By Cameron Woodhead, Tony Way, Jessica Nicholas, Andrew Fuhrmann and Mikey Cahill
This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes a story about the tragedy of former mining town Wittenoom, a one-hander that reverses the vanishing act that seems to accompany the sexuality of middle-aged women, the premiere of a play that looks at a notorious chapter in local art history, an intimate jazz performance, a mind-bending work of circus, a marathon ballet pared back to 50 minutes, a work that breaks new ground, the Midsumma Extravaganza and a gig that fans have waited eight years for.
THEATRE
Sunday ★★★½
Anthony Weigh, Melbourne Theatre Company, extended until February 21
Myth clings to the lives of great artists and those who inspired them. Anthony Weigh’s Sunday brings fresh eyes to one the most storied circles in Australian art history – the bohemian commune at what is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne – reimagining it through a stimulating examination, with a hint of tragedy to it, of how art can break the shackles of convention, even if those who make it can’t escape the nightmare of history entirely.
Sunday brings fresh eyes to the story of the bohemian commune at what is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art.Credit: Pia Johnson
Arts patrons John and Sunday Reed, the founders of Heide, were famously unconventional. From the 1930s on, the dairy farm they purchased at Bulleen became a mecca for artists such as Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. Creatives were drawn by the intellectual and artistic ferment and the freedom Heide allowed them to explore, in a utopian spirit, a lifestyle that embraced radical left-wing politics and polyamory (the latter has become so fashionable these days the young seem to imagine they invented it).
Sunday Reed’s intense and ill-fated affair with Nolan, conducted with the full knowledge of her husband, lies at the heart of the drama. And if that sounds like a recipe for soap opera, the pitfall is (mostly) avoided, thanks to sensitive and finely realised performances from Nikki Shiels and Josh McConville.
Nikki Shiels and Josh McConville star in Sunday.Credit: Pia Johnson
Their undeniable chemistry grows, at first, through provocation. Sunday is no passive muse to an active artist. She is a critic – opinionated, erudite, utterly remorseless about the conformity of the Australian art scene – who takes to grilling the stammering Nolan about his work, while her husband bustles in the kitchen.
Some scholars have suggested Sunday played a more instrumental role in Nolan’s artistic development than is generally acknowledged – that it’s possible she collaborated on his iconic Ned Kelly series, for instance.
That becomes more than a suggestion in this striking and powerful portrayal, which is driven as much by Sunday’s consuming passion for art – in its way a substitute for religion, or the children she cannot have – as it is by romantic love.
Refreshingly, sexual jealousy doesn’t get much of look-in. Matt Day as John Reed is understated – a man who wears his principles like a tailored suit, allowing himself only the odd twinge of discomfort; his commitment to and affection for Sunday plainer for being so quietly drawn.
What does torpedo the open relationship and lead to permanent estrangement is Nolan’s proposal of marriage. It’s the same fate that befalls the unconventional heroine of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and there’s an echo of Olive’s distress in the moment when an ashen-faced Sunday realises Nolan’s possessiveness will doom their love.
For her part, Sunday is possessive about her power to influence art. A cruel outburst from Nolan puts her in her place, reminds us how class complicates the picture, and presents both sides of the structural issue of funding the arts through philanthropy. Sunday Reed was wealthy – a member of the prominent Baillieu family – and could afford to be unconventional; the artists drawn to her oasis were not, and they had few options but to rely on such largesse.
The production is not without flaws. It’s overlong, the design does little to focus the performances or to create a sense of intimacy, and there’s a splash of histrionic melodrama towards the end that feels out of character.
Yet the intelligent dialogue, complex themes and three excellent performances make Sunday a new Australian play well worth catching.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Wittenoom ★★★
Mary Anne Butler, Red Stitch, until February 19
The tragedy of Wittenoom haunts the imagination and the conscience. Once a thriving asbestos mining centre in the Pilbara, the site is now a ghost town. It was degazetted by the Western Australian government in 2007 – the last resident evicted in 2022 – and remains toxic to human life, the largest contaminated area in the southern hemisphere.
