This Sunset Boulevard looks the part, but just isn’t dark enough to deliver

MUSICAL
Sunset Boulevard ★★
Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Book & Lyrics: Don Black & Christopher Hampton
Princess Theatre, From May 29

It’s been nearly three decades since the Australian premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, starring Hugh Jackman and Debra Byrne, and longer than that since Sarah Brightman left musical theatre to pursue a solo career as one of the world’s most popular sopranos.

Sarah Brightman returns to musical theatre as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Credit: Justin McManus

The social media age has dawned upon us in the interval. Now that anyone can be famous for anything, we all seem to have a little bit of Norma Desmond in us – the toxic obsession with celebrity that drives the musical has spread, alas, to the general population.

This new production doesn’t do much – OK it doesn’t do anything – to take that change in, but it does have Sarah Brightman. Musical theatre royalty. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the role of Christine Daaé in Phantom for her, before she became a global recording sensation, and if you want to see the legend live in a musical, this could be your last best chance.

But you’ll be doing it because Brightman’s music means something to you, or to tell all your friends you saw her, or perhaps to further your parasocial relationship with the star.

Sarah Brightman is renowned for her three-octave range.Credit: Justin McManus

Truth is, Brightman’s long hiatus from musical theatre has diminished her theatrical skills, and vocal stylings that work like a charm in the recording studio don’t always translate well to the stage.

Humour, pathos, menace: these are the notes you’ve got to hit as Norma Desmond, an ageing silent film star and classic femme fatale. And if few musical notes are beyond Brightman – who’s renowned for her three-octave range – her vocals here are so operatic, and resort to such heavy vibrato, that you sometimes can’t make out the lyrics.

There’s an argument for Brightman’s artistic choice. Opera precedes musical theatre as silent cinema does talkies, I suppose, and if the aria-busting vocals had been deployed with a sharper sense of parody and attention to character, they might’ve worked.

But the singing tends to remain somewhat disconnected to the rest of the performance, and it’s one reason the essence of Sunset Boulevard – which is supposed to be black comic Hollywood noir – gets shortchanged in this production.

The web of erotic attraction and revulsion between Norma and failed screenwriter Joe (Tim Draxl) doesn’t stick either, which neutralises some of the complex tensions that make noir work. Draxl is a bit lightweight, vocally, to be going toe to toe with Brightman, and the portrayal is probably too nice for a Chandleresque antihero succumbing to moral decay.

Some supporting performances are excellent. Ashleigh Rubenach as the optimistic love interest is Norma’s worst nightmare – young, clever, vivacious, with a voice as crisp as a bell. Jarrod Draper makes a striking impression as her lovely but limited fiance. You can’t fault Robert Grubb as the gothic butler with a secret past, or Troy Sussman’s cigar-waving film producer, or Paul Hanlon’s cameo as Cecil B. DeMille.

Tim Draxl plays failed screenwriter Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard.Credit: Justin McManus

But this production doesn’t exude the confidence and energy you would’ve hoped for on opening night. That isn’t to say the ensemble performs badly, nor that the period-inspired choreography and big chorus numbers aren’t entertaining (however much Andrew Lloyd Webber seems to be plagiarising himself by the time he gets to Sunset Boulevard).

It’s just that the cast look like they’re still on tenterhooks, and it may take a week or two for all traces of effort to be properly disguised.

We’re left with a Sunset Boulevard that looks the part – vibrant period costume, stormy projections and silhouetted palms, a set dominated by an imposing Spanish gothic revival mansion – but often fails in performance to be funny or dark or tense enough to deliver the guts of the show.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Multiple Bad Things ★★★★
Back to Back Theatre, Malthouse, until June 9

In Multiple Bad Things, Simon Laherty marches onstage like a ringmaster to deliver a content warning upfront. The list isn’t short. As is the fashion in theatrical circles these days, the audience is treated to an extended remix of anything that could trigger, or even offend, the most delicate snowflakes among us.

Simon Laherty offers up a warning to the crowd at the beginning of Multiple Bad Things.Credit: Jeff Busby

He takes a breath and then deadpans, slightly less grudgingly, “This is theatre. It is not real…” before wandering off to doomscroll and play solitaire on his PC for most of the show.

