Mad March reviews: The shows to watch this year
NZ pop royalty Lorde, Canadian dance theatre and a walking sheep – read the latest reviews from the Arts Editor’s desk.
SA News
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
With more than 1000 shows and events on around town during festival month, let The Advertiser’s team of critics guide your way with the latest stars and reviews from the Arts Editor’s desk.
ADELAIDE’S MAD MARCH REVIEWS
Jennifer Koh, violin
Adelaide Festival
Ukaria
March 19
Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin are among the most extraordinary works in the history of Western music.
Oddly, not much is known for certain about why he wrote them and for whom. What is certain though is that they demand a violinist who is not merely a virtuoso – which in my book is not necessarily a compliment – but also a fine musician.
Jennifer Koh certainly fits the bill.
These are tremendously difficult works and violinists sometimes bend them around a bit in order to cope with thorny passages, or to suit their interpretive whims.
Not so here – Koh’s approach is straight down the line, and she is evidently not afraid to push herself to the limit, or at least allow herself to be pushed by the music.
There are many different ways these works can be played. Koh’s approach is notable for its power and intensity.
If there is not a lot of room left for tenderness, the monumental scale of the music is conveyed emphatically.
Wedged between the Bach Sonatas in A minor and C major were two works by Missy Mazzoli – Kinski Paganini, and Dissolve, My Heart.
Woven through them are passages reminiscent of Bach, and they have an intensity that perfectly suits Jennifer Koh’s temperament.
They formed an impressive interlude between Bach’s remarkable sonatas.
Stephen Whittington
Fantastical Journeys
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Town Hall
March 18
Young Finnish conductor Emilia Hoving made her impressive debut with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in Fantastical Journeys.
Hoving, who received the 2021 Finnish critics’ prize for best newcomer, has a commanding stage presence and communicated a clear vision in her interpretation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
She brought out a stunning range of colours from the orchestra, and created a thrilling energy in the climactic moments.
Despite her commanding presence, Hoving also allowed plenty of space for the many solo lines in Scheherezade to unfold. Guest concertmaster Elizabeth Layton showed great sensitivity in the extensive violin solos, and there was beautifully warm and nuanced playing in the woodwind, horn and cello melodic lines.
The program as a whole was well conceived, with a clear thematic throughline and musical connections between all three works in the concert.
Sibelius’s The Oceanides, a tone poem depicting images from Greek mythology, may be one of the composer’s lesser-known works, but it is an excellent example of his skilful orchestration with luscious harmonies and particularly effective writing for woodwinds.
Missy Mazzoli’s Violin Concerto, according to the composer, “casts the soloist as a soothsayer, sorcerer, healer and pied piper-type character, leading the orchestra through five interconnected healing spells”.
Mazzoli creates a captivating sound world in this, using unusual instrument pairings and techniques like slap pizzicato, harmonics and bowed percussion to great effect. Violinist Jennifer Koh was absolutely electrifying in this, with phenomenal technical agility.
Melanie Walters
Revisor
Adelaide Festival
Her Majesty’s Theatre
March 17 to 19
The curtain had not yet hit the floor when the audience leapt to its collective feet to cheer the performers of Kidd Pivot to the flies.
Such was the reaction of the first night audience to Revisor, as remarkable a piece of dance theatre anyone is likely to see.
Not just to see, either, but to experience.
Kidd Pivot, with creators Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, have substantial Adelaide form with a sellout season of their Betroffenheit in 2017. That is another work that leaves an indelible mark, a confronting account of the journey from grief and anguish to redemption.
Revisor is no less challenging. Loosely based on Gogol’s The Government Inspector, where the corrupt leaders of a rural commune are thrown into turmoil by the rumoured visit of a high-ranking official, Pite and Young give the story’s satirical intent – mistaken identities, and all that sort of thing – a 21st century political edge. The Inspector becomes the Revisor, who has been sent to “move the commune to the left.”
The first section is sheer delight. A prerecorded narration is deftly lip-synched by the dancers, and what a funny tale they tell. The horror at the thought of their idyllic life being upset – or their corruption exposed – are expressed in silent movie-like exaggerated poses of woe, but what glorious moves they make to get there.
Jerky, rapid-fire movements are executed with breathtaking precision. And how well the individual characters are drawn.
The second part of this epic journey replicates the first, to a certain extent, but in purer dance. Casting off the costumes, the dancers revisit parts of the story, the narrative now turning to the language of the studio as they repeat their moves. At times, they seem stuck at a certain point. Which part of the story are they stuck on? The fluidity of the ensemble is awesome. The lighting in this section, reflective design from Jay Gower Taylor, is especially fine.
An epilogue, again in costume, brings us full circle, as the Director discovers a real Revisor is about to arrive. The wildly exaggerated reactions draw plenty of laughs, but they’re a little more wry than at first. We do well to remember Gogol’s words in this very play. “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves.”
Revisor really is as good as it gets. A must-see.
Peter Burdon
The Sheep Song
Adelaide Festival
Dunstan Playhouse
March 16 to 19
One sheep literally “stands” alone from the flock in the surprise opening scene of this mesmerising but challenging, wordless physical and visual theatre work by Belgian company FC Bergman.
That funny first sequence – the details of which are best not revealed in advance – is worth the price of admission alone, but there are many more which are equally sublime or horrifying in this Faustian Odyssey (to mix mythologies).
Faceless human passers-by initially stop, turn and stare at the spectacle before following it … like sheep.
Remarkably realistic, the sheep costume is a marvel in itself, as is the fact that the actor inside performs on the balls of their feet – on platform soles, no less – throughout its journey of self-discovery as it heads towards enlightenment, which beckons in the form of a shining light from the wings.
Adding to that challenge are the multiple moving sidewalks which run back and forth across the front of the stage, keeping the sheep’s evolution in constant motion from its first tentative steps to full-speed sprints, along with the props and occasional sets viewed as if from a travelling vehicle.
En route, the show creates a series of striking tableaus – one even echoing Michelangelo’s Pieta – as the sheep is beaten, engages in sex and undergoes multiple surgical procedures in an effort to become more human.
Punctuating this at regular intervals is a perverted puppet show in which the Punch-like character becomes perpetually aroused and is punished by its God-like puppeteer.
Like the grotesque half-human, half-lamb baby it fathers – a truly disturbing animatronic which moves and cries at agonising length – and the characters it encounters from Pinocchio to Michael Jackson, the mutant sheep is not at home in the new life or skin that it so sorely sought.
Afterwards, someone commented that it reminded them of an audience member who, when asked their opinion of another show, said they were “still processing” it. The Sheep Song is likely to have the same effect long after you leave the theatre.
Patrick McDonald
Lorde
Adelaide Festival
Entertainment Centre
March 16
Almost a decade ago a teenage singer from across the Tasman Sea fronted a modest crowd at the Thebarton Theatre armed with two fresh Grammy Awards and sickening stage fright.
An instant global star, her hit first single Royals from her 2013 debut album Pure Heroine made the Auckland-born teenager one of the youngest artists ever to have an international number one hit.
Then Ella Yelich-O’Connor – more commonly known by her stage name Lorde – was 16 years old, deathly afraid of the limelight and fearful of where her new found fame would lead her.
Now at 26, she stands with unshakeable confidence in the middle of the Entertainment Centre arena, as part of the Adelaide Festival, on one of the last legs of her Solar Power tour, which was put on hold while a pandemic swept the globe.
“It’s my absolute pleasure to finally be back in Adelaide, it’s been a minute,” she acknowledged. “It’s a long f***ing time.”
South Australian fans were ready to hear the album’s eclectic range live and Lorde did not disappoint.
The stage was lit by hazy, bright lights reminiscent of warm summer days, the inspiration behind her most recent album, and decorated with sets of stairs including one single file set leading up to the roof where Lorde performed for the nosebleed section.
Opening with Leader of a New Regime, Lorde set the scene swimmingly: “Wearing SPF 3000 for the ultraviolet rays,” she sang.
Wearing a sultry blue silk, three-piece suit, Lorde sashayed with seasoned ease, inviting the crowd to eat up her smooth movements and even smoother vocals.
She slipped seamlessly between tracks from Pure Heroine, Melodrama and Solar Power – Homemade Dynamite from 2017 and Buzzcut Season from 2013 – with a quick change of the lights and four costume changes throughout.
Highlights included a heart-wrenching performance of Stoned at the Nail Salon, which made for an eerily emotional atmosphere of 20-somethings wondering if they too had made the right decisions in their life.
The crowd erupted when Lorde positioned herself directly under a harsh stage light, projecting her silhouette onto the stage backdrop, and sung “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”, the opening line of Royals, her most successful single.
Other notable moments included Ribs, when Lorde invited the crowd to “dance for our 15-year-old selves”, Liability, Mood Ring, Supercut, Perfect Places and Solar Power.
However it was Greenlight that truly made the show as Lorde allowed her fans to sing some of the song’s iconic lines.
The main act was accompanied by 23-year-old Adelaide singer-songwriter Stellie whose heartfelt lyrics, bold synths and hypnotic beats mesmerised the audience almost instantly.
Stellie was followed by one of Lorde’s favourite bands, LA-based trio MUNA, which had never performed in Adelaide before. The trio’s energy was infectious, imploring the audience to “groove” along to their dynamic music.
Lorde ended her incredible show with Team, a song that represents the intersection of all her albums and an acknowledgment of her roots.
Evangeline Polymeneas
Heartland
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Town Hall
March 16
The evocative soundscape of Heartland beautifully captured the spirit of the Australian landscape.
William Barton and Véronique Serret’s Adelaide Festival performance was a live, multimedia version of their 2022 album of the same name.
Barton and Serret are renowned for their virtuosity on didgeridoo and violin respectively, but Heartland also featured emotive vocals from both musicians, as well as skilful guitar playing from Barton and an effective array of electronic and percussive techniques.
Described in the program as a “chamber oratorio”, Heartland had a compelling narrative structure with the different musical and visual material unfurling over the course of the performance. Much of the music featured static, minimalist harmonies with exquisite textures built from layers of drones and looped motifs, which gradually evolved into rock-influenced driving rhythms in the song Didge Fusion.
The soundscape was combined with subtle lighting design and stunning projected visuals by Samuel James, with depictions of diverse natural phenomena including videography of rock faces, leaves, scribbly bark and raindrops.
Heartland was inspired by the poetry of Barton’s mother, Aunty Delmae Barton, and the performance included several readings of her work. There were some balance issues that made the text difficult to comprehend, but this was a minor issue in an otherwise exceptionally well-conceived and executed artistic venture.
Melanie Walters
So Much Myself: Piano Portraits
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Town Hall
March 17
Pianist Sonya Lifschitz and composer Robert Davidson have created a powerful mixed media statement in So Much Myself, with Lifschitz’s role running far beyond simply playing. Davidson loves language and enthusiastically subjects the writings and speeches of his all-female cast through archival film footage to obtain musical parallels. The theme of female potential is explored from the 10th century Hrotsvit to Julia Gillard and Greta Thunberg by way of Nellie Melba, Nina Simone and many others.
Davidson cannily picks up on speech inflexions, modulations and rhythms with his musical score underlining and characterising what is being said. At times the effect was almost reminiscent of traditional musical recitative giving the filmed conversations and speeches added dimension and colour but without distraction.
The one hour plus work was nicely paced, with some more relaxed moments in the middle involving delicious humour from two of Lifschit’z older family members recalling incidents during the terrible Second World War in Ukraine. And nostalgia evoked by Clara Schumann’s significant artistic accomplishments was swiftly countered by the redoubtable Ethel Smythe’s views on Brahms’ moral character. Lifschitz and Davidson end on a deadly serious note with a stirring conclusion involving Rachel Carson’s and Greta Thunberg’s influential words on climate change.