Caroline Lee and Emily Goddard star in Wittenoom.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
Even drawing breath there can be fatal. The blue asbestos tailings that riddle the place cause pleural mesothelioma, an aggressive and otherwise rare lung cancer. That’s something mining companies knew full well during the 1950s and chose to ignore. The result? Around 2000 former miners and residents have died from the disease since the mine closed in 1966.
Quite a few Australian artists have been inspired by the story – famously, Midnight Oil wrote the song Blue Sky Mine about Wittenoom – and Mary Anne Butler, whose play Broken took out the lucrative Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature in 2016, finds an unexplored angle in Wittenoom, creating a poetic two-hander from the lives and sad fate of the town’s women and children.
Emily Goddard and Caroline Lee play a daughter and mother dealing with the aftermath of living in real-life mining town Wittenoom.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
The free-spirited and impoverished Dot (Caroline Lee) came to Wittenoom from Perth as a single mum, with her daughter Pearl (Emily Goddard) in tow. She was drawn by the money – the possibility of a better life for Pearl – and the chance for reinvention in the outback, as well as the sexual liberation the remote, male-dominated town offered her.
Shimmering between past and present, and sometimes layering them onstage simultaneously, the play threads lively scenes of the town in its heyday into a grim evocation of both characters facing terminal cancer, decades later.
The performers channel the doomed vitality of the piece through a poignant twining of life and death, from Pearl and her friends playing innocently with asbestos in the streets to Dot pursuing sexual escapades with brawny men who sicken and die.
Lee draws a striking dramatic contrast between Dot’s feistiness and joie de vivre in the prime of life and her spectral decline. As Pearl, Goddard could delineate the two time periods more clearly, and her vocals need modulation – the volume and pitch of her delivery are excessive for such an intimate space.
Some of Butler’s more densely poetic writing can sound recited rather than acted, though the show’s dramatic compression (it’s only 65 minutes), not to mention the unnerving atmosphere and sustained intensity it achieves under Susie Dee’s direction, ensures no moment goes to waste.
And I doubt I’ll be the only one reflecting on the people most sidelined by the history of Wittenoom – the traditional owners, the Banjima people.
As the play reveals, they were often given the worst jobs by the mining industry, and they’re still waiting today for whitefellas to remediate the land so that they can continue to respect their ancient connection to Country in safety.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Bendigo Chamber Music Festival Opening Gala ★★★★
Capital Theatre/Australian Digital Concert Hall, February 1
Now in its fourth year, the Bendigo Chamber Music Festival continues to enrich and enliven the musical life of the city by astutely blending youth and experience.
The Bendigo Chamber Music Festival Opening Gala, February 1, 2023.Credit: Australian Digital Concert Hall broadcast
On the youthful side of the ledger, festival directors Chris Howlett and Howard Penny have further enhanced the festival by entering into a long-term partnership with the London-based Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT), which will see emerging artists perform exclusively in Bendigo each year. The accomplished and engaging performances by this year’s YCAT artists, clarinettist Jonathan Leibovitz and pianist Ariel Lanyi, in the festival’s opening gala bode well for future collaborations.
Bringing plenty of colour and agility to Spohr’s Fantasia and Variations on a Theme of Danzi, Leibovitz effortlessly negotiated its extremes of range, while riding its waves of tender lyricism and high romantic drama.
Lanyi joined fellow pianist Daniel de Borah in the two-piano version of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn; the pair finding an amiable synergy that brought admirable rhythmic flexibility and well-considered timbre to each finely characterised variation.
