Christie Whelan Browne’s hilarious cabaret serves up rare authenticity

CABARET
Life in Plastic ★★★★★
Performed by Christie Whelan Browne, Chapel Off Chapel, until October 27

How can singing Katy Perry’s Roar in a dinosaur costume be an act of feminist empowerment that has audiences leaping to their feet? You’ll have to see Life in Plastic to find out.

Starring Christie Whelan Browne, written and directed by Sheridan Harbridge, this zany, raw, warts-and-all autobiographical cabaret follows Whelan Browne’s life, from the irrepressible awkwardness of girlhood to stardom in an industry which – despite the courage she and others like her displayed in refusing to stay silent – still has much to answer for in how its treats women.

Christie Whelan Browne stars in Life in Plastic.Credit: Angel WL

No one’s born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, and the tragicomedy of gendered socialisation soon whirls into inventive hilarity.

Whelan Browne begins in school uniform, adopting a teen persona to lisp Girls Just Wanna Have Fun through gruesome orthodonture. She leans into the cringe of puberty’s hormonal onslaught.

Acidic potshots are taken at the mixed messages of third-wave feminism. The performer recalls formative years when teenage girls thought they could “have it all” by wearing a skort, when they internalised Kate Moss’ odious one-liner: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” in the 1990s, at the height of fashion’s descent into heroin chic.

Barbie cops a serve in allowing destructive messaging on body image to fester through decades. The show’s ventriloquist act with a cynical showbiz Barbie is hardly less bizarre and awful than, say, literally basing Barbie’s body shape on a German sex doll. (Thanks Mattel!)

Funnily enough, Whelan Browne’s first acting gig was playing Barbie at a Westfield shopping centre. The anecdote slides into a fight between Barbie and Ken dolls; a mordant mash-up of Aqua’s Barbie Girl peeling ironic layers from the confection, then pairing it with #MeToo and the fight against misogyny in the entertainment industry.

Whelan Browne is battle-hardened there. Thrown into a years-long legal quagmire after airing sexual harassment and assault allegations, she takes control with a few choice quips.

The star also exposes grubby tactics endured in court, when lawyers tried to muddy the waters by dredging up photos of her holding a penis pinata at a hen’s night. How does Whelan Browne respond? I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.

Details of another private battle are movingly revealed: Whelan Browne’s gruelling struggle to have a baby with her partner through IVF, the long road to motherhood, and the steadfast love that carried them through.

Life in Plastic is anything but. This cabaret serves up realness and rare, behind-the-curtain authenticity.

It kaleidoscopes through comedic highs and raw emotional depths with hard-won insight, flaunting all the talents and powers of entertainment that make Whelan Browne such an intimate, and inimitable, delight to watch onstage.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Wayfinder ★★★★★
Alexander Theatre, MPAC, October 18

Wayfinder is a glorious, chromatic frenzy of dance and acrobatic movement, created by Kyle Page and Amber Haines, the artistic and associate artistic directors of Townsville’s Dancenorth. It’s a jubilant mess of a show and impossible to resist.

In beautifully gaudy costumes, the ensemble of seven streams through the space like prismatically dispersed sunshine. On a foam stage that gives them extra bounce, they tumble and flip and pop in a riot of waving limbs and big Townsville smiles.

Wayfinder offers a uniquely kinaesthetic experience. You can feel the performance in your own body. The feeling of bouncing, cartwheeling and tumbling on grass is stirred irresistibly in the muscles – no matter how distant the recalled memory.

Wayfinder offers a uniquely kinaesthetic experience.Credit: David Kelly

Central to the experience is a pile of multi-coloured ropes that drop impressively from the ceiling at the beginning of the show. These create a sense of disorder that is the perfect setting for the exuberance of the performances.

The dancers wrap each other in these ropes, they bury themselves in them, connect with them and strew them across the stage.

A pile of multi-coloured ropes is central to the experience of Wayfinder.Credit: David Kelly

The soundtrack is a collaboration between Bryon J Scullin and the progressive Melbourne-based art-funk quartet Hiatus Kaiyote. The music, with its big beats, vocal acrobatics and constantly changing rhythms, suggests a week-long party compressed into an hour.

