Pop princess perfection: Dua Lipa does it her way
By Chantal Nguyen, John Shand, Bernard Zuel, Harriet Cunningham and Peter McCallum
MUSIC
Dua Lipa
Qudos Bank Arena, 28 March
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★
Sydney has had no shortage of pop-princess perfection since a certain Eras juggernaut rolled through last year, and yet Dua Lipa brings a fresh aesthetic and energy all her own to a field bursting with talent. Her music is squarely in the pop mould and her look all glossy glamour, yet her performance is distinctly rock star in its swagger and command of this vast room.
That is not to say she has the arrogance that comes with the swagger: in two prolonged interludes she is the genuine young woman chatting with her fans, at one point moved to tears to one’s story of being brought back by her music from the brink of despair. That she can combine these dual Lipas into one believable, coherent persona is a testament to the complexity and depth of her style.
Dua Lipa brings a fresh aesthetic and energy all her own to her performance.Credit: Getty Images
That complexity is reflected in her visual performance – Madonna poses, Kylie feathers and Paula Abdul choreography locate her in a rich pantheon whose influences she does proud. It is also there in her music: complex and yet instantly familiar, infinitely catchy. Part of that familiarity comes from her knowing references to her pop precedents: echoes of Chic, Jamiroquai and Marc Almond reverberate through her sound.
That makes her attempt to show local sensitivity by covering a homegrown band look clumsy by comparison. Wheeling out an incongruously cardigan-clad Kevin Parker, they manage an unilluminating cover of Tame Impala’s The Less I Know, the Better that briefly drains the show of all energy. It gives the lie to that title: her wider set pays far more clever homage to our icons Olivia Newton-John (Physical) and INXS (Break My Heart).
That sad little interlude is the only drag on a night that is otherwise consistently exuberant. Variation comes in the contrast between songs, some merely great and others verging on genius. The latter category peppers her show – from One Kiss, through Don’t Stop Now and Levitating and, concluding the night, the legendary Houdini – a measure of how spoilt she is for choice in constructing a set of pop classics.
Pop may be disposable, but Lipa’s grooves have only deepened with time – and this show, too, will linger long and deep in the memory.
MUSIC
Schubert’s Winterreise: Trifonov & Goerne in Recital
City Recital Hall, March 26
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★
As he sang the 21st song, Das Wirtshaus (The Inn), of Schubert’s great cycle of mournfulness, Winterreise, Matthias Goerne moved arms, hands and torso with the free expressive grace he had shown throughout the performance, almost as though tracing and amplifying through the air the superb melodic shapes created by his voice.
At the piano his co-artist Daniil Trifonov sat implacably immobile, the hymn-like arch of the melody welling and attenuating under his fingers as though controlled solely by concentrated thought. Over and above the artistic calibre of each, the uniqueness of this event was witnessing two supreme artists, each with their own powerful vision and distinct artistic personality, create a masterpiece before one’s eyes.
Daniil Trofonov and Matthias Goerne.Credit: Craig Abercrombie
With the first song Gute Nacht, Goerne began the cycle with light pleasantly arched line, Trifonov establishing the dull foot-fall rhythm that initiates the cycle’s literal and metaphoric journey, while highlighting accented details with almost morbid insistence. In the second song, Goerne released flashes of anger and wildness, while he threaded fragile lines against Trifonov’s spiky piano part to sinister effect.
The turbulent activity of the piano’s right hand in Erstarrung (Numbness), set up a tussle for dominance with the voice’s lower notes. A similar striving was to become evident in the 18th song, Der stürmische Morgen (The Stormy Morning), though this was not misjudged balance, but rather deliberately bringing out a struggle inherent in the music.
A different sort of struggle was captured in the cycle’s best-known song Der Lindebaum, in which the quietly nervous agitation of Trifonov’s introduction was answered by superb melodic curves of idyllic beauty from Goerne. In Die Post (The Mail Coach) at the cycle’s half-way point, Goerne made the lines float with a sense of evanescent hope, which Trifonov grounded in stubborn reality with spiky precision.
