A doomed love story that started in Pentridge prison has been reimagined through music

MUSIC
Moonlite ★★★★
Homophonic! and The Consort of Melbourne, Fitzroy Town Hall, July 26

Bushranger Andrew George Scott, aka “Captain Moonlite” has long captivated Australia’s popular imagination, inspiring works from a 1906 stage play through to a 2019 musical. Part of Moonlite’s appeal is his devotion to James Nesbitt, whom he met in Pentridge prison. “Nesbitt and I were united by every tie which could bind,” Scott said.

Front: Lachlan McDonald; and behind from left: Elspeth Bawden, Kristy Biber and Timothy Reynolds.Credit: Darren Gill

Released from jail, the pair led a doomed existence. Prevented from working and hounded from society, desperation led them to hold up a homestead in Wantabadgery, New South Wales. In a gunfight with police, Nesbitt died in Scott’s arms. Scott was arrested for the death of an officer and went to the gallows wearing a ring of Nesbitt’s hair.

Moonlite, a 90-minute oratorio for voices, percussion and viola composed by Wally Gunn with a libretto by Maria Zajkowski, explores this intriguing same-sex love story in an imaginative contemporary idiom.

Spoken excerpts from Scott’s death-cell letters are married to Zajkowski’s sung poetic reflections. These scenes are punctuated by interludes for solo viola that mark the passing of time, expressively delivered by Phoebe Green.

Singers Katherine Norman, Elspeth Bawden, Kristy Biber, Jack Jordan, Timothy Reynolds and Lachlan McDonald from The Consort of Melbourne are empathetic communicators: cohering beautifully in chorale-like passages and vividly evoking Gunn’s many vocal effects, including birdsong, murmuring and audible exhalations.

Louise Devenish and Zela Papageorgiou perform in ‘Moonlite’.Credit: Darren Gill

Percussionists Louise Devenish, Kaylie Melville, Zela Papageorgiou and Hamish Upton impress with razor-sharp precision as they contribute tellingly to the work’s dramatic ebb and flow. Surtitles become helpful, especially in quietly uttered sections or densely textured passages where voices and percussion vie for attention.

Enthusiastically overseen by artistic directors Steven Hodgson and Miranda Hill, the Australian premiere of Moonlite (a winner of the prestigious Albert Maggs composition prize) allows the colours of the rainbow to illuminate the often sepia-tinted world of our colonial past.
Reviewed by Tony Way

DANCE
Agitato ★★★★
Dancehouse, until August 2

Back in 2018, Jo Lloyd had great success with her joyful, eccentric take on Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now she turns to the work of Felix’s older sister, conjuring something darker but no less impressive.

Curious details in Agitato fascinate.Credit: Darren Gill

Agitato is a response to an obscure étude Fanny Mendelssohn wrote when she was just 18: a stormy bit of youthful enthusiasm, full of leaping figures, thick chordal textures and a wild, improvisational energy.

It is pulled apart by composer Duane Morrison, a frequent Lloyd collaborator, and transformed into a crashing, twanging, hour-long odyssey of angst. It’s not backing music so much as a colossal nervous breakdown.

Lloyd finds all sorts of intriguing choreographic material in this encounter between Morrison and Mendelssohn. At times, the dancers become almost statuesque, holding strong, monumental lines, presenting clean shapes amid the glitchy score.

At other moments, we get those loose, whirling movements unique to Lloyd. Impulses surge through the dancers, limbs responding with delayed articulations, sending ripples that rise, twist and collapse under their own weight.

Agitato is a response to an obscure étude Fanny Mendelssohn wrote when she was just 18.Credit: Darren Gill

The ensemble – Lee Serle, Thomas Woodman, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Lloyd herself – shift between coordinated action and absolute divergence, occasionally sharing motifs in striking and always intriguing encounters.

There are only fleeting echoes of the humour that made a work like Handsome so entertaining. But curious details remain and fascinate. Serle’s disembodied head peering from the wings like the perfect voyeur, or Ritchie-Jones repeatedly whispering into Lloyd’s ear.

It all suggests a kind of eerie inwardness, as if the dancers are keeping something from us, turning away, disappearing. Perhaps, like Mendelssohn herself – who performed in concert only once – they’re performing for each other?