Dohnanyi’s Sextet in C major for the curious combination of violin, viola, cello, clarinet, horn and piano provided an appropriately festive finale, initially offering a wide romantic vista in which Nicolas Fleury’s golden-toned horn unfurled an expansive melody. Successive movements showcased the fine string playing of Sophie Rowell, Tobias Breider and Howard Penny, with further cameos from Leibovitz and Fleury. Laurence Matheson’s brilliant pianism came to the fore in the madcap final movement with its detours into dance music and comic ending.
Concluding on Sunday, the festival offers the chance to hear many rarely performed works as well as premieres of works by Australian composers Harry Sdraulig and Justin Williams. Between this rich offering of chamber music and upcoming performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Bendigo is striking musical gold.
Reviewed by Tony Way
THEATRE
The MILF And Mistress ★★★★
Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Theatre Works Explosives Factory, until February 4
The MILF and Mistress sounds like lesbian bondage porn, and I’d be surprised if the publicist didn’t trigger a few spam-filters trying to promote the show. Yet there’s much more to this one-hander than meets the eye. Indeed, illusion is so crucial to Jane Montgomery Griffiths’ new play that it’s bookended by stage magic.
Jennifer Vuletic is utterly magnetic in The MILF and Mistress.Credit: Andrew Bott
The show opens with a tall middle-aged woman in an emerald-green pantsuit, an arch smile playing upon her lips as she performs a rope trick (what else?) and invokes “suspension of disbelief” – that submission to a shared act of imagination which most theatre demands of its audience.
There’s a strong visual echo of the “Don’t look behind that curtain!” scene from The Wizard of Oz in this gambit. And our imposing, self-possessed, remorselessly eloquent heroine soon drops the smoke and mirrors to bare her daggier and more diffident soul.
This is Ali (Jennifer Vuletic), a lesbian high school English teacher living in the ’burbs with her partner and two teenage sons.
The warts-and-all portrait of her life bristles with self-deprecating humour, sharp observation, and gossipy wit. Some details of her soccer mum existence will be familiar to many suburban households – the upholstery in her Subaru has been scuffed into “open wounds”, and you can virtually smell the pong of adolescent boys in the back – but there’s a singular, and melancholy, estrangement in being the only rainbow family in the neighbourhood.
Ali isn’t unhappy with her choices. Yet in the black and white Kansas of the heteronormative world she’s bought into, her sexual self has faded into invisibility. She doesn’t recognise or feel connected to her own body anymore, and this ferociously intelligent, powerful woman has fantasies of being dominated, objectified, controlled – free to be nothing, for a time, but essence and sensation.
Her anxious encounter with a dominatrix is, ultimately, joyful. The BDSM scenes aren’t prurient in the least, playing out behind a translucent curtain bisecting the stage. And Ali embraces her desire to enact fantasies of humiliation without shame, hiring a sex worker the way other women might have regular pedicures or expensive haircuts.
The MILF and Mistress bristles with self-deprecating humour, sharp observation and gossipy wit.Credit: Andrew Bott
First-time director Di Toulson doesn’t fine-tune the piece – a more experienced hand might have sharpened and varied the pace of the comedy (and rethought the design to lend dynamism and focus to the erotica) – but with a performer as talented as Vuletic, those are quibbles.
Vuletic is utterly magnetic, investing Ali with compelling intelligence and an irresistible, almost conspiratorial sense of humour, while tracing the character’s vulnerabilities and shadow-lines to poignant effect.
It’s a liberating, beautifully acted piece, and the real magic lies in how completely it reverses the vanishing act that seems to accompany the sexuality of middle-aged women, and lesbians in particular, in a sex-positive way.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
JAZZ
Monty Shnier Sextet ★★★★
The Jazzlab, January 29
Just days after recording their second album, the Monty Shnier Sextet took to the stage at Jazzlab on Sunday to unveil their new repertoire in front of a small but deeply attentive crowd. Shnier – a strikingly gifted young bassist and composer – is completing an honours thesis at the Victorian College of the Arts, and this new suite of music has been informed by a deep dive into 19th-century classical harmonic concepts.
