Seann Miley Moore is a killer Hedwig in this must-see show
By John Shand and Peter McCallum
MUSICAL THEATRE
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
Carriageworks, July 19
Until August 3
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
There’s no Hedwig and the Angry Inch without a star. No, not just a star: a supernova. iOTA first burst into our lives playing Hedwig, and 19 years later it’s Seann Miley Moore’s turn to dazzle us.
Hedwig is a role in which performers can unleash their all, from tempestuous rock songs that let their voices strip the paint from the walls, to raucous comedy – whether innuendo-laden or very black – that brings the house down. There are moments of pathos, chances to ad lib, and endless scope for sexual provocation. Directed by Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis, Moore amply ticks all the boxes.
Sean Miley Moore lets rip as Hedwig.Credit: Shane Reid
Devised by John Cameron Mitchell (text) and Stephen Trask (music and lyrics), Hedwig tells how Hansel Schmidt grew up in a dysfunctional family in East Berlin (where his mother taught sculpture to limbless children). He opts to have gender reassignment surgery to marry a US soldier, Luther. Alas, the surgery is botched, leaving an angry inch. Hansel, now Hedwig in a fright wig, is dumped, leaving her to pick up the pieces with Tommy Gnosis, who becomes a rock star, while Hedwig trails around in his wake in dive bars with her band the Angry Inch.
It’s one of the most stripped-down musicals imaginable, having only two characters: Hedwig and her new husband, Yitzhak (Adam Noviello), plus a four-piece rock band. Cunningly, playing live is part of a story that, in turn, is fleshed out by the songs.
Poor Yitzhak is treated as abominably by Hedwig as she was by everyone else in her life. In fact, Yitzhak would be a pretty thankless role were it not for The Long Grift, a song in which he reveals his repressed talent, and Noviello certainly makes this the show stealer it’s supposed to be.
The set and costumes largely sustain the stripped-down theme, and this restraint allows Geoff Cobham’s lighting to co-star with Moore, its impact amplified by Carriageworks’ cavernous Bay 17 venue. The venue also suits the story’s conceit that Tommy is playing next door, with Hedwig intermittently opening a door to hear the songs she wrote with or for him.
The band is led by Victoria Falconer at the keyboards and, to vivid effect, a theremin. The sound is compromised, however. So much of the story’s mythology is embedded in rock music, and while there’s a vast bass end, the tops and mid-range have been miniaturised, presumably to leave ample room for us to hear the lyrics. But this means we miss the crunch, especially from the guitar, for which the music cries out.
The one lame song, Wicked Little Town, makes the show feel it has a flat tyre for a few minutes, but otherwise this is a killer production of an utterly unique musical, with Moore in swaggering, pouting, winning form. Don’t miss it. It may be another 19 years before it returns.
THEATRE
BETRAYAL
The Old Fitz Theatre, July 15
Until August 10
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★
What slippery little creatures are we, in all our representations of ourselves to others. And how absurdly fragile the kingdom of our untruths. It’s likely, or so Harold Pinter implies, the greatest lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
The British playwright’s 1978 Betrayal, now showing in a stripped back Sport For Jove production at the Old Fitz, is a masterclass in deceit through the prism of monogamy. Staged in front of a long wall of fluttering vertical blinds (Melanie Liertz’s set), with simple text projections anchoring us in time and place, it travels backwards through seven years of infidelity, to the moment when married man Jerry began an affair with Emma, his best friend Robert’s wife.
Are Emma (Ella Scott Lynch) and Jerry (Matt Hardie) in love with each other, or with the thrill of their deception? Credit: Kate Williams
We begin at the epilogue of the affair. A few years after they last saw each other, Emma (Ella Scott Lynch) meets up with Jerry (Matt Hardie) to tell him that her husband knows – it all came out last night. The confession was in fact offered freely after Robert (Andrew Cutcliffe) himself owned up to cheating throughout their marriage. In one of many detonations of dark humour that Pinter plants in a backwards trail, we see Jerry in a state of amazed disbelief that his ex-lover would throw his relationship with the friend he was cuckolding under the bus.
Yet the version of events Emma told isn’t quite true after all. As director Cristabel Sved deftly rolls back Pinter’s tape, all that we believed was genuine implodes. Friendly overtures are revealed as loaded snares; memory elides truth to serve fantasy; and language doubles and darts out like a snake to hiss secret, second meanings.
It’s thematically significant that the two men are also literally co-workers in fiction – they have jobs at the same company as a literary agent and book publisher – and that their star-lister writes auto-fictional novels that justify the author’s domestic status quo.