Throughout, whether as performer, speaker or actor, and often all three simultaneously, Lifschitz exuded a tremendous energy and élan that was entirely apt for the distinguished figures she was presenting.
Rodney Smith
Air Play
Adelaide Festival
Festival Theatre
March 15 to 19
It’s amazing what can be done with a few balloons and veils once there is air for them to sail upon.
Bring the technical forces of the Festival Theatre into play and some party tricks become great spectacles that set people alight with childlike wonderment.
Acrobuffos performers Seth Bloom and Christina Gelsone have been working up this hour-long engrossing, wordless event with kinetic sculptor Daniel Wurtzel to create simple comedic clown sequences that explode into glorious, performed visual arts.
At its most simple, the two play with perfectly buoyed balloons, employing excerpts of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopedies for sound effects. Careful choices of music from classical to rock help set up the mood for each sequence.
A ring of fans creates uplift to keep long veils afloat and twisting together, even without their handlers, and looking like an enormous flame.
Balloons are chased out into the audience by Bloom and Gelsone in bold and deliberately childlike clumsiness across rows of people, causing mayhem and laughter wherever they go.
And when big latex balloons eat up and swallow the performers, it launches an entirely original sequence of nuttiness.
Music, sound, lighting – and wind – are used to perfectly encase the performers and their floating objects and it all comes together in a memorable, moving tableau of starry skies to excerpts of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
A lot of children, and their parents, will long remember this show.
Tim Lloyd
Celestial
Adelaide Festival
St Peter’s Cathedral
March 15
Amid the bustle of the festival season, Adelaide Chamber Singers’ Celestial performance provided a welcome moment of tranquillity and reflection.
The ambience of St Peter’s Cathedral was well-suited to this program, which, according to the program, was “about looking up and out, to the natural harmony of the heavens, and its relationship to our earthly lives”.
This was achieved with a thoughtfully curated program that paired medieval and renaissance music with a diverse range of contemporary works.
A simple arrangement of the 13th century Dou Way Robyn/Sancta Mater Gratiae opened the program, with clarity and pathos from ACS. Welsh composer Paul Mealor’s Ubi Caritas followed; the close harmonies in this were executed with precision and warmth.
Ērik Ešenvalds’ Stars made excellent use of the ethereal sounds of resonating wine glasses and singing bowls, while the antiphonal effects of the double choir in Z. Randall Stroope’s We Beheld Once Again The Stars worked beautifully in the cathedral’s acoustic.
Alongside the contemporary works and early music, the program featured arrangements of music by JS Bach and Elgar. Both Rhonda Sandberg and Knut Nystedt’s arrangements of Bach’s Come, Sweet Death made effective use of dissonance in expressing the nuances of the text. Sandberg’s arrangement featured subtle choreography by Edwin London to further express the yearning in the text.
John Careron’s Lux Aeterna, a transcription of Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, was as effective (if not more so) as the original, and showcased the singers’ excellent blending and dynamic control.
Melanie Walters
Music for Other Worlds
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Town Hall
March 15
Great improvisation requires impeccable technique and imagination. Marvellous improvisation just needs Paul Grabowsky.
His instantaneous response on piano to photographer Alex Frayne’s vision of Australia was a unique and unrepeatable joy.
If you only know Frayne’s black and white pictures of the city’s lanes and dishevelled alleys, his radiant colours will open your eyes.
Grabowsky responded to the mist-veiled gums of Botanic Park with an impression at times reminiscent of Ravel, and the abandoned Methodist church at Claypans was celebrated with a half-remembered hymn.
Jazz syncopations accompanied a mesmerising set of roadscapes, heading north on Kangaroo Island, and a sun-drenched landscape and a creek in the hills manifested the palette of Tom Roberts’ A Break Away!
There was barely any human presence; a girl on a swing in a darkened garden, three distant figures on a beach. I didn’t notice, as a mate did, the dead kangaroo.
The title talks of music for other worlds but these impressions, visual and aural, are of our world, only experienced and communicated with imagination, skill and integrity.
Ewart Shaw
The Trombone Guy Story
★★★★★
Holden Street Theatres/The Garage International
March 14 to 19
Swedish trombone virtuoso – for it is so – Elias Faingersh’s solo show The Trombone Guy’s Story is little short of a revelation.
With just himself, his trombone, and a serious bit of looping tech (oh, and a cored apple and a glove puppet) he’s not so much a one-man band as a one-man orchestra.
He starts “at the very beginning,” with the sounds of new life. The trombone, and his voice, through the technological interface, are the cries of a newborn. Genius.
Later on, they’re the annoying sounds of the teen next door, doof doof and all. Later on still, they’re the sounds of passion – and if you’ve ever wondered what trombone sex sounds like, this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
But his triumph is a blinding performance of Ravel’s Bolero, made of the simplest musical elements yet achieving a complex timbre that’s made it a justly popular classic. Musicians, storm the doors! Everyone else, too.
Peter Burdon
Circus Wonderland – A Neverland Adventure
★★★★½
Wonderland Spiegeltent
Until March 19
Are you ready to go back to Neverland? Not the Michael Jackson one – nobody’s ready for that – but the one from J.M. Barrie’s classic story about Peter Pan, Wendy, Tinkerbell, a bunch of pirates and a ticking crocodile.
Think your happy thoughts and get ready to take the second star to the right and head straight on ’til morning to Circus Wonderland – A Neverland Adventure.
It’s hard to get the balance right on a family show – pitch it too much at the kids and the parents have a miserable time, make it too crude and you disappoint your paying customers – but this one nails it.
Sure it’s about a children’s character, but this show genuinely has something for everyone. The storyline is easy to follow, the music’s fantastic and the acting and dry, sarcastic (and clean) comedy is probably the funniest I’ve seen in a kids’ show. And I’ve seen plenty.
But this, first and foremost, is a circus show and that aspect is exceptional. There are some truly exhilarating performances and stunts including balancing, acrobatics, some impressive five-way juggling, dazzling hoopwork and truly beautiful aerial displays.
Oh, and the acoustic ending is a wonderful change of pace, with Captain Hook displaying an impressive set of pipes on Ruth B’s captivating Lost Boy.
This show is perfect for the young ones who want to stay that way forever, and equally enjoyed by those who grew up a long time ago.
Tom Bowden
Voldemort and the Teenage Hogwarts Musical Parody
★★★★★
The Virago at Gluttony
Until March 19
You don’t need a crystal ball to know that someone, somewhere, is cashing on the Harry Potter phenomenon.
Salty Theatre gets away with murder, mayhem and music in this energetic investigation of the early years of he who must not … well, you know the rest.
It’s a joyful and unauthorised romp through the corridors and common rooms of Hogwarts, for everyone who grew up alongside Harry, Hermione and Ron.
Alex Donnelly’s rocking Tom Riddle is a bad boy from the start, even if the murder of his beloved Muffin, Stephanie Beza, may have tipped the balance.
Jonathan Shilling’s gormless Derald, Emerson Hansford as the unfortunate Moaning Myrtle, and Stefanie John, an entitled Genevieve Gryffindor, have the best time on stage and Guillaume Gentil is Professor Al, whose surname keeps getting mangled disrespectfully.
The singing and the dancing will carry you along but when Jay Haggett, a young Hagrid, sings his ballad about the care of magical creatures, you’ll be spellbound. It’s worth seeing the show again just for that truly magical moment.
Evidently investigators from the Ministry of Magic have let this irreverent tribute flourish, like a weed in a crack in the edifice of JK Rowling’s success. One hundred points to director Miranda Middleton and Salty Theatre.
Ewart Shaw
Underwire
★★★★
Holden Street Theatres
March 14 to 19
“Mam’ries!” sings Adelaide expat Gemma Caruana (with apologies to Cats) as she introduces the heavy load she’s been carrying since her teens.
A double-F-sized load, in fact, that was so problematic that she had breast reduction surgery at the tender age of 18.
But as fans of the famous Otto Titsling know, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, and Caruana tells her story with unfailingly good humour.
She laughs off the indignity of it all for a young teen, and the vile catcalls later on. And we laugh with her, not just because we’re on side, but because her stories, for example about fitting an enormous bra, are really, really funny.
It hurts, for sure, but with a whole lot of love and the heart of a lion, she powers on through.
Peter Burdon
Lawrence Mooney – Embracing Your Limitations
★★★★
Umbrella Revolution at GOUD
Until March 19
Lawrence Mooney knows a thing or two about self help books. He’s read The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People and is well versed in the ways of Tony Robbins.
Which makes him the perfect person to tell us what works and what’s bullsh*t.
So ditch your social media envy and join Guru Larry on a hilarious guided hour in a quest to find inner happiness and true joy, through some life lessons from the Moonman himself.
From his experience with AA, and embracing the joy of being judgmental, to acquiring an easily pleased ex-racehorse, it’s a terrific hour of stand-up from an instantly likeable storyteller, interspersed with a couple of rounds of game show “Cat or Woke Lefty?” for good measure.
His bit about the diminishing satisfaction of marriage is a standout, and I guarantee you’ll notice more adult massage parlours in your travels after seeing this show. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out the beauty right in front of you.
Tom Bowden
Maureen: Harbinger of Death
Adelaide Festival
Space Theatre
March 14 to 18
A very sharply observed character, endlessly funny turns of phrase, and a great deal of empathy in this show by writer-performer Jonny Hawkins compel us to view the value of society’s older women and cherish their experiences and opinions in a fresh, more celebratory light.
Far from the doom and gloom suggested by its title, Maureen: Harbinger of Death is an absolute hoot from go to whoa, while also being a deeply emotional and sociopolitical commentary.
Hawkins introduces us to Maureen, an aged lifelong resident of Kings Cross – based on a real person but now an amalgam of different women’s stories – before donning the character’s jewellery, lipstick and skirt, which matches the fabric covering the walls, floor, table and chair.
Rooms are like souls, we learn, and people are very much the places where they live.
Maureen, now confined largely to her chair, spews forth cigarette smoke and unsolicited opinions in equal measure and without any filter, a privilege of the old, wielded with trembling hands and a voice like a rasp.
She has lived through the Swinging Sixties and survived the AIDS crisis, although many of her friends have not, and Maureen possesses an uncanny ability to predict the moment of their deaths.
Through her contemporary retelling of the Persephone myth, the character also shows how attitudes have changed – and how they still have further to go.
Hawkins’ work is both inspired and inspirational, and a one-person tour de force.
Patrick McDonald
WOMADelaide – Monday
Adelaide Festival
Botanic Park
March 13
One of the mainstays of the WOMAD tradition, Youssou N’Dour has been a great favourite of Adelaide audiences for years – actually for decades.
The master singer and musician is close to royalty in Senegal, and a media baron and former tourism minister there to boot.
He invented his own music style by marrying the tradition of griot, a kind of sacred minstrel, with the traditional mbalax style of song, and fusing that with Latin styles.
A dozen members of his band Le Super Etoile de Dakar nestle this great talent, never in his way but all capable of great contributions, especially percussionist Assame Thiam on talking drum.
But this performance is all about one of the greats of the World Music movement at 30 years of WOMADelaide, 31 counting the inspired programming of Rob Brookman for the 1992 Adelaide Festival.
A generation and a half seemed but an eye-blink as the sounds of Soul II Soul, whose amazing beats accompanied many a denizen of The Planet and the Cargo Club, filled Botanic Park.