Members of the Monty Shnier Sextet: Ashley Ballat (trumpet); Monty Shnier (bass); Hector Harley (tenor sax); Mia Barham (alto sax).Credit: Jessica Nicholas
But if the compositions spring from academic theories, the music we heard on Sunday night felt wonderfully alive. The ensemble members may have been following charts closely, intent on navigating Shnier’s arrangements with precision, yet the leader’s writing left plenty of room for the players to colour the music with their own imagination.
Ashley Ballat’s trumpet played a central role, forging vivid melodies, doubling piano or bass lines, or sinking into warm three-part harmonies with saxophonists Hector Harley and Mia Barham. Shnier’s supple yet firmly authoritative bass allowed pianist Matt Steele and drummer Ollie Cox the freedom to eschew a strict pulse for a more organic feel – though the rhythm section could also move in effortless tandem to conjure a bossa-tinged sway, a syncopated heartbeat or (less commonly) an upbeat, strutting swing.
Of the new tunes, Head in the Cloudlands was especially compelling, with frequent harmonic shifts that were as beguiling as they were unpredictable, creating an air of sinuous mystery that eventually built a sweeping momentum.
We also heard several numbers from Shnier’s debut album Where the Blackwoods Grow, including the evocative title tune and the graceful Holding Space. The band’s final offering of the night was Signs and Promises, which built from a simple bass motif to a bold, surging canter, the band members conversing in passionate, improvised spurts before gradually drifting into silence.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas
The Monty Shnier Sextet performs again at Jazzlab on February 14.
DANCE
Storytime Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty ★★★★
Australian Ballet, Comedy Theatre, season complete
If you’re looking for a school holiday outing with a bit of swish and sparkle, look no further than Storytime Ballet. This series, launched by The Australian Ballet in 2015, presents pantomime versions of classic ballets aimed at preschool and primary-aged kids.
The Sleeping Beauty, set to music by Tchaikovsky, is normally a 3½-hour marathon. In this version, however, it’s cut to a brisk but entertaining 50 minutes. And, with three shows a day, it’s easy enough to find a time that suits.
A scene from The Australian Ballet’s Sydney staging of The Sleeping Beauty.Credit: Rainee Lantry
Youngsters, of course, are encouraged to dress the part – as fairies, princesses and princes – and there are accessories for sale in the foyer. “You don’t need another star wand,” one mother was overheard saying. “You both have beautiful Frozen wands at home.”
The ensemble of 12 dancers, most of them recent graduates of The Australian Ballet School, showcase an attractive and fresh style, characterised by confidence and deliberate precision. They effortlessly capture the fairytale spirit while demonstrating their skills in a clear and generous way. Sean McGrath, as the charismatic narrator of the piece, is a familiar feature of the Storytime Ballet series. His natural rapport with the audience guarantees a sense of intimacy and emboldens even the very young to join in the fun.
Hannah Lukey and William Humphries are charming as Princess Aurora and her prince, while Amber Alston, Sophie Burke, Catherine Richardson and Sophie Wormald are all solid as the fairies. Hugh Colman’s costumes and sets are borrowed from Maina Gielgud’s full-length 1984 production of The Sleeping Beauty. They were memorably described by a reviewer for The Times during the company’s 1988 London tour as a sickly combination of Walt Disney baroque and Tyrolean operetta. Well, they might have been too much for Covent Garden, but they’re just right for a rowdy matinee at the Comedy Theatre.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
MIDSUMMA | CIRCUS
Hot Summer Nights! ★★★½
Gasworks Arts Park, season complete
A sultry summer evening is the perfect setting for this queer outdoor circus, but whatever the temperature, it will feel positively chilly compared to what’s happening onstage.
Hot Summer Nights! serves up a fever-dream of drag, contortion and clowning – and you might want to bring a personal fan for the acrobats, who cater to all tastes and perform with enough erotic pop and sizzle to fluster the coolest of customers.
