Squeezing this big show into a tiny theatre is a stroke of hilarious genius
By Peter McCallum, Joyce Morgan, Harriet Cunningham, John Shand and Penry Buckley
THEATRE
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE
Hayes Theatre, February 19
Until March 16
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★
Hayes Theatre Company’s latest production, The Pirates of Penzance, is a riotous example of artistic directors Richard Carroll and Victoria Falconer’s “What if?” approach to art. What if we shoe-horned a big, blowsy warhorse into the pocket stage of the Hayes? Would it be funny?
The answer is a resounding yes. Under Carroll’s direction and using a fistful of versatile performers who double as cast, chorus, orchestra and stage crew, a 19th-century spoof on the scourge of piracy becomes a 21st-century paean to poetry.
Pirate King Jay Laga’aia with the cast of The Pirates of Penzance.Credit: John McCrae
Our hero, Frederick, is a trainee pirate turning 21. With his coming of age comes freedom from piracy and the chance to reboot himself as a gentleman. The pirates, ruled by the flamboyant Pirate King, are actually a soft-hearted, cuddly bunch. They are sad to see him go and especially sad to see Frederick’s former nursemaid – the steadfast Ruth – go with him. What will Frederick discover, and can the pirates be Ruth-less?
The nuts and bolts that hold together Carroll’s feat of adaptation are an intrinsic part of the show. For example, the chief of police (Jay Laga’aia) looks off into the far distance of the wings to spot the Pirate King (also Jay Laga’aia), noting that he might take a while to get on stage and, by the way, he’s a fine-looking man.
Meanwhile, cast members all play, climb on and move around the upright piano, which also doubles as a wardrobe and handy screen for quick changes. The audience are all in on the joke. Indeed, some are in on the action, seated on either side of the stage. Participation is inevitable and hilarious.
The set (Nick Fry) doubles as a playground and a visual essay on the Pirates phenomenon. Posters on the walls conjure up ghosts of Pirates productions past, while the work’s subtitle, The Slave of Duty (which is an important plot point), has its own follow spot. Lily Mateljan’s costumes make sure we know who’s who, and sound designer Daniel Herten makes sure we hear the words and much more.
The homespun aesthetic and knowing pratfalls hide a hugely sophisticated show delivered by five multi-talented performers. Jay Laga’aia’s vocal range is not a perfect match for the Pirate King, but he makes up for it with winning bravado and moments of great lyricism. Maxwell Simon is a delight as Frederick, the 21-year-old virgin about to grow up fast, while Billie Palin rushes around, providing harmony and plugging plot holes. Trevor Jones prevails as the modern Major General, delivering the famous patter song with razor clarity and nicely tweaked for today from the piano.
Last but not least, Brittanie Shipway takes the roles of both the dowager Ruth and ingénue Mabel in a feat of vocal virtuosity. Indeed, it’s Shipway’s performance that tips this production from ragged fun into a classy new take on Gilbert and Sullivan’s much-loved, much-abused hit.
OPERA
CANDIDE
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House, February 20
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★½
The long list of contributors to Leonard Bernstein’s operetta, Candide (including Voltaire, who wrote the 1759 novella on which it is based, Stephen Sondheim, John La Touche, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker as well as librettists Hugh Wheeler and Richard Wilbur) and its many revisions, indicate the difficulties of jamming the baroque complexities of Voltaire’s satirical plot into a few hours of theatre.
When the original musical was being operatically revived, Hellman, the instigator and first librettist, said she thought of it more as a circus than an operetta and Bernstein agreed. This production directed by Dean Bryant, originally for Victorian Opera, catches some of the circus element with anarchic pace.
Euan Fistrovic Doidge as Maximillian, Cathy Di-Zhang as Paquette, Eddie Perfect as Pangloss, Annie Aitken as Cunegonde and Lyndon Watts as Candide. Credit: Carlita Sari
Dann Barber’s set is a battered caravan and his costumes are, in Bryant’s words, a “jumble sale” of stylistic references from 18th-century farthingales to plastic garbage bags. The collection of voice types is also motley, introducing a zing of incongruity into duets and ensembles.
In the absence of star singers, however, this generally served the musical side less effectively. Eddie Perfect’s rasping sandy-gravel voice has cut-through projection that is apt for his narrator’s role as Voltaire, though slightly less so for his other role as Pangloss for whom “everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire’s satiric take on the philosophy of Leibniz).
