It has been an incredibly busy year for Jakarta Players. The season began with a production of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, the famous jury-room drama. Before Christmas there was a one-act show, Beggars Belief, which explored the themes of faith and belief. This was followed by the customary spring musical, John Michael Tebelak’s world-renowned [...]

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As a jazz fanatic it was a privilege to be at the Java Jazz Festival this year. Held for the ninth time, this festival not only attracts artists from all over the world, but visitors also travelled from far to be at this prestigious event. I reckon they got what they came for: enough satisfying [...]

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The recent flooding followed by the inevitable Jakarta traffic grid-lock must make us look back wistfully to a time when Jakarta really was a big village and the commute to the office was not something to be dreaded. We need to go back to the 1970s for such luxury, but even then urban Jakarta had [...]

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“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” – Voltaire The movies I generally seek out are those with a superbly directed cast of gifted actors bringing to life a captivating story. Very rare, however, are those movies that leave you [...]

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Raffles and the British Invasion of Java Tim Hannigan Monsoon Books 2012 368pp ISBN 978-981-4358-85-9 As a lad growing up in post-World War II London, I was force-fed a history diet which told me that Britain was great because it once had an Empire. I was taught that as an island nation, we had fought [...]

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The first Jakarta International Fringe Festival is over and what a week it was! Bill Bailey was in town with 15 other top international comedians from all over the world and I don’t think I have ever laughed so much. As you can probably imagine, drinking beer with 16 of the funniest people in the [...]

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The performing arts and entertainment scene in Indonesia is set to enter a new era in November with the launch of the country’s first ever International Fringe Festival which will be held on November 7-11. The event, organized by the Jakarta Comedy Club, BeritaSatu.com and TheJakartaGlobe.com will feature five days of continuous live acts, exhibitions [...]

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by Scott Merrillees, Reviewed by Dachlan Cartwright Jokowi – what better buzzword these days to begin any piece of writing about Jakarta. Let us hope that Scott Merrillees will present a copy of his recently published visual record of Jakarta’s history, (together with its predecessor Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (2000)), to our new Governor, [...]

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This article follows on from that on Classic Western Fiction Set in Indonesia and Malaysia published previously in issue 76. Most of the books mentioned here have not been published or reprinted by Oxford-in-Asia or Periplus, for example, but often become available for online purchase. Romantic Java (1927), by H S Banner, is a collection [...]

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Dancing salsa for twelve years in Rome, which is home to some of the largest Cuban Diaspora in Europe, and where thousands of dancers join clubs on weekends, I would have never imagined finding better salsa. But after moving to Jakarta I discovered some of the classiest and most elegant Latin nights. As you rightly [...]

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Congratulations on your debut feature film “Crawl”. How does it feel to have completed such a big project which Paul wrote and directed and Benjamin produced? You guys must be so proud! It feels really great. It’s difficult in the independent film world just to make a movie and it’s been a long project. It [...]

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If you live in Jakarta, it is easy to get distracted by the mess of the city; the mind-bending traffic, the corruption, the pollution, the mind-blowing poverty; it feels like a city that is about to self-combust while you can only sit and gape and wonder, who is doing anything about this mess? Does anyone [...]

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On a recent Saturday night, after elbowing my way across a crowded nightclub, I arrived at the ladies’ room to discover that it, too, was absolutely crammed. Packed to the gills with similarly full-bladdered women. So I waited. And waited. After five minutes passed and not one person had emerged from a stall, I began [...]

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In July 1960, Allan Williams, a Liverpool club owner on a trip to Hamburg, wandered into a club off the Reeperbahn, and saw, “an Indonesian group performing Elvis Presley songs in German.” Williams was involved with rock’n’roll bands in Liverpool who had taken the music a stage further than Elvis, with the booming amplified bass [...]

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