He considers himself to be the best rapper of all time. Could he be right?

MUSIC
Kendrick Lamar | Grand National Tour ★★★★★
AAMI Park, December 3

Cars filmed in haunting black-and-white surveillance footage blaze rubber track marks across two colossal screens flanking the stage.

Kendrick Lamar performs at AAMI Park in Melbourne on Wednesday. Credit: Achraf Issami

Kendrick Lamar – who many (including himself) believe to be the greatest rapper of all time – appears backlit and launches into wacced out murals, a highlight track and opener of the album at the heart of tonight’s performance, GNX.

For the uninitiated, GNX is the result of Lamar’s extended beef with the Canadian pop MC, Drake, during which the pair traded diss tracks over a few months last year. Lamar lapped his opponent in a humiliation grand prix that included his biggest single hit, Not Like Us, and culminated in GNX.

The album name is itself a convoluted diss involving the car companies the men align themselves with – Lamar on team Buick and Drake, Ferrari – and Lamar’s stage on Wednesday was an ingenious ode to four-wheeled power and worship.

Bursts of pyro leave black smoke hanging in the dusk like exhaust fumes, metres-tall fluffy dice and pine tree air fresheners hang from the stage scaffolding, and a temple-sized muscle car is erected that could only be piloted by an ego as voluminous as Lamar’s.

And perhaps that’s fair enough when you have a catalogue as deep as his. Few artists can afford the liberty of dispensing with a hit as beloved as King Kunta in a medley; or drop Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe, Money Trees and Poetic Justice back to back with an almost comedic level of casual confidence. Every hand in the crowd bounces like a lowrider’s hydraulics.

So when Lamar finally drops Not Like Us, the Drake takedowns feel a bit like watching someone cut off a P-plater on the freeway. At this point, Lamar is operating at a level of artistry so far beyond his peers that he’d won the race before it even began.
Reviewed by Nick Buckley

OPERA
Orpheus and Eurydice ★★★★
Regent Theatre, until December 5

A “death-defying act” might be a moniker for circus acrobatics, but the same could hardly be said of opera. How then do the two come together so intrinsically and impressively?

Opera Australia’s production of Orpheus and EurydiceCredit: Jeff Busby

It helps to have a libretto centred on a deed of the same nature, as with Gluck’s version of the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice.

It’s a story that’s been told a thousand ways through every possible medium; film, TV, musicals, plays, books, even video games. This 2019 production, by Opera Queensland and Brisbane-based contemporary circus company Circa, has seriously done the rounds, most recently to rave reviews at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival. Melbourne’s reception should be no different.

Premiering in 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice is sung in Italian but was hugely influenced by 18th-century French style. Gluck cut out all the virtuoso singing-for-the-sake-of-it stuff and kept the story simple.

The role of Orpheus, originally written for a castrato, is here sung by British countertenor Iestyn Davies.

Orpheus and Eurydice is a story that’s been told a thousand ways through every possible medium.Credit: Jeff Busby

Great countertenors are rare; they have a unique ability to produce a powerful falsetto sound, akin to the colour of a female mezzo-soprano. Davies is quite extraordinary – his intensity never wavers, his voice warm and lyrical. Australian soprano Samantha Clarke sings both Eurydice and the god of love, Amore, and is glorious as both.

Conductor Dane Lam joined this travelling circus from the beginning and is by now very familiar with and clearly fond of the work. Orchestra Victoria play buoyantly under his guidance, with only a few moments of overpowering volume.

The director and designer, Circa’s Yaron Lifschitz, has set this production in an asylum, which might be a slightly tired theatrical trope, but it works reasonably well – we’re unsure of what’s real and what is imagined.

Particularly arresting are the surtitles projected onto the back wall, appearing and fading as if thoughts swirling in Orpheus’ head. The acrobatics are truly stunning feats of athleticism, only occasionally pulling focus but mostly aiding the drama.

Opening night did seem to suffer from some overall staging missteps, with the finale bunched up on one side, and other moments off-centre or with movements slightly out of time.

This is an opera for your culturally curious friend who’s never actually been but maybe enjoys the ballet or appreciates theatre. At 80 minutes’ duration there’s no time to be bored, and with acrobats literally flying all over the place, there’s no worry that the sometimes stagnant nature of opera will put anyone to sleep. Come for the pearl-clutching stunts, stay for the beautiful music.
Reviewed by Bridget Davies

THEATRE
Sabotage ★★★★
The Motley Bauhaus, until December 6

Every now and again Melbourne’s indie theatre scene throws up something destined for a bigger stage. I hope that’s the case with Harrison Clark’s Sabotage. The two-hander writhes with comedic life, even as it probes loneliness and trauma, and talent scouts and arts programmers should make a beeline for this very short season.