The plot is based on the pretext of testing this hypothesis by making things go as badly as they possibly can. Dramatically, Perfect adopts a boldly casual, semi-improvised persona that mediates well between audience and stage. Lyndon Watts plays Candide with wide-eyed naivety until the penultimate scene. His voice is wholesome but lacks the tonal finish and development in the upper range to carry the work’s key moments of lyricism and reflection.
Annie Aitken sings his beloved Cunegonde with a piercing doll-like sound and sugary vibrato, creating a pantomime vocal characterisation. She received applause for Glitter and be gay by maintaining a hard vocal edge through endlessly distracting stage antics. Dominica Matthews was a redoubtable Old Lady, shaping musical lines and leading the tango with theatrical professionalism.
Euan Fistrovic Doidge created the role of Maximilian, Cunegonde’s brother, with theatrical slickness and pointed edge to his vocal sound. Cathy-Di Zhang sang pertly as Paquette although the amplification masked the freshness of her sound somewhat. Eddie Muliaumaseali’i brought an operatic sound to Cacambo, John Longmuir was versatile in a range of roles while Andrew Moran remained laconic through every disaster. The Opera Australia Orchestra under Brett Weymark played the overture robustly, albeit with some caution in giving bite to the chaos-inducing cross rhythms.
The Opera Australia Chorus joined the stage madness with enthusiasm, imparting theatrical energy to some of the dance numbers, although the combined sound of chorus and soloists in the closing number Make our Garden Grow had a raw, unblended stridency in the unaccompanied section that may have partly arisen from the amplified sound mixing.
Amid its theatrical challenges, it has traditionally been Bernstein’s score that has carried the piece, but the musical quality here was not quite up to the task.
MUSIC
DENZEL CURRY
Hordern Pavilion, February 22
Reviewed by PENRY BUCKLEY
★★★★
“Give me your energy, give me your energy,” roars Denzel Curry to the audience, before, supercharged like a Dragon Ball Z character, he starts up Hit the Floor, and the crowd responds in kind, bouncing up and down.
From his SoundCloud beginnings, via concept albums such as Ta13oo, to new mixtape King of the Mischievous South, Vol.2, the raw intensity of the Floridian rapper’s performance never dims.
Curry plays a breathless, 22-song set inside a neat hour, from the moment he whips off his hood to the distorted bass of Act a Damn Fool, which segues straight into the rhythmic, bopping Ricky, through to set closer, the dark, melodic Clout Cobain.
As Curry’s seven mixtapes and two collaborative albums suggest, his career has been built on partnerships. But alone on stage save for his DJ, his dynamism more than fills the space, be that on collaborations Ratatat or First Night. (Although a version of the Armani White song Goated falls a little flat in the non-Curry verses as the backing track plays on its own.)
He remains compelling to watch in front of the shifting stage and lighting visuals. During Walkin, the lights cut on and off as he moves in elegant syncopation with the sometimes soulful, sometimes heavy beat.
He is a complex character, capable of softness on tracks like the R&B-heavy Got Me Geeked, and dropping influences such as filmmaker Akira Kurosawa on Walkin.
Curry, whose early songs were often used in memes, gets the crowd involved with a call and response during G’z Up, and by getting them to pay respect to his home neighbourhood, Carol City, during Zone 3 (“Put your threes up,” Curry yells).
And as he pulls his hood down low for the creepy, carnival intro of the set’s penultimate song, 2015 breakout hit Ultimate, it is he who supercharges them. When the bass-heavy verse kicks in, the audience erupts.
THEATRE
NUCLEUS
Griffin Theatre Company, February 19
Until March 15
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★½
Two scientists lob grenades across the trenches of the nuclear debate. He’s a nuclear engineer, she’s an anti-nuclear activist.
For decades, they have publicly shouted each other down. Yet, in private, there was that one night at a conference long ago when arguments over nuclear fission gave way to sexual frisson – and more – that neither can forget.
This is not a dialectic about the merits of each side of this fractious debate. Rather it explores the extent to which it’s possible to care for someone with whom you profoundly disagree. Do you need to share the same values to share a life?
Nucleus explores the extent to which it’s possible to care for someone with whom you profoundly disagree.Credit: Brett Boardman
There’s an urgency to such questions in these shrill, polarised times when trolling, outrage and cancelling have turned public discourse toxic.
Alana Valentine’s two-hander unfolds as a series of monologues and duets as Dr Gabriel Hulst (Peter Kowitz) and Dr Cassie Logart (Paula Arundell) state their cases, recall their past and consider the future their children will inherit.
It opens as Gabriel, speaks directly to the audience of his disdain for the activist. Pompous, loquacious yet witty, he’s a man used to being heard.
