nature of betrayals.

papermoon's production does a reasonably strong production of this, justifying the revival largely thorugh the four strong actresses in the leads. All four get their moment to shine  - Elaine Noon as the widow-with-more-than-one-secret, hiding under a layer of polite meekness until she breaks; Nikki-Lynne Hunter as the fashionable real-estate agent still seething over her divorce even after acquiring her own younger lover; Alice Ferguson as the PR woman whose attempts to gloss over the situations gets more and more desperate, and Lainie Hart as the one who's whose own morality serves as persistent irritation to the others.

This isn't quite a perfect production - there's a couple of moments where the play's shifting attentions feels a little like gear shifting - but in a case where opening-night-is-also-first-time-with-an-audience, this can only grow and develop further over the next few nights. This isn't a particularly showy production - the set and lighting are nicely functional - but it's a great showcase for the central four actresses who seize the opportunity to play with an evenly balanced set of four meaty roles. Worth catching.

Playhouse Creatures, Pidgeonhole Theatre, Theatre 3

Three years, two different casts, two interstate and one international tour later, it's the final show of one of my favorite shows in recent memory. And returning to it three years later, it's familar yet new, still full of life as four actresses and their dresser struggle with career, relationships and social position as they emerge during the Restoration as the first actresses to perform. There's distinct changes (Christiane Nowack's set has had a few alterations to make it more easily tourable, and of the main cast of five, 3 are replacements), but the solid bones of Pidgeonhole's production show strong, even as the changes mean the show belongs to the new cast as much as it did to the originals.

Comparisons between then and now are almost beside the point - if, perhaps, when first watching the show there was a great sense of women launching into an unknown future, at the end of the run there's maybe a bit more weight to that uncertain future, and to this as an elegy of how each of these women ended their time on stage. The two returners show just as much strength as they did before - Liz Bradley still hilarious and touching as the slightly disrespectful Doll Common, and Karen Vickery being both an imperious terror in her prime and a touching figure as she finds herself sidelined by her husband. The replacements give different effects to their moments - comparing them you find one element is increased while another diminished, so Natasha Vickery's Nell Gwynne is perhaps a touch more naive, a touch less brash; Yanina Clifton has a different kind of hunger as Mrs Farley, so eager to hold onto the status she's only just acquired; and Lainie Hart's umbrage at her mistreatment as Mrs Marshall seethes differently. But it's still superlative theatre, and it's a wonderful farewell to a work that feels like it's expanded the horizons of Canberra theatre in all kinds of good ways.

The Miser, Bell Shakespeare, Playhouse, Canberra Theatre

This is Bell Shakespeare's fifth go-round with Moliere (though only the second to do the grand touring thing - their versions of "Tartuffe", "Le Misanthrope" and "Les Femmes Savantes" (as "The Literati") only played seasons in Sydney or Sydney and Melbourne. All have been done with translation by Justin Fleming and ... I must admit, his translations are starting to pall a little for me - his use of somewhat relentless rhymes (yes, there is a varying rhyme scheme, but still...) has become pretty repetitive, with the gag of chucking in Australian colloquialisms becoming pretty damn stale (yes, I'm aware it's very easy to rhyme stuff with "shut your clacker", the question now becomes "should you"). And all this extra not-particularly-funny gagginess tends to drag what should be a short sharp incisive comedy out to around two and a half hours.

My other problem may be that the last two Molieres were at least directed by the superlative Lee lewis so they had incisive energy and skill applied to them, and this one is directed by Peter Evans instead. Oh, it's very prettily designed, and there's a couple of decent moments here and there, but it's fairly uninspired work. Of the cast of nine there's three performances I'd consider reasonably strong (John Bell has a pretty good grotesque lead performance, Michelle Doake steals scenes where she has anything to do but alas that's pretty much confined to one scene, and Jamie Oxenbould has a goofy charm as an impertinent servant). Otherwise, I must admit I found this fairly lumpen - trying to be "fun" but feeling largely forced.

And the final image is a fairly desperate reaching for poignancy that the production hasn't really earned and, for me, doesn't land.

If Moliere works (and yes, he can work, and potentially even in these clunky translations), it needs to feel fresh, lively and sharp. And this feels dull, clunky and forced. So this was a disappointment.

Simon Amstell: What is This?, MICF, Farfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne

Simon Amstell's a british comedian whose best known work is probably the work he's trying to retreat from - his 2006-2009 run hosting the music panel show "Never Mind The Buzzcocks", where he spent much of his time mocking the various guests on the program. He's gotten very into analysis and self-help since, and much of his subsequent solo standup shows reflect this. His 2010 show "Do Nothing" is a pretty solid breakthrough, and his current show more or less continues as that goes on - albiet, perhaps, a bit less tight and a bit more rambly. It's not that this is a bad show, it's that it's ... familiar and it doesn't really show anything new. And yes, one could argue that he's basically the same person, and has basically the same set of thoughts (alibiet one now settled with a boyfriend and with a few new drug adventures) - but that doesn't mean that it's still not a disappointment that I don't think he's entirely found a new vein to work in or something richer or different. It's not a bad show so much as it's a familiar remix-of-similar-hits. And I enjoyed in the moment but I'm hoping for something a tad newer.

#KWANDA, MICF, Melbourne Town Hall

"Q and A" is one of the more irritating programs on TV. Presented as a chance for the public directly to question politicians and other public figures, in the end it becomes a show about people avoiding saying anything other than their normal boring set pieces. It's an exercise in avoiding the truth more than in getting any of it.

#KWANDA breaks that fairly quickly - it's an episode of Q and A where, at some point, everybody on the panel, including the moderator, breaks and starts to rant about what they're really thinking. It's brutal, it's funny, it's disturbingly familiar, it pokes holes in every political sacred cow that's out there, and it's an absorbing 70 minutes of theatre. It's mostly a triumph of Tom Ballard's writing and, to some extent, some of the acting (in particular Emily Taheny as the Labour party representative disappointed by her party one too many times, Geraldine Hickey as the Tasmanian-says-it-like-she-sees-it-moron and Michelle Brasier as the right-on musician who unfortunately has never actually thought about any of her political positions beyond the easiest slogan) The staging is pretty basic (just one big desk with the cast largely behind it), but if the current state of politics needs an exorcism, this feels like the big comic one that allows you to laugh at things that have been making you internally scream for way too long.