Goerne’s ability to change vowel shape, and inflate lines with dreamy weightlessness while combining with the unyielding rhythmic tread of Trifonov’s chiselled disciplined sound with absolute precision, captured to perfection the combination of hope and despair that underlines Schubert’s conception, nowhere better than in the penultimate song Die Nebensonnen (Phantom Suns).
For the closing song Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man), Schubert empties the music of feeling with a repetitive figure on the piano over a static bass to which, in contrast to his previous rhythmic discipline, Trifonov gave deliberate rhythmic waywardness as though fingers were numb with cold and the controlling mind had departed. After singing without break for about an hour and a quarter, Goerne was still able to inject the muffled closing lines with the subdued richness of fading warmth. Unforgettable.
DANCE
Somos
Neilson Studio at Sydney Dance Company, March 27
Until April 13
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★
Growing up in Spain, Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela listened to flamenco tapes his father played in the car. His father was from Granada, renowned for flamenco music and dance. The teenage Bonachela – whose dream was to be Leroy from the film Fame – was more keen on “Michael Jackson, Tina Turner…anything but flamenco”.
Decades on and settled in Sydney, Somos (Spanish for “we are”) is Bonachela’s “love letter” to Spain and the haunting music of his adolescence. It features a remarkably beautiful playlist of Latin music, including flamenco songs, Mexican ranchera music (a favourite of Bonachela’s mother) and covers by flamenco pop legend Rosalia (who in the Spanish-speaking world is often considered to be bigger than Taylor Swift).
Somos is Rafael Bonachela’s love letter to Spain.
Somos originally premiered in 2023 in SDC’s then newly renovated studios, on a small mirrored stage configured in-the-round. The choice of venue was a pragmatic decision – at the time, the usual Sydney theatres were booked by other companies. But the cosy venue gives Somos its trademark feeling of closeness, by turns intimate and suffocating.
Somos makes the audience feel almost voyeuristic, peering at the dancers through a sheer red curtain (Kelsey Lee’s set design) under soft amber lighting (by Damien Cooper). In the universe that is Somos, everyone seems impossibly beautiful and in a relationship, clad in barely-there mesh and peering through the curtain with smokey eyelined eyes (Lee’s costumes). Here, dancers don’t simply walk, they pace – with a smouldering, sultry air.
In its 2023 iteration, Somos was undeniably stylish but became almost superficially one-note in its focus on Spanish sexiness. In this updated version, Bonachela has changed two songs and some of the choreography, giving Somos a far more expansive emotional range and compelling musical variety. You can almost hear the piece opening up and sighing in relief at becoming a little bit more human, a little bit more complex and relatable.
There are gorgeous duets and ensemble scenes, featuring incandescent, athletic, impeccably timed partnering. Highlights are the duets from real-life couple Naiara de Matos and Piran Scott, who leap headlong into a fearless series of soaring lifts and turns; and Ryan Pearson and Luke Hayward, whose heart-in-your-mouth finale to Estrella Morente’s cover of Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas sears with push-and-pull vulnerability and cruelty.
THEATRE
The Glass Menagerie
Ensemble Theatre, March 26
Until April 26
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★½
Memory is a slippery beast. You reach out and try to grab it, and it either slips away or, at your touch, crystallises into an entirely new thing that is neither truth nor fantasy. You must handle it with the utmost care to protect its fragility or see it shatter into pieces.
I’m in pieces after seeing the Ensemble Theatre’s new production of The Glass Menagerie. Starring Blazey Best as Amanda Wingfield, the family matriarch, and featuring promising debuts from Bridie McKim and Tom Rodgers, Tennessee Williams’ breakout work shakes off the weight of its masterpiece status to become a gripping night in the theatre.
