This could be the silliest play I’ve ever seen
By Peter McCallum, Kate Prendergast, Rod Yates and John Shand
THEATRE
CONGRATULATIONS, GET RICH!
Wharf 1 Theatre, November 25
Until December 14
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★½
The appropriate venue for this play was the bottom drawer. About an hour into its 90 minutes, I sensed my partner’s tolerance hitting the red line, and whispered, “There’s not too much more.” But there was, because every minute was an eternity, while, across the road, three-and-a-half hours of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? blasts past.
Of course, that’s a real play. This is… what? Something someone should have axed before it hit firstly Brisbane and Singapore, and then landed on the Wharf 1 stage like an indisposition of the digestive system.
Kimie Tsukakoshi, Merlynn Tong and Seong Hui Xuan.Credit: Prudence Upton
A co-production between STC, La Boite Theatre and Singapore Repertory Theatre sounds like a worthy enterprise in theory, especially when playwright Merlynn Tong has previously delivered the widely acclaimed Golden Blood.
Perhaps it was up to director Courtney Stewart (La Boite’s artistic director) to tell Tong it wasn’t ready – and probably would never be. Perhaps there wasn’t time, and instead Stewart decided to sugar-coat it in set, sound, costumes and lights, and hoped no one would notice.
But an indisposition of the digestive system is hard to hide. It’s why nappies have so many layers.
Tong sets her play in Money Money Karaoke, a newborn bar run by Mandy (Tong) and Xavier (Zac Boulton). On the opening night, they’re short on customers until the ghosts of Mandy’s grandmother (Kimie Tsukakoshi) and mother (Seong Hui Xuan) arrive, and embark on a little remodelling of Mandy’s life.
Underpinning this is a profound tragedy from Tong’s past: her own mother ran a karaoke bar, and died by suicide when Tong was only 14, having already lost her father to cancer when she six. So writing this allowed her to imagine conversations she never had.
Rather than confront that pain, however, Tong’s penned an intended laugh-out-loud comedy that barely tugs at the smile muscles. There are a couple of cute moments: the ghosts are constantly hungry, for instance, but can’t eat. Instead, they make clucking sounds while twitching like marionettes, and then somehow suck in their nutrition. The choreography and performances of the two women in these moments are genuinely entertaining.
James Lew also distracts us with some lollies in the set and costumes design, although the karaoke performances that punctuate the show – as light relief! – are a sin against music. Composer and sound designer Guy Webster not only assails our ears with excruciating songs (albeit in keeping with the idiom) sung badly, but backs up the comic-book action with comic-book sound effects, consisting of more explosions of white noise than is fair on the ears.
By the time the morals about mother-daughter relationships and having the courage to break one’s own rules engulfed us, I just wanted to be somewhere else. Vying for the silliest play I’ve seen, this made a director, playwright and actors who are capable of good work look fourth rate.
MUSIC
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Simone Young
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House, November 26
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Bass Samuel Dundas displayed lusty enthusiasm, almost relish, when he rose in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to dismiss the 40 minutes or so of diligent orchestral playing from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and ushered in the voices for the famous finale with the words: “Friends, enough of that! Let’s have something a bit more pleasant and joyful” (loose translation by author).
Lest anyone concluded the first three movements had been joyless and unpleasant, it is worth summarising their virtues.
The volatile, sometimes serene, sometimes tempestuous first movement under Chief Conductor Simone Young was particularly notable for its clarity and insistent discipline and breadth of tempo, which made space for arresting outbursts, the building and easing of tension, and for those small reflective moments from the woodwind in the development section that seem to question the point of all this assertive striving.
The Scherzo (from which Young omitted the repeats that extend the length considerably) was tight and full of buoyant energy. For the Adagio theme of the third movement, Young maintained hushed, slowly moving breadth, yet the strings, under concertmaster Andrew Haveron, maintained the continuity of the melodic line, both in the breathless quietness of the theme, and in the slowly stirring animation of the later variations.
The contrasting Andante Moderato theme was flowing yet the movement as a whole balanced stillness and forward movement up to the arresting fanfare that revealed a beautifully balanced D flat chord in the afterglow, as though a verdant sunny vista had suddenly opened up.
When the voices joined following Dundas’s outburst, they quickly moved beyond pleasant. The quartet of soloists, Lauren Fagan, Deborah Humble, Simon O’Neill and Dundas created a finely coloured, golden texture in the opening variations. Singing from memory Sydney Philharmonia Choirs produced a thrilling open sound with commendable pitch control.
O’Neill, who recently delighted audiences in Wagner’s Siegfried, brought ringing vigour and lyrical strength to the March. The exposed high notes and pointed articulation of the Seid Umschlungen (“Be embraced”) theme from the choral tenors and basses, combined with broad tempo direction from Young, became a bold, truculent assertion of humanity.