What music it was, still clear as a bell, haze of time (among other hazes, if memory serves) notwithstanding.
With Jazzie B still fronting the band, and ever more Messianic as the years go by, this was a superbly produced set covering pretty well all the key numbers from the seminal Club Classics Vol One of 1988 through to Love Enuff from 1999.
The tunes stand on their own, but never better than when sung by Caron Wheeler and Charlotte Kelly, still pumping it out after 30 years. They also stand the test of time. Great stuff.
The recent re-release of jazz legend Madeleine Peyroux’s 2004 Careless Love was a cause for celebration among her legions of fans, and the reception she received from a rapt WOMADelaide audience showed clearly how popular her music remains.
An hour-long set included many of the classic tracks on the famous album, with a couple of bonbons thrown in for good measure, like the steam train rhythm of There’ll Be Some Changes Made.
A new song, How I Wish, is a tough number, an outright attack on much of what doesn’t make America great: “Endless journeying / Yet to hear freedom ring.”
Peyroux’s voice grows huskier over the years, but what an instrument it is.
A Māori woman, Ria Hall has looked to international styles and a full-rhythm band of guitars, keys and percussion to make her passionately expressed views carry.
There is strong reggae underpinning to set up her engagement but her lyrical melodies and powerhouse big-range voice come across WOMADelaide on their own trajectory.
That she is a champion of indigenous ways of looking at the world is clear from her talks, her love songs to her children and her pleas for us to recognise western values in history and ownership are not part of her own culture.
To underscore her ideas and bring emphasis, the music can break radically out of the reggae groove into other modes, of folk and a winning K.D. Lang-style country pop.
The sounds of Tuareg rock star Mdou Moctar are the sounds of some of the great western guitarists recycled through his early passions and brought back with a lightning technique.
Once he was a kid in Niger, improvising a guitar against the wishes of his parents.
Nowadays he’s the star on stage, standing tall in electric blue dress and white shawl and with a left-hand guitar with a bunch of dials.
His two-fingering of the strings while working the frets percussively is deceptively light but the sound coming out is very fast, drawing comparison with Eddie Van Halen.
It’s very loud rock with a thumping drum kit, made for headbanging, mosh dancing, exotic through being sung in Moctar’s native tongue.
Ripple Effect Band is the first women’s rock band out of western Arnhem Land, and they are keen to get the message out in English and in their native languages about their cultures.
Their country rock songs are about life in Maningrida, from cyclones to lullabies, and the challenges of life in tropical homelands.
They sing in unison songs they have written that should become part of the future anthems of their country.
With a strong, fast rhythm section there is a lot of kick to the band, but it is the introductions – to the healers, mothers and tradition holders – that makes the journey this set of women has embarked upon special.
US singer-songwriter Angel Olsen’s distinctive country-cum-Americana vibe has been an undercurrent in her music for many years now, but on her current release Big Time it really comes to the fore.
Much of her one-off WOMAD set drew on the album, and it’s always interesting when a large crowd – Stage 2, the second largest – goes quiet: “How can I go on? / With all those old dreams / I am the ghost now / Living those old scenes”.
Olsen didn’t ignore the back catalogue, and hundreds were singing along with 2016’s powerful Sister, big and expansive, vast waves of sound reverberating around the park. The laid-back 2022 track All The Good Times seemed a calm closer, but her impassioned cover of Without You brought a memorable set to an epic end.
Tim Lloyd, Peter Burdon
Kronos Quartet
Adelaide Festival
Festival Theatre
March 13
The Kronos Quartet was upstaged at this concert – by a bird.
The bird in question is known to ornithologists as Cracticus nigrogularis, more commonly as the Australian pied butcherbird.
French composer Olivier Messiaen said “birds are the greatest musicians on the planet” and the butcherbird is living proof of that.
It can produce tones of absolute purity and sing intervals with the most perfect intonation, but equally it can produce an array of noises that imitate all manner of things both human and natural. Its musical inventiveness is astounding.
BEAK, a creation by Australians Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor had its premiere at this concert – it featured a recording of a butcherbird, with video projection, and the Kronos Quartet in a kind of dialogue with the bird.
Kronos Quartet are formidable musicians, but honestly the bird won hands – or wings – down.
Kronos opened with George Crumb’s Black Angels, a work that has been in their repertoire for many years. This performance was, as you would expect, authoritative and utterly absorbing.
The staging of this performance was striking, with the instruments hanging from the ceiling when they weren’t being used, and an array of musical glasses on a platform behind the quartet which were theatrically revealed midway though the performance.
Aleksandra Vrebalov’s ilektrkés rimes (Electric Rimes) is, in part at least, a finely crafted tribute to Black Angels, inhabiting a similar sound world but with a rather different, more meditative character.
The program also included pieces by Penderecki and Missy Mazzoli. There was a bonus addition to the concert when Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat joined the quartet for a group of songs – some of which had been performed earlier at WOMADelaide.
All in all, this was a concert of exceptionally fine playing by one of the world’s most respected quartets, but the song of the butcherbird was a revelation.
Stephen Whittington
WOMADelaide – Sunday
Adelaide Festival
Botanic Park
Until March 13
Another WOMADelaide and another discovery, San Salvador, a group of six singers from south western France preserving an amazing music along with their Occitan language.
There is closely harmonised call song underwritten by driving rhythms from drums, clapping and percussive speech-song that’s breathtakingly fast.
Each song is so packed with musical adventures rhythms that it as an opera in itself. You can hear all the tension of flamenco and of minaret calls tightly mastered and re-purposed into a unique style. An instant hit.
San Salvador has another workshop session at 3pm Monday on the Zoo Stage.
Smooth jazz seguing to Afrobeat from eight-piece UK band Kokoroko settles a mood on the big dancing crowd. The brass is called on to occasionally upbeat a whole train of sound from the rest of the band – guitars, keys, and two sets of percussion.
At the front the vocalists can move across from languid romantic styles to Fela Kuti kinds of calls.
High class players all, but vocalist and trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey can do bent, lonely notes that bring Miles Davis to mind.
WOMADelaide is a superbly organised festival, but the best laid plans can go awry.
Out of the four instrumentalists of Taraf de Caliu, three did not arrive from Romania. That left the violinist and the singer.
Three Australian musicians had to be found at short notice; They were confronted with the daunting prospect of playing with Georghe Anghel, a legend in the realms of Romanian Roma music.
The music often starts at a tempo that is “as fast as possible” then progresses to “faster” and “even faster”. Add to that the unusual rhythmic patterns and improvisatory elements, and they had every right to be terrified. If things were slightly uncertain to begin with, they settled in and did a fine job.
Anghel produced some unusual sounds from his violin, scraping the strings with his fingers to produce sounds that might have come from the barnyard, and did indeed lead into a kind of Romanian barn dance. Together with his son Robert as singer, Anghel gave a genuine taste of this earthy, frenetic music.
One of the many visual highlights of WOMAD 2023 is surely France’s Didier Théron Company whose unforgettable inflatable suits are utterly irresistible to old and young alike.
As these pastel spectres rove through the crowds, every interaction is a treasure, from awe-struck stares to squeals of delight – not all from the young, much to the amusement of many – and everything in between.
A courtly dance here, a jive there, and some delicious responses to the music of passing stages in the park. This is organic, situational theatre without the pretence, and a sheer delight.
Small Island Big Song is the result of 16 nations of the Pacific and Indian oceans working together in music, dance and film, a project which brings the dangers of rising sea levels from global warming home to roost.
This is a kaleidoscope of singers, a totally eclectic mix of instruments from thumb piano to conch shell and songs from Madagascar to Taiwan. The music moves from reggae to dub and most heart-rending, lament.
Behind the performers a film screen captures elements of life from oceanic peoples. It makes clear the special relationships so many islanders have with water in all its moods.
Zambian singer, rapper and songwriter Sampa Tempo aka Sampa the Great shot to attention in 2017-18 when her amazing Birds and the Bee9 mixtape won the Australian Music Prize.
Since then she’s gained a huge following, climaxing in an appearance – the first by a Zambian band – at Glastonbury in 2022. If neither she nor her band are the first from that proud nation to front WOMADelaide, she nonetheless got (and expected, by all accounts) a rock-star reception with an expansive set that drew on her two studio albums and her extensive singles catalogue, through to the new track she debuted at Glastonbury, Never Forget.
The massive Adelaide crowd was swaying in time – it’s what this festival is all about.
A big Colombian band, Ondatropica is like a party; so many things are going on at once it’s hard to know where to look. There are even speeches. In Spanish.
It’s late at WOMADelaide and everyone is boogalooing to this big brassy Latin groove, an exploration of dance styles across the top part of South America. They are stirring up the inches of feathers which have turned the world snow white, accumulated from three nights of the Place does Anges spectacle.
Gradually Ondatropica unwinds its soloists, from band leader Mario Galeano on synth and accordion to an excellent grand pianist.
Tim Lloyd, Peter Burdon, Stephen Whittington
WOMADelaide – Saturday
Adelaide Festival
Botanic Park
Until March 13
After two years of the “other” WOMAD – Wearing Our Masks And Distancing – it is a joy behold a singing, grooving throng of 30,000 people making the most of the glorious long weekend weather … and a World Of Music, Arts and Dance.
The fact that Saturday was a sellout became very evident during Florence + The Machine’s set – the place was absolutely jammed.
It’s not hard to see why Brit Florence Welch is a major drawcard. Resplendent in a flowing gown and matching long red locks, Welch channels the great front women – Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks, Bjork – while bringing something that’s completely her own.
During hit track Dog Days Are Over, Welch paused to conduct a routine she does at every show – the “put your f#%^ing phone away” ritual.
“This isn’t about what you can share later, this is about what’s happening now.”
Big God is sparse, haunting and completely brilliant with Welch working the crowd from the photographers’ pit, handing out hugs to the faithful.
She’s backed by a band capable of weaving complex and beautiful soundscapes before switching to powerful, driving rock when required.
Earlier, South Korean ensemble ADG7 melded traditional instrumentation with contemporary K-pop sensibilities and “shamanistic ritual music” to create a sound that oscillates between a deliriously cutesy girl group and a historical action film score.
A six-piece band dressed in white is fronted by three female singers in different outfits cut from the same blue-and-red patterned fabric, and lead the crowd through “the magic spell that makes all of you happy” with lots of fun, crazy jumping, semi-robotic dance moves and lots of hand waving.
Most intriguing among the instruments were two gayageums – 12-string zithers which were variously played with bows like a cello, plucked like guitars and strummed like harps – and the saenghwang, which can sound like anything from a harmonica to a full-blown church organ.
Stage 2 was packed to overflowing for The Proclaimers as Scottish twins Craig and Charlie Reid delivered the most joyous, uplifting singalong imaginable, spanning their 35-year catalogue from the new, rollicking opener Dentures Out to the inevitable closing 1980s double-whammy of I’m On My Way and I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).
Their four-piece backing band, propelled by keyboardist Steven Christie’s Hammond organ sound, seemed to turn the rock dial up for the occasion as they barrelled through upbeat classics like Over and Done With, There’s a Touch, the wedding waltz of Let’s Get Married, the soul-infused funk of Life With You and huge vocal climax of What Makes You Cry?
From the hilarious but politically charged Angry Cyclist, through the gentle strum of Letter From America, to the piano-and-vocal of Sunshine On Leith with its gorgeous sibling harmonies and slide guitar fade-out, the gig was an absolute delight.
Now in their fifth decade as a string quartet, Kronos Quartet single-handedly liberated the string quartet from the stuffy world of classical music and made it cool.