Blazey Best stars as Amanda Wingfield, a fading Southern belle abandoned by her husband.Credit: Prudence Upton
Amanda Wingfield is a fading Southern belle, long abandoned by her husband. Her two adult children, Tom and Laura, still live with her. Tom has a dead-end job and a yen for travel. Laura is shy and awkward. Meanwhile, a portrait of their father, an alcoholic travelling salesman somehow recast as a hero, lowers over them all.
Dreams, memories and fantasies can barely sustain them. Into this bleak house comes a gentleman caller. Jim O’Connor, Tom’s work colleague, is bright and affable and feels like a potential lifeline, but can he handle the glass menagerie without breaking it?
Director Liesel Badorrek embraces the poetry and symbolism of Williams’ ravishing prose. Danny Ball, an eloquent and explosive Tom, doubles as Tom-the-narrator, and the decision to have him also voice part of the stage directions offers further layers of meaning. Laura’s tray of glass ornaments glows with its own inward light as action takes place in the shadows (lighting by Verity Hampson).
Meanwhile, a naturalistic setting (costumes and set by Grace Deacon) melts, literally, from the wall-papered backdrop onto the floor, like the cloudy edges of an old photo. Tom’s opening soliloquy drips with Southern vowels, and Blazey Best’s accent is a brittle, fascinating fabrication. Is it too much? The accents, which do mellow across the evening, play at the edge of parody, but perhaps we have to take Tennessee Williams at his word: as Tom-the-narrator says: “Being a memory play … it is not realistic”.
Best dazzles as Amanda Wingfield, simultaneously exasperated and desperate for her children’s futures. Her range, from coquettish simper to tiger roar, is exhilarating and well-matched by Ball, who takes Tom from poetic malaise to volcanic rage in the blink of an eye.
By contrast, Bridie McKim and Tom Rodgers, as Laura and Jim, hold the stage with silences that range from excruciating to magical. They negotiate their dialogue with delicacy and lightness to the point that you almost believe Jim has fallen in love with Laura.
The Glass Menagerie is a classic that comes with some hefty baggage of history, not least the shock of 1930s America’s casual racism and ableism. This production pays respectful but not slavish homage to the original to create a compelling piece of theatre for our times.
MUSIC
MJ Lenderman
Sydney Opera House, March 25
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
One of the more irritating descriptions of a certain type of, let’s say relaxed rock – where drawling vocals and dragging rhythms meet solid-state and sometimes squalling guitars – is the term “slacker”.
It’s a phrase that works as a generational putdown (“kids today ...” etc.), and a cool-kids boast (“we’re above all that”, etc.) and regularly is applied to a lineage running from Neil Young to J Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr) and Kurt Vile to MJ Lenderman.
MJ Lenderman and his band.Credit: Jordan Munns
The inaccuracy of this term and its assumptions was made abundantly clear four songs into this wonderful night of country-inflected rock from North Carolina’s Catholic saviour.
A man of buoyant hair and sleepy eyes, with a band that look like ’70s West Coast dudes washed through a ’90s indie cycle
We’d had the low twang opening/hair-tossing climax of Wristwatch, and we would soon get almost funky and definitely bi-coastal with You Have Bought Yourself A Boat, but in Rudolph, there was a definite rhythm and momentum that drove rather than dozed.
The fuzzed guitar diversions and snaking lines were ragged and sometimes gnarly; the pedal steel was curly and often tender. It moved air, chugging and chunky enough, but above it all, it was romantic. Not mere heartache but in the idea of the music and its potential to redirect and maybe even change you with energy or hope or succour.
It is central to Lenderman: he loves this and believes in it, burrows into it in the new song, Pianos (melody descending, guitar ascending and hitting that War On Drugs sweet spot of blurry power and blissful harmonics) and soaks us all in it with the languorous You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In.
It’s why in She’s Leaving You, pushed by solid thumping drums that made the guitar even starker, you couldn’t miss that a Mac-like pop song was barely hiding inside its meatiness. And why a cover of Neil Young’s Lotta Love in the encore was pulled together by a dreamer’s deep affection.
