Smoky effects don’t cloud zany humour in musical of classic Almodovar film
MUSICAL THEATRE
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Hayes Theatre, May 14. Until June 8
Reviewed by John Shand
★★★½
When, during the first half, Pepa, the protagonist, accidentally set fire to her bed (as in Pedro Almodovar’s film on which this is based), the fire blazed up so dramatically that I glanced at the emergency exits. Pepa duly put it out, but I doubt what happened next was intentional.
The smoke became so thick on stage that you could barely see the still-bravely singing performers, and then it drifted into the audience. Luckily, the interval soon let us escape, and yet even when we returned, the smoke, while less visible, remained an acrid presence.
Amy Hack, Grace Driscoll and Tomas Kantor in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Credit: Daniel Boud
Presumably something or someone malfunctioned. Thankfully any sprinkler system wasn’t triggered, and hopefully the performers’ respiratory systems were in reasonable order for the next show.
Smoke aside, if you loved the film, you’ll like the musical. That mix of quirkiness and zaniness that defined Almodovar’s tale of five women stressing out – three of them over the same man – in Madrid in 1988, is intact, and sometimes Jeffrey Lane’s book and David Yazbek’s lyrics are even funnier than the screenplay. Anyone who rhymes “matador” with “metaphor” deserves a medal. In fact, you giggle so much that you intermittently forget how samey, predictable and lame the mock-Spanish songs are – mainly when there’s no singing.
Alexander Berlage’s production maximises the humour, and is cast superlatively. Amy Hack is hilarious as Pepa, the C-grade actor who becomes desperate when her long-term lover Ivan (Andrew Cutcliffe) jilts her. Cutcliffe turns out to have the best voice in the cast: a beefy baritone, which, in a couple of Yazbek’s songs, can seem like it’s a co-conspirator in sending up Lloyd-Webber-style schlock.
The real problem comes when the show stops the steady stream of satire and comedy, and takes itself seriously. If a character presumes to sing of deeper feelings, it falls as flat as someone trampled in the running of the bulls.
Grace Driscoll is uproariously funny as Candela, Pepa’s ditsy model friend, and Nina Carcione all but matches her as Marisa, the fiancee of Ivan’s son, Carlos (a highly amusing Tomas Kantor), and the first victim of Pepa’s Valium-laced gazpacho. Marisa, caught in the dysfunction of Carlos’ family, tells him: “That’s why people marry orphans.”
Mel Russo, Aaron Robuck, Sean Sinclair and Tisha Kelemen complete the admirable cast – the latter playing Lucia, Ivan’s estranged and unstable wife, who stares at a Picasso painting as though it’s a mirror, and says, “I look dreadful”.
Hailey Hunt’s set is a gem, that, like a dream, can have a phone box in a bedroom, and thereby accommodates endless changes of location without any change of scenery. Dylan Pollard (music director), Chiara Assetta (choreography), Phoebe Pilcher (lighting) and especially Sam Hernandez (costumes) add their zing, and you walk out happy to have seen it, but probably only remembering it as “that Valium musical … with all the smoke”.
COMEDY
ANNA DOOLEY – ENDHOE
Factory Theatre, May 14. Until May 16
Reviewed by Daniel Herborn
★★★★
Endometriosis has just been promoted; she’s now in charge of Anna’s central nervous system. Now, she needs to rally her loyal underlings, the bowel, bladder and stomach, to hit her KPIs and inflict maximum pain and suffering on her host human.
That’s the central conceit of Anna Dooley’s Endhoe, a post-Fleabag autobiographical show relating the comedian’s experience with the chronic condition, which has seen her admitted to the emergency room dozens of times and undergo four operations.
Comedian Anna Dooley tackles endometriosis in her show Endhoe as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival.
Imagining the disease as a smarmy CEO, versed in corporate cliches and barely concealing a sadistic streak, proves an effective device, giving us an entry point to living with endometriosis. It casts the disease as cunning and shape-shifting, persistent and unpredictable as it wreaks hellish pain on those who live with it.
We hear about how the disease is under-researched and often misdiagnosed. Some, like a certain former commercial radio loudmouth, even like to proclaim it doesn’t exist. Those around Anna proffer unsolicited and useless advice on how to deal with the symptoms, including peppermint tea and crystals. Then there’s the financial cost, the constant fear of embarrassment in social situations and the toll on one’s mental health.
Despite the subject matter and presentation, which is closer to theatre than club comedy, Endhoe has its share of rousing laughs, whether produced through Dooley’s knack for flinty, wry observations or her committed physical comedy. A strobe-lit sequence where endometriosis whips her troops into action to crank Anna’s pain up to a 10 and a bit where she moonlights as a hack stand-up are particularly inspired.