Declan Magee and Harrison Clark star in Sabotage

The play hinges on a surprise reunion between a young Protagonist (Declan Magee) and an Antagonist (Clark) in an airport lounge, as the former prepares to depart Australia bound for a new life in London.

For quite some time, you’re not sure what’s going on. This Gen Z duo appear to know a great deal about one another – perhaps too much – and the bantering relationship between them has a youthful intimacy rippling with raw disclosure, shared cultural touchstones, and unspoken assumed knowledge, leaving the audience half-in, half-out of the conversation. The script is a compelling blend of voyeuristic and enigmatic – full of overheard dialogue, while retaining enough contextual ambiguity to avoid the obviousness of paint-by-numbers realism.

Power imbalances emerge, along with a history of parental abuse and mental illness, as dramatic conflict – cloaked in the mysterious connection between the two figures – continues to deepen. Who are these people? Are they brothers? Are they lovers? Why is the Antagonist trying so hard to stop his interlocutor getting on that plane? Where is it all going?

You wouldn’t get invested in answers without strong writing and charismatic performances, and the actors are matched like pieces of a jigsaw. Magee embodies a sensitive young man whose flow towards identity and self-awareness has been stopped. He’s been tormented into withdrawal by grief, insecurity and defensive melancholy, and Clark baits him towards insight with sly wit and chaotic agency; an unexpected tangle of kindness and desire.

Director Maya Britbart Ellazam has drawn out nuanced and emotionally intelligent performances. Intimacy co-ordinator Eliza Grundy guides the actors into the kind of breath-catching physical performance you used to get routinely before intimacy co-ordinators existed. The design is barely there, but that’s suited to the play’s liminal encounter.

Sure, Sabotage could use a trim and there’s a part of me that desperately wanted the play to preserve its indeterminacy, rather than to collapse into just one thing with a simple message. Arguably, the ending does the latter, though without mawkishness or sermonising.

It’s a talented drama, broaching dark material with sensitivity and a light comic touch, illuminating the challenges of coming of age today in a way that speaks with the distinctive inflections of that cohort, while feeling broadly relatable to everyone.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Nihilistic Optimism on Trampolines ★★
Theatre Works, until December 6

Kasey Barratt’s Nihilistic Optimism on Trampolines takes a seminal moment in the history of Gothic literature – the writing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and reimagines it unfolding in the present day, at a trampoline park during a thunderstorm.

Nihilistic Optimism on Trampolines at Theatre Works is an imaginative retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.Credit: Sian Quinn Dowler

The show stitches together unlikely elements – trampolining, TikTok-length choreography, a live rock band and an original play spliced with excerpts from Shelley’s novel and letters – and I admired the boldness, ambition and willingness to experiment that this young ensemble bring.

Is it any good? Not really. It’s a strange and misshapen creation which, unlike Shelley’s classic, often feels like less than the sum of its parts.

Famously, Shelley began writing Frankenstein aged 18, as part of a ghost story competition initiated by Lord Byron at Lake Geneva during the inclement summer of 1816. (The event also birthed the first vampire fiction in English, John Polidori’s The Vampyre.)

Barratt morphs the figures present – Mary (Gabrielle Ward), her fiance Percy Shelley (Bek Schilling), her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Sophie Graham Jones), Lord Byron (Eleanor Golding) and Byron’s doctor John Polidori (Zoe Wakelin) – into bored employees at Trampoline World.

The show – set in a trampoline park – stitches together unlikely elements.Credit: Sian Quinn Dowler

A lackadaisical teen movie vibe cuts against gothic atmospherics, and Barratt’s script spends too long establishing the cheerless routines and post-industrial ennui of young drudges at a leisure park. Most of the water cooler conversation, petty power plays and furtive work flings aren’t especially funny or dramatically compelling, though occasional flashes of camp do lighten the drear.

Things pick up when Victor Frankenstein’s creature (Jett Chudleigh) boings into view. Encounters between the young author and her creation, using dialogue from the novel as well as physical theatre and dance, have an eerie lustre.

Yet somehow the act of reassertion in the face of a historical erasure (Percy Shelley was originally credited as the author of Frankenstein) doesn’t go all-in.

The climax is shadowy and under-realised, and I would have loved to have seen the monster go on a murderous rampage against the male characters (most played in drag) and for feminist fury to be unleashed with maximal force through text and stage action.

Part of the problem is an inexperienced cast. Performance elements from choreography to microphone technique could use more precision and confidence. And the script, too, needs to refine its themes and junk ineffective dialogue.

