Their music conjures private moments – so how did they pull off an arena show?

MUSIC
Cigarettes After Sex ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, March 11

Cigarettes After Sex are a bedroom band. Their music conjures private moments, darkened rooms, the intimacy of a headphone passed from one person to another. It is the music of longing, of heartbreak, of feeling like the only person in the world who has ever fallen in love. Songs bloom and die with the hypnotic intensity of a first crush.

Cigarettes After Sex perform at Rod Laver Arena on March 11.Credit: Martin Philbey

The last time Cigarettes After Sex were in Melbourne, they played the Corner Hotel – a venue notable for its sticky carpets and 800 capacity. Seven years, two albums and several viral TikTok hits later, their star has risen and the band is headlining two sold-out shows at Rod Laver Arena.

But how does a band like Cigarettes After Sex pull off a stadium show? How do you confer a sense of intimacy to a room of more than 10,000 people?

The band emerges from the darkness onto a stage hemmed by up-lights and fuzzed with smoke. The stage production is minimal, unadorned. Aside from the abstracted black-and-white visuals that are occasionally projected onto background screens, there are no distractions.

Neither are there theatrics: singer Greg Gonzalez does little more than slink languorously from one side of the stage to the other, while bassist Randall Miller and drummer Jacob Tomsky are equally understated, focused on the music rather than the thousands of adulating fans below.

The band defies the stadium setting, delivering the same intensity, the same intimacy, as if they were playing a hazy club in the middle of nowhere.Credit: Martin Philbey

Onstage, Gonzalez is a consummate performer. His voice, ambiguously pitched, is sometimes mistaken for that of a smoky-voiced woman’s. His lyrics are by turns melancholy, romantic, obsessive, bittersweet, nostalgic and horny. They have a diaristic specificity that’s blurred just enough around the edges that it’s possible to project one’s own experiences of love and heartbreak onto them (this perhaps goes some way to explaining the band’s extraordinary popularity among Generations Z and Alpha).

Songs like Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby, Dark Vacay and Cry ooze with slow-burn intensity, while John Wayne is played slower and sweeter than the album version, as though everything has been dipped in honey. Throughout the show, roaming spotlights illuminate the crowd in brief moments of chiaroscuro, transforming rapturous faces into renaissance paintings.

The band defies the stadium setting, delivering the same intensity, the same intimacy, as if they were playing a hazy club in the middle of nowhere. During Opera House, the final song of the evening, phone lights come on one by one, filling the room with a thousand fireflies. Smoke rolls across the stage. We are held, spellbound, until the final note fades.
Reviewed by Nadia Bailey

DANCE
Somos ★★★
The Show Room, Arts Centre Melbourne until March 23

Somos takes us to the living end of choreographer Rafael Bonachela’s fascination with Hispanic music and dance in an intimate revue-style production full of baroque affectations and eroticism.

Somos has a sense of humour, which gives it warmth and immediacy.Credit: Pippa Samaya

The eye-catching costumes designed by Kelsey Lee are the show’s standout feature. The large ensemble parade through the space in an array of fishnet stockings, deconstructed corsets and other parodically meagre items.

The men get the best of these fantastically kinky outfits. One dancer appears to be wearing little more than a distressed body stocking, giving him the appearance of a flayed martyr, as imagined by Guido Reni.

The women’s costumes are less distinctive but nonetheless effective in conjuring a mood of over-the-top burlesque fun: the whole ensemble looks like it escaped from the floorshow of an underground Hamburg nightclub.

Somos is a production full of baroque affectations and tongue-in-chic eroticism.Credit: Pippa Samaya

And Somos – performed in the round in the cosy Arts Centre Show Room – does resemble a floorshow, with its series of short acts, mostly duets, trios and solos.

The soundtrack features an array of mostly female Latin pop, folk and jazz artists. Bonachela makes striking use of the many long Hispanic melismas to work his dancers in and out of elaborately tangled embraces.

There are also fragments of Spanish dance sprinkled throughout. These are best seen in the odd but absorbing duet for Naiara de Matos and Piran Scott, in which the lumbering Scott repeatedly lifts the much smaller de Matos by her head.

These sorts of manipulations are typical of Bonachela’s recent style. The dancers treat each other like dolls, cyphers for the choreographer himself, who pushes them together, opens them up and turns their legs to the ceiling.

As a kind of freeform folies hispaniques, this piece has its charms, despite the predictability of the choreography, its repetitions and vacuities. And it has a sense of humour, which gives it warmth and immediacy – despite the amatory flamboyance.

Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC
PJ Harvey ★★★★
Melbourne Plenary, March 11

A PJ Harvey concert on this tour is, to borrow a bit of sporting parlance, a game of two halves.

PJ Harvey at the Melbourne Plenary on Tuesday. Her performance mesmerised, but her failure to talk to the crowd kept her a little distant.Credit: Richard Clifford

The first half is dedicated entirely to her most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, which she and her four bandmates play in full and in sequence. The second half offers a good sampling of Polly Jean’s extensive back catalogue, with enough rock to offset the folky leanings of the first, and to leave the crowd happy and wanting more.