Jarred Dewey is one of the performers at Midsumma’s Hot Summer Nights.Credit: Bryony Jackson
The spectacle unfolds in two rapid-fire halves and is hosted by drag queen Tash York, whose cabaret styling comes with a spark of audience participation.
She improvises songs on the spot – based on the names, occupations and favourite foods of a few random audience members – and doesn’t miss a beat, though admittedly, she did have to pull some gymnastic rhymes to serenade Nathan, the pasta-loving payroll compliance consultant.
If, like me, you’re allergic to participation, you can always sit in safety at the back of the bleachers and enjoy the thrilling acrobatic display.
There’s the heavily tattooed Tro Griffiths, executing an aerial straps routine with exquisite poise and control. Or Rockie Stone taking on a Jenga tower of chairs, in a sequence that mixes physical humour, a supreme balancing act, and a touch of escapology. Or the sheer flexibility of Jarred Dewey, pole-dancing in platforms so high and shiny they look like they might achieve lift-off and rocket the artist into space.
Drag artiste Valerie Hex (James Welsby) adds enchantment with lavish costumes, expert lip-synch and choreography and a spot of magic; while Flip Kammerer and Luke Taylor join forces in a clownish double-act, full of manic pratfalls, in which Kammerer plays an unco-ordinated fitness influencer on rollerblades.
Between astonishing feats of physical prowess and the high-spirited hilarity of the cabaret and comedy, no one will leave Hot Summer Nights! unentertained.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Shadowfall ★★★½
Joachim Matschoss, La Mama, season complete
No one in the theatre world needs me to tell them that La Mama can stage absolute rubbish. Even Betty Burstall had sharp views on some work staged in the theatre she established. And yet La Mama is a remarkable institution because it’s in it for the long haul. It recognises that theatre must be allowed to fail if it is to break new ground, and every so often, a work comes along that succeeds in ways no one was quite expecting.
A scene from Shadowfall at La Mama.Credit: Brendan Bonsack
Shadowfall is one of these. It’s a strange and ephemeral piece, difficult to pin down. The program note invokes known theatrical quantities (it views the COVID lockdowns as “one big Brechtian gesture”, as if crisis itself were an alienation technique) but the show’s dramaturgy feels much freer than that may suggest – a flight, if you like, over unexplored terrain.
The youthful ensemble throws itself into a poetic style of nonlinear drama – one that weaves snatches of thought, song and physical theatre around fragmentary scenes that arrive onstage like unbidden memories.
The latter accumulate without ever shrinking themselves into any obvious narrative, though motifs and suggestions multiply. The myth of Icarus is one triangulation point, with a recurring image of melted wax and feathers haunting the piece, but the interplay between the mythic and the personal is more abstract, its emotional valency unstable.
We are left to ponder how brief scenes portraying the social ostracism and relational aggression of schoolgirl bullies, or conversely, concern at a friend spiralling into drug addiction or mental illness, might be interpreted.
But the piece has been constructed to resist collapsing into common sense. It’s charged with an emotional logic of its own. Between the cast’s impressive commitment, Joachim Matschoss’s striking word choices, and the elegiac quality achieved as it touches down, Shadowfall wrestles a curious and new style of performance into being before our eyes.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
VARIETY
Midsumma Extravaganza
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, January 21
Variety is at the heart of what Midsumma celebrates. It was fitting, then, that the ultimate form of variety performance – the extravaganza – kicked off the festival’s cultural program at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
Courtney Act performs at the Midsumma Extravaganza.Credit: Mark Gambino
The annual gathering of Melbourne’s rainbow tribes has grown in inclusiveness, size and prominence since its inception. As the shorthand used to describe the community has grown – the full version these days is LGBTQIA+ – so has the pool of talented performers.