Slacker? Nah, he cares. A lot.
La Musica Notturna
Omega Ensemble
City Recital Hall, March 25
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½
Cellist and guest director Umberto Clerici joked that he had replaced the first piece on the program, Giovanni Sollima’s Alone with another piece by Sollima, Hell 1, because he had played Alone so often that he was bored with it.
Ennui with Alone had apparently subsided by the end, and he played it as an encore. Sollima is a Sicilian cellist and composer with eclectic imagination for local colour and the program showcased another work of his, Violoncelles, vibrez! for two cellos (Clerici and Paul Stender) and strings.
The program concluded with the Sydney premiere of Everything we hear comes from silence for solo cello, solo clarinet and strings.
Hell 1 began with a chant-like melody on solo cello, to which the accompanying string group added modal harmonies, over which the soloist adds decorative embellishment with the chant returning unadorned at the end.
Taking its inspiration from Dante’s Inferno, it made the first circle of hell seem more melancholy than torturous and not even particularly unpleasant.
Violoncelles, vibrez! began with repeated notes that went out of phase as more instruments joined, creating minimalist textures for the string ensemble. Against this, the solo cellists played languorously sliding sighs that also moved in and out of phase before giving way to more frenetic music.
After the sigh-like gestures returned, the piece ended with a pulsating figure on strings drifting away to nothing. Alone, for solo cello, also featured a chant-like melody set in organ-like textures by the idiomatic use of multi-string chords, with the cello’s D string providing a focus and modal centre.
Between the Sollima works, the Omega Ensemble dipped into the eighteenth century with the fancifully descriptive Quintet, Opus 30, No. 6, La Music Notturna delle Strade di Madrid by cellist/composer Luigi Boccherini and Vivaldi’s Concerto for cello and strings in B minor, RV424.
Boccherini’s quintet evoked church bells, dancing, beggars, street singers and soldiers, creating a harmless though inconsequential diversion. Clerici played the solo part of Vivaldi’s concerto with elegance and a strong projection of the music’s gesture and overriding expressive shape.
The program concluded with the Sydney premiere of Everything we hear comes from silence for solo cello, solo clarinet (David Rowden) and strings by another cellist-composer, Peter Gregson. The first movement began with a hushed high unison from cello and clarinet, which gradually diverged to create a still, expansive mood like the glistening presence of a dew-covered dawn.
The second movement evoked a similar mood in a lower pitch register, while the third opened similarly, then gained in speed for a moment before returning to the glowing, cinematic mood of the opening. Though calming, more variety of mood and texture might sustain a three-movement work better.
MUSIC
RUTHIE FOSTER
The Lounge, Chatswood Concourse, March 21
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
Ruthie Foster wasn’t just born to sing; she was probably already singing in the womb. Music pours from her like water from a tap, and when she turns the tap on full, she makes an astounding sound: a huge, church-bred cry that pierces your very soul.
OK, you say, many singers have big voices. The wretched TV talent-quest industry is built on belters. But here’s the thing: when Ruthie hits the big notes – high, long, and of phenomenal power – she doesn’t lose the intimacy of when she’s singing softly. It’s the same deal, it just happens to be pushing you so far back in your seat you’re nearly in the lap of the person behind.
There were many highlights in Ruthie Foster’s gig.Credit: Lucinda Goodwin
Few singers have been able to do that. Aretha Franklin and maybe Sinatra at his best, but it’s a short list. The records of hers with which I’m familiar didn’t prepare me for the fact I was to hear someone live in the memory on the plane of greats like José Carreras and Betty Carter.
Foster is from Austin, Texas, the state that’s given us so many great musicians, from Ornette Coleman to Janis Joplin, Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson and Beyoncé. Like others on that list, she has catholic tastes that emerge both in the songs she writes and in those she covers, so the blues, gospel, soul and even country become one, united by an unfailing feel for a funky groove.