Theatre might be the more apt point of comparison, though. This is performance more than concert, something to watch rather than become part of. Harvey enters the stage wearing something between a cape and a bishop’s chasuble; in shape, it could be Navajo, it could be druid, it could be Portobello Road. It’s embellished with a pattern that seems drawn from nature – leafless winter trees, perhaps, or are they the twisted forms of ancient men reaching for the skies?

The projected backdrop furthers the theme, and the confusion. It is both abstract and concrete, a network of jagged lines – cracks in the floor, tangled tree roots, a forest at night, lightning flashing across the night sky, paint cracking and flaking and lifting from a rendered wall in a derelict building. It could be any, or all.

It’s all of a one with Harvey’s vibe of pagan earth walker and spirit talker. She skits across the stage, dancing in a manner that can’t help but bring Kate Bush to mind, seeming to summon the spirits of the land, the sky, the forest, the hills of her native West Country as she and her superb four-piece band – long-time collaborator John Parish on guitar, Jean-Marc Butty on drums and Giovanni Ferrario and James Johnston on a host of instruments – glide through this suite of songs.

The first half of PJ Harvey’s performance was of newer, folky material but in the second half she rocked. Credit: Richard Clifford

I Inside is vaguely folky, more than vaguely olde Englishe in its lyrics (adapted from Harvey’s 2022 Orlam collection of poems), pagan and sexy. It is, she has said, about a young girl on the cusp of adulthood; it throbs with longing, loss and the desire to experience love. It’s a beautiful record, and even richer in a live setting. But it’s not exactly foot-stomping material.

The changeover happens as Harvey briefly leaves the stage and the men play (and sing) The Colour of the Earth, a folky song about a soldier’s awful experiences at Gallipoli.

When she comes back, they play The Glorious Land, another track from 2011 album Let England Shake that straddles folk and rock, with its enviro-catastrophe refrain “What is the glorious fruit of our land? Its fruit is deformed children”. A couple of songs later, she draws the biggest cheer so far as the band launch into the dirty blues of 50ft Queenie.

Man-Size, Down By The Water, To Bring You My Love follow, and all draw rapturous responses. PJ may have come here to play the new album – and rightly so; it is terrific – but most of the 5300 or so people in the room have come hoping to hear her rock out.

Harvey is a powerful performer, but not a terribly communicative one. She mesmerises with her prowling and scything across the stage, but she doesn’t even talk to the crowd until the final song.

In a venue of this size, with no video screens to bring her closer, that keeps her at a remove. These songs are intimate, but the venue – though acoustically terrific – is not.
Reviewed by Karl Quinn

MUSIC
WOMADelaide
Botanic Park, Adelaide, March 7-10

I think I may have been a bat in a former life.

Observing the fruit bats in Adelaide’s Botanic Park – 40,000 share their home with WOMADelaide each year – I felt a distinct sense of kinship over the festival long weekend. With temperatures in the high 30s each day, the heat-stressed bats flapped their wings madly and did their best to stay cool. Festival attendees did the same, fanning themselves and seeking shady spots.

Fans push through high temperatures to enjoy WOMADAdelaide this year.Credit: Sage Prime

On two of the festival’s four days, high temperatures necessitated the closure of one music stage in daylight hours, with multiple shows relocated or rescheduled. Overhead sprinklers gave festival patrons (and fruit bats) a welcome mist, but I felt for the artists who performed in the blazing mid-afternoon sun. American singer-songwriter John Grant marvelled at how hot the black keys of his piano had become, though he struck them with conviction to match the dramatic heft of his vocals.

Some acts welcomed the extreme heat: Estonia’s Duo Ruut had escaped sub-zero temperatures at home, and enlivened a soporific afternoon audience with their wonderfully imaginative use of an Estonian zither (played in distinctly non-traditional ways, using a violin bow, drumsticks and bare hands to create a rich array of textures and effects).

Bangarra perform The Light Inside at this year’s WOMADelaide.Credit: Morgan Sette

Brazil’s Bala Desejo magically softened the sun’s glare into a seductive tropical breeze, coaxing audiences out of the shade with their buoyant Afro-Latin rhythms. And South African vocal group The Joy provided just that – joy – as their lush five-part harmonies drifted up to the towering pine trees above.

As the sun set in the evenings, twilight brought instant relief and revival. The bats emerged from their torpor to take nocturnal flight and over the entire festival site, the energy lifted.

PJ Harvey roamed the stage like an ethereal sprite, her flowing robes amplifying the theatrical, almost ritualistic effect of her music as she flitted between haunting ballads and distortion-flecked rock.

Ana Carla Maza turned her one-woman set into a Cuban fiesta with just her voice and a cello, transforming her eager audience into a mass of undulating bodies.

Scottish trio Talisk also had the crowd kicking up dust and leaping with delight with contagious Celtic tunes.

Estonian musicians Duo Ruut played an Estonian zither played in very non-traditional ways at WOMADelaide 2025.  

