Bill Murray show opens up some new worlds

HOLLYWOOD comic star Bill Murray deadpanned his way through two hours of words and music on his first visit here for 38 years.

Bill Murray performing at Sydney Opera House with cellist Jan Vogler (right), Vanessa Perez and violinist Mira Wang. Picture: Prudence Upton

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HOLLYWOOD comic star Bill Murray deadpanned his way through two hours of words and music on his first visit here for 38 years in an evening which brought some enchantment with occasional strangeness and plenty of hilarity.

German star cellist Jan Vogler and Friends — Vogler’s wife Mira Wang, armed with a Strad and a figure-hugging shimmering golden gown, and exciting young Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez — provided the music in an eclectic track mix which veered from a Bach cello suite prelude to a slow piano trio movement from Schubert, taking in some George and Ira Gershwin, Tom Waits and Leonard Bernstein along the way.

These extracts were spliced with Murray’s masterful readings from American literature (hence the show’s title New Worlds) of poems by Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier ”Leatherstocking tales”, reminiscences of Paris by Ernest Hemingway and a long section from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Friend (cue Henry Mancini’s Moon River). The tour was also promoting the Decca album of the same name which grew out of a chance encounter between Murray and Vogler on a long haul flight.

New Worlds by Bill Murray, Jan Vogler and Friends

There’s nothing new in exploring the nexus between words and music — consummate entertainers Peter Ustinov and Victor Borge both did it in their inimitable ways decades ago.

But it’s a road that hasn’t been less travelled in recent years so Murray’s show was eagerly awaited. Patchy at times — a shockingly bad rendering of Robert Burns’ Loch Lomond was one of the few low points — the star of Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and a swath of indie cult classics, held his audience amused and enthralled by turns.

DRUNKEN

A highlight for this listener was Wang’s louche performance of Ravel’s Blues from the violin sonata — full of sliding sevenths and syncopated pizzicato — to set the scene for Murray’s reimagining of James Thurber’s excruciatingly witty skit on a drunken Ulysses S Grant mistakenly surrendering to General Robert E Lee, instead of the other way round.

Bill Murray vamps it up with cellist Jan Vogler, Vanessa Perez and violinist Mira Wang. Picture: Prudence Upton

It Ain’t Necessarily So from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and I Feel Pretty from Bernstein’s West Side Story showed off his finely honed vaudevillian skills, and the 68-year-old tangoing with Wang to Astor Piazzolla’s steamily erotic Oblivion let us know he was no mean hoofer as well.

A slapstick take on Waits’ My Piano Has Been Drinking and gospel growling version of Van Morrison’s When Will I Ever Learn to Live In God showed a performer who gives it his all, even if his singing can best be described as “characterful” and on a night when he was occasionally coughing from a head cold or overdose of seeds from City of Sydney’s obsessive planting of London plane trees.

He still managed to belt out six encores — including crowd pleasers Smokey Robinson’s My Girl and Marty Robbins’ El Paso — before rounding off a night “in the coolest room in the town” with Vogler’s nuanced performance of Saint-Saens’ The Swan, overlaid by Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats, with Murray giving his fans the benediction “may you in your innocence sail through this to that”.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: Bill Murray, New Worlds

● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

● WHEN: Friday, November 9