Nellie Small: Black, queer, proud … and way before her time

CABARET
SEND FOR NELLIE
Wharf 1 Theatre, January 10
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½

In a jazz band-backed medley of vocal, vaudeville, cabaret and blues, Alana Valentine’s Send for Nellie aims to animate and honour the lost legend of Sydney’s queer black showbiz star, Nellie Small.

Billed as a “male impersonator” while cross-dressing both on stage and off, Small’s proudly lived identity was a radical act for her time. Vocal powerhouse Elenoa Rokobaro (Caroline, or Change; Tick, Tick…Boom) embodies the fierce performer, from the 1930s when she first appeared on stage to her subsequent career. It’s an extraordinary story of irrepressible life, trailblazing talent and the vulgar contradictions of racism.

Elenoa Rokobaro flexes gender as Nellie Small.Credit:

Rokobaro cuts a debonair figure in cream topper and tails. Flexing gender like a king, the actor is compelling with both her charismatic physicality and gospel-enriched voice. For all the production’s technical sound issues – and there were many – she commits.

The all-female band (piano, drums, clarinet and sax) mirrors Rokobaro’s look with the addition of kohl-pitted eyes and rakish suspenders. The band’s lead singer, an impressive Eleanor Stankiewicz, swings into various characters – from a post office bigot to Small’s talent manager Edith Meggitt.

The resurrection of Nellie Small in our cultural memory is hugely important. Notably, Valentine, a Helpmann winner known for collaborations with marginalised groups – engaged the artist Kween G as co-creator and cultural governance lead.

Yet the show fell just short of soul-stirring. Perhaps the tone too jaunty, too light, to call up Nellie’s ghost? The Groucho glasses Nellie and band whipped out for one number seemed out of place.

Despite evoking the jazz bar set, the Wharf 1 theatre also had an oddly sapping effect. Trained to be docile in an elite-coded space, a crowd that should have been hollering was disappointingly well-behaved.

Nellie’s showbiz career began on Oxford Street. Let’s hope, now the forgotten history has been re-awoken by this world premiere, this show will reappear in the kind of space she worked in. Nellie is way too badass, after all, to have just one story told.

PUPPETRY
A BUCKET OF BEETLES
Everest Theatre, January 9
Until January 13
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Like children’s books, the best children’s theatre and, in this case, puppetry, hooks in the adults, too. So if you have any bored six-to-nine-year-olds digging you an early grave during the holidays, A Bucket of Beetles will unshackle their minds from the digital grasp for 45 minutes. Add in the round trip, and you’ll have a memorable outing. One you can talk about.

You can discuss the astoundingly talented Lunang Pramusesa, who, at the age of four, devised this story of a boy and a beetle, and who then helped design the puppets, and now works alongside four adult puppeteers.

The astoundingly talented Lunang Pramusesa

A Bucket of Beetles comes to Sydney Festival from Indonesia’s Papermoon Puppet Theatre. Essentially without dialogue (other than from some small audience members), it tells of Wehea, a boy who lives in a rainforest, not as a human in competition with nature, but as a human at one with nature.

I know, that will have the cynics cursing yet more eco-propaganda, so let’s pin them to the back of a glass display case for the moment, and delight in the innocence, the beauty and the expert puppetry.

The narrative, however, is not all plain sailing. Wehea initially seems to fall for one beetle, before his affections are usurped by another: a rhinoceros beetle, a creature that can nudge 6 centimetres in length, and that here, in puppet form, is about the size of a large cat.

Try to sit close to catch all the intricate storytelling.Credit:

I guess Wehea changes allegiances because he can fly on the rhino beetle’s back, which, if you’re a little boy, is something only dumb adults wouldn’t understand.

The story hits more of a headwind when Wehea and his beetle buddy disappear for a while, during which time a fire apparently engulfs the forest. When they do return, safe from the destruction, you sense the plot could have been more suspenseful had we seen them in imminent danger.

Nonetheless, the puppetry is often spellbinding (including that of Wehea, operated by a puppeteer on a low, wheeled stool, his feet ingeniously becoming the boy’s), admirably enhanced by the set, lighting (sometimes just torches), projections and especially the music, with its emphasis on exotic percussion. But do try to sit close.

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Victorian Opera
Il Tabarro by Puccini
Australian National Maritime Museum
January 9
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

The stage was a historic lightship, the Carpentaria, coloured angry orange, topped with a glowing beacon, and moored between a lifeboat, a lighthouse and a submarine.

With Barangaroo’s new brace of skyscrapers as a backdrop, it embodied with more verismo than Puccini might have imagined possible, one of the work’s sub themes, - the despairing netherworld of bargeworkers on the River Seine, dreaming of city glitter.