The stage design, by artist Hiromi Tango, includes a towering technicolour sculpture that appears during a rare quiet moment. This marvellous swamp-gothic column provides a visual constant, holding the scene together as the party becomes a carnival in its final act.

There’s also a novel sound and light sculpture created by Robert Larsen and Nicholas Roux, which is distributed throughout the theatre. This is composed of glowing globes about the size of honeydew melons with individually programmed audio.

Are there too many gimmicks? The multi-coloured fabric, the trampoline floor, the strobe lighting effects, the glowing balls that sing at you and everything else? Is it all too much? Perhaps, but that’s the joy of Wayfinder. It revels in its excess.

Unfortunately, the Melbourne season at the Alexander Theatre was two nights only, which is not enough for such a crowd-pleaser of a show.

Later this month, the company will take Wayfinder to Mexico City for the Festival Internacional Santa Lucia.

Before then, however, this Friday and Saturday, Dancenorth will be lighting up the Geelong Arts Centre. Go and see them if you can. Go and chase this remarkable burst of happiness in rainbows all the way to Geelong. You won’t be sorry.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC
Jazz at the Bowl (Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller) ★★★★★
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, October 19

Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller may be the names on the ticket, but there was a lot more to the stellar Jazz at the Bowl (part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival) at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on Saturday night.

Maucus Miller performs at Sidney Myer Music Bowl on October 19.Credit: Duncographic

They’re headliners, comperes and bearers of the jazz legacy still dominated by Miles Davis. Davis comes up multiple times across the night. Miller, introduced tonight as “one of the most-recorded bassists of all time”, worked extensively with Davis (as well as Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and others). Hancock played in Davis’ quartet through his 20s. Both are keen to impress the connections on us.

Bass isn’t typically a lead instrument, but Marcus Miller’s five-sometimes-six-piece band (particularly Donald Hayes on saxophone and Russell Gunn Jr on trumpet) take the lead frequently, and Miller slips into a backbone role. They play several numbers he wrote for Davis, including the highlight of their set, Mr Pastorius, with Gunn playing a very Davis-y muted trumpet.

My allocated seat is in an echoey corner of the bowl (opened, by the way, the year Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue). When I reposition myself to a mysteriously empty seat near the front, the experience changes significantly. I’m on the inside, rather than the fringe. It’s a communion, playing jazz, and you need to be close. Miller is thunderous, hand over and under the neck of his bass.

But Hancock steals the night. His five-piece band has a way more playful edge, and plenty of chaos too.

Herbie Hancock steals the night at Jazz at the Bowl.Credit: Duncographic

He paints with piano, throwing colour across an already busy canvas, while the trumpet screams in the foreground and the drums stampede behind him.

After a killer opening medley, Hancock veers between a grand piano and a Korg synthesiser in clavinet mode.

In a long digression, he speaks at length about COVID. “There’s only one family on the planet,” he says in a heavily-vocoded voice reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman. “Every human being is part of this beautiful, huge family.” It’s sad and long and faintly absurd, and ultimately unifying.

In the last act of the set, he dons a massive white keytar, leading rousing versions of his hits (yes, a jazz instrumentalist with hits!) Rockit and Chameleon. Hancock, 84, duels with his bassist, both with (justified) grins on their faces, and plays bleep bloop noises through Chameleon. The crowd goes wild. Again, justified.

Hancock’s music remains unpredictable, wild and truly collaborative. It’s his name on the ticket, but this is no solo show.

While introducing the band, he goes on a tangent about how guitarist Lionel Loueke just juggled multiple contradictory tempos during Doin’ It.

And drummer Anwar Marshall, he informs us, is just 26.

Maybe in 60 years we’ll be back here at an Anwar Marshall show, the lineage from Miles to Herbie to Anwar remaining at the heart of some cool Melbourne night in 2084.
Reviewed by Will Cox

THEATRE
Victorian Seniors Festival
Time and Tide ★★★
La Mama, until October 24

La Mama Theatre serves many communities. All of them will be affected when it ceases public performance next year. For many young theatre artists starting out, it’ll take out the first rung on the ladder of their careers, but spare a thought, too, for older Australians.

Time and Tide is a well-chosen miscellany of snippets and monologues performed by Dennis Coard.

No theatre company has done more to include our elders in recent years.