Such an expression also lay at the heart of William Barton’s specially commissioned Ayatku Muruu (One Country), which had begun the program and was receiving a world premiere. Mixing words from the Kalkadungu language and English, Barton’s choral writing floated in long syllables and clear melodies, while the orchestral parts evolved more changeably, sometimes in dreamy quiet, sometimes with twirling bird-like woodwind sounds and sometimes with more complex rhythmic pulsation.
THEATRE
THE SEAGULL
KXT on Broadway, November 26
Until December 6
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
This is Chekhov’s The Seagull not so much adapted as recooked. The characters remain recognisable despite some renaming, and the story’s intact despite being set in Bellingen during Covid. The big change of ingredient is the dialogue, but even that remains close to the original’s spirit.
Despite ending with a suicide, the play was penned as a comedy, with Chekhov satirising age and class distinctions and – like holding up a mirror and drawing a caricature of himself on it with a crayon – the pretensions of theatricals. Would-be playwright Konstantin decries the hidebound conventions of theatre at the time, and here writer/director Saro Lusty-Cavallari delights in having his Constantine rip into the fabric of Sydney theatre and its protagonists.
Brendan Miles, Tim McGarry, Jason Jefferies. Credit: Robert Miniter
In fact, between Constantine’s petulant rancour the gossipy grudges of his mother, the famed actor Irene (previously Arkadina), Lusty-Cavallari drops a truckload of steaming mockery on Sydney’s theatre scene, from its loftiest names to its indie quirks. But, like Chekhov (and however heated Constantine becomes), he satirises with some affection rather than with pure contempt. Chekhov might have especially relished Lusty-Cavallari’s lampooning himself as “a bearded playwright stealing from the classics, and calling it new Australian writing”.
His robust cast includes Deborah Jones feasting upon Irene, with her stylish hair, large sunglasses, permanent glass of wine, toffee accent and bulldozing self-obsession; one that sweeps all before it, including her son’s sense of his place in the world.
Saro Lepejian blazes as Constantine, for whom every nuance of art, culture, love and social intercourse is a life-and-death matter. Tim McGarry (Irene’s witty older brother, Peter) and Brendan Miles (the doctor) shine, their characters now two ageing Bellingen hippies, dope-smoking their way through the lockdown, with the doctor the most benign of a scrambled tribe.
Shan-Ree Tan plays Irene’s beau, the famed author Alex, with a delicious mix of urbane pomposity, predatory charm and a whisper of self-doubt. Talia Benatar sinks her teeth into bad girl Maddie, so lovelorn over Constantine as to be drinking beer for breakfast. Kath Gordon is also good as Maddie’s embittered mother, Polly, Irene’s “help”, and Jason Jeffries is the dull school teacher, Marty, whom Maddie marries out of boredom.
Finally, Alexandra Travers plays Nina, who performs in Constantine’s grotesquely over-written – “post-dramatic” – backyard play, Eros in Plastic, and who, unable to return Constantine’s love, falls for Alex. She, too, excels, until act four, when she returns from her failed affair, miscarriage and jobbing-actor career. Now, when Lusty-Cavallari switches tone from cavorting satire to emotional desperation, neither his writing nor Travers’ performance quite ring true, and after so much of the play delighting, the ending is dissatisfying.
The production, astutely blocked and with amusingly choreographed changes of designer Kate Beere’s settings, marks the 10th birthday of Kings Cross Theatre, a vital piece in the puzzle of Sydney theatre.
MUSIC
FREEDMAN JAZZ
The Neilson, November 22
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
Twenty-four years ago, pianist Andrea Keller won the inaugural Freedman Jazz Fellowship, and now she was one of a trio of judges announcing saxophonist/composer Sam Gill had won this year’s $30,000 fellowship. Gill will pursue compositional studies, collaboration and recording in New York over the next two years.
While the windfall can be life-changing, the evening again felt more of a concert than a competition, with the four finalists performing in one of Sydney’s best venues, with musicians of their choice. It was a testament to the diversity and creativity of Australian jazz that all four sounded like no one else in the music’s history.
Gill performed three of his compositions with an iteration of his band Coursed Waters, featuring pianist Novak Manojlovic, electric bassist Christopher Hale and drummer James McLean. Instantly we were assailed by the piquancy of Gill’s soprano saxophone sound and the intriguing outside-of-the-box nature of his sophisticated compositions, with their rhythmic switchbacks and radically changing vistas.
On Double Down, he turned to his more usual alto saxophone for a piece that could have been the love child of a menage a trois between Anthony Braxton, Frank Zappa and Nino Rota. It allowed the players maximum creative scope, including a Manojlovic solo that swelled and ebbed with the rhythm section to create an extraordinary sense of the music arriving in waves rather than metered time. After a glorious solo from Hale’s six-string bass, the band converged on a sudden starburst of energy that one felt as a physical jolt.