Others, like the Turtle Island and JACK quartets, have followed their lead, but Kronos was there first. They have premiered an astonishing number of new works, but the piece that most people remember is their version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.
That’s what they opened their WOMADelaide set and decades later it’s still thrilling to listen to. Terry Riley’s One Earth, One People, One Love’ is a beautiful meditation on the world we live in, performed appropriately in front of Luke Jerram’s Gaia sculpture.
Kronos were joined by Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat, whose exquisite voice blended beautifully with the quartet in a series of songs based on the poetry of Rumi and Hafez.
This is Kronos’s last tour of Australia but the impression they have made on the musical world is indelible.
Fantastic Negrito can add Funky, Fabulous and a bit Foxy (Lady) to his stage moniker after mashing together a potted history of funk’n’soul’n’rock’n’roll with what seemed like effortless panache.
He even evoked the sound of African-American slave spirituals on In The Pines (Oakland).
Negrito and his band didn’t so much play songs as extended jams which seemed to borrow heavily – in the best possible way – from Hendrix (as did his pink’n’purple wardrobe), with hefty doses of Led Zeppelin, liberal sprinklings of James Brown, and tasty morsels of Bill Withers and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
The exhilarating sound of Qawwali has echoed down the years at WOMADelaide since the very beginning. The first event featured the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – an unforgettable experience for those lucky enough to be there.
This year his nephews Rizwan and Muezzin Qawwals are here, leading a group that brings exceptional fervour to this remarkable form of devotional music. There’s no form of music I can think of that is more exciting than qawwali in full flight.
Sometimes they sing in praise of God, or the Prophet, sometimes they sing of earthly love – these themes overlap, because earthly love is a reflection of divine love. But whatever they sing about, they bring to it a passionate conviction culminating in an ecstatic union that is transcendent. Rizwan Muezzin Qawwals are masters of this art and it is wonderful sit there and be swept away by it.
Meute is a German brass band that has replaced oompah-oompah with doof-doof.
Like a Salvation Army band, they dress in military uniforms, but the resemblance ends there.
Techno is their thing, and this is possibly the weirdest techno act on the planet. From an ensemble point of view they are brilliant, negotiating the syncopated rhythms of this genre flawlessly.
Heard on acoustic brass and percussion instruments, techno sounds a lot like Steve Reich-style minimalism, apart from the nearly omnipresent doofs.
Kefaya & Elaha Soroor is something of a discovery, a Hazara woman exiled from Afghanistan who is preserving the songs of the women of Afghanistan, not so much as a traditional performance but in conjunction with a jazz and electronica band.
The project is helped by guitarist Giuliano Modarelli who can recreate some of the sounds of traditional Afghan instruments before a big drum set and a mix of electronica join in to fill out a jazz fiction approaching Weather Report in scale.
Elaha herself, introducing songs of her world and singing in a full calling voice, is driving the whole combination. It makes you wonder where else the love songs of oppressed peoples can survive.
Bab L’Bluz is a rock band but it uses a traditional Moroccan three-string awicha as lead and a larger version, here called a gimbri, as bass with a light flute circling overhead and a big drum set pushing out thumps.
Gateway to the blues, as the band’s name in Arabic indicates, is a creation of Yousra Monsour, achiwa, and Brice Bottin, gimbri, with Yousra’s energetic calls and ululations giving sounds of Mali through to Morocco.
The revelations are the rare occasions when the two fretless string instruments are used for long rising notes like Jimi Hendrix, yet instantly place you in North and sub Sahara Africa.
Asanti Dance Theatre evolved in Australia from a Ghanaian émigré community and over 20 years or more has gone on to develop a style all its own, a fusion of West African contemporary dance styles seen through an Australian lens.
Their WOMAD set is rich and varied, beginning with the gentlest and almost mystical percussion, and some physical theatre – balancing and the like – that hints at the breadth of the dancers’ talents.
It isn’t long before the pounding drums cut in, then it’s excitement all the way, the crowd learning by doing as they stamp their feet with delight. The company’s final performance on Monday is a workshop – get along and join in the fun.
Patrick McDonald, Stephen Whittington, Nathan Davies, Tim Lloyd, Peter Burdon
Tracker
Adelaide Festival
Odeon Theatre
March 10 to 18
When Daniel Riley was announced as artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre, he made it clear that he saw the appointment as an opportunity to utilize First Nations practices and ideologies in Australia’s oldest contemporary dance company – and one, furthermore, with a national and international reputation.
Tracker was developed during Riley’s time as an Associate Artist with Ilbijerri Theatre Company, the nation’s oldest First Nations theatre company, so when the opportunity arose to create a piece for the national festival circuit, a partnership with ADT was a perfect fit.
And what a story it tells. Riley was long aware of an ancestor Alexander “Tracker” Riley, who became the first Indigenous police sergeant in NSW, applying his traditional skills to hunt down felons, black and white alike.
His reward, after 40 years of service, was a gold watch. Like women and other Aboriginal officers, no pension.
Tracker is jointly directed by Riley, who also choreographs, and Ilbijerri artistic director Rachael Maza. The script by Ursula Yovich is equal to anything this gifted writer has produced. The blend between movement and text is weighted towards the spoken word (and possibly this needs review), but the narration from actor Ari Maza Long is so persuasive that you’re quickly along for the ride.
The prodigious skills and experience of Indigenous dancers Tyrel Dulvarie, Rika Hamagucki and Kaine Sultan-Babij mean that the movement itself, alluding both to Tracker’s gifts, and to the plight of those being tracked – and by extension, to Indigenous people of every time and place – is deftly executed, deeply encultured, and exquisitely shaped.
Tracker’s understanding was profound. The land, he said, was not his to give, and not others to take. This message is movingly told in Daniel Riley’s own message to his son, a tender epilogue to a moving and insightful story.
Peter Burdon
Poème: Chamber Landscapes
Adelaide Festival
UKARIA
March 10 to 12
AN ANCIENT SONG: Outi Tarkiainen’s song cycle The Lustful Mother really stole the show in the opening concert of this year’s Chamber Landscapes. Soprano Judith Dodsworth captured the work’s emotional intensity, with exceptional tonal range and technical control from all performers. The program also featured two staples of the flute repertoire, Debussy’s Syrinx and Jolivet’s Chant de Linos. The Jolivet effectively matched the intensity of The Lustful Mother, and was played with compelling conviction by flautist Alison Mitchell and pianist Paavali Jumppanen. Mitchell gave an elegant and subtly nuanced rendition of Syrinx. Still, it felt like a missed opportunity for a more adventurous programming choice from the many lesser-known but more interesting solo flute works that would have suited this concert’s themes.
Melanie Walters
THE TRANSCENDENTAL: Konstantin Shamray’s commanding performance of Charles Ives’ titanic, volcanic and altogether epic Piano Sonata no 2 Concord, Mass., 1840 – 60, will remain resolutely in the mind for some time. Equally impressive, Elina Välhälä’s and Paavali Jumppanen’s eloquent, elegant playing in Beethoven’s last Violin Sonata No 10 in G brought out every nuance with crystal clarity. Pairing these two works to shine a spotlight on American Transcendentalism proved provocative but not at all quixotic.
Rodney Smith
THE EXOTIC: The Saturday night concert was a beautiful exploration of tone colour. Boulez’s landmark 1955 work Le Marteau Sans Maître evokes an expansive sonic world through its extremely effective use of percussion and instrumental timbres. The fiendish challenges of this piece were met not only with precision but with a wonderful range of expression by this ensemble. Similarly evocative was Hans Tutschku’s gorgeous Shadow of Bells for piano and electronics, played with great sensitivity by Andrea Lam. Also on the program was a vibrant performance of Debussy’s violin sonata by Elina Vähälä and Paavali Jumppanen.
Melanie Walters
MYTH & PASSION: Violinists Elina Välhälä and Jakub Jakowicz, violist Christopher Moore, cellist Timo-Veikko Valve and pianist Andrea Lam threw themselves into Amy Beach’s much neglected but truly excellent Piano Quintet (1907) with immense drive and gusto, producing a sparkling performance from its richly romantic tapestry. Earlier Jakowicz with Konstantin Shamray had played Szymanowski’s Myths (1921) with spine chilling intensity, revelling in its post-romantic virtuoso pyrotechnics. Kitty Xiao’s In Flesh (2021) and Lutoslawski’s Subito (1992) rounded out a program that would have met even the most passionate listener’s expectations.
Rodney Smith
PREMIERE AT DAWN: An immediate standing ovation greeted violinist Jakub Jakowicz’s and pianist Paavali Jumppanen’s splendidly fiery interpretation of Beethoven’s iconic Kreutzer Sonata. Not a performance for the faint-hearted, their full-on high-voltage rhetoric was as impactful as they come. Previously Jakowicz was joined by Elina Välhälä, Christopher Moore and Timo-Veikko Valve in a joyful, good-natured performance of Haydn’s Sunrise Quartet that brought its warm humour and playfulness into strong relief.
Rodney Smith
POÈME: Chamber Landscapes curator, pianist Paavali Jumppanen produced not only mesmeric sonorities from both inside the piano as well as from its keyboard, but also visually arresting almost balletic movements and vocals in a personal tour de force performing Outi Tarkiainen’s Without a Trace. The purple passion of Chausson’s ecstatically romantic Poème found the perfect advocate in Jakub Jakowicz’s intense violin playing ably accompanied by the Australian String Quartet and pianist Andrea Lam. Rounding the program off in style, composer Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music took a leaf from Kurt Weil with violinist Elina Välhälä, cellist Timo-Veikko Valve and Andrea Lam in superbly ironical form bringing the house down.
Rodney Smith
MUSIC FOR A SUMMER EVENING: The Chamber Landscapes program ended in the uniquely coloured sound world of George Crumb’s Music for Summer Evening.
It’s nearly 50 years old but probably still passes for “contemporary” in the conservative world of “classical” music – another misnomer. It sounds very much part of the time in which it was written, but no less aurally bewitching for that. Crumb was, if anything, a late Romantic with New-Ageish sensibility and a very individual sonic imagination, which came out vividly in this superb performance by pianists Paavali Jumppanen and Andrea Lam, with percussionists Amanda Grigg and Jeffrey Means. With the backdrop of the Adelaide Hills at dusk behind it, this was a lovely way to conclude this year’s Chamber Landscapes.
Stephen Whittington
WOMADelaide – Friday
Adelaide Festival
Botanic Park
Until March 13
Love it or loathe it – and let’s face it, dumping any animal product on the WOMADelaide crowd is always going to be controversial – there’s no denying the sheer sensory spectacular that is French art collective Gratte Ciel’s Place Des Anges.
Tonnes of brilliantly white feathers are dumped from on high by tightrope walking angels to an ethereal soundtrack. Circus-meets-art-meets/ music on a warm evening in Botanic Park and WOMADelaide 2023 is up and running.
A complex history of colonialism, slavery, rebellion and emigration has produced the culture of Garifuna people who today can be found from the Caribbean to New York. Its distinctive rhythms and singing are not quite like anything else, and eminently danceable. The Garifuna Collective, who opened WOMADelaide on Friday afternoon, are great ambassadors for this under-appreciated and vibrant music.
Unfortunately the large Foundation Stage didn’t show them to best advantage. A somewhat smaller stage – maybe on that at least allowed us imagine we were in a bar in Belize – would have been better. As it was, they were overamplified for the huge space and crowd they were performing to, with a massive bass that masked some of the detail of the music, which is inappropriate to this kind of music.