Il Tabarro is the first and darkest instalment of Puccini’s trilogy of one-act operas, Il Trittico (which Opera Australia is presenting in full in July.) It tells of a working-class marriage, failing under the combined pressures of grinding work, a lost child and restless yearning, ending in violence just as a glimmer of healing emerges.

The cast made full use of the unique setting aboard the Carpentaria.Credit: Jacquie Manning

More broadly, it presents a metaphor of life adrift, buffeted uncomprehendingly by toil, dreams and passion as it flows inexorably towards death.

Director Constantine Costi, with designer Sabina Myers and lighting from Matthew Marshall, used this gift of a setting with inventive simplicity, creating the magic of theatre by simply inhabiting found spaces and juxtaposing them tellingly.

This required the wizardry of amplification to draw together the voices, singing from the prow of a ship or halfway up a ladder, and the concealed orchestra into a cohesive musical fabric. The tonal balance from sound designer Tony David Cray was serviceable, highlighting necessary orchestral detail and showcasing vocal power without stridency at climactic moments.

Soprano Olivia Cranwell (heard memorably as Sieglinde in Opera Australia’s recent Ring cycle) soared with magnificence as Giorgetta, lifting the central duet with Luigi to create the evening’s peak musical moment with thrilling forcefulness, and persuasively capturing the character’s conflicted restlessness.

Joshua Morton-Galea, as the proverbial drunken sailor, sang with light lyrical tenor sound.Credit: Jacquie Manning

As Michele, her taciturn husband, Simon Meadows had brooding darkness in quiet passages, opening out with full-voiced passion in his aria before the close. Tenor James Egglestone sang the lover Luigi with lean sound and promising tonal attractiveness while Syrah Torii played the soubrette role of Frugola with bright clarity.

She partnered congenially with smooth-voiced baritone Stephen Marsh, as husband Talpa, from the top of the lighthouse without apparent vertigo. Joshua Morton-Galea, as the proverbial drunken sailor, sang with light lyrical tenor sound.

Though the setting created this event’s uniqueness, it would be rewarding to hear all these singers again unamplified in natural concert acoustic. Conducting a reduced orchestration played by the Victorian Opera Chamber Orchestra, conductor Simon Bruckard coordinated skilfully, accommodating expressive easing of tempo to create the work’s fateful musico-dramatic arc with sombre focus.

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Smashed: The Nightcap
Wharf Theatre
January 7, until January 27
By CASSIE TONGUE
★★★★

It’s summer in Sydney, the right time for light entertainment: drag, burlesque, circus and cabaret. For pop songs remade by chanteuses and remixed to underscore human spectacle. It’s exactly the right time, then, for Smashed: The Nightcap, now playing at for Sydney Festival.

A looser, funnier, hotter and more pleasantly alive follow-up to last year’s festival cabaret Smashed: The Brunch Party, Victoria Falconer (performer and co-Artistic Director of Sydney’s Hayes Theatre) plays ringmaster to a host of cheeky, clever, and charming acts designed to celebrate the pleasures and freedoms that await curious audiences in the dark of night where it’s safer to be yourself.

Smashed: The Nightcap features a host of cheeky, clever, and charming acts.Credit:

Beginning at a polite 7:30pm, Falconer works the crowd into a more relaxed and positive state of community: encouraging us to close our eyes and take stock of the Country we are on, communicating solidarity and inviting cheer, and introducing light audience participation that escalates during the night.

There are audience dance-offs and quick check-ins and exchanges of energy from performer to audience and back again; this critic was serenaded, and motorboated, by an international cabaret star. Anything goes at Smashed (but only, of course, with enthusiastic consent).

Falconer introduces a constellation of talents: Malia Walsh (combining hula hoops and marshmallows in unexpected ways); Bridget Rose (aerial straps); Karlee Misi (burlesque) and Tynga Williams (dance). Plus, drag superstar Courtney Act reworks a Cold Chisel number into a torch song, and on this night Rizo, a cabaret star also on the Festival lineup, joined as a surprise guest, glorious in fringe and glorious of voice, for a show-stealing number. Later shows will feature nightlife performers like Kween Kong, Hans, and Kelly Ann Doll. You might need to return to appreciate the revolving lineup.

And why not? At only 70 minutes, the show knows not to overstay its welcome. It’s fun, sexy and charming. It’s not as subversive as it could be – you can feel a tiny threat of rebellion in its core just dying to be let out – but it’s deeply entertaining and enjoyable, perfect for sharing with friends. Why not follow it up with a drink at the Festival’s pop-up Moonshine bar, just buildings away, and make a night of it? It’s a great way to kick off the new year: a reminder that we can find joy in our city, in each other, and what we can create together.