Nonetheless, Agitato is a fine bit of dance theatre. It presents a dark world – off-kilter and charged with anxiety – whose rules are sensed but obscure, with an intensity and complexity that challenges but enthrals.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC
Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird ★★★
Corner Hotel, July 25

Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird enter the stage to the sound of Take Me To the River by Talking Heads, which is uplifting, even if inviting the comparison isn’t especially wise.

Lachlan Rose of Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird. Credit: Martin Philbey

“I’ve got all the time in the world / Time until the river ends,” singer/songwriter Lachlan Rose croons on opening number Rosewater. Tonight they’re launching their fourth album, Rosewater Crocodile, a smooth and enthusiastically received slice of soft rock.

Cousin Tony’s records are a bit smooth and frictionless for my liking. They’re playing in a very specific field of early ’80s sophistipop, always in danger of veering into pastiche. Even their name evokes a cosy nostalgia for something long discontinued.

But live, some of that smoothness gets roughened up. Live looks good on them. Francesca Gonzales on keytar and backing vocals, and Oliver Whitehead on sax, especially add colour. The sax on Bluestone and Every Morning, it Breaks, in particular, are sweet and jagged in just the right ways.

Cousin Tony’s have been at it for a decade. Their knees are giving way, they tell the audience. They no longer they excited about pedals, they get excited about gear storage solutions.

Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird perform at the Corner Hotel on July 25, 2025.Credit: Martin Philbey

“Maybe people behind the Corner’s famous pole [a structural quirk that blocks the view of a small portion of the audience at any given time] are glad not to have to look at this old mug,” says singer/songwriter Lachlan Rose. Nonsense. He looks like a Melbourne sharehouse Paul Mescal, with his tousled hair and moustache, and sings like Bryan Ferry. He’s a dreamboat, and he writes dreamboat songs, and the crowd loves him.

Rose is a great songwriter, as proven on Mango Season and My Ghost & Its Crawling. I like Cousin Tony’s best when they break away from the smoothness on songs like Joy, and Rose’s solo performance of Head Home (“What, pray tell, would you have me do? Short of shootin’ my way through / There’s a killer on the loose”).

“I’m gonna go get a beer,” says Rose before wandering off like we’re chatting at a house party, and the band build something funky for floor filler Mercury Rising, bringing the set back round to the Talking Heads song that welcomed them to the stage. It’s infectious and for a moment, they lose themselves in it. There’s not a shred of irony to it, just six people under a groove.

Encore Love is Heartbreak is alive with synth and some beautiful bass. It’s a hit, it’s smooth and wise with a hint of swagger. It might be Cousin Tony’s at their peak.
Reviewed by Will Cox

THEATRE
Coriolanus ★★★
Bell Shakespeare, Arts Centre Melbourne, until August 10

Melbourne theatregoers should welcome the chance to see a full-blooded production of Coriolanus. The inclination is likely to be more pronounced, however, in anyone who watched the play reduced to its essence by experimental UK company Forced Entertainment at the Rising Festival in June.

Brigid Zengeni, Hazem Shammas and Suzannah McDonald in a scene from Coriolanus.Credit: Brett Boardman

That show was part of a tabletop version of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, gaming out Shakespeare’s plots using only a narrator seated at a table with an array of household objects before them.

Though the device powerfully condensed themes, it also eliminated the acting – and any actor is going to outdo a stovetop coffee maker, one would hope, when it comes to inhabiting the rage of a seething Roman matriarch or the wiles of a scheming tribune from the play.

Peter Carroll gives a crafty, wonderfully poignant comic performance as Menenius.Credit: Brett Boardman

Steeped in machismo, Peter Evans’ production with Hazem Shammas as Coriolanus foregrounds violence to the extent that Shammas appears in a war montage, hands bloodied, body spattered and begrimed – a vision of Coriolanus as a kind of Rambo, almost, emerging from a nimble, unshowy 20th-century frame.

The action hero is in his element in times of war. Performative politics is another matter entirely, and the play’s intrigues (and the social inequalities behind them) are laid down with brisk lucidity.