But then trumpeter Niran Dasika would have been a worthy winner, too, initially elevating us to the heavens with celestial solo trumpet – although any angels involved were of the fallen variety, with digital looping, circular breathing and vocal growls used to supernatural effect. When joined by guitarist Lawrence Folvig and drummer Kyrie Anderson, the impact was nothing short of visionary.
The guitar hummed and sang like some natural phenomenon, while Anderson was endlessly inventive both texturally and rhythmically, and the trumpet cried out its songs of quiet desperation. In its conceptual scope, this was not a trio, but a three-piece orchestra.
Pianist Wilbur Whitta’s trio with bassist Cameron Undy and Alexander Inman-Hislop was utterly engrossing in its sheer playfulness and its ability to make jazz minus the cliches. Again, the compositions were notable for their originality and internal contrasts, with Whitta’s playing effortlessly blending blitheness and conviction.
If Perth singer Holli Scott didn’t quite rise to the heights of the other three, she was engaging on her own terms, proving an imaginative lyricist, composer and singer, whose music drifted and swooned like a morning-after reverie. Her songs were performed with trumpeter Jessica Carlton and guitarist Dom Barrett, who ensured that dreaminess remained the prevailing aesthetic, even if the trio was reportedly compromised by sound issues.
THEATRE
Cowbois
The Seymour Centre, November 22
Until December 13
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½
This is a noble-hearted, gun-twirling yet dismayingly middling Australian premiere of Charlie Josephine’s 2023 queer western comic fairytale that rides into Sydney town. Making too much of its saddle of progressive morality, this Siren Theatre production of Cowbois stints the energising camp and soaring spirit needed to vindicate its overlong runtime, going down like slow service on watery whisky.
For all of director Kate Gaul’s good intentions, it only occasionally comes into itself as a radical, celebratory, liberated reimagining of a genre that traditionally loves a binary.
Emily Cascarino, Faith Chaza, Branden Christine, Rory Spinks, Jules Billington, Jane Phegan and Amie McKenna. Credit: Alex Vaughan
The play is set, naturally, in a small-town saloon. Unnaturally – some could say “queerly” (an overused joke) – there are almost no menfolk here. Aside from the liquor-shaky sheriff and a precocious boy (referred to as “kid”), the husbands all up and left to join the gold rush a year ago, valiantly promising their wives they’d return with a fortune.
Another unnatural thing: the town was built to be an exceptional forward-thinking haven, its two founding principles “no guns, no politics”. However, neither of these are upheld.
And when fugitive outlaw Jack Cannon swaggers into town, a new kind of man wanted for murder and wanted in a second, sacrilegiously biblical way, its petticoated inhabitants are left weak-kneed, round-eyed and fundamentally shook. New lawless awakenings are about to happen – and not even the returning wave of toxic masculinity that crashes down when the boys get back can reinstate the old oppressive “normal”.
Jules Billington is our gunslinger in red, infusing as much tender kindness as cocksure masc into the trans baddie. There’s not a whole lot of substance behind the performativity of their character, though, and Jack’s romance with married Miss Lillian (Emily Cascarino) seems to gallop on subversive lust alone (do they have one intimate exchange before professing love to one another?). An impossible event between them confirms the British playwright’s story to be a wistful, better-world fantasy.
A live band in the rafters provides subtle atmospherics, comic sound effects and backing for a few song and dance numbers. The actors weren’t cast to excel in this form of entertainment, with a lack of talent and gusto in throat and on hoof making you wonder why what’s billed as “feel good” so often feels bad. Brockman’s dramatic lighting and Emelia Simcox’s set, featuring clamshell footlights and enormous yellow drapes with purple tassels, battles the underwhelm with immersive aesthetics.
One’s heart can’t help but clench in gender-affirming plot moments, too, particularly those involving vulnerable transformation. The sweetest is when “Miss Lucy”, inspired by Jack, shucks off her long skirts to become Lou (Faith Chaza), brave and beaming in jeans and necktie. Sheriff (Matthew Abotomey) also gets a cheer for self-expression of repressed femininity with silk.
Clay Crighton (previously on piano and violin, who also contributed original music and lyrics) is a second-act show-stealer as Charley Parkhurst, a hilarious drag caricature of a rival outlaw. His entrance interrupts a long and scattered argument between the townsfolk about new and old values. The most conservative voice is then conveniently shot by dainty hand, and his death promptly passed over by a hammy, action-packed shoot-out.
Lord knows the messages of Cowbois are important in a backsliding world. But this desperado could do with more fire in the belly, their steed a swift kick with sharp spurs.
