Bangarra’s beautiful moments never quite reach full potential in night of firsts

DANCE
ILLUME
Sydney Opera House, June 4
Until June 14
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★
Illume is Bangarra’s first season on the Sydney Opera House main stage, the Joan Sutherland Theatre: a remarkable achievement for the iconic Australian arts company.

In her opening speech, artistic director and co-CEO Frances Rings observed that the Joan Sutherland Theatre has long been a mainstay for opera and ballet, but would now become “a stage for the first stories of this nation”.

Bangarra dancers perform Illume at the Sydney Opera House. Illume is Bangarra’s first season on the main stage, the Joan Sutherland Theatre.Credit: Daniel Boud 

Adding to the list of firsts is the collaboration with a visual artist. Illume is a co-creation between Rings and Darrell Sibosado, a Goolarrgon Bard artist from Lombadina, Western Australia, whose contemporary artwork reimagines traditional pearl shell carving practices. Performed against a backdrop of Sibosado’s geometric galactic designs, the piece evokes light as a bridge between the physical and spiritual world, a beacon of sacred truths and identities, and a battleground in the climate emergency.

What a shame, then, that the performance fell short of Bangarra’s finest. Illume has beautiful moments, but never quite overcomes its weaknesses to realise its full potential. Sibosado’s shimmering artwork often casts a hypnotic spell, taking the Bangarra visual aesthetic into a contoured, almost futuristic constellation of shooting stars and swirling whirlpools (Charles Davis’ set design with Damien Cooper’s lighting).

But at times the dancers and choreography become lost in the shadows and the moving pinpoint graphics, making the visual focus muddied and obscure. Rings’ choreography also has gorgeously inventive moments, such as the Blood Systems vignette where the dancers interweave long LED strips across the stage and around each other, symbolising luminous kinship networks and life-giving connection. Gajoor, a scene featuring ash rising from fire and simultaneously falling from the heavens, is also breathtaking in its searing symbolism and visual poetry.

But none of these moments quite overcome notable lulls in flow, emotional connection, or choreographic clarity. Some parts even feel strangely unfocused and superficial: words I never thought I’d use to describe Bangarra.

However, the end chapter, Mother of Pearl reprise, is a triumph and reminds us why Bangarra has been such a force on the Australian cultural scene. As Sibosado’s gorgeous pearl iridescence flashes across the stage like kaleidoscopic lightning, the Bangarra troupe move into the unified, celebratory dancing that is one of their great strengths and a clarion call unique across the world.

THEATRE
EUREKA DAY
Reginald Theatre, May 31
Until June 21
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Eureka Day is a satire to make you squirm more than laugh. Exaggeration is almost non-existent, the corollary being that naturalism is ratcheted up to the point where it can seem like spying on real people more than watching a play.

Playwright Jonathan Spector takes his title from the private Californian primary school where the play is set. A board of four parents and the principal decide matters of school policy – strictly by consensus rather than voting. Anything else would set a bad example for the children, who are so perfect as to cheer when the other side scores a goal in soccer.

Eureka Day is a satire to make you squirm more than laugh.

The system has apparently worked like one big love-in until a case of mumps is diagnosed. Now the saccharine consensus rapidly sours. The board, you see, contains a couple of anti-vaxxers in May (Deborah An) and especially in the pushy school co-founder, Suzanne (Katrina Retallick). It also has two who trust the medical science: wealthy philanthropist Eli (Christian Charisiou) and especially newcomer Carina (Branden Christine). Don, the principal (Jamie Oxenbould), inclines towards the science, but inclines even more to conflict avoidance and fence-sitting.

With battle lines drawn, Spector gives us his centrepiece and crowning glory: a virtual town hall meeting for parents and board, dubbed a “community-activated conversation”. Occupying a quarter of the play, the scene flicks the satire from squirmy to laugh-out-loud, as the parents’ ever more vitriolic online comments are projected for us to read. At the same time, the poisoned interaction between the on-stage characters continues, almost as a soundtrack to what we’re reading.

Masterfully constructed, the scene manages to build in its hilarity, after which Spector dumps us back into harsher realities: Eli’s son’s mumps threaten his life, and it was losing a child post-vaccine that made Suzanne an anti-vaxxer.

Just as you read Shakespeare’s plays not knowing whether he was a committed Protestant or a closet Catholic, you reach this point still wondering where Spector stands in the vaccination debate, which is infinitely preferable to the play being baldly didactic.

Craig Baldwin directs this Outhouse Theatre Co production with typical detail (other than the voices being too soft) and careful casting. Spector, who also flirts with racism (as well as climate denialism, social media behaviour, political correctness and public-versus-private education) specifies the racial make-up of his characters. Don and Suzanne are white and older; Carina, 40s and black; Eli, younger and Jewish; May (originally Meiko), younger and Asian.