It’s true that the machinations of the people’s tribunes (Marco Chiappi, Matilda Ridgway) have perhaps too clownish an edge at times, but they don’t try to compete with Peter Carroll’s doddering senator Menenius – a crafty, wonderfully poignant comic performance that finds power in the kind of softness that the world of Coriolanus seems geared to destroy.

Softness is anathema to Shakespeare’s wolf-mother Volumnia, given a simmering and unpredictable portrayal by Brigid Zengeni in this production.

Infamously, the matriarch takes ghoulish delight in her son’s warlike exploits and his injuries (wounds take on an almost totemic significance in the play), and at least some of the tragedy lies in the way that Volumnia’s extreme embrace of patriarchal values comes to warp the life of her child.

Some of the finest acting is between Coriolanus and Volumnia. Any temptation to fault Shammas’ Coriolanus as too abrasive and unformed dies in the throat in these scenes, and the character makes perfect sense when you see what his mother is like.

There are some quibbles with this production. Editing a child’s physical presence out of the play isn’t an improvement; the bromance (or whatever it is) between Coriolanus and his nemesis Aufidius (Anthony Taufa) was so awkwardly handled that the audience sniggered at it. Hardly an ideal response to homoerotic subtext.

Still, Shammas at his best gives a dangerous, darkly charged performance. With several remarkable supporting actors in the ensemble, it should be a Coriolanus to remember.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Blood Wedding ★★★
Theatre Works until August 2

It’s a tale as old as time – thwarted love, unrequited desire, inherited enmities. In Tashmadada’s adaptation of Blood Wedding, it’s a tale at least as old as 1932, when Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca wrote Bodas de Sangre, the first of three rural tragedies.

Blood Wedding is anything but a blithe play.Credit: smw image

Janis Joplin’s jaunty Piece of My Heart, playing on loop, greets audiences as they walk into the auditorium, with cast members frolicking about on stage and engaging with the front rows. It’s a light-hearted prelude to what is anything but a blithe play. As the house lights dim, six of the seven cast members stand in a row, blindfolded, oblivious to what is about to transpire, powerless to stop it.

Harry Gill’s set is demarcated into different spheres, each symbolising the competing intentions and contrary factions of a mountainside town. To the left is the domain of Mother (Tess Lynch Steele), confined to the kitchen as she despairs over her son (Jonathan Pindiura) falling in love with Bride (Teresa Giansiracusa) and leaving her, all while lamenting the death of her husband and eldest son at the hands of the Felixes.

There’s much to love about this artfully staged adaptation.Credit: smw image

Perched atop the set is Bride, the subject of Groom’s affections, who goes through the motions of her day while harbouring feelings for Leonardo Felix (Dion Zapantis) and living a cloistered life beneath Father’s (Connor Raselli) watchful eyes.

Below her is Leonardo’s Wife (Mia Cannolo), who suffers through an unhappy marriage – her baleful singing the haunting melody that backdrops much of the unfolding action leading up to the cataclysmic wedding.

The wedding, as so many do, tiptoes between decorum and mayhem, expanding beyond its Spanish source material to evoke the revelry of Middle Eastern, Greek, Jewish and Eastern European celebratory customs.

Jessamine Moffett’s garbing of everyone in black lends it a befitting sombreness as the characters (metaphorically and physically) dance around one another, unable to express their true feelings outside the binary of their age-old feuds with one another.

Images are projected on a screen backdropping the stage – some more successfully than others. The magnifying of Bride and Groom as they circle one another before the wedding is affecting, less so the persistent imagery of horses, which harks back to Lorca’s original text but feels out of place in this adaptation.

And for all the play’s excellent sound design – Irma Thomas’ Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) bookends the play, an especially astute choice – the actors struggle to project their voices without the aid of mics. Mohamed Al Ziady – who oscillates between playing an impish devil on the shoulder and an omniscient narrator – is skilled at the former, less so at possessing the gravitas required for the latter.

Deborah Leiser-Moore’s adaptation honours the surrealism of the source material, with beautifully choreographed formations of intimacy, ardour and anger suffusing the script. The climactic fight scene is especially well-enacted, with “blood” making its presence known in fresh and unusual ways.

A play with as weighty a sense of fatalism and obsolescence as Blood Wedding can feel lugubrious at times, but there’s still much to love about this artfully staged adaptation.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.