Using a classical analogy, Béla Fleck is to the banjo as Paganini was to the violin. The analogy is not too far-fetched as he did play some violin music – part of Bach’s Partita in D minor for violin – which slowly morphed into bluegrass as it progressed. It was an amazing display of instrumental virtuosity and musical imagination.
His partner in music and life, Abigail Washburn is no slouch on the banjo, a fine singer and, as we found out at the end of their program, a notable exponent of a style of Appalachian dancing known as clogging.
Their duos were built on the foundations of folk music but add to it a level of sophistication in rhythm and harmony that is something else entirely. Their intricate version of Roscoe Holcomb’s Little Birdie was extraordinary in every way. A charming part of their performance was the appearance on stage of their two children – the elder, Juno, singing with his mother, which the younger, Theo, blocked his ears – a budding music critic, not doubt.
Ukraine is on most people’s minds these days. Balaklava Blues brought Ukraine’s plight vividly to life in their music. Lead vocalist Marichka Marczyk has a powerful voice that would carry from Kyiv to Lviv. There is an ancient quality to it, with roots that lie deep in Ukraine’s past – you can’t help imagining that centuries ago the vast plains of Ukraine resounded to voices like this. At the same time, it is given a modern twist that embeds it in contemporary music genres.
Balaklava in the group’s name most visibly refers to the face masks worn by two of the three performers. At the same time it is also the name of a town on the Crimean Peninsula – once part of Ukraine, now annexed by Russia, and, of course, also a town in South Australia. Nearly every song had some direct or indirect connection to Ukraine’s current situation, but without overplaying it – which made it all the more powerful.
With her disarming ingenue chat and Isadora Duncan gusts of dance it can be easy to overlook what drive Aurora brings to the stage.
Her far-ranging voice takes on flights of fancy but then cuts down to telling it like it is in songs like Queendom and A Dangerous Thing.
A pop star with thousands knowing her words, or setting off WOMADelaide with ethereal sounds from the forests of Norway, Aurora wins the adoration of a huge crowd. Keyboard, power percussion and gutsy backing vocals do the rest.
Cimafunk is high energy Afro-Cuban rock that is a must to hear and dance to live. Named for the Cimarrons, the escaped slaves of Cuba who lived in independent bands, it is a loose collaboration of musicians working with Erik Rodriguez, or Cima, as he calls himself.
He’s in white-framed sunglasses, jet black coat and white and black slacks, so every move is big and brassy. Cima mouth-percussions as much as sings, filling in baroque flourishes to Afro-Caribbean and hip hop beats. The band, especially the women with brass and sax, are wonders in themselves.
Sydney born Julian Belbachir delivers an investigation of many of the sounds of Africa through the instruments that he has studied and made after working alongside the masters of their makers.
They include n’goni, African harp, drums like the djembe goblet drum or the deep dundunba, the 21-stringed kora, the balafon or xylophone, the guembri or skin-covered three string guitar and the kraken or Arabian castanets.
In performance things are a little tentative compared to the main bands in these north and west African traditions. It takes the guembri player and singer to bring some fire to the show.
English troubadour Billy Bragg, fresh off three big nights at The Gov, thrilled a big crowd with a mix of classics, a couple of classics, and even some faves from his Woody Guthrie collaboration with Wilco.
Way Over Yonder In A Minor Key, Sexuality, Waiting For The Great Leap Forward and Levi Stubbs’ Tears were highlights, as was Bragg’s funny and poignant banter.
American Indie sweethearts Bon Iver, led by frontman Justin Vernon, closed the main proceedings in fitting fashion,
Seamlessly blending acoustic folk with synths and vocoders, Bon Iver had the park singing along with favourites like Skinny Love and the epic Naeem.
Stephen Whittington, Nathan Davies, Tim Lloyd
Terrain – Bangarra Dance Theatre
WOMADelaide
Botanic Park
March 10
The inclusion of Bangarra Dance Theatre in the 2023 program is a treat in itself. To have the company revive Frances Rings’ wonderful Terrain in the year in which she takes on the artistic directorship of the company is a joy.
Terrain has been described as a hymn to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the salt lake that fills but once in a generation. And what a hymn it is, from barren wastelands, endless fields of salt inimical to almost all life, to a vast flooded lake teeming with life.
The nine sections of the work stand alone, yet all form part of a cycle, from drought to deluge, from anticipation to reward.
Complex, sinuous episodes for the full company are punctuated by small, intimate solos and small ensembles.
Perhaps the most successful is Spinifex, where gorgeous tufted headdresses lead into Salt, a gracious duet (and a reminder that when we last saw this work in 2012, one of the pair was none other than Daniel Riley, now director of Australian Dance Theatre).
Terrain is a hugely successful blend of movement, music and design, with Jennifer Irwin’s costumes an absolute triumph. A new era in the long life of a flagship company is off to a great start.
Later on Friday came Bandaluzia Flamenco, which has been a mainstay on the festival circuit for a good many years now, and their every appearance gains a few more followers.
WOMAD is a near perfect setting, with the fans in place an hour ahead of time, and passers-by attracted by the vibrant rhythms and the clatter of fleet feet.
Theirs is a brilliant blend, with all the technical underpinning of this most sophisticated music and dance, but a gleeful lack of restraint when it comes to conventional forms. The dance from Rosalie Cocchiaro and Jessica Statham is breathtaking, and the three-strong musical trio in a league of their own. Bandaluzia also perform on Monday at 2pm.
Peter Burdon
Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk)
Adelaide Festival
Dunstan Playhouse
March 10 to 12
Marrugeku, an Indigenous dance theatre company based in Broome, was last seen in Adelaide in 2019 with Le Dernier Appel (The Last Cry) a powerful, political work about liberation from colonial shackles.
Now they return with Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk), a no less political and intensely moving comment on the national disgrace that is the incarceration of those whom our political lords and masters regard with disdain.
They are First Nations people, locked up on mere suspicion, and dead a day later. They are refugees, sent to island hellholes.
It is the diversity of the company that immediately strikes. Various sizes, shapes, ages, ethnicities, and ways of moving: All products of their own cultures.
Choreographer Dalisa Pigram and director Rachael Swain do a brilliant job of weaving this diversity into a cogent whole.
There are potent references to some of the best-known incidents of recent years. Dylan Voller, the teenager shackled and wearing a spit hood at the awful Don Dale detention centre. Ms Dhu, the Yamatji woman whose death was found to be directly related to racism in the health and justice system. The asylum seekers denied even the most basic health and mental health care.
These and many more are celebrated – and it is not wrong to say they are celebrated – for as we are forcibly reminded, they will never be forgotten, and for all the cruelty, all the pain, joy can never be taken away. The celebration of these good memories is a triumph indeed.
There’s no escape for the audience. The fourth wall comes down again and again. Anyone expecting not to be confronted, not to be moved, needs to have a good hard look at themselves.
Peter Burdon
Messa da Requiem
Adelaide Festival
Festival Theatre
Until March 11
Ballett Zurich performs at its Switzerland home in sight of the great Alpine peaks and dances here alongside one of the great monuments of European music.
The Verdi Requiem is a sacred text infused with the composer’s operatic intelligence.
For this striking production, choreographer Christian Spuck makes no attempt to match the dance to the music.
In this fine performance, directed stylishly by Johannes Fritzsch with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the two forces coexisted but rarely connected.
Spuck’s choreographic vocabulary is steeped in tradition. The big moments are carefully constructed but the intimate duets and trios are exquisitely lovely, white-clad young women lifted skywards.
Against their elegance, the eloquence of the four soloists spoke directly to the audience. Pelham Andrews, heralded by the brass, brought dignity to the doom laden Tuba Mirum, and Caitlin Hulcup’s bright mezzo soprano was a commanding force.
Tenor Paul O’Neill may have been suffering a mild indisposition, but brought pathos to the prayer Ingemisco.
The Festival Chorus was the bridge between them. Massed on either side the stage, they would come together and move in waves. At one point they advanced to the front of the stage raising their hands and shaking them violently, an absurd and childish thing.
It was after the Offertory quartet that the curtain came down following a backstage incident. Half-an-hour later the performance started again with a confident double chorus, Sanctus, re-establishing the energy. Christie Anderson’s chorus, featuring many of our finest soloists among their ranks, were unfailing in their commitment.
The final moments, led by soprano Eleanor Lyons, were unforgettable with Lyon’s strong, clear statement of the Libera Me, a prayer of deliverance, leading into the release and relief of the Requiem.
The audience, music lovers and ballet lovers alike, responded vociferously at the end of this mystical and, yes, at times mystifying tribute to the human spirit and the skill and commitment of all involved.
Ewart Shaw
Hear My Eyes: Pan’s Labyrinth x Sleep D
Adelaide Festival
Hindley Street Music Hall
March 9
This was a great opportunity to experience Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth on the big screen again – or for the first time.
There are a few excruciating scenes that are even more unsettling when seen on a cinema-sized screen rather than on your phone or tablet. Overall though the film still looks magnificent even if it no longer represents the state-of-the-art in special effects.
You immediately become emotionally invested in the fate of the characters, especially the young Ofelia, and you are drawn into the enchanted world of her imagination.
And that’s where Melbourne-based electronic musicians Sleep D, with Hektor and RBI (on clarinet) come in. Music is vital to a film like this – it seduces you away from the everyday world into a realm of fantasy that seems utterly plausible.
Film alone would struggle to do this. At the same music can supply an emotional depth that enriches the experience immeasurably.
The idea of providing a new soundtrack, performed live, to a film that already has a soundtrack – one that the director presumably approved – may seem a little odd.
But the live performance aspect adds another unpredictable dimension to the experience. The musicians tracked the emotional tone of the film accurately and were particularly effective at suggesting the menace of the very unpleasant Captain Vidal and the mixture of fear and wonder evoked in Ofelia by the Faun.
It might not quite be the Pan’s Labyrinth that its many admirers love, but it was powerful, absorbing viewing.
Stephen Whittington
Grey Rock
Adelaide Festival
Space Theatre
Until March 12
As the situation in Israel becomes more dire through religious nationalism this production by Remote Theatre Project about finding a space for Palestine gains an even sharper edge.
It is a satire with plenty of comedy and a light, almost homemade touch that belies its occasional power punches.
Yusuf, a Palestinian TV repair man grieving for the loss of his wife, has retired to the back shed in his West Bank home, focused on building a rocket to take him to the moon to plant the Palestinian flag, just like the US did in 1969.
His secret plan is greeted with suspicion if not horror by his fellow villagers, his imam, and his daughter Lila.
But Yusuf will no longer submit quietly to a life of occupation of his homeland. He single-mindedly seeks this gesture of hope and freedom.
After he negotiates to disguise the 35-metre rocket as a minaret at the local mosque things swing wildly out of control.
Just as Yusuf – played with stoic intensity by Khalifa Natour – is throwing caution to the wind, so is Lila (Fidaa Zaidan) enticing us into the parallel drama of her choice between a safe betrothal and a love match.
Amir Nizar Zuabi has written and directed this beautiful dual structure where even the title has a psychological and literal meaning. It is full of earthy village humour that yet makes clear the choices Palestinians must make every day.
Tim Lloyd
Karin Schaupp & Finders Quartet
Adelaide Festival/Musica Viva
Adelaide Town Hall
March 9
This warm-hearted concert, centred around the less-often encountered combination of guitar and string quartet, featured star Australian guitarist Karin Schaupp.
Her gently amplified guitar sonorities blended seamlessly with the Flinders Quartet’s measured and always refined playing, producing a sumptuous sound in the already generous acoustic of our Town Hall.
