This show breaks some of my biggest rules for theatre. Here’s why it still works

THEATRE | Rising Festival
Heartbreak Hotel ★★★★
EKBM, Arts Centre Melbourne, until June 22

Do not make a show about your relationship breakdown. Not my No.1 rule of theatre, but it’s totally in my top hundred, alongside: Do not make your ex a character; don’t rant about science too much in the context of emotional and/or existential issues and, of course, avoid playing musical instruments if you’re not very good at them.

Karin McCracken in Heartbreak Hotel.Credit: Andi Crown Photography

But rules were made to be broken, right?

Heartbreak Hotel is a charming, unconventional bit of not-quite musical theatre out of Aotearoa New Zealand. It rips up every page of that rule book, and one of its endearing qualities is that a lot of the artistry goes into creating a genuine sense of muddling through.

Anyone who has ever been seriously heartbroken will be amused and touched by its tragicomic arc. The distress involved in a long-term relationship ending is portrayed with soul-baring authenticity, sometimes blow-by-blow, and the show’s humour is just as strong in depicting the shambles and the struggle of recomposing oneself after such loss.

Karin McCracken arrives onstage in an Elvis suit and asks if the fringed sleeves are too much (the audience seemed divided on this question), before scanning the faces of spectators for signs of unresolved grief and heartbreak (definitively present).

Heartbreak Hotel is a charming, unconventional bit of not-quite musical theatre.Credit: Andi Crown Photography

The downbeat comedic shtick wins you over from the outset. But the action soon shifts into a reverse-engineered story of a particularly bruising break-up and its years-long aftermath.

This unfolds in scenes with the ex, as well as doctors and awkward first dates and a gay best friend – all played with brio by Simon Leary.

There are musical interludes featuring heartbreak songs throughout – vocals auto-tuned and self-accompanied by the synth McCracken half-heartedly learnt to play while trying to get back on the horse.

Comically obsessive monologues on the physiology of heartbreak are interwoven, too.

McCracken gives a biomolecular hot take on the grieving process; makes excursions into neuro- and social psychology. These, and a penchant for Google-diagnosing the rarest possible disorders – yes, you can really die of a broken heart, it’s called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, apparently – are desperate measures to control the acute sense of powerlessness the show explores.

A minimalist set creates a transient, liminal space reminiscent of a hotel lobby, and it’s all seamlessly directed and performed, without a hint of sentiment or preachiness or over-realisation.

Instead, Heartbreak Hotel offers the balm of warmth and authenticity, using a melange of cabaret, stand-up, and the brisk intimacy of a theatrical two-hander to transform the ineffable mess of life into art.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
The Wrong Gods ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio, until July 12

Countless clashes take hold in Sydney playwright S. Shakthidharan’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed epic Counting and Cracking: that between old and new, fate and agency, tradition and technology, the rural and the metropolis, the ancient practice of animism and the worship of progress at all costs.

Radhika Mudaliyar and Nadie Kammallaweera play Isha and Nirmala in The Wrong Gods.Credit: Brett Boardman

These concerns find their apotheosis in the increasingly frayed relationship between Isha (Radhika Mudaliyar) and her mother Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera). Isha dreams of a life beyond the confines of her riverside village and finding a different truth, but is stultified by her mother’s reticence to change. Nirmala is staunch and steadfast in her desire to live and die by her land, dictated by the caprices of the climate and environment.

Enter Lakshmi (Vaishnavi Suryaprakash), a cog in a multinational company who Nirmala calls “the devil”. Simultaneously introducing Nirmala to newfangled farming technology and financial arrangements while offering Isha the freedom to realise her dreams of becoming a scientist, Lakshmi promises a form of liberation to both women. What could go wrong?

The Wrong Gods takes its inspiration from India’s “greatest planned environmental disaster”, where one of the world’s biggest hydropower infrastructure projects involved damming the Narmada River, a life source for millions, leading to displacement of indigenous communities and severe ecological catastrophe.

Catapulting us seven years into the future in its second act, we see Nirmala protesting the ever-encroaching threat of irresponsible development on her land, aided by Devi (Manali Datar), while Isha pursues her dreams in the city. Their eventual reunion occurs under fraught circumstances none of them could have foreseen – but how they contend with it is the tension that drives the play forward.

Much of the exposition occurs in the dense dialogue that’s exchanged between all four characters.Credit: Brett Boardman

The Wrong Gods allows space for multiple truths to exist at once, disavowing easy resolutions and the reductive tendency to pick a side. You can support Isha’s desire to live a self-determined life, while wanting this same autonomy to be extended to her mother. You can wish for an easier life for Nirmala, while rejecting the ways colonial powers and corrupt state governments extract and exploit.

At times, The Wrong Gods is both oversimplified and overexplained – much of the exposition occurs in the dense dialogue that’s exchanged between all four characters. They flit from idea to idea at lightning speed, from the patriarchy of god worship to the overconsumption of cities that sees rural denizens as collateral damage.