These artists may have a long way to go, but they’ve a long time to get there. And the range of talents on display – from the athleticism of the trampolining to the three musicians jamming live accompaniment – bodes well for developing a unique theatrical style.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
A Christmas Carol ★★★★
Comedy Theatre, until December 24

For a fourth year, A Christmas Carol graces the stage in Melbourne’s East End theatre district. The show has firmly established itself as a family-friendly tradition, and it delivers Charles Dickens’ festive ghost story with such charm that it’s impossible to be jaded or selfish or unmoved to charity in its presence, however Scrooge-like you may be.

Lachy Hulme plays Scrooge as a kind of Santa-gone-wrong.Credit: Justin McManus

Dickens’ parable was always designed to awaken social conscience. In his own time, the 1834 Poor Law slashed the cost of poverty relief by forcing able-bodied paupers into workhouses, where they performed hard labour under nightmarish conditions in exchange for food and shelter.

In ours, one-third of Australian households face food insecurity, according to the 2025 Foodbank Hunger Report, and this production has encouraged audiences over the years to donate millions to FareShare, a charity that prepares and distributes meals to those doing it tough at Christmas.

As Dickens put it in the original story: “I have always thought of Christmas … [as] a time when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

That’s an insight the inveterate miser Ebenezer Scrooge must be haunted into having for himself, over and again, and the one thing the show does change up every year is the celebrity playing Scrooge.

Claire Warrillow and Lachy Hulme in a scene from the 2025 season of A Christmas Carol.Credit: Justin McManus

Each actor who’s tackled the role has put a distinctive spin on the character’s unlikely road to redemption. David Wenham (2022) gave us a crusty, broken-hearted romantic. Game of Thrones star Owen Teale (2023) hid Scrooge’s sorrow behind a wall of rage so high he looked set to behead Christmas itself. And last year, Erik Thomson (Packed to the Rafters, Hercules, Xena: Warrior Princess) played Ebenezer as an emotional shut-in, flinching at even the suggestion of vulnerability in others, lest he be compelled to accept his own humanity.

Lachy Hulme is as suited to baddies as heroes – playing Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Furiosa (2024), and Macduff in a 2006 film of Macbeth set in Melbourne’s criminal underworld – and his Scrooge holds a dark mirror to the spirit of Christmas.

This is Ebenezer as a kind of Santa-gone-wrong. It’s as if the big guy with the sack had been suddenly made redundant as a young Mr Claus in the gig economy, only to moonlight as a moneylender for so long that the mask became his face.

That’s fascinating to watch and makes Scrooge’s improbable transformation seem weirdly plausible, as his myopically misplaced nobility gets transferred from the world of transaction to one of emotional connection.

As always, Matthew Warchus’ production is a bell-ringing, carol-singing delight. I’ve seen it four times now, and if it continues to be a feature of my own Christmases – past, present and future – I’ll count myself lucky.

With uplifting music and dance, elegant costume and design, a spot of audience participation, buoyant performances and a swiftly paced narrative, it’s a perfect Christmas gift for theatre lovers of all ages.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Franz Ferdinand ★★★★
Live at the Gardens, Royal Botanic Gardens, November 28

It’s a Friday night in Melbourne at the edge of summer – so naturally, the outfit du jour is raincoats and ponchos. Drizzle turns into a steady downpour through the night, but Scottish band Franz Ferdinand feels right at home – “like playing in a park in Glasgow”, says frontman Alex Kapranos.

Franz Ferdinand perform at Live at the Gardens on Saturday night.Credit: Richard Clifford

A bit of rain doesn’t deter the band, or the crowd, from partying like it’s 2004.

Franz Ferdinand were poster boys for what’s affectionately (or derisively, depending on who’s saying it) referred to as “indie sleaze” – that noughties era of angular guitar, skinny jeans and an insatiable thirst for the dancefloor. Kapranos, one of two remaining original members, might be in his 50s now, but all that means is that he’s grown even further into his sonorous baritone, always rich beyond its years.

The band released its sixth album, The Human Fear, this year. It’s a mixed bag: some songs, such as the hammy Hooked, are better forgotten. Others include flashes of new and old inspiration – on Black Eyelashes, Kapranos nods to his Greek heritage by playing a bouzouki, which also makes an appearance in the live set. At one point in the evening, all five musicians play the drum kit together.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the earlier hits that get the loudest cheers: No You Girls and Do You Want To are as irresistible and hook-laden as ever.

Alex Kapranos and the band – or the crowd – aren’t deterred by a bit of rain.Credit: Richard Clifford

There’s a bit of self-indulgence on display – the instantly recognisable introduction of the band’s best-known track, Take Me Out, is drawn out for over a minute – but all is forgiven when it rumbles into its iconic tempo shift, building towards what remains one of indie sleaze’s finest moments.