Christine and Retallick’s performances are especially nuanced in the increasing barbed exchanges between Carina and Suzanne, while Oxenbould finds a physicality for Don that amusingly dovetails with his fence-sitting proclivities.

But there’s also something missing, not so much with the production as with the play. Amid the discomfort of watching five people who mean well behaving somewhere between foolishly and abominably, we remain oddly detached because the author seems to have little affection for those he’s satirising.

VIVID LIVE
ANOHNI & THE JOHNSONS
Opera House Concert Hall, May 26. Also May 27.
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★½

Some 20 years ago – a virtual lifetime in music, and a quite different life for Anohni, who then was Antony and by no means the star of that Leonard Cohen tribute ensemble show – she entered the Opera House stage with a self-effacing shuffle in a ratty jumper and mussed, face-obscuring black hair. She silenced the murmur with a voice that was staggering in its difference, wondrous in its capacity and shattering in its impact, then left.

Anohni & the Johnsons in full flight at the Opera House for Vivid Live. Credit: Jordan Munns

This time she came on in a white floor-length gown with long white gloves and shoulder-length white blonde hair, holding the centre with grace, but that voice remains a thing of wonder. Her message resonated through an eight-piece band encompassing woodwind, strings, percussion, piano, guitars, drums and bass.

The message was in the show’s subtitle: Mourning the Great Barrier Reef. Using underwater reef footage as the backdrop, and sobering, frightening, devastating interviews with reef scientists as the between-songs mic drop, Anohni wove a story of abuse, attempts to rescue and a future bleak, if still being written.

The message was not just in those interviews, though, but in the weaving of their point within her songs; some that addressed this directly (“I want to see you boil … it’s only 4 degrees”) but most of which had begun life as personal stories.

From the pop song in theatrical garb that is Hopelessness and the Curtis Mayfield-like gospel soul of It Must Change, to the hauntingly beautiful You Are My Sister, with sadness built into its tenderness, and Cut the World, a song about freedom beckoning, these songs rose to meet us.

In 2016, Anohni’s Opera House show was a similar blend of visuals projecting the natural world in disrepair, a plea to change our ways, and songs that looked to connect personal and societal separation. It was only partially successful because the connection between singer, songs, message and audience was not always established.

But this time the songs served as cries of anger and pain, loss and resignation, denial and acceptance and warning, with grief under everything. Anohni crushed all hope and somehow offered hope at the same time, like in the old fan favourite that closed out the night, all of us quietly singing, “Hope there’s someone to take care of me when I die”.

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THEATRE
MARY JANE
Old Fitz Theatre, May 25. Until June 15.
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

Although Alex never appears, Tenkei, a Buddhist nun, speaks for us when she tells Mary Jane, Alex’s mother, “I see him very clearly.” Alex, 2½ years old, has been riddled with critical medical conditions since birth. Mary Jane has split with the father, and loses her job, but never loses her capacity for hope and unconditional love.

It’s curious to see this Amy Herzog play so soon after the American’s 4000 Miles and after Beckett’s Happy Days. The former alerted us to her compassion and tinder-dry humour, and here her titular character is a theatrical cousin of Happy Days’ Winnie: weighed down with an unimaginable burden, yet fighting on, clinging to hope, and unwilling to burden others.

Eloise Snape (right) is desperately moving as Mary Jane.Credit: Phil Erbacher

Ultimately, the play’s about the profound necessity to share that load. Mary Jane’s plight touches those around her, and all do help in their very different ways. So, even though it’s among the saddest plays you’ll see, you come out having watched a little monument be erected to the triumph of shared humanity, scene by aching scene.

I’ve never known a stage play with so much that we hear happening offstage, but don’t see, and Herzog also writes dialogue that poleaxes you with its authenticity. Countless sentences aren’t finished, ending instead with an exhalation, a facial expression or a (usually wrong) suggested word from the interlocutor. It’s a play that demands exceptional acting and a deep chemistry between the players. Director Rachel Chant (for Mi Todo Productions) has both.

Eloise Snape is desperately moving as Mary Jane, whose outward natural bubbliness must always mask a despairing cry within; a cry she dare not hear, or she will shatter. She comes close, cracking once at the hopelessness of the hospital’s understaffed music therapy department, and Snape spears your heart in doing it. She treads a delicate line, however, and doesn’t let her Mary Jane disintegrate. Like the other characters, you come to love this woman because she’s fundamentally such a sunny person, despite the desolation constantly gnawing at her vitals.

The other cast members play two characters each: one in the first act, when Alex is still at home; another in the second, in hospital. Di Adams, Sophie Bloom, Isabel Burton and Janine Watson are so good as not only to withstand the blowtorch of sharing scenes with Snape, but to enhance them. Watson is supreme as the razor-sharp nurse in act one, and, in the second, a torn doctor struggling for the words that will ease Mary Jane towards reality, without completely puncturing her fierce, fierce hope.