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DANCE
Encantado
Drama Theatre, January 5
Until January 10
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★½

This year’s Sydney Festival opens not with a bang but an unravelling: of a giant fabric patchwork as wide and long as the stage. I’m reminded of the Vietnamese fabric stores of my childhood, where vast rolls of brightly patterned fabric unfurled like dusty rainbows. This is Lia Rodrigues’ Encantado, featuring the Lia Rodrigues Companhia De Danças from Rio de Janeiro.

Unusually for a high-end choreographer, Rodrigues’ work focuses on the poor and downtrodden of Brazil’s stratified society. Shaking off her white middle-class upbringing, Rodrigues headquartered her company in a Rio favela, partnering with a local NGO and the favela community in a synergy of art and social activism.

The dance becomes an ever-growing celebration of movement and fabric.Credit:

Encantado – created in 2021 – is her response to the logging and mining companies who target Indigenous tribes under the far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro (known in some circles as the Brazilian Donald Trump). “Encantado” is a reference to the encantados, or “enchanted ones”: spirits of Brazilian folklore who shape-shift between the spirit world and the natural landscapes of Brazil.

It begins with the dancers unrolling the patchwork, comprising 140 blankets patterned with bold flowers and animal prints. Re-entering naked, they then begin draping the fabric on themselves until they resemble mermaids, snakes, birds, armadillos, and mountains. It’s inventive, surrealist, and slightly camp, but the nudity becomes too predictably provocative and the whole section is indulgently long, prompting the audience – as a dancer slowly wrapped his head in leopard print – to giggle.

But then the music begins and things liven up. The songs of Encantado are recorded from the 2021 protests of the Mbyá Guaraní people singing for recognition of their ancestral lands. It’s glorious, uplifting sound and one of Encantado’s great strengths. Spurred on by the music, the dance becomes an ever-growing celebration of movement and fabric, tossed and whirled across the stage in joyful swoops of colour. Rodrigues’ dancers are undeniably impressive in this part, overflowing with irresistible electric energy. It’s so vivid I begin wondering if I am at Fashion Week, by the banks of a riverside washerwoman’s party, or watching some kind of pillow fight.

But for all its joy, Encantado stops at its attractive aesthetic, leaving me wanting deeper ideas or emotions, or if not that, at least a tighter timeframe and less indulgent repetition. If you’re after a summery burst of colour though, it’s good fun.

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MUSICAL THEATRE
BANANALAND
Riverside Theatres, January 4
Until January 14
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★

Bananaland can certainly be cute, but it can also be trashy. Were it bottled, it would be shocking pink or lime green, come with a high-sugar warning, and explode when you opened it. Instead, it’s a Jekyll and Hyde musical – a Banana Split if you will.

Part of that two-paced style is intentional, the story tells of a neo-punk band, Kitty Litter, becoming entertainment for kiddies (like the Wiggles) called The Wikki-Wikki Wah-Wahs. Another part, however, is plain weird. For instance, Ruby, Kitty Litter’s Yoko Ono-adoring leader, lives for her wrathful songs, with titles such as Consumerist Pig and Requiem for the Patriarchy, and they’re rather good in their thrashing way.

Max McKenna, Maxwell Simon, Georgina Hopson and Joe Kalou in Bananaland.Credit:

But when she sings about her inner thoughts – as a character in a musical, as opposed to a singer in a band – she suddenly goes all big-ballad, and drowns us in syrup. The others do the same. If the art of musical theatre is to blend words, music, character and story into a cohesive whole, then the work of the show’s vastly talented creators, Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall (responsible for Muriel’s Wedding The Musical), simply doesn’t stand up this time.

Yet the cuteness factor is undeniable. The show can be very funny, and director Simon Phillips has applied his trademark polish to this Brisbane production, including in design terms. It also brims with entertaining performances, notably from Amber McMahon in several secondary roles that bring her abundant comic flair to the fore, including Mimsi, a thespian of a certain vintage who helps the angry young things transform themselves into an all-dancing singalong troupe for the preschool brigade.

Max McKenna excels as the planet-saving, capitalism-hating Ruby, desperate to be taken seriously as an artist rather than a mere entertainer. Georgina Hopson exhibits her fine voice as Max’s sister, Karen, and, among the minor characters, Chris Ryan is a riot as the band’s sole fan: a lonely nerd who draws the line at their latest change of direction.

For every joke that works, another three are merely puerile, plus there are several set-ups in search of a punchline and some awful songs. Terry (Steve Pope) and Terri (Amanda Jenkins), however, deserve special mention as the band’s hilariously deadpan drummer and bassist.