The groove comes courtesy of her own guitar (a new, Australian-made model Lloyd Spiegel gave her at the start of this tour) and Scottie Miller’s keyboard. The latter has been her collaborator for 17 years, and it shows. Mostly using piano or electric piano sounds, sometimes with a frosting of strings, Miller colours the songs and solos with panache and adds backing vocals. He’d already proved he was a more than useful operator in an opening solo set, playing his own material.
But sometimes, one wished he would just back off the chordal playing enough so we could more readily hear Foster’s slippery, finger-picking grooves. Even better, of course, would be if she’d come with her full band, but that’s a hope for another time.
As it was, the highlights were many. Having signed to Sun Records for the Mileage album that just won her a first Grammy (after six nominations), she showed a keen sense of tradition by taking Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s That’s Alright (which was a Sun hit for Elvis Presley), slowing it down, and letting it simmer on a funky dialogue between guitar and keyboard.
Even better was Pete Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer, again slowed but very insistent, with her voice ringing like some vast bell. Then, on her own Phenomenal Woman, she unleashed the full power of her miraculous singing to such an extent that all that had gone before seemed merely a trickle before the flood.
MUSICALS
Guys & Dolls: Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour
Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquarie’s Point, March 21
Until April 20
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★½
Staged on a giant outdoor floating stage backed by breathtaking harbour views, Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour (HOSH) is one of the ritziest events of the year. The red-carpeted annual spectacular alternates between big-scale operas and lucrative musicals. This year’s was the latter: Guys & Dolls, the 1950 musical theatre classic about a gambler with a heart of gold.
Brian Thomson’s successful New York City set is all gritty concrete and smokestacks. The centrepiece is a big yellow taxi, and this year for the first time the orchestra is visible in an overhead gantry, removing previous HOSH latency issues.
Jason Arrow as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Joel Granger as Benny Southstreet and John Xintavelonis as Harry the Horse.Credit: Neil Bennett
If you like your musicals traditional, Guys & Dolls is for you. It’s a cookie-cutter New York City where men in candy-coloured plaid suits (Jennifer Irwin’s luminous costumes) dance in lines, unironically singing with pork pie hats in outstretched arms. Women have flouncy skirts, tight curls and high 1950s voices.
The ensemble (Kelley Abbey’s choreography) is outstanding: the dancing is sharp, unified, bursting with energy.
The cast is warm, likeable and strongly voiced. Annie Aitken brings comedic sympathy as Salvation Army heroine Sarah Brown, Bobby Fox creates theatrical depth as craps game organiser Nathan Detroit, and Home and Away starlet Angelina Thomson is an audience favourite as showgirl Adelaide. Cody Simpson looks the part as hero Sky Masterson. Both Thomson and Simpson (a former elite athlete) bring strong physicality to their performances.
Jason Arrow, fresh from leading Hamilton, scene-steals as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. His rendition of Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat saves a sluggish Act 2, overflowing with such charisma the audience loses itself cheering and clapping along.
Angelina Thomson as Miss Adelaide. Credit: Carlita Sari
But despite its charms, Guys & Dolls leaves a strange taste in your mouth. Thomson convinced then-director Jo Davies to stage the musical for its feel-good vibes, but OA possibly overlooked that Guys & Dolls has not aged well, as many recent reviews of it from around the world attest. Unlike HOSH’s 2019 and 2024 West Side Story – startling in its urgent relevance – this production unthinkingly accepts 1950s “wink-wink boys-will-be-boys” attitudes.
Gambling addictions, and seducing a naive young woman with rum when she asks for a milkshake, are funny; “but I love him” justifies years of being taken advantage of; and the female solution to problematic male behaviour is forcing men into marriage. It’s a polished production. But its content is so light-heartedly, unquestioningly 1950s that some may even go as far as wondering if it’s the kind of thing Trump might program for his Kennedy Center.