Perhaps more fluidity could be reached in some of the scene changes, although Soham Apte’s set is magically seamless in the way it converts from an apartment in Queens (with a blocked kitchen sink) to a hospital waiting room. Were all theatre this good, I’d have the best job in the world. Oh, and there’s fine performance from an uncredited goldfish.

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MUSIC
TRAIN
ICC Sydney Theatre, May 24
Reviewed by ROD YATES
★★★½

Say what you will about American pop-rock veterans Train, but they work hard to get the audience on their side.

In third song If Ii’s Love, frontman Pat Monahan pulls out his phone and begins filming the room, asking the crowd to go crazy for the clip he’ll post to Instagram.

During an extended Meet Virginia, which gives guitarist Taylor Locke an opportunity to show off his chops, Monahan takes a break from singing to lob Train T-shirts into the masses.

The cleverly constructed set-list also plays its part with staples such as Hey, Soul Sister, Play That Song, a spirited Save Me, San Francisco and a beautifully tender Marry Me peppered with several moments tailored for the Sydney audience.

First is a cover of Gotye’s Somebody that I Used to Know, with Scottish artist K. T. Tunstall – who earlier delivered a hugely entertaining support set – singing the parts made famous by Kimbra, before duetting with Monahan on the slick country pop of Train’s own Bruises.

The other surprise guest is INXS’ Andrew Farriss, who wanders onstage and dutifully makes it his own for renditions of INXS classics Never Tear Us Apart and Don’t Change.

The band even cede the spotlight before the latter so that Farriss can show off an abbreviated country-rock version of the song, which proves to be more puzzling than anything else.

Oddly, though, it’s in these moments that the show really comes to life, with Tunstall providing an injection of joyful energy, and Farriss an element of spontaneity, that are otherwise largely absent.

There’s no faulting the band, their musicianship or the smooth precision with which they perform hits such as Drive By or rousing finale Drops of Jupiter, every vocal harmony immaculate.

And at 56, Monahan still has a golden set of pipes and a dry wit to match, at one point announcing how much better Sydney is than Melbourne before adding, “Full disclosure: I said the same shit there.”

It’s a well-oiled performance by a seasoned band that knows exactly what it takes to do this, night in, night out.

But with a little more of that spontaneity, you’d have a show for the ages.

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VIVID LIVE
SIGUR ROS
Opera House Concert Hall, May 23. Also May 24 and 25.
Reviewed by ROD YATES
★★★★

Before starting this tour, Icelandic three-piece Sigur Ros were at pains to point out these shows would be more than just a traditional group performance with the backing of an orchestra. Indeed, bassist Georg Holm told this masthead that concertgoers would be seeing “the orchestral version of the band”.

In this tour’s orchestral mode, Sigur Ros position themselves with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as part of the ensemble.Credit: Daniel Boud

And so it is that when the trio follow British conductor Robert Ames onstage, each member clad uniformly in black, they position themselves among the already seated Sydney Symphony Orchestra, rather than at the front of the stage. The message is clear: Sigur Ros are a part of the ensemble, no more or less important than the 41 musicians surrounding them.

It’s a point made time and again throughout this two-hour excursion through the band’s cinematic, often ethereal catalogue, from the title track of their 1997 debut album Von to material from their latest, 2023’s Atta.

The rich cellos that usher in Untitled #1 – Vaka lend it a warmer, more sombre gravitas than its recorded counterpart; the rousing oompah climax of the exquisite Se Lest benefits from the added bombast, one of the rare occasions the orchestra takes full-blooded flight.

The very presence of the SSO affords the band the opportunity to realise the string-laden Staralfur in all its glory, a feat they long stopped trying in their more traditional live shows.

They are masters of navigating dynamic musical ebbs and flows; as Ekki Mukk draws to a close and the orchestra slowly dissipates, Kjartan Sveinsson’s haunting keyboard refrain is rendered even more fragile by virtue of the sound that came before it, a contrast that renders the audience completely silent as the notes fade to a whisper.

On occasion the songs do tend to blend into one another, vocalist Jonsi Birgisson’s majestic falsetto (an instrument in itself) gliding above the sweeping strings. It would, however, be a disservice to label it repetitive – instead the effect is more hypnotic and dreamlike, as though the entire Opera House is one giant, fully immersive sound bath.

A triumphant Hoppipolla concludes with Sigur Ros leaving the stage, after which the SSO bring the evening to a close with a volcanic, thunderous Avalon.

When the band return to soak up two standing ovations, their musical spell has finally been broken, replaced with an outpouring of gratitude and joy.

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