But the heightened emotional stakes of the personal relationships at the play’s fulcrum anchor it. Each character undergoes a metamorphosis of sorts as their perspectives and perception in the eyes of the others shift. Under Shakthidharan and Hannah Goodwin’s direction, they pace around and across the deep concentric grooves of tree rings, stuck in a cycle that was imposed on them as they look for ways to resist and defy it.

Kammallaweera is a highlight as the exceedingly strong Nirmala, providing comedic relief even as she wrenches the rug from beneath us in an emotionally stirring performance (special mention to her machete skills). Suryaprakash keeps us guessing as to Lakshmi’s motives in a stunning interplay of opacity and sincerity.

Compressed into a neat 90 minutes, The Wrong Gods is significantly shorter than Counting and Cracking, but shares its deep engagement with big ideas that traverse the personal and the political.

Reviewed by Sonia Nair

THEATRE | Rising Festival
Legends (of the Golden Arches) ★★★
Merlynn Tong and Joe Paradise Lui, Melbourne Theatre Company, until June 28

This rambunctious show follows two Australian artists of Singaporean Chinese descent as they battle ghosts past and present, in a comedy of (pop) cultural collision that sends them to Chinese hell and back.

Joe Paradise Lui and Merlynn Tong in a scene from Legends (of the Golden Arches).Credit: Jessica Wyld

Merlynn Tong and Joe Paradise Lui saunter onto the stage as themselves. They’re super low-key about it, and as their banter moves between shared nostalgia for, and shit-talking about, the childhoods they’ve left behind, conflict emerges.

It emerges that both Lui and Tong have lost older relatives with a taste for McDonald’s burgers – one was a Filet-O-Fish connoisseur, the other a Big Mac fiend – and the immediate reason for their being onstage together is the aftermath of a funeral for one of these – Lui’s grandfather, for whom Tong insists on observing Chinese funerary traditions. She wants to fold and burn joss paper (as underworld currency, so the deceased can bribe their way past the many lords and officials in Chinese hell) and stay up all night, lest the dead ancestor remain trapped as a hungry ghost.

Mourning doesn’t become Joe Paradise Lui, though. He hired strippers for the funeral and has long outgrown superstitions he now finds anathema to his firmly anti-capitalist, pacifist ethos.

Whether his contempt is (at least partly) a psychological defence against loss – Lui chose an artistic career and permanent exile in Australia over compulsory military service in Singapore – is a question he’ll have an eternity to confront.

Legends (of the Golden Arches) draws the audience into hilarious and heartfelt odyssey.Credit: Jessica Wyld

In a moment of pique, Lui throws a bag of Mickey D’s on the offering pyre. The act of disrespect opens a portal to a terrifying, and distinctly Chinese, hell dimension.

There’s a flamboyant reveal, supercharged by garish Getai performance in futuristic costume, before all hell does break loose.

Set designer Cherish Marrington brings the guardians of the underworld to carnivalesque life through custom-made inflatables, and the performers can only escape the funfair atmosphere after Guanyin – goddess of mercy in the Chinese pantheon – intervenes.

Visually splendid video artistry from Wendy Yu illustrates the retelling of Chinese legends in this work, from the backstory of the Chinese god of war, Guan Yu, to tales of the underworld’s incorruptible judge, Bao Gong. Unfortunately, the script isn’t always as vibrant or effective as the design – some jokes fall flat, and some of the cultural commentary is so basic it feels patronising.

When Legends (of the Golden Arches) succeeds, though, it draws the audience into a hilarious and heartfelt odyssey – one that balances respect for the living and the dead, while navigating the mystery and majesty (and absurdity) of cultural traditions ancient and modern.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Katy Perry | The Lifetimes Tour ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, until June 14

Katy Perry is pure pop. Her songs promise, and mostly deliver, a good time. And her Lifetimes concert does the same, across two and a half hours, five acts, multiple costume changes and more than 20 songs from a back catalogue stretching to 2008 (the pre-Perry Christian singer Katy Hudson gets a brief acknowledgement but no stage time).

Katy Perry on stage at Rod Laver Arena.Credit: Martin Philbey

But this big, spectacular, noisy and surprisingly intimate show also has grander ambitions, in which it has mixed success.

It’s all there in the framing device: a video game in which KP143, an “enhanced” version of Katy Perry, attempts to unseat Mainframe, the AI that has come to rule humanity rather than serve it. To do so, she must free the butterflies that have been captured to power the AI, and to do that she needs to collect love, in the form of glowing hearts that descend from the arena rafters.

The 143, of course, refers to the title of her latest and much-criticised album, and is tech speak for “I love you” (with its origins in pager messaging from the 1990s).

Phew. That’s a lot of freight to load onto the shoulders of a bunch of pop songs, even a set as hook-heavy as Perry’s. And at times, the strain shows.

Perry and her team of 10 dancers work their collective butts off.Credit: Martin Philbey

The stage is set in what looks like a figure eight, though it’s actually the infinity symbol; later on, while singing E.T., a lightsaber-wielding Perry does battle with a lengthy bit of heating duct that is meant to represent the “infinite worm” spewed out by Mainframe. It’s the weakest moment in a show that has plenty of goof and lots of camp and heaps of flying on wires, and mostly manages to deploy them to great effect.