The show goes on afterwards, but it’s hard to beat hearing a song like that live, dancing ourselves clean in the pouring rain and feeling the years wash away.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Adrian Sherriff.Credit: Tobias Titz

JAZZ
Adrian Sherriff’s Kalachakra ★★★★
The JazzLab, November 30

In May last year, multi-instrumentalist Adrian Sherriff launched a marvellous new ensemble – Kalachakra – performing music that fused contemporary jazz with south Indian classical traditions.

Now, Sherriff has unveiled the next incarnation of Kalachakra, with a fresh addition to the line-up: koto player Miyama McQueen-Tokita. As a result, the group’s primary focus has shifted from India to Japan.

Sherriff is primarily a jazz artist, but his fascination for traditional Asian music has led to a decades-long study of classical instruments from both countries.

His mastery of the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) was on vivid display on Sunday night, when Kalachakra 2.0 made its debut at JazzLab. The concert opened with Sherriff’s arrangements of two of the earliest works written for shakuhachi and koto, dating back more than 400 years. Sherriff’s exhalations on shakuhachi sounded like gentle gusts of wind, while the three string instruments (koto, bass and cello) formed a wonderfully atmospheric, textural backdrop.

On Rokudan, the koto and shakuhachi moved in stately tandem, creating an almost ritualistic feel before making way for Jay Dabgar’s tablas, snapping and fluttering in an animated solo. Chidori, too, had the feel of an ancient ceremony, the string instruments overlaid with McQueen-Tokita’s graceful vocals.

Not all the tunes were centuries old. Fragments (a brand-new piece by McQueen-Tokita) allowed the Australian-Japanese composer to display a more contemporary side to her artistry, improvising nimbly on the koto and inviting her colleagues to solo in turn over the tune’s graceful ¾ sway. Sherriff’s playing on this tune was breathtaking, his bass trombone shuddering and leaping across intervals with extraordinary control and precision.

Peggy Lee (on cello) and Rohan Dasika (bass) made a formidable pairing throughout, often working in unison as they navigated complex melodic or rhythmic motifs, and using extended techniques to create expressive slides, sighs and whistling harmonics.

The night’s final number, Song of the Waterboy, began with the jovial twang of Sherriff’s morsing (Indian jaw harp), setting up a playfully bluesy groove that saw the whole ensemble cut loose, swaggering and extemporising with visible delight.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

MUSIC
Mirra – Norwegian Tradition Reimagined ★★★★
Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, November 27

Growing up in the Hardanger fjord region in Norway’s west, Benedicte Maurseth developed twin passions that have continued to propel her creative vision and career. One is the traditional nine-string Hardanger fiddle; the other is the natural beauty of the vast Hardanger mountain plateau.

Benedicte Maurseth’s latest album, Mirra, is inspired by wild reindeer.Credit: Agnete Brun

These two passions are directly intertwined on Maurseth’s latest album, Mirra, inspired by the habitat, behaviour and migration patterns of wild reindeer.

At the Recital Centre on Thursday, Maurseth led a superb quartet through a program that – like the album – followed a seasonal cycle. We began in the depths of winter, where reindeer run in circular patterns to keep warm, or lie perfectly still in the snow as the wind whips over them. Mats Eilertsen’s bowed bass harmonics and Haakon Morch Stene’s rolling percussion suggested the former, while Morten Qvenild’s glistening electronics and Maurseth’s graceful fiddle phrases effortlessly evoked the latter.

Spring brought new life (The Calf Rises) with a ravishing fiddle and piano duet, while Summer Pastures coaxed the music into more rhythmic territory, with electric bass, insistent vibraphone and a trance-like, minimalist drum pattern. Reindeer Call included the sampled voice of a reindeer herder, nestled within a thicket of abstract, improvised textures that gradually coalesced into a slow, shadowy Hunting March.

The reindeer nudged themselves into the foreground at various times (via field recordings of their communicative grunts), as did other native wildlife from the Hardanger region. Heilo featured the cawing of the Eurasian plover as a recurring motif, buoyed by Maurseth’s fiddle as it glided weightlessly on invisible thermals.

Often one composition segued into the next without pause, adding to the sense that we were immersed in this mysterious and awe-inspiring landscape. Occasionally the electronic elements dominated and overwhelmed the sound of the fiddle, smothering the resonant shimmer of its sympathetic strings. But for the most part this was an utterly entrancing evocation of the natural world in all its fierce beauty, majesty and vulnerability.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

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