All artists were empathetically engaged with one another’s music as well as their program of essentially 20th and 21st century music, bookended by earlier works of Carulli and Boccherini.
Front and centre was Carl Vine’s Endless, in a premiere performance, dedicated to the memory of Jennifer Bates.
The elegiac writing is shot through with lighter moments, including salsa dances, one of Bates’ pleasures. The intimacy and directness of Vine’s writing, always cohesive but never overly cerebral, made an immediate impact and this work can stand tall with or without its external narrative.
There was fun aplenty in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Quintet Op 143, with nods to Poulenc and Albeniz as he embraced Spanish styles in this Segovia inspired work. Rhythmic, benignly melodic and often determinedly dance-like, it’s small wonder he counted André Previn and John Williams among his pupils.
In Schaupp’s capable hands John Cage’s Dream, an early work from 1948, proved both gentle and listener-friendly with its Satiesque aphorisms. Imogen Holst’s equally early Phantasy Quartet, full of evocative pastoral allusions, provided fertile musical soil for the Flinders Quartet’s sensitive approach.
Rodney Smith
Seamen! The Sea Shanty Spectacular
★★★★★
The Pyramid at Fool’s Paradise
Until March 12
Shanties were, in the main, the preserve of seamen under sail, until 2021 when Nathan Evans posted Wellerman, a whaling shanty, on TikTok.
Since then the whole nautical archive, like the sunken treasure of the seas, has been raised up and shared generously with choirs and singing groups of all descriptions.
The Shanties Choir, a bunch of landlubbers from Melbourne, have brought their own particular vision of life aboard the tall ships to Victoria Square.
They are no rough-and-ready mariners. Their solo voices are strong and confident. Their five-part arrangements are sophisticated and beautifully delivered. They have assembled traditional and modern songs from many seafaring cultures, including the indigenous music of Northern Australia.
It is almost too beautiful, and the audience would have happily sat through another hour at least of such superb entertainment
Treat yourself to a shot of rum and a chance to join in the nautical experience with The Shanties, even if it’s just once around the bay and not far into the whale haunted deeps.
Ewart Shaw
Whitney – The Greatest Love of All
★★★★
The Fantail at Gluttony
Until March 13
The popularity of Adelaide’s Gospo Collective was on full display at the opening of its super-slick tribute show Whitney – The Greatest Love Of All.
Even on a cold, wet night, the enormous outdoor Fantail at Gluttony was well-filled with enthusiastic supporters, plastic ponchos and all.
As we’ve come to expect from Gospo director Charmaine Jones, the show was tight as a drum, and her lead vocals set a high standard that in turn inspired the 60-ish strong choir and soloists.
Whitney classics were there in abundance, both as stand-alone numbers and in excellent medleys. The crowd sang their hearts out, beginning with I Wanna Dance With Somebody and on through the catalogue. Joanna Arul Tropeano chimed in for a powerhouse performance of My Love Is Your Love.
Whitney is a true celebration of one of the most remarkable music legacies there is.
Peter Burdon
The Culture
★★★½
The Arch, Holden Street Theatres
Until March 16
Best friends turn out to be their own worst enemies when it comes to making romantic decisions in The Culture, as comic banter gives way to complex issues.
Mina Asfour and playwright Laura Jackson are wonderful as Will and Katie (royal reference intended), besties since school days and now housemates with a podcast, both single and looking for love in all the wrong places … such as anonymous dating apps and office parties.
She’s heterosexual, he’s “an introverted gay Arab boy” – although sometimes the boundaries of their relationship have become blurred.
It’s well delivered but Jackson’s script relies on every cliche in the book, right down to the characters falling in love with exactly the problematic stereotypes they vow to avoid.
References to “straight white males” are also often delivered as punchlines, but without any actual joke attached.
The Adelaide season supports Women’s Safety Services SA, and the play feels very much as if survivors of domestic violence – both physical and psychological – are its primary audience.
Patrick McDonald
Barbaroi
★★★★
The Vault at Fool’s Paradise
Until March 19
Barbaroi has gained a following which seemed greatly pleased and impressed with this, ostensibly the circus ensemble’s final appearance.
They’ve thrown a theatrical context around their routines: There’s a lightly sketched-in derelict society, with lots of aggressive interplay between the performers.
They may snarl and threaten, pushing and shoving, but the core of the show is marked by confidence and immense trust between each of them.
There’s lots of the insolent physicality and gymnastic prowess we’ve come to associate with shows like this, which have proliferated.
There’s some excellent juggling and a blink and you’ll miss it routine involving swallowed razor blades and a metre of dental floss.
It’s when they leave the ground the show takes off. On ropes and on the pole, held by hands, or ankles or teeth, they make light of the physical challenges and mortal risks.
The final routine has two men on the pole. As the one above decides to slide down at speed, the player below him actually lets go and hangs suspended by nothing more than will power before grabbing the pole again.
Even if you have seen such daring before, you will hold your breath. Barbaroi know what they are doing.
Ewart Shaw
Rio 40°
★★★½
Nexus Arts/The Lab at Light
Until March 17
Local dance sensation Talita Fontainha has lifted the art of samba to dizzy heights in the few years since she settled in Adelaide, after a dozen or more years teaching and performing all over the world.
Now her new production house TQ Productions presents its debut show Rio 40°.
Named for the classic 1955 film that explored the authentic side of Rio de Janeiro, favelas and all, it’s a vibrant, colourful and superbly executed display of Latin dance, with a couple of aerial acts for good measure.
There’s a thread running through of a couple of clueless tourists and their unexpected encounters.
A good idea, but their costuming was lamentable, more Bali than Brazil, in stark contrast to the sexy, snappy dancers, especially when they’re feathered and sequined to the max. Fix that and you’ve got a solid four stars.
Peter Burdon
The Cage Project
Adelaide Festival/Musica Viva
Grainger Studio
March 7 and 8
It’s approaching 50 years since John Cage performed in person at the Adelaide Festival. Those who are old enough to have been there will remember the mass exodus of the audience during his solo concert.
Whatever controversies may have surrounded him in the past are long gone, and Cage has entered the musical canon, to be listened to with the same attention as Mozart et al. Cage himself was happy to describe his music as experimental, meaning the outcome was unforeseeable.
This concert was an experiment in that sense: numerous technical challenges had to be solved in order to allow pianist Cédric Tiberghien’s playing of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes to communicate with Matthias Schack-Arnott’s extraordinary mobile sculpture.
The experiment could have failed at any point, but instead, thanks to the technical team, it was a remarkable success. The huge sculpture suspended from the ceiling responded to notes from the piano as if by magic – or some superior form of Wi-Fi.
Diverse sounds of the prepared piano, created by the insertion of bolts, screws and other objects inserted between the strings, provoked responses from the metal disks, plates, pipes and pieces of wood hanging above the piano seamlessly and seemingly instantaneously.
The sculpture moved, its various arms propelled by small fans. Ingenious lighting projected that movement onto the walls and ceiling. The performance space was suffused with the resonances.
At the heart of this was Tiberghien’s intensely focused playing, with an acute sense of the gestural aspect of the music.
This was real Festival fare – a bold experiment that produced an engrossing experience. John Cage would have loved it. And the rapt attention of the audience suggested that we have progressed in the past half century.
Stephen Whittington
Cédric Tiberghien
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Town Hall
March 6
France’s Cédric Tiberghien is a master of tone colours and dynamic shading at the piano. Most pianists would not dare to play as softly as he does in a concert hall.
So softly in fact that he was completely inaudible in John Cage’s 4’33”. Commonly referred to as “the silent piece”, the pianist is instructed not to make any intentional sounds at the instrument.
There are many different ways not to play the piano: For example, the austere style of Cage himself, sitting impassively in front of the keyboard with stopwatch in hand.
Tiberghien’s approach in comparison was quite histrionic, ending with a theatrical gesture that some of the audience took as permission to let out the laughter they had been suppressing for the previous four-and-a-half minutes.
Tiberghien started the concert with the transcription of Bach’s violin Chaconne by Brahms, for left hand alone. It’s deceptively simple but in the right hands, or hand – which of course is actually the left hand – it is a small-scale marvel.
Mozart’s A major Sonata followed, played with an admirable balance of vigour and refinement.
It’s impossible today to imagine the experience of a Viennese audience circa 1800 when Beethoven played his own music. It was evidently terrifying, like having a raging bull in your salon beating the piano into submission.
Tiberghien put tremendous energy into the Eroica Variations, but added his characteristic subtle shades of colour and pianissimo just this side of inaudible. It was a tremendous piece of pianism.
Tiberghien ended with an encore, Oiseaux tristes by Ravel. Very much on his home ground, this was music that brought out the finest qualities of his playing with exquisite effect.
Stephen Whittington
Hans + Gret
Adelaide Festival
Queen’s Theatre
Until March 12
Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre and Melbourne-based design studio Sandpit present the world premiere of Hans + Gret, a bold reimagining of the classic fairy tale for a contemporary audience.
At its heart, the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel is about abandonment, and the suffering that the children experience when left at the mercy of an evil witch.
In our own time, the same might be said of parents whose self-absorption with a wafer-thin veneer of beauty or status or leads them to neglect those for whom they ought to care.
There’s much about the piece that cuts to the quick. Mother is just back from a health retreat – think physical and emotional cleansing, loopy stuff – and is under the thrall of a con artist whose self-improvement strategies are rather more akin to self-satisfaction.
If that means, quite frankly, exposing children to emotional and physical abuse, then so be it.
It’s risky stuff, made all the more so by the ingenious use of technology on an individual level. Every member of the audience has their own device and earbuds.
On these we share something of ourselves, and thanks to some nifty hocus pocus we all have a customised experience of Hans + Gret’s journey through darkness and light.
Incoming Windmill artistic director Clare Watson does a terrific job with Lally Katz’s keen, incisive script and the stellar talents of the onstage company.
We’re quickly on side with Gret (Temeka Lawlor) and Hans (Dylan Miller), and all too well aware of the facile platitudes of parents Mum (Jo Stone) and Dad (James Smith). Gareth Davies’s Witch – the bogus self-help guru – is a riot.
The design from Jonathon Oxlade is a triumph, a gleaming, mirrored house on a huge revolve, and the technology with its individual impact is a marvel.
Peter Burdon
Ngapa William Cooper
Adelaide Festival
Ukaria, March 5 and
Adelaide Town Hall, March 7
This unique collaboration brings together several musical traditions to tell the story of Uncle (Ngapa) William Cooper’s protest against Nazi persecution of Jewish people at the German consulate in Melbourne, following Kristallnacht in 1938.
By that time Cooper had half a century behind him of political activism on behalf of indigenous Australians. His story is remarkable and one that is too little known.
All three contributors to this work are notable musicians in their respective fields. Nigel Westlake has had a distinguished career as a composer in the Western classical tradition; Lior is of Jewish heritage; and Lou Bennet is a Yorta Yorta woman from the same country as William Cooper.
Out of this remarkable partnership has come a work that powerfully and directly addresses the political, social and, ultimately, moral dimensions of this story.
The highly expressive voices of Lior and Lou Bennett were joined by the Australian String Quartet, pianist Andrea Lam, percussionist Rebecca Lagos, and Kees Boersma on double bass, in an outstanding performance that was powerful and passionate.
Earlier, the ASQ gave fine performances of two works by notable composers of Jewish American heritage. Bryce Dressner’s Aheym, an energetic post-minimalist work, is notable for its driving, motoric rhythm. String Quartet No. 3 by Philip Glass, derived from the film score to Mishima, is classic minimalism, its restless arpeggios evoking a sombre fatalism.