His early monologues are at times heavy on exposition, especially about the history of the nuclear industry in Australia. (But who knew it was Liberal prime minister Billy McMahon who put the kibosh on its development?)
The energy lifts as Cassie gives her side of that early encounter. She seduced Gabriel and planned to use this against him. She knew it was wrong. So wrong she had never orgasmed so intensely.
Nucleus is a departure from the verbatim theatre for Valentine is particularly known. She makes clear in a program note that this is a work of fiction – having binned verbatim drafts in favour of creating two characters who fundamentally disagree with each other.
The play is energetically propelled by the messiness of the human heart so in conflict with the entrenched positions of her two scientists.
Andrea James’s direction is clear and crisp as the stakes notch up and bombshells land. But the play eventually teeters into melodrama, culminating in an ending worthy of a Puccini opera.
Arundell is superb as the mercurial Cassie. Manipulative, playful, fierce, anguished – she shifts on a dime.
She is well-matched with Kowitz as Gabriel. Engaging - even in his initial mansplaining - he becomes a more sympathetic character. While Gabriel reveals a strong moral core, Cassie’s determination to manipulate is deeply troubling.
Isabel Hudson’s visually strong abstract set, with three intersecting ovals above a circular stage, suggests atomic particles.
Verity Hampson’s lighting makes fine use of these ovals while Phil Downing’s subtle sound design shifts from classical to ambient.
When the playwright began penning her play about four years ago, the possibility of Australia contemplating a nuclear industry would have seemed political suicide.
With an election soon to be fought on whether to take the nuclear option, Valentine’s prescience is striking.
THEATRE
SONG OF FIRST DESIRE
Belvoir St Theatre, February 19
Until March 23
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, by yourself or in a collective? Can you say it out loud? Does anyone else know? Do you resent them for knowing? Will you ever forget this thing you did? Can you ever forgive yourself? Should you ever forgive yourself?
These are the sorts of questions Andrew Bovell asks in Song of First Desire, here having its first Australian season after premiering in Madrid, where, following successful productions of two of Bovell’s previous plays, it was decided to collaborate on a third. This would investigate Spain’s ongoing struggle to knit itself back together after the horrors of firstly the Spanish Civil War and then the Franco years.
Eight Spanish characters across three generations constitute Bovell’s case study, the universality lying in everyone and every nation having a past, with unresolved pasts inevitably resulting in ongoing torment. The play is epic in its trans-generational scope and the profundity of its questions, yet it also shrinks to taut family drama, down to the poisonous kinship between two twins and a toxic marriage between a fascist lackey and his wife.
Borja Maestre and Sarah Peirse (foreground) with Kerry Fox and Jorge Muriel. Credit: Brett Boardman
Director Neil Armfield returns to Belvoir to continue his fecund partnership with Bovell. His cast contains two actors from the Madrid production, Borja Maestre and Jorge Muriel (the Spanish translator of Bovell’s work), plus Kerry Fox and Sarah Peirse.
The latter, yet again, excels, playing elderly Camelia in the present day and younger Margarita when the play dredges the past. Peirse moulds her characters as if from clay, making shapes and angles that she then imbues with the electricity of words. She communicates so much without speaking that when she does, she grips you with her intensity, whether when she hardens her voice until it has a metallic edge or when she’s as vulnerable as a pressed flower.
Maestre has presence and conviction in both his roles; Muriel is especially good at exuding the menace of the fascist Carlos, and Fox has Carmen, Carlos’ wilfully ignorant wife, more nailed than Julia, the abrasive twin of Luis (also played by Muriel).
But as the stakes rise to jagged heights more usually found in Greek tragedy, a taint of melodrama stains the production. It feels as though as it reaches for those altitudes it should somehow become more spartan and less wordy. The latter is an odd comment to make about a Bovell play because the lyrical economy evident just in the (Lorca-derived title) title has been such a hallmark of work that’s placed him among our most distinguished dramatists.
There’s no sense of melodrama in Peirse’s performance, however. Perhaps there could have been more of this stillness in the production as a whole when the drama rears up; perhaps less angst in the writing and less fastidious tying up of familial connections across the generations. Then the sense of menace would be all the greater – and this menace of which Bovell writes is now all around us.
MUSIC
Simone Young conducts Mahler’s Third Symphony
Opera House Concert Hall, February 20
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Mahler, on a conducting trip to Helsinki in 1907, is alleged to have said to Sibelius (whose music he knew only slightly) that a symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.
In none of Mahler’s symphonies is “the world” (still within the European framework, though he was later to glimpse beyond) embraced more diversely and expansively than in Symphony No. 3 in D minor, of which Simone Young, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, the Sydney Children’s Choir and majestic contralto Noa Beinart gave such an epic account to open their 2025 season.