Now there’s a classic Back to Back Theatre paradox. You’re left questioning the motives for theatre’s contemporary trigger warning fetish (is it control in the guise of care?), while acknowledging the supreme irony that this company should insist on theatre’s unreality when, over 37 years, it’s produced a body of work that stands as an unflinching reality check for the world.

Along the way it has established itself as our most internationally decorated theatre ensemble, winning theatre’s version of the Nobel Prize (the International Ibsen Award) in 2022 and picking up the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre, to be presented at the Venice Biennale next month.

Simon Laherty, Bron Batten and Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price in Multiple Bad Things.Credit: Ferne Millen

Multiple Bad Things is yet another provocative and emotionally intelligent piece of devised theatre. It creates from the outset an atmosphere of atomisation and retreat in the face of crisis.

Anna Cordingley’s set and Richard Vabre’s lighting carve out individual space for the performers, who seem to be co-workers building a monument of some kind centre stage, under oh-so-comforting projections of supercell clouds spawning multiple tornadoes.

Things aren’t going well. The structure still looks like a chaotic splotch of squat pyramids, and Sarah Mainwaring has been left to do most of the construction work.

Her colleagues appear preoccupied. Scott Price brings gender into the equation by manspreading on an inflatable flamingo and leaving the work to the women. He’s obnoxious, raising the spectre of sexual misconduct, and telling a facetious anecdote about a car named “White Privilege” for good measure.

Scott Price in a scene from Multiple Bad Things.Credit: Ferne Millen

No one will be sad to see Bron Batten deflating his patriarchy, but Batten can’t lay claim to any reliable moral high ground either. She too is obnoxious, arguing with Price while ignoring Mainwaring’s immediate needs for help, and giving a masterclass in how the discourse surrounding social oppression and disadvantage can be co-opted and gamed by so-called allies with their own interests at heart.

The hard-earned denouement comes when the conflict between Price and Batten grinds to a destructive conclusion, and Mainwaring is left alone. When her call to a parody of a corporate helpline (voiced by Rachel Griffiths) fails to make any human contact, Mainwaring raises the monument – a familiar symbol of sanctuary – by herself, and a simple hug from Laherty provides what the helpline didn’t.

That gesture, after Laherty has spent an hour disengaged from the IRL world, is one moving answer to the complex questions of agency and disempowerment, real and perceived, that Multiple Bad Things raises with fearless clarity.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Angie McMahon | Making it Through Tour ★★★★
Forum, May 28

“I have really bad acid reflux right now,” Angie McMahon says on stage. “I feel like I sound nasally.”

Angie McMahon performs at the Forum on May 28, 2024.Credit: Richard Clifford

You wouldn’t guess it by the way the Melbourne singer-songwriter commands the home-town crowd on the first of three sold-out nights – she has one of the most dextrous and distinctive voices in Australian music, from its rich lower register to a glorious soar or an energetic yelp.

McMahon’s most recent album, Light, Dark, Light Again, thrums with imagery of nature and the universe as she sings healing self-affirmations. Live, she is accompanied by four musicians and backdropped by a pastel sky – above them, the Forum’s artificial stars twinkle. It all coalesces into something sublime.

Compared with her 2019 debut album Salt, McMahon’s newer material has a lighter touch.

On delicate set opener Fireball Whiskey, the audience takes over to sing the chorus as one. Keeping Time is the first of the older songs, and the band launches into an all-encompassing soundscape. McMahon is skilled at both modes.

Angie McMahon has one of the most dextrous and distinctive voices in Australian music.Credit: Richard Clifford

It’s all about the voice: McMahon starts Soon solo, then lets it bloom into harmony; her impressive range is on full display in the euphoric Exploding, and when she shouts the affirmations that close Letting Go (“It’s OK, make mistakes”).

Some small details are lost live – recorded, McMahon’s jagged breathing is an instrument in itself on Serotonin, adding to the song’s intimacy – but it’s a minor gripe.

McMahon’s social conscience is evident in the stomping climate-dread anthem Mother Nature and a beautiful cover of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind with Ruby Gill. Those lyrics are, McMahon says, “tragically still relevant”: “How many years must some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?”

“This is my dream job,” McMahon says with a shy grin. How lucky we are, too – she’s one of our best, and only getting better.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

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