Our three leads are marvellous in their dissembling roles, capturing the rather pathetic yet too-human nature of (as Elena Ferrante puts it) “the lying life of adults”. Hardie’s Jerry resembles a rumpled, shameless labrador, a foil to the wolfish and watchful wife-beater of Cutcliffe’s Robert, who is increasingly unnerving with his teeth stretched into a cynical smile. Lynch is refulgent in a vixenish red dress and nails, and plays perhaps our most audacious and opaque character. There is a fourth minor character, with Diego Retamales briefly and comically popping up as a bungling waiter.
Not everything works seamlessly in the staging and the set. There’s the awkwardness of having someone fiddle with the blinds at every transition. In just one of these, we see a video projection of blurry happy children’s faces, presumably to remind us of “the innocent”. It’s both a little maudlin and forgettable.
Betrayal is nonetheless a haunting portrait of the dangerous games we play in love and lust, here graced with great leads. I do wonder if the future will spring a story about what betrayal looks like in post-monogamous relationships. Pinter for the polycules?
THEATRE
Conscience
Greek Theatre
July 17
Until July 26
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★
Political biography as theatre seems to be having a moment. We’ve seen Julia and RBG. Now, Joining the Dots Theatre presents the first Australian production of Conscience, Joe DiPietro’s 2020 play about American politician Margaret Chase Smith.
Like Julia, the catalyst in Conscience is a key speech, Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience”, a 15-minute oration delivered in 1950 as a lone Republican voice challenging the divisive fearmongering of Joseph “Enemies within” McCarthy.
Ben Dewstow is an expansive McCarthy.Credit:
Unlike Julia, in Conscience Smith’s speech is the ultimate anticlimax, greeted by silence from a restless audience. It’s an awkward moment in this otherwise fast-moving 90 minute play: a moment that should be greeted by cheers, falling flat in the face of fear. And as such, it is a visceral evocation of the tightrope we walk when speaking truth to power.
The Australian premiere of Conscience is a humble production that packs a punch. Matthew Abotomey brings a quiet intensity to Bill Lewis, Smith’s closeted political adviser, while Jordan Thompson makes a promising debut as Jean Kerr, research assistant and later wife to McCarthy. Ben Dewstow is an expansive McCarthy, developing from an aimless buffoon into a deadly attention-seeking missile with frightening efficiency.
For Alison Chambers, as Margaret Chase Smith, the character development is more subtle but equally impressive, transforming from a nondescript conservative middle-aged woman to a political force to be reckoned with.
For a play mostly powered by words (and an independent theatre company no doubt mostly powered by love), the production design is appropriately minimalist: a noisy smoke machine vies with a simple but effective underscore (Alex Lee-Rekers) and the overhead growls of Sydney Airport. Lighting designer Theo Carroll frames the most dramatic of moments and director Madeleine Stedman choreographs the ensemble cast to conjure up crowded moments of history full of telling details.
But what makes this production of Conscience really fly is its timeliness. DiPietro wrote Conscience following the first Trump administration, in that interregnum of relative sanity. Put next to Trump, McCarthy looks like a loser, a blip in American politics, whose death from alcohol-related causes brought his career to an early end.
But if the personal parallels are not obvious, McCarthy’s political playbook is all too familiar: misogyny, conspiracies, and above all, the use of fear as a political piledriver. There are audible gasps of recognition from the audience as McCarthy tantalises Smith with a list (in this case, of supposed communists) and blithely dismisses lies as inaccurate reporting.
In Conscience, McCarthy is defeated and Smith gets the last word, declaring: “As an American, I condemn a Republican fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat communist. They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”
Fine words, and well said. If only they were heard.
OPERA
Rusalka
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House, July 19
Reviewed PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Making a welcome and triumphant return to Sydney, Nicole Car sang the title role of Rusalka with all the warmth, strength and depth of humanity that notionally eludes the operatic character she portrays.
I say “notionally” because Rusalka is an allegory for a person who, in failing to understand human fickleness, superficiality and venality, ends by performing the most deeply human act of compassion, sacrifice and love.
Nicole Car as Rusalka.Credit: Carlita Sari
Car is at her magnificent best when opening out climactically at the peak of phrases with thrilling sound and immaculate melodic arc, but the sound is evenly controlled and shaded across the full range. She unfolded the lines of the opera’s most well-known aria, Song to the Moon, with gentle reserve, allowing the melody’s natural grace to place a stamp of beauty on this mysterious tale at its outset.
It is a performance that fulfils in every respect the exciting promise Car revealed in her earliest roles with Opera Australia (including as Michaela in Carmen, one of the first roles in which she attracted listeners’ ears).
Tenor Gerard Schneider sang her Prince with attractive light sound and Disneyesque good looks, true in pitch and tone and unforced in expression. As the Water King, Warwick Fyfe maintains a fierce, fretful and doom-laden tone, his chief narrative function being to warn that this isn’t going to end well.