Simone Young leads the SSO’s season-opening Mahler program.Credit:
Mahler once titled the first movement “Summer marches in”, and it certainly isn’t all flowers and butterflies. The SSO horns played the opening theme with noble sound and confident stride, but Young avoided pomposity in the punctuating chords, keeping the music moving forward into the darker shades and funereal echoes that follow.
The trumpets flashed distant premonitory fanfares, the trombones unfolded the melody with a velvety smoothness that quickly became sinewy and gnarled, and the flutes and woodwind shone sunlight on glistening misty chords that quickly dispersed. Life and death, exultance and brusqueness, depth and banality appear in quick succession without a hint of sentimentality at their passing.
In the second movement, the violins and oboe flirted with floral delicacy, creating a gracious, transparent sound. The third, a scherzo-like movement, began with mocking playfulness from clarinets and piccolo, and Young created a general sense of lampooning pile-on from trumpets, horns and all the rest until attention was magically called to a distant flugelhorn, played through an open door in the high southern gallery against hushed violins on stage.
It mixed with woodwind and horns to create a still moment of idyllic calm before being pushed aside with raucous roughness. The true still point of the performance came when Beinart rose in statuesque quietness to sing lines by Nietzsche with a voice that was at once voluptuous and full in texture yet stark and austere in expression: “The world is deep and deeper than the day imagined.”
There are hints of ominous bells in this movement, but the bell sounds from the Sydney Children’s Choir in the fifth movement had a crisp edge, like a picture book, while the women of the Philharmonia Choir told a childlike story with doleful refrains from Beinart.
The violins, led by concertmaster Andrew Haveron, started the last movement with silvery sweetness, adding progressively astringent dissonance as the hymn-like melody developed into immanent presence. This was a magnificent window into the Sydney Symphony’s current musical excellence and the irrational vastness of Mahler’s world.
Samuel Marino
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
City Recital Hall, February 18
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★
With flamboyance, vocal agility and his unusually high vocal range for a male singer, Venezuelan soprano Samuel Marino delivered a mixture of slow, plaintive arias and display pieces from operas by Handel in the opening concert of the Australian Brandenburg’s 35th season.
Although cross-gender singing and acting was a familiar device in 17th and 18th-century theatre and opera (for a mixture of musical, theatrical and sociological reasons), Marino added a further twist by choosing music Handel originally wrote for female heroines to be sung by the famous female singers of his day.
Samuel MarinoCredit:
They are thus not to be confused with the arias for male heroes, sung in Handel’s day by castrati singers and, in modern times, by male countertenors or female singers in imitation of the so-called “breeches” roles. This was thus not a gesture towards historical authenticity but was more the spirit of modern female actors playing Hamlet. Confused? Well, just sit back and enjoy.
In Ritorna, o caro e dolce mio tesoro′ from Handel’s Rodelinda, Marino adopted a welcome simplicity exploiting a still pure sound on some notes to telling effect. The pitch was true in the first part, falling off slightly in the second. Ma quando tornerai from Alcina is in Handel’s fiery “revenge aria” style with Marino and the ABO, under director Paul Dyer matching rapid figuration, until the cadenza where Marino paused on a piercing high note with arresting shrillness.
Music from Alcina had been heard at the start of the concert in the orchestral overture. In an orchestral interlude by Benedetto Marcello from an oratorio Joaz, concertmaster Shaun Lee-Chen played the Adagio with a persuasive sense of line, followed by a jostling Presto where the cadences were punctuated with unusual sliding gestures evoking something murky and ominous.
In Ombre piante from Rodeinda, Marino was joined by trumpet and oboe obbligato parts played with skill by Adam Masters and Alexandra Bieri, though Marino’s imitative hijinks in the cadenza were a little overdone – less is sometimes more in these situations.
To start the second half, Dyer set a furious pace in the outer movements of a Sinfonia by Adolf Hasse, the frenetic finale resembling music accompanying a chase scene in a silent movie. In Scoglio d’immota fronte′ from Handel’s Scipione, Marino’s pitch was again a little unsettled, but in Che sento? from the same composer’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto there was drama in the recitative and some effectively expressive notes in the central section.
After the Overture from Handel’s Semele from the orchestra, the closing aria, Scherza in mar la navicella from Handel’s Lotario was brilliantly ornamented. Enlivened with Marino’s nimble articulation, it brought an enthusiastic response from an initially cautious audience who, by the end, seemed completely won over.