Stephen Whittington
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Adelaide Festival
Her Majesty’s Theatre
Until March 12
Metamorphosis, both of the physical actors on stage and the screens on which their virtual selves appear, is at the centre of this visually dazzling, heart-racing, hi-tech adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 gothic thriller
Continuing in the vein of last year’s hit The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde fuses action filmed live on stage with prerecorded footage and real-time special effects on multiple video screens suspended overhead in ever-changing configurations.
Every mark on stage and line of rapid-fire dialogue has to be hit with pinpoint precision to align with the camera crews following the actors on stage, the quick costume changes and constantly moving sets.
It is such a marvel of technical and human achievement that any occasional glitch can be forgiven and forgotten as quickly as the story itself rockets along.
Together, Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams and his two extraordinary actors, Matthew Backer and Ewen Leslie, transport us both to the foggy, gaslamp-lit streets of Victorian London and what feels like the set of a black-and-white Hitchcock movie.
Leslie astonishes as he switches seamlessly between multiple characters, including the two title roles and often playing against filmed versions of himself, but Backer more than matches this with his relentless, nailbiting narration as Jekyll’s lawyer and best friend Gabriel Utterson.
A violent, shuddering transformation from Jekyll into Hyde earns its own round of applause, and the potion-induced Technicolour techno trip which precedes it provides some hilarious moments of levity before the final horror is unleashed.
Patrick McDonald
Wwurukur djuanduk balag – Ancestors Are Calling
Adelaide Festival
Ukaria Cultural Centre
March 4
Lou Bennett’s song cycle Ancestors Are Calling and Ukaria Cultural Centre might have been made for each other.
With Ukaria’s wide-angle window on Peramangk country behind stage, the synergy was plain to see as Bennett’s extensive 40-minute canvas unfolded in the capable hands of the Silo String Quartet, with Allara Briggs Pattison and Bennett herself on sound desks and vocals.
Initially created by Bennett for Melbourne’s Rising festival in 2022, Silo’s cellist Caerwen Martin has arranged the score for string quartet plus recorded sound and voices.
It begins almost as a meditation and morphs into a joyful paean on the meaning of First Nations ancestral possessions currently dispersed worldwide.
Bennett’s use of First Nations languages throughout, both spoken and sung, is masterful. Extended techniques demanded utmost concentration from the Silo strings in the cycle’s opening sections, with whisps of sonic luminesce creating a brooding, probing atmosphere with minor mode colourations.
The work’s overall direction revealed itself clearly at a pivotal moment when almost traditional tonalities, together with some English language, began to emerge and there is a joyful fun-filled ending leaving listeners in hope, not despair.
Bennett’s and Pattison’s vocals were very persuasive and polished with the Silo Quartet matching their musical finesse.
Even without definitive translations or musical guidance in the audience programs, listeners remained entranced throughout this gentle, glistening piece of sonic art. You could have heard a pin drop.
Rodney Smith
Spinifex Gum – Opening Event
Adelaide Festival
Elder Park
March 3
When Spinifex Gum premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2018, it was immediately acclaimed as an important project, mainly for its uncompromising representation of many of the issues facing Australia’s First Nations people.
Now it returns, five years and a swag of outings later, with composers Felix Riebl and Ollie McGill (of Cat Empire fame) and the voices of Maliya combining with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under Aaron Wyatt.
It’s a magnificent set, 20 or so numbers sensitively orchestrated, and performed with supreme confidence by the young voices of Maliya. These youngsters truly are the stars of the show, but that’s not to forget the massive contribution of singer/songwriter Emma Donovan, those powerhouse performance of Make It Rain, and the tender My Island Home, drew thunderous cheers.
The music is amazingly diverse, both rhythmically and stylistically, but the heart of the show is the importance of culture and spirit to a people whose very lives are often threatened, and all too often taken, by the newcomers who’ve so thoughtlessly abused the land and its people. The visuals, especially of seemingly endless trains of iron ore cutting across the landscape, are at once awesome and dispiriting, dividing more than the land.
Music is a vehicle for protest as well as praise, and the stark reality of physical, cultural and spiritual abuse, rape and murder, are not shied away from. To deny this truth is to be on the wrong side of history. The whole of a packed Elder Park sang “Voice, Treaty, Truth, Now.” Opponents of The Voice ignore these voters at their peril.
Spinifex Gum was preceded by a spirited performance from the “Citizens’ Orchestra,” a fun bit of community music making led by UK composer/conductor duo Tim Steiner and Ricardo Baptista, and a special performance from Karl Winda Telfer and Yellaka.
What a way to start the Festival.
Peter Burdon
Escalonia de Montserrat
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Town Hall
March 3 to 5
The choirboys of the Escalonia de Montserrat are young but the choir is old.
A tradition stretching back a thousand years has shaped the sound of the choir, which is notable for the exceptional purity of its sound and the wonderful musicality of its performances.
Tradition can be a straitjacket but not in this case; it is a wellspring that is constantly renewing itself. The repertoire reflects this, beginning in the Middle Ages and ending in the 21st century.
Being resident in a monastery dedicated to the Virgin of Montserrat, the choir’s primary function is religious services, so the first half of the concert spanned an ancient plainchant sung as a processional through to a startling setting of the Marian hymn Salve Regina by one of the choir’s alumni, Bernat Vivancos.
In the latter work the beautifully lyrical choral sections were interrupted from time to time by jagged, dissonant organ chords that evoked an image of the rugged outline of the “serrated mountain” of Montserrat.
The second, more relaxed half of the concert contained delightful settings of Catalonian folksongs. Among them was the famous Song of the Birds (El Cant dels Ocells) closely associated with one of Catalonia’s most famous musicians, the cellist Pablo Casals, who played it as a homage to Catalonia and as a plea for peace. It’s a song that still resonates in today’s world.
Watching the young choristers sing was a delight in itself; they showed a slight awkwardness in the unfamiliar concert setting, and at the same time that lack of self-consciousness that is the natural state of all children – because they are children, despite their high musical accomplishments. The choir was directed by Llorenç Castelló and superbly accompanied by organist and pianist Mercè Sanchis.
Stephen Whittington
A Little Life
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre
Until March 8
This melodrama about pain and suffering is in itself a challenge to the senses. At nearly four hours long it gives a near-exhaustive account of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestseller of the same name, a hefty tome approaching 800 pages.
It is a chronicle of the lives of four men from the outset of their brilliant careers in New York. One of them, Jude, has a buried past of pain and suffering, and the play unravels and smooths out so far as is possible that terrible legacy.
This Dutch company, now called Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, has been one of the Adelaide Festival’s greatest theatre attractions of recent years as its director Ivo van Hove finds radical new ways of staging ensemble theatre with technological wizardry.
Here he wants a more intensely theatrical expose of the close personal bonds that drive these men.
The theatre in the round gives intimacy; the stage is a city loft, set between two halves of the audience, with slowly unwinding New York street promenades playing through video screens at each end, surtitles overhead.
Ramsay Nasr is Jude, a genius of pure maths, of music and of law. But it is his anthemic, beautifully sung Mahler lied – with a string quartet – that tells us that he truly is a gift.
Otherwise he has an almost self-negating leading role, the hapless messiah covered in stigmata of his own making; the object of the worst vices of men. He is the charismatic focus of the lives of his friends’ circle, the centre of gravity of the whole production.
The melodrama comes from blood – lots of blood – sex, nudity and self-harm. It is a tough, hard-edge production about the highest emotion: Love.
Tim Lloyd
The River That Ran Uphill
Adelaide Festival
Space Theatre
Until March 6
Adelaide’s own Slingsby company’s touring “Flying Squad” brings to life a tragic story of one of the great challenges of our time – and that, inescapably, is climate change.
Edgell Junior, a proud Ni Vanuatu man, experienced himself the trauma of Cyclone Pam back in 2015. As he narrates something of those terrible days, the cast create a vivid landscape, from the crashing waves and howling winds to the treasured possessions floating away.
So mighty was the wind – gusts of 360 kilometres an hour, the speed of a bullet train – that rivers ran uphill. One destroyed a house, and the miraculous escape of a loved one thought dead cuts to the quick.
Using Slingsby’s trademark techniques of light and shadow, forced perspective, engaging music, and much more, it’s an often tense and traumatic ride.
More than a few audience members – many young adults among them – gasped with shock at Junior’s vivid descriptions.
The stories of camaraderie and mutual support in times of trouble are heartwarming, but the brutal facts of the impact of climate change are chilling.
A football pitch on which Junior played 20 years ago is now underwater. It’s a fact. We ignore this at our peril.
Peter Burdon
Dogs of Europe
Adelaide Festival
Dunstan Playhouse
Until March 6
Dogs of Europe casts into a future where Vladimir Putin has re-made the Russian Empire, wiping out the cultural heritage of Belarus and Ukraine, among others.
It is adapted from a sprawling 2017 novel by the Belarus writer Alhierd Bacharevic and is eerily predictive for Belarus of the situation the world now faces in Ukraine.
Left with no alternative but to fight for its culture, language and identity, it is that war that makes the politics of this production by a dissident and exiled Belarus Free Theatre so powerful.
This is by no means an easy production. Long, with bewildering storylines, it mixes physical theatre, dance, glorious song and music created live on stage. Its attempts to summarise the anarchic narrative in mixed language dialogue with rapid-fire English subtitles is less successful.
At no time does the energy lag, and there is always startling new imagery, such as the central one, of a naked female Sisyphus constantly striving to roll a huge sphere made of books uphill, only to fail and have to start again.
Another striking image is the literature and culture of a whole people’s burning brightly before being snuffed out live on stage.
There are no happy outcomes, but today’s audiences know that. We can only mourn the loss of freedom and identity that comes with the assertion of imperial strength and brutality.
Tim Lloyd
Speed: The Movie, The Play
★★★★
Gluttony, Rymill Park
Until March 5
Speed takes place in and around an old bus on the lawns of Rymill Park. There are no real bells and whistles (a bit like this review). It’s deliberately cheesy and low-fi (there’s an old screen projector which reminded me of my Year 7 science classes in the mid ’80s) … and all the better for it.
It crams the entire storyline of the epic 1994 movie, Speed, starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and the late, great Dennis Hopper into a single hour. It’s a lighthearted, very, very funny romp, whereby the small ensemble cast interacts with the audience which, after a quick introduction, crams into the said bus, where most of the action takes place.
The cast is great. They are warm, funny and well-rehearsed (all the great movie lines are repeated, hot shot), which makes the audience interactions (for those of us filled with dread at the very thought of such things) easy and familiar.
The whole thing is a bloody riot; self-referential, silly, and often laugh out loud funny. If anyone was having a bad time during our show, they hid it well. And if there’s more fun to be had in 60 minutes at this year’s Fringe, please show me where.
Matt Deighton
The Gods The Gods The Gods
★★★★★
The Kingfisher at Gluttony
Until March 18
Every now and then comes an act which is extraordinary, an experience unlike any other which moves – in this case literally – and engages its audience on a completely different level.
The Gods The Gods The Gods is such a show. Immersive in the true sense of the word, it places its participants in the centre of a haze-filled dance floor surrounded by three neon-lit bare stages, and compels them to dance.
Zeus is calling the gods together for what may be a final fling, as former worshippers begin to explore their own personal stories and discover that the true deities may lie within themselves.
UK team Grainger & Wright, known for their acclaimed interpretations of Orpheus and Eurydice, takes us through 12 songs which tell four stories with three performers who keep our focus spinning from stage to stage before moving among us mere mortals on the dance floor.