During the darkest days of COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, La Mama’s partnership with the Victorian Seniors Festival streamed the wisdom of Uncle Jack Charles and Liz Jones, and an eclectic variety show from older artists. It was perhaps the most successful and inspirational digital migration of the performing arts at that time, and La Mama has continued to build on its legacy ever since stages reopened.

This year’s Seniors Festival showcases brief seasons featuring theatre veterans. It opens with Time and Tide, a well-chosen miscellany of snippets and monologues performed by the wonderful Dennis Coard.

Death, the fragility of life, and resilience in the face of slings and arrows are themes, with Coard first leaping manically into the role of an itinerant Irish wizard hurling jeremiads and gallows humour at visions of climate apocalypse (in excerpts from★★ Jodi Gallagher’s play Prophet).

A moving Australian diptych based on Michelle Wright short stories pairs a father broken by the desolating loss of a son with a man eulogising his dauntless single mother and remembering her final days.

Nikki Coghill and Geoff Wallis in a scene from Lung.Credit: Darren Gill

And in the Daniel Keene monologue Getting Shelter, Coard brings infectious larrikin mischief to a wily homeless man, hospitalised after a bashing, yet cheerfully putting one over on the pack of wolves who connive to inherit his greatest treasure.

He even moons the audience, before returning (fully clad) for a short desideratum on growing older and what passes, without cliché, for wisdom.

A digital offering exists for those who can’t access La Mama in the flesh: Kate Herbert’s Lung is a staged radio play in which corporate lawyer Anna (Nikki Coghill) faces a life-changing respiratory disease.

Only a transplant can save her, and her lungs have a thing or two to say about that. The play explores the strain on Anna’s close relationships, and the emotional and psychological rigours of chronic illness.

Other live works in the festival include Maude Davey’s free-wheeling, unreliable stage memoir, My First Bike; a play resurrecting controversial prime minister Billy Hughes and putting him on trial; and The Butcher, The Baker, twisted narrative cabaret from Ella Filar, originally inspired by the 1970s NSW women’s commune at Amazon Acres.

Worth taking a punt on them – this is one of the last chances you’ll have to see a live show at La Mama before it goes dark in 2025.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

OPERA
Eucalyptus ★★★★
Victorian Opera, Palais Theatre, until October 19

Rossini cruelly said of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin that one could not judge it on a first hearing, and he certainly didn’t plan a second. Rossini meant it as an insult; when I say Jonathan Mills’ new opera Eucalyptus might need a second hearing, I mean the reverse.

Australian-born, Britain-based composer Mills has produced a complex, often exciting, moving yet challenging score which, based on the audience comments as they exited, showed many had struggled to grasp. In fact, Mills opens with his own homage to Wagner, a quiet low-register, gradually increasing distilling of nature reminiscent of Das Rheingold. He also followed Mozart in giving long legato lines to the principals, contrasted with scurrying tunes to the chorus.

Eucalyptus at the Palais.Credit: Charlie Kinross

This is an excellent production. Experienced librettist Meredith Oakes has written for such composers as Thomas Adès, and this was a convincing and clever adaptation of the Miles Franklin award-winning novel by Australian author Murray Bail about a father who offers his daughter in marriage to anyone who can identify the 500 eucalypt varieties on his property.

Oakes used the Victorian Opera chorus as a sort of Greek chorus, advancing and commenting on the narrative, and they responded with a stellar group performance.

Director Michael Gow is a noted playwright and director who brought the simple staging to vivid life. Simone Romaniuk’s effective and economical set included a semi-transparent gumtree-lined backdrop with the orchestra behind, so that conductor Tahu Matheson (who enhanced his growing reputation) appeared like a ghost emerging from a tree trunk.

Jonathan Mills has produced a complex, moving, often exciting, yet challenging score.Credit: Charlie Kinross

This co-production between Victorian Opera, Opera Australia, Perth Festival and Brisbane Festival had an extraordinary collection of soloists, led by soprano Desiree Frahn as the daughter, Ellen. What a performance!

A ferocious challenge of vocal leaps and constant high notes at full volume was met with technical and emotional conviction. Simon Meadows, Michael Petruccelli, Samuel Dundas, Natalie Jones and Dimity Shepherd also all excelled.

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