There’s real heart beneath the tricksiness here and the central narrative is compelling. It’s a tale that hits hard both as an arresting personal story and a powerful riposte to medical misogyny. File it under “painfully funny”.
MUSIC
ERIC GALES
The Soda Factory, May 13
Reviewed by John Shand
★★★★
Imagine if those trying to sell Newcastle as a tourist destination had sent Silverchair overseas, or those selling Sydney sent Midnight Oil, or those selling Melbourne used Hiatus Kaiyote right now. That would be much too radical, when we have beaches, reefs, a rock and a bridge. We do use musicians for soft diplomacy, but to attract tourists? No, the closest we come to using art that way is the Opera House: its exterior.
Eric Gales in action at the Byron Blues & Roots Festival in 2023. Credit: Edwina Pickles
Memphis gets it. OK, so a city smaller than Adelaide has fostered the careers of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, Al Green, Aretha Franklin and scores more. Nonetheless, Memphis Tourism sends a contemporary hometown hero, guitarist Eric Gales, to Sydney (on his way to Blues on Broadbeach) to play a gig for travel agents.
They’re a boisterous bunch, so you need to sit close and prick your ears because Gales is in intimate mode: singing and playing acoustic guitar, accompanied by his wife LaDonna on percussion and fellow guitarist Trevor McKay. The huge upside is hearing one of the world’s leading guitarists in a little club, when he’s usually in a concert venue or at a festival.
The downside is trying to listen through the din. If I wasn’t reviewing and driving, I’d have gargled enough drinks to tell them that they had musical royalty in the room, and should show some respect. Gales did that his own way when he introduced his rawest wound of a song, The Storm, which begins with: “How can you love what I do/But hate who I am?”
That shut them up for a while; long enough so they latched on to the deep groove; long enough to hear the stingray guitar lines that should have been brought forward in the mix, but still had Gales’ trademark capacity to startle. After the plethora of guitarists to solo over music somewhere between blues and rock, Gales makes you feel like you’re a kid again, and are hearing it for the first time.
He started playing aged four, and, guided by his left-handed brother, plays a right-handed guitar left-handed (which he’s not), without reversing the string order (as Jimi Hendrix did), so the highest-pitched string is the top one rather than the bottom. This makes every downward strum like a conventional guitarist’s upstroke, and gives his rhythmic playing a distinctive bite.
Two acoustic guitars and a tambourine cooked up some wicked funk on I Want My Crown, and Gales tore apart Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile, while cheekily inserting snippets as diverse as Beethoven’s Fur Elise and Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.
If that sounds wantonly showy, it’s part of Gales’ schtick, along with the string-bending, mind-bending virtuosity and soulful singing. Shame he didn’t give LaDonna a song. On YouTube, you’ll find her ripping into a mighty Take Me Just as I Am. Gales brings his electric band here in November.
Eric Gales plays The Toff, Melbourne, on May 15.
MUSIC
THE OFFSPRING
Qudos Bank Arena, May 11
Reviewed by Michael Ruffles
★★★½
What do you do when one of your giant lightning skeleton zombie props fails to inflate properly? When you’re the Offspring, you just keep playing because the guitars are electrifying enough.
The California rockers tore through a blistering set of pop-punk bangers, barely pausing for breath as they proved why they have survived long enough to morph from the genre’s enfants terribles into elder statesmen. They play hard and fast.
Todd Morse and Noodles.Credit: Richard Clifford
The crushing and crunchy riffs of Come Out and Play, interspersed with the bright licks of ’60s surf rock, was the perfect tone-setter. It’s an incisive look at youth violence with equal parts anger and wry humour. In short, anarchy.
Original Prankster is made for mass appeal and goes down easy, Staring at the Sun is built for speed and is a high-wire act (and the only time the band wobbles a bit) and Hammerhead is relentless (skeleton snafu notwithstanding).
Relief comes when frontman Dexter Holland and lead guitarist Noodles become a comedy act; the skits include riffing on Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and (most brilliantly) Edvard Grieg. Have you even heard In the Hall of the Mountain King unless you’ve heard it shredded by an ageing skunk-haired punk while the mosh pit heaves?
Holland provided the most affecting moments of the night, sitting at a white grand piano as smoke drifted across the stage for a stripped-back rendition of Gone Away. The once-howling lament was made more poignant for its simplicity, before the band ramped up a cathartic finale.
Before any tears had chance to dry, the band unleashed the biggest vibe shift of the night and launched beach balls at us while jumping into the one-two punch of the Ob-La-Di-inspired Why Don’t You Get a Job? and the batty mega-hit Pretty Fly (For a White Guy). Whether it’s nonsense or genius, you’ve had nearly 30 years to make up your mind.