Comedian Joel Creasey and drag artiste Kween Kong compered the night. They were delivered to the stage by Dykes on Bikes and launched straight (if that’s the right word) into what they each do best: Creasey served up some droll satirical poetry; the mighty Kong whipped out the kind of pumping dance-hall drag number that made her a star on the Down Under series of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.
Kween Kong was one of the comperes for the evening.Credit: Mark Gambino
Drag, as you might expect, was well-represented. There was a flamboyant memorial to the pioneering Miss Candee, who died last year and would have loved the idea of a phalanx of drag queens, armed with more red sequins and ostrich-feather fans than anyone could hope for, strutting their stuff in her honour. What she would’ve made of Midsumma reviving her flatulent granny routine, on the other hand, is anyone’s guess, but the audience wasn’t above toilet humour.
The program also offered a tantalising guide to potential festival highlights.
Dolly Diamond and Tash York gave us a glimpse of their show Attention Seekers, and their onstage rivalry made for a frantic and funny game of one-upwomanship. The closest musical theatre analogy might be Anything You Can Do from Annie Get Your Gun (which I’d love to see them perform), but nothing was off the table when it came to hogging the limelight – Dolly donning a nude suit for a growling rendition of Cry Me A River; Tash sweeping through a parody of The Winner Takes It All, complete with amusing vocal impersonations of various gay icons.
Mama Alto performs at the Midsumma Extravaganza. Credit: Mark Gambino
In fact, cabaret was strong across the board, from Aboriginal performer Steven Oliver mixing defiant hip-hop and heart-warming coming-out story, to jazz standards soaring into the heavens on the wings of trans diva Mama Alto’s transcendent falsetto.
And I’d happily spend an hour watching any of the stand-up comedians – Scout Boxall, Nina Oyama, Rhys Nicholson, among others – who filled their spots with relaxed delivery and diverting material.
As an entree to Midsumma, the evening certainly whetted the appetite.
A stronger focus on arts and culture is, after all, what distinguishes the festival from Sydney’s Mardi Gras, and with a full program over the next three weeks, the real extravaganza is only just beginning.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Ty Segall ★★★★
The Forum Theatre, January 21
“Turn it up, front of house, this is a f---ing rock show!” shouts a perturbed fan. People around him grumble back: “Turn yourself down.” Spicy.
Ty Segall at The Forum in Melbourne.Credit: Rick Clifford
California’s Ty Segall is three songs into his 95-minute set and facing guitarist Emmett Kelly, the two singing Californian Hills conspiratorially low, so we all lean in and listen harder.
“From the history, histories of Western civilisation,” he whispers, pushing the tense, tantric vibes to the limit in front of a (mostly) patient crowd who had waited eight years for this.
Ty Segall’s performance at The Forum also featured local band CLAMM.Credit: Rick Clifford
Five songs in, the rest of Segall’s Freedom Band stroll out to a huge cheer, looking like they’ve just stepped off the set of Cameron Crowe’s Singles.
Fans were promised “a berserker, fuzz-tone, glam-garage-travaganza not to be missed!” and that’s exactly what they got, extra emphasis on psych’n’sludge sonics, less focus on Segall’s pipes.
Swathes of red and yellow light duck and swoop across the stage as the 35-year-old gets to work on what he loves to do most: rain down riff after pulverising riff. Wave Goodbye and Manipulator help stir the crowd into action and a mosh breaks out. I count a total of 11 crowd surfers for the night: nine blokes and two women.
“Put your vapes in the air,” quips a guy next to me at a quieter moment, the smell of a certain ’erb snaking its way around swaying heads. I look up at The Forum’s many naked statues and swear I can see the ghost of David Crosby glinting down.
Returning to the stage for a two-song encore, Segall and band go full Ween with the comically good My Lady’s on Fire causing the biggest singalong of the night (even the angry guy looked happy), which concludes another dose of cathartic rock’n’roll as Melbourne continues to heal.
Reviewed by Mikey Cahill
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