The backdrop is a wall of screens, suggestive of the importance of video to Perry’s success, but also integral to the narrative; it’s up here, in lengthy clips, that the framing story unfolds, while Perry is offstage changing costumes.

The four-piece band – women on guitar and keys, men on bass and drums – play beneath the screen, while Perry and her 10 dancers make full use of the elongated stage. “Not a bad seat in the house,” she boasts.

If “love” is the connective tissue here – and suddenly, her bizarre proclamation upon returning to Earth after that ill-conceived Bezos-shilling space flight makes so much promotional sense – the main theme is self-actualisation.

The video screen backdrop plays a crucial role in the show’s narrative.Credit: Wolter Peeters

In the dubiously conceived segment where the audience gets to “request” songs via QR code (it sent me to a sign-up page for the tour, with no option to vote), she plucked an 11-year-old to join her onstage while she sang Thinking of You, from her 2008 album One of The Boys. Maddie from Traralgon said she’d had a dream about this moment; Katy from California says keep dreaming because as this moment proves, if you dream it you can be it.

The singer’s continual reinvention of herself is proof of that maxim. And her performance of the ballad – playing acoustic guitar, with no backing track and nowhere to hide – was proof that beneath all the razzle-dazzle she remains a serious talent. As she says towards the end, “Never forget you are the main character of your video game”.

The 143 album got a cold shoulder from critics and the charts, but its songs were loudly cheered and sounded great – Woman’s World and Lifetimes especially. Once the dust settles, these will, I suspect, come to be considered bona fide bangers to rank alongside Hot and Cold, Roar, California Girls and the rest (all of which got an airing, naturally).

Whenever she is onstage, Perry works her butt off. Running, jumping (at the end of Act One, she literally leaps into a pit and disappears), standing atop a tall pillar, dangling upside down in a spherical cage, flying high on the back of a giant butterfly. It’s spectacular, and for the most part she sings well, looks great, and appears to be having almost as much fun as her audience (a spread of ages, including many young girls, with their mums, first-wave Perry fans who’ve passed the baton of sparkly empowerment on).

Katy Perry is a consummate performer.Credit: Martin Philbey

Perry can be a little tone-deaf at times – her Blue Origin flight reeked of privilege, and working with producer Dr Luke was problematic at the least – but so much of the recent criticism of her smacks of ageism.

She knows it, too. When she finished a terrific rendition of Teenage Dream, she responded to a call from a fan. “Oh still? I can be your hall pass still? I’m 40 years old. Forty and fabulous.” That she is.
Reviewed by Karl Quinn

MUSIC | Rising festival
Pete and Bas ★★★
Max Watts, June 8

Peter Bowditch and Basil Bellgrave take the stage at the packed Max Watts a little early. They’re men in their 70s and they talk (and dress) like they’re in a Guy Ritchie film.

Pete and Bas perform at Max Watts on June 8.Credit: Mandy Wu

“Are you ready for some madness?” says Bas, in a broad cockney accent.

“We ain’t here for a laugh! This is serious” says Pete. The DJ fills the room with reverberating rap airhorn and they launch into a drill track called Do One. I’m in.

So are they actors? An elaborate bit of performance art? A septuagenerian Milli Vanilli? Did they have ties to notorious London gangsters the Kray brothers? Did Bas do a stint playing piano on cruise ships? I’ve looked into all this. The answers are far less interesting than the questions.

So maybe it’s a joke. But the joke wouldn’t land if they weren’t actually great.

Are Pete and Bas actors? An elaborate bit of performance art?Credit: Mandy Wu

Their flow (on the recordings at least, more on that later) is fast, aggressive, razor sharp. And their lyrics are full of colour, character and flashes of violence. Sample: “Recipes, batches, powders, waxes, cash in hand no taxes / Kerosene, matches, burn down factories, big boy tactics / Burning, burning, all this money I’m earning.” Like most rappers, they’re entertainers, storytellers.

Bas drags an excited young woman on stage.“I f--ken love you c---s!” she screams into the mic before twerking her way through the next track, Pint and a Fag.

The crowd are rowdy. Half a dozen people are hauled up to dance and occasionally rap. It is, as Bas puts it, “gettin’ a little bit lively”. Pete throws a wad of cash into the crowd. Like the rest of the night, I can’t quite tell if it’s real or not.

At 70-something, they do struggle to keep up with the flow. The backing tracks come complete with the recorded vocals as guides, and occasionally they lose track and mumble their way through a verse. It doesn’t hinder the night as much as you might think.

After about an hour ,they wrap up with Mr Worldwide (“Keep one eye open for the plainclothes / I need more leg room for the plane home”), and they’re off. “Back to our coffins,” as Pete puts it.

It’s possible I’ve just seen a couple of elderly actors fumble through a lip sync for an hour at the behest of a canny management company. I don’t know! Frankly, I don’t want to know. That was the most fun I’ve had at a show in ages.
Reviewed by Will Cox

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