His appearance in this role accentuated the resonance of Dvorak’s opening scene with that of Wagner’s Rheingold, in which Fyfe sang a ferocious Alberich in 2023. As though to clinch the connection, director Sarah Giles has chosen to locate this scene not beside the lake, as the stage directions say, but in it.
Charles Davis’ set, David Bergman’s projections and Paul Jackson’s lighting create this illusion deftly, conjuring a sense of strangeness and, later, of alienation from the brightly lit vacuousness of the human world. Poetically, the water is the cool subconscious, linked with the unsullied but austere purity of moonlight that, though corrupted by human contact, remains an ideal of chaste beauty that the Prince aspires to but can attain only in death.
By contrast, the human scenes in the castle are filled with paper-cutout people. In this world, Natalie Aroyan has a glowering edge to her tone as Rusalka’s flouncing rival, the Duchess. Just as Dvorak leavens the gloom with folk-like music (anticipating the stylistic collisions that his compatriot Janacek was later to exploit), Giles mixes the opera’s sorrowful aspect with comedy.
Andrew Moran and Sian Sharp inject rustic simplicity and humour, Sharp singing with incisive brightness. A different level of comic subversion comes from Ashlyn Tymms as the witch Jezibaba. With shopping trolley and glittering accessories, she pollutes both the human and natural world to feed acquisitive consumption, and Tymms sings her mocking incantations with penetrating brittleness.
Renee Mulder’s costumes range from pallid fish-like grey for the water dwellers to meretricious colour for Jezibaba. Her Wood Sprites, brightly sung by Fiona Jopson, Jennifer Bonner and Helen Sherman, lumber comically with branches for arms and bad hair.
Conductor Johannes Fritzsch mines the symphonic richness of the orchestral textures expressively, though he and the Opera Australia Chorus articulated crisply the distinctly Czech snaps in the rhythm. At the end, Giles has Rusalka ambiguously turn towards Jezibaba, undermining Dvorak’s redemptive message with a hint that malignancy is constantly shape-shifting.
THEATRE
CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION
Wharf 1 Theatre, July 17
Until September 7
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½
Annie Baker can make a play out of minimal words and minuscule gestures. The effect borders on shock because we’re so used to huge emotions with titanic consequences. You have to readjust, put your antennae on higher alert.
Baker wrote two of this century’s best plays: The Aliens, and above all, The Flick, about the death throes of a cinema. If Circle Mirror Transformation isn’t in that league, it’s because her sheer daring doesn’t always succeed.
On the page, the play sometimes presents the merest sketches of the characters, and at other times, she exercises infinite precision about what happens and, most particularly, what doesn’t happen. If the spaces between notes define a rhythm, the spaces between words or events can define the feel as well as the pace of a play.
Cameron Daddo and Ahunim Abebe. Credit: Daniel Boud
Just as Beckett famously used a metronome when directing a Happy Days production, so one can imagine Baker writing Circle Mirror Transformation with a stopwatch by her side.
The setting is a weekly adult acting class in a Vermont community centre, run by Marty, admirably played by Rebecca Gibney after a 20-year hiatus from the stage. Marty doesn’t use texts, but rather games and improvisations. Her four students are James, her husband (Cameron Daddo), Schultz, a recently divorced carpenter (Nicholas Brown), Theresa, an ex-actor (Jessie Lawrence), and high school student and wannabe actor Lauren (Ahunim Abebe).
We come to know them by the way they engage – or don’t – with Marty’s games, and by how they interact before, during and after these sessions. Baker manages to squeeze fulfilled and unfulfilled romances into her scenario, but they are merely cross-hatched; we do the colouring-in.
Poor Lauren was hoping to do some “real” acting before auditioning for a West Side Story production, and she speaks for us when she doesn’t “get” some of the perverse and even irritating games. It’s in the repetition of these that Baker dares us to stay on board, the experience being akin to one of those elaborate jokes where you pray the pay-off is worth the wait.
For me, she stretched our patience. In this Sydney Theatre Company production directed by Dean Bryant, the casting and acting are largely on point, with Gibney and Daddo bringing an easy charisma to bear that suits their likeable characters.
Schultz and Lauren suck us in too, with Abebe’s portrayal of the latter replete with her toes pinching each other as she initially feels excruciating discomfort in participating (just as Gibney beautifully “conducts” her exercises with tiny hand gestures). Theresa is the least interesting character, and Lawrence does well to keep us engaged.
If you want to see a play contrived almost out of thin air; a play with warmth, humour and a perfect capturing of our stuttering attempts at real communication, this is it, yet you leave with a nagging sense that a deeper emotional impact went begging.
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