Legal Blondes Galore !

Tim Mimchin with Sarah & Nel Minchin at the Helpmanns

Legally Blonde swept the boards at the 2013 Helpmann Awards last night at the Sydney Opera House scooping up 5 gongs including  best musical, direction and choreography and an award for Lucy Durack as best female actor in a musical.

the Tap Bros

The spectacular Melbourne based stage event  King Kong, won four design awards for costumes, lighting, sound and scenery, plus a special award for Outstanding Theatrical Achievement. There are bound to be more plaudits for King Kong as it's heading for Broadway in the near future.

A total of 43 Helpmann Awards were presented during a glitzy night honouring the most outstanding live performances in Australia in the past year.

Colin Friels won for Death of a Salesman at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre and Alison Bell won for her role in Hedda Gabler at the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Geoffrey Rush was named best male actor in a musical for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.



Paul Capsis (below right) Lucy Durack (right )  Elizabeth Debicki (below)

theatre heavyweights : Baz Luhrmann, Andrew Upton and a glamorous blonde

Briden Star         Helen Dallimore            Erika Heynatz & Andrew Kingston           Cheryl Barker                                       

heading for Broadway : King Kong

King Kong The Musical

Get ready for a world exclusive, a musical about the world's favourite rampaging giant ape King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of The World.

King Kong will be staged at the Regent Theatre in Collins Street in Melbourne next year and will feature a Kong created by Global Creatures who are responsible for the amazing show Walking With Dinosaurs.

The story pretty well follows the plot of the various movies : a mysterious island with the mythical Kong and a party of explorers hoping to film the great beast with a hapless heroine captured and eventually King Kong himself captured by the party and taken to New York where, yes he ends up climbing the Empire State Building to meet his fate.

Playing the heroine Anne Darrow will be Esther Hannaford (left) who has sung in the musicals Hairspray and Mama Mia and picked up the odd Helpmann Award along the way. Composer of the musical is Marius  Du Vries who  has won Ivor Novello and BAFTA Awards and worked with acts like Bjork, U2 and Rufus Wainwright, with a list of musical credits a mile long.

King Kong opens on June 15th 2013 at the Regent Theatre and you can book now at this website