MUSIC
Bach Mass in B minor
Sydney Chamber Choir
City Recital Hall, November 22
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
With his genius for contrapuntal combinations carrying deep musical and symbolic significance, Bach constructed the great four-part fugue, Donna Nobis Pacem, which concludes the Mass in B minor, so the pleas for peace pile harmoniously on top of one another, each beginning before the previous one has ceased and overreaching it (a “stretto” in musical terms) to create a sonic image of collective yearning.
The swelling sonority and translucent texture of the Sydney Chamber Choir and the Muffat Collective orchestra under Sam Allchurch in this number encapsulated all the virtues of the performance that it brought to such a glowing close: clarity, balance, judicious tempi and an absence of unwanted accent or distortion.
Conductor Sam Allchurch. Credit: Robert Catto
The striking opening chords that begin the Mass were sung with an unforced, open sound, allowing pure vowels and the music’s harmonic richness to convey the necessary emphasis. The ensuing expansive five-part Kyrie fugue flowed with a deeply embedded, unhurried pulse.
For the Christe, soprano Sara Macliver and alto Sally-Anne Russell created a nicely edged duet sound and their pealing imitation in the second theme was like the playful eddies of running water.
For the second Kyrie, the choir returned with a tone of measured seriousness. The choruses of the Gloria and the addition of a brilliant battery of three trumpets require, of course, more animation, but Allchurch’s broad metric direction ensured the music was emblematic of joy rather than over-excitement.
Concertmaster Matthew Greco led with light precision, aptly demonstrated in the nimbleness of his and Macliver’s ornamentation in Laudamus te. Illustrating the two-in-one theme implicit in the text of the Domine Deus section, flute players Melissa Farrow and Mikaela Oberg wove threads of silvery filigree against Macliver and tenor Andrew Goodwin, the latter singing with smoothly tanned finish and blooming projection.
Russell sang the Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris aria with full sound and rich colour, memorably bringing the same qualities to the darker depths of the penultimate Agnus Dei just before the final chorus. Bass David Greco enlivened the Quoniam and Et in Spiritum Sanctum arias with pointed, elastic articulation that accentuated the natural rhythmic emphasis of the complex melodic line.
While the orchestra retuned after the Credo, Allchurch regrouped the chorus to facilitate the double-choir format Bach uses for the Osanna. The regrouping also highlighted the broad antiphonal strokes of the Sanctus, which swayed majestically like great tolling bells and gave the music of the Donna nobis pacem (which had been heard earlier in the Gratias agimus fugue with the former grouping) a more focused, brilliant finish.
When performed as well as it was here, Bach’s Mass inevitably creates a sense of awe and wonder at the extent of human imagination and craft. What better way for Sydney Chamber Choir to end its 50th anniversary season.
MUSIC
Sam Fender
Showring, Entertainment Quarter, November 21
Reviewed by ROD YATES
★★★★
In 2019, British singer-songwriter Sam Fender played his debut Sydney show at the 500-capacity Oxford Art Factory.
Fast-forward six years – during which he’s amassed three UK No.1 albums, a Mercury Music Prize for this year’s People Watching LP and, in June, a sold-out show at the 80,000 capacity London Stadium – and his star has risen significantly.
Among the 15,000 people flowing through the gates of the Showring, the constant stream of Newcastle United shirts suggests his expat appeal remains strong.
However, when the North Shields-born artist asks how many in the crowd are British and how many are Australians, the loudest cheer comes from the locals, affirmation that his songs of everyday life and blue-collar tribulation have resonance beyond his home country.
Sam Fender’s star has risen significantly. Credit: Deb Pelser
On this night, those songs sound majestic.
That Fender opens his biggest-ever Sydney show not with a mainstream hit but the deep cut Angel in Lothian suggests this is a man not tied to the staid old traditions of arena rock but one who has faith in his material and his band to make it a convincing opener.
His backing group has swelled to a seven-piece over the years, a younger, northern English answer to Springsteen’s E Street Band, and they look like they’re having the collective time of their life.
That they can pull off the howling noise-punk rock of Howdon Aldi Death Queue – introduced by Fender as a “stupid song”, and arguably the only set-list misstep of the evening – and follow it with a track as nuanced and elegant as Spit of You is a byproduct not only of the hundreds of shows they’ve played together but their history as friends stretching back to their teenage years.
The real stars, though, are the songs themselves. Anthems such as Seventeen Going Under, People Watching and triumphant closer Hypersonic Missiles blend wildly melodic hooks with Fender’s lyrical talent for making his deeply personal experiences resonate with the masses.
He begins The Dying Light – a song that addresses suicide and those “who didn’t make the night” – solo on piano before shepherding it to a triumphant, hopeful, full-band climax. The Borders delivers an additional element of joy when a fan is invited onstage to play guitar; recent single Talk to You (the recorded version of which features Elton John) sits as comfortably in the set as older songs such as Will We Talk?
Fender says he’s about to disappear for a while to concentrate on his fourth studio album. When he returns we’ll likely all be heading out to Olympic Park.
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