Any of the performers would make a mesmerising act in their own right: Composer Phil Grainger serenading while playing guitar and triggering backing tracks, compelling rapper Brains stepping in for writer Alex Wright to deliver the narrative drive, and Australian actor Megan Drury showcasing the voice of a jazz chanteuse.
Patrick McDonald
The Marvellous Elephant Man: The Musical
★★★★★
Wonderland Spiegeltent
Until March 13
Outrageously entertaining from the tip of its trunk to the twist in the end of its tail/tale, this fanciful musical spin on the story of John Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, is also a rollicking chortle-a-minute.
The circus tent venue is perfect for a character whose severe deformities meant that the real-life Merrick was exhibited in 19th century freak shows before being introduced to London society.
There may be little else required in the way of sets and props but in every other respect, this original work by joint writer-composers, Elder Conservatorium graduate Jayan Nandagopan, Adelaide-raised Marc Lucchesi and US born, Melbourne based musical director Sarah Nandagopan is the equal of any top-notch Broadway or West End show.
It’s ribald and politically incorrect, overloaded with outdated stereotypes – and the audience laps that up with every gasp of shock followed by howling laughter and applause.
The cast is also extraordinary, from opera tenor and The Voice finalist Ben Clark’s hauntingly beautiful range which builds in a rock roar as Merrick, to Annelise Hall’s superb soprano as love interest Hope.
Kanen Breen threatens to steal the show as the sneering, archetypal British villain Dr Treves, but is given a good run for his money by co-writer Lucchesi with multiple roles including the Ringmaster and a brothel madam.
Guy Masterson’s direction and Eden Read’s dazzling choreography keep the eyes as well as the ears endlessly engaged in this preposterous pachyderm pantomime.
Patrick McDonald
The Party
★★★★½
The Spiegeltent, GOUD
Until March 19
You’ve never been to a house party like this before.
A glittering, glamorous rave for the senses, this delightfully risqué Strut + Fret offering will leave you buzzing with adrenaline … but maybe don’t bring your grandparents.
Think nipple tassels, strap-ons and singing toilets: It’s high-energy, hysterical and downright horny.
From the creators of Fringe favourites Blanc de Blanc, Limbo and Purple Rabbit, this intoxicating two-hour circus of debauchery is filth at its finest, with a cast of gifted performers you simply won’t be able to take your eyes off of.
While the music and costumes for act one are wildly impressive alone, admittedly this party takes a little while to warm up. But after an intermission (during which you’ll want to grab a glass of wine), the mood switches from mildly quirky dance party to full-blown disco orgy on acid.
Prepare for a gasp-inducing aerial act, an X-rated shower scene, and flips, twists and twerking to a soundtrack of unpredictably distorted bangers for a truly outrageous trip.
The Party is the ideal Saturday night venture into the Garden, if you dare.
Bella Fowler
Jesus, Jane, Mother and Me
★★★★★
Holden Street Theatres
Until March 19
Way back in 2010, English playwright Philip Stokes fairly set the town alight with his Heroin(e) for Breakfast, a hard-hitting piece, and a reminder that life, for many, is no bed of roses.
That same uncompromising, gritty writing carries forward into Jesus, Jane, Mother and Me. The me is 18 year old Daniel, whose childhood has been fraught, to say the least. He and his mother have coped with abject social deprivation by embracing two saviours. First there was Jesus, thanks in large measure to Reverend Birch’s magnificent oratory. Then there was Jane McDonald, a proud Yorkshire lass whose local popularity led to stardom.
Daniel is a loner, precocious, intelligent, and quite a handful. The fantasy world in which he lives is exemplified by an affected, posh accent — in truth he’s Yorkshire through and through — but nothing can change the fact that he’s on a hiding to nowhere, and no amount of stentorian declamation can conceal the distant sounds of violence and neglect.
Now he is 18, and it’s Mother's Day, and time to tie a bow around a miserable childhood and move on. The real question is whether he’ll have the strength to do it.
Jack Stokes — the playwright’s son — is sensational. His performance, and the play, are already much awarded, in the UK and now in Australia, and it’s no wonder. Go and see this terrific show.
Peter Burdon
Mansion
★★★½
The Octagon, Gluttony
Until March 19
Those expecting the hyper-sensualised circus glitz and burlesque glamour of Bass Fam Creative’s previous hits Matador and Oracle may find the company’s latest effort Mansion comparatively morose and morbid.
Originally conceived as a haunted house experience with each act to take place in different rooms of an actual mansion, the intimacy becomes lost not only on a big stage but beneath less-than-bright lighting effects, with performers often working in complete darkness among the audience.
What you get is an hour of interpretative dance and jazz ballet on the theme of death, loss and grief, interspersed with the now obligatory but tired aerial rope, ribbon and trapeze acts.
When there are flashes of flesh, or touches of techno beat amid the slowed-down, minimalist versions of pop hits, it feels inappropriate given the story of a widow and children trying to come to terms with the death of their drink-driving husband/father.
Even the narrator’s voice is as far removed as possible from the spooky Vincent Price style required to create a haunting atmosphere. Thriller this is not.
Patrick McDonald
Unfolding
★★★★★
AC Arts, Light Square
Until March 5
When Lewis Major’s Unfolding premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2021, it was much praised for its near-perfect fusion of design, light and movement.
Having gone on to tour internationally in 2022, it returns to Adelaide for a short season as a tremendously confident and accomplished work.
The use of light – extraordinary 3D projections by lighting and visual artist Fausto Brusamolino – is instantly memorable, richly textured and utterly captivating, as different environments enfold the dancers and as they weave in and out of vertical shafts and silos.
In the second section of this tightly-knit work – around 25 minutes – the performance space transforms from circular to square and the dancers are seen in sharper relief, the intricacy of the choreography on full show.
Towards the end there is a return to the gentler, distant beginning.
What is unseen is the interdependence of movement, light and sound – James Brown’s fine score – that evolved in the development of the work when the creatives were separated during the pandemic.
It was a way of connecting at a uniquely challenging time. In person, it’s a celebration.
Peter Burdon
The King of Taking
★★★½
Holden Street Theatres
Until March 5
It’s a few years since New Zealand physical comedy performer Thom Monckton graced an Adelaide stage. The last time was with a show entitled The Pianist which was one of the funniest things imaginable.
So it’s with some anticipation that we front up for another serve of his mime-cum-physical comedy in The King of Taking, about a self-absorbed monarch who has the regal disdain to ask audience members to bring him a gift, with an unsubtle hint about personal safety should the command be ignored.
The set-up is simplicity itself. After his trademark chaotic entrance, the King first finds that the red carpets upon which he must walk have not been unrolled. The laying of same, with arms and legs akimbo, is cleverly done.
Unwrapping of the gifts, too, is top-shelf clowning – as is incorporating the more unusual gifts into the show.
Perfect family fodder: Take the kids.
Peter Burdon
Horse Country
★★★
The Bally, Gluttony
Until March 19
Two gamblers trapped in a meaningless void of American life and culture go round and round in overlapping conversational circles for US playwright and political satirist CJ Hopkins’ Horse Country, a surreal variation on Waiting for Godot-Only-Knows-What.
It’s also an homage to the rapid-fire repartee and physical comedy of iconic vaudeville teams: Think, in particular, of film duo Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s On First?” routine.
As Sam, Michael Edwards’ Muppet-like, agitated physical exuberance and exaggerated expressions play brilliantly against Daniel Llewelyn-Williams’ nonchalant to nonplussed Bob, and their complex banter never misses a beat.
Whether this show by acclaimed Welsh theatre company Flying Bridge engages, irritates or eventually bores will come very much down to the individual viewer’s tastes, much more so than in most theatre/comedy works.
All three outcomes were evident at this performance: Some audience members laughed throughout, others sat silently, while a couple began thumbing through program guides for other shows, muttering and looking at their phones.
This critic constantly swung between reactions – which may very well have been the whole point, if indeed there was one.
Patrick McDonald
Mustard
★★★★
Holden Street Theatres
Until March 19
A girl known only as E is on the rebound from a pretty monumentally failed relationship with the man of her dreams: An international cyclist, no less. but the bliss was short lived.
She nonetheless hangs on, hoping that the flame might be rekindled.
In the meantime, she copes in her own peculiar way. For some it might be alcohol. For others chocolate. For E, it’s mustard. Good, old-fashioned, bright yellow, hot English mustard.
The symbolism gradually becomes clear. Mustard is strong, but it also stains. It enhances, but it can also contaminate.
Mustard is beautifully written, with some delightful setups. E’s walk around town buying up every jar of mustard she can lay her hands on, and ending with a bulk delivery from Amazon Prime, is really funny.
There are some terrific turns of phrase: her mother’s “pleas for prayers” and “the madness in my bones or the mustard on my mind”. And the energy which writer and actor Eva O’Connor puts into the performance is striking indeed.
But you won’t think of mustard in quite the same way afterwards.
Peter Burdon
See You
★★★★★
AC Arts, Light Square
Until March 5
At the end of a conversation, we often say “See you”. To someone we’ve just met, it’s polite. To someone we know, or someone we love, it’s heartfelt.
See You from Taiwan’s Hung Theatre – a nice play on words, for it is both a part of choreographer Lai Hung-Chung’s name and the Chinese character meaning “fly” – is an extraordinary piece, an uninterrupted hour of tightly wrought movement and dance.
Inspiration for the piece came from two unrelated events. The first, a car accident he witnessed in his home city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. The other, more ephemeral, the comings and goings in the life of a travelling dancer.
Episodic in nature, neither narrative nor character-driven, See You is a journey of fleeting encounters, with others and with self. There are ensemble pieces with sudden, abrupt endings.
There are intimate duets, some the briefest of encounters, others more extended. There are the lonely moments, walking in a strange city being buffeted around by strangers.
If the tempo of See You is mostly measured, the intensity is at fever pitch throughout, and the tension is often electric. It is really accomplished work from a rising star.
Peter Burdon
Peter Goers And Isn’t It Pathetic At His Age
★★★★
Holden Street Theatres
Until March 19
Eight years back, the incomparable Peter Goers dared to present what was intended to be a trilogy of “very nice” entertainments for people of a certain age. In 2023, he presents the eighth part of the trilogy, and no, he doesn’t get it either.
With the same delight in the mundane as well as the madcap that’s made his radio show so enduringly popular, Goers regales his delighted audiences with stories of his youth, which seems surprisingly remote for someone who’ll be 48 on their next birthday.
There’s John Martins, and Trims, double cut rolls, Vienna coffee, and of course a Kitchener bun.
There’s the Balfours bag on which the school lunch order would be written, coins duly deposited. There’s milk delivered by horse and cart, and no fresh bread on Mondays. It’s bliss.
The wonderful Wills Singers, Susan and Anne, can still belt out a tune 50 years and more since they were entertaining the troops in Vietnam.
But nothing compares to the long-awaited Adelaide debut of Australia’s newest, if not freshest, drag queen, Dawn Service, fresh from the 2022 Broken Heel Festival. What has been seen cannot be unseen!
Peter Burdon
Originally published as Mad March reviews: The shows to watch this year
Adelaide Uni abortion academic lashed over ‘Baby Killers’ list
The law professor is facing demands to delete a social media post that included a slideshow of seven high-profile women she’s labelled a “Baby Killers Club”.
Unlikely hero saves mum and toddler from carjacking
A mother and her child, who were victims of a terrifying carjacking attempt, have a former criminal to thank for their lucky escape.