What is in no doubt is The Kids Aren’t Alright is terrific, a searing indictment on middle America and undeniably rousing.
How best to make sense of the anarchy? Perhaps best not to think too hard and instead heed the cry from You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid and dance.
MUSIC
RAPTURE
Australian String Quartet, The Neilson, ACO on the Pier. May 12
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★★
In a program of music of strong expressive intensity, No Feeling is Final by Melbourne-based composer Vanessa Perica began with a theme of weighty substance and dragging heaviness. Perica’s background is in jazz and the ensuing soaring theme over irregularly foreshortened patterns of pulsating quavers was one of the few places where one might have guessed this.
The four-movement work tells a challenging personal story and abounds in tousled textures and driven rhythmic energy. With some notable exceptions, string instruments are not the natural domain of jazz musicians, but Perica demonstrated imagination for their textures and a feel for their resonance and depth.
The Australian String Quartet presented a program of strong expressive intensity.
The second movement maintained and intensified the rhythmic momentum. The third, however, slowed to a dreamier mood before settling on a slow plucked cello rhythm like a heartbeat beneath longer chords of suspended tension. As though in resolution of previous trauma, the jagged finale returned the previous rhythmic energy, closing with a swooping halt, like a horse being pulled up after a wild ride.
The Australian String Quartet began the program with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, Opus 95, thereby defying the composer’s stipulation in a letter in 1816 that it was ‘never to be performed in public’. But perhaps Beethoven wouldn’t have minded. The ASQ played the first movement with incisive definition at the start and tapered yearning in the second theme.
The Allegretto ma non troppo began with gnomic poise and, in the fugal interludes, the parts intertwined like reflective mingled thoughts. However, I wondered if a slight less pressed tempo in the finale (marked Allegretto agitato) might have better communicated its haunting lilt.
After interval the ASQ gave an outstandingly impassioned and engaged performance of Janacek’s String Quartet No. 2, Intimate Letters. This work is a love letter written by a 73-year-old teenager. Its emotions shift almost every phrase from the heights of ardour to rasping frustration and jealousy but, with steely strength, long-range focus and a wide palette of timbres, the ASQ players bound them all together into an utterly persuasive, deeply human testament to the extremities of human feeling. In complete contrast, the final work Tenebrae by Osvaldo Golijov was an essay in deep tranquillity, its serene closing phrases stilling with restful calm the stormy waters traversed by the three previous works – for now.
MUSIC
DANIEL LOZAKOVICH PERFORMS SIBELIUS’ VIOLIN CONCERTO
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, May 7
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★★
Twenty-four year old Swedish violinist Daniel Lozakovich played the haunting opening phrase of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with a sound of unstrained clarity, freshness and natural sweetness with nothing cloying. Standing with poised stillness, there was a complete absence of tension about his playing, and he produced not so much fireworks with his bow but an eloquent flow of musical utterances, keenly focused and coloured with limpid tone.
Yet the expressive range was wide. The second theme opened out in richly rhapsodic double stops, the cadenza was driven and steely without lapsing into forced demonic wildness, and, when the main theme returned on the lowest string in G minor, it glowed with strength and intensity.
Daniel Lozakovich performs Sibelius’ Violin Concerto at the Sydney Opera House.Credit: Craig Abercrombie
After the wistful woodwind introduction to the slow movement, Lozakovich played the first idea with a tone of simple warmth, in contrast to the distant loneliness with which the concerto began, and in the climax soared against the orchestra with towering incisiveness.
The unleashed vitality of the finale began with a biting edge and, in the rambunctious rusticity of the first episode, the mood for the first time became genial and touched by humour. String harmonics whistled ethereally and virtuosic passages leapt across the strings with unimpeded lightness.
Before this, Czech conductor Tomas Netopil conducted a symphonic suite created by Manfred Honeck and Tomas Ille of music from Janacek’s opera Jenufa, whose works were regularly performed by the Australian Opera (as it was then called) under the championship of Charles Mackerras but which have become a rarity in Sydney.
The suite mixed music of sometimes-pained expressiveness with more rhythmic, dance-based passages that Janacek sets with a degree of distance, detachment and sometimes menace. The orchestration is imaginative and original, using a repeated note figure on the xylophone as a nagging, threatening transition theme.
After interval, Netopil led a sunny, exuberantly engaged performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6 in D, Opus 60, starting the work lightly so that it gradually gathered vigour to a point of irrepressible vitality, the outer movements ending in blazing brightness from the brass.
In the slow second movement, Netopil drew out each unexpected change of harmonic direction with undisguised delight. The scherzo, Furiant indulged in rumbunctious triteness, while the contrasting central part achieved Arcadian simplicity, its phrase ends elegantly tapered by the piccolo as though disappearing into the air of a summer evening.