The Beck's Bar at Hyde Park Barracks Museum is always one of the Sydney Festival's key venues, thanks to the variety of acts it attracts - often on the one bill.

SPEECH DEBELLE

LOS ANGELES: A custody deal has been reached for Michael Jackson's children that will see the biological mother of the two eldest have parental rights and their grandmother retain permanent custody of all three, US media reported yesterday.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $32.99

THE final, posthumous performance of Michael Jackson was in the transcendent tradition of his previous shows: part musical feast, part religious experience, part examination of a man who seemed not a man but something else his public was always trying to figure out. Boy? Demigod? Alien? It was, at times..read more