After their invitation to perform at WOMADelaide 2024 was controversially rescinded, Palestinian group 47SOUL were offered a prime slot on the biggest stage, where the welcoming and vocally supportive crowd embraced their heady shamstep rhythms and hip-hop-infused Arabic and English lyrics – some poetic, some pointedly political.

Ane Ta Abia (a collaboration between the Australian Art Orchestra and Tatana Village Choir) was as thought-provoking as it was affecting, blending traditional Motuan prophet songs with adventurous, contemporary jazz to reflect the complexities of life in post-independence Papua New Guinea.

Whatever your mood, there was music to mirror it. Mariza’s arresting voice was there to hypnotise and beguile, as were Shabaka’s mystical, trance-inducing indigenous flutes.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s The Light Inside hummed with quiet intensity, though I was more moved by Restless Dance Theatre, whose short but profound show Seeing Through Darkness gently explored perceptions of disability through movement, gesture and shadow play.

If it was euphoria you were after, there was Goran Bregovic with his irresistibly madcap Wedding and Funeral Band – or Nils Frahm, darting like a possessed scientist among banks of keyboards to concoct a pulsating, multilayered cosmos of celestial dimensions.

As I trudged towards the exit on Monday night, tired but satiated, a giant, illuminated helium balloon rose slowly into the air.

A single, shimmering acrobat was suspended just below the balloon, somersaulting and gliding above a sea of faces tilted upwards in delight.

It was an image that perfectly encapsulated the sense of wonder, community and togetherness that WOMADelaide captures so well – an oasis of calm and contentment in a complicated world.

Goran Bregovic performs on Thursday at Hamer Hall. Nils Frahm performs on Friday and Saturday, also at Hamer Hall.

Note: No star rating has been applied to the above review

Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

THEATRE
An Audience with Don Dunstan ★★
Chapel Off Chapel, Until March 23

Premiers of Australian states don’t usually have plays written about them. Despite some larger-than-life characters and lasting legacies, it is the fate of most politicians in this country to be ignored by the artists they underfund.

Of course, premiers don’t usually wear pink shorts to Parliament, either. Don Dunstan was different, and joins select prime ministers – Julia Gillard, the subject of a recent political monodrama by Joanna Murray-Smith, or Paul Keating, whose dazzling arrogance fuelled Casey Bennetto’s musical romp Keating! – in being granted an onstage resurrection.

Curiously, Neil Cole’s An Audience with Don Dunstan marries the two impulses behind those works, in a blend of eccentric cabaret and scattershot reflection on a trailblazing political career.

Set in an Adelaide bar in the mid-1990s, we encounter a retired Dunstan (Alec Gilbert), loosened by a few chardonnays into chatting with singing waitress Asiya (Ag Johnson), who fled civil war in Africa and came to South Australia with her family as a girl, and is pursuing a career in musical theatre.

She opens the show with a sharp jazz rendition of Mack the Knife. Afterwards, Dunstan points out that Brecht’s original lyrics were anti-capitalist, modified later to make the song more palatable to American audiences. So begins a barfly conversation which bounces around chronologically, covering a life devoted to progressive reform.

Removing the White Australia Policy from Labor’s platform. Abolishing capital punishment and the crime of sodomy. Introducing anti-discrimination laws, and the first stab at native title. Appointing the first woman as a Supreme Court judge, and later, the first Aboriginal governor of the state. Increasing arts funding by a factor of six.

A miscellany of performance modes intrudes, not always successfully – a spot of vaudeville; a song from Oh, What A Lovely War; an operatic re-enactment of a judicial inquiry; poetic recitations from Wilfred Owen and W.B. Yeats and John Donne.

Alec Gilbert looks fab in pink shorts, and portrays a staunch, drily charismatic Dunstan. He’s at his best rising above small-mindedness with a smile: among interviews with various journalists (Isabella Gilbert), there’s a priceless scene in which the premier defends publishing a cookbook.

Dunstan was bisexual, and lived openly with his male partner, Steven Cheng, in later years, but he wasn’t gay as premier and the slurs on his personal life were a reaction against the fearless approach he took to life and politics.

They were also a form of tall poppy syndrome. Dunstan achieved so much that this show was always going to struggle to condense the material into effective theatre. It does what it can, offering a colourful glimpse at one of the most fascinating figures in 20th century Australian politics.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Three Sisters ★
Theatre Works, until March 22

Three Sisters is arguably the most difficult of Anton Chekhov’s major plays to stage today.

(From left) Joanna Halliday as Masha, Stella Carroll as Irina, and Mia Landgren as Olga in Three Sisters.Credit: Steven Mitchell Wright 

It’s woven on the same loom as the others, but its delicate threads of human frailty possess more obvious kinks and, in the absence of subtle and committed ensemble performance, coarseness and melodrama risk overwhelming the tragicomedy.

Sadly, they dominate and derail this indie production.

Syd Brisbane, Simon Chandler, Joanna Halliday, and Gabriel Partington in Edwardian garb in Three Sisters. Credit: Steven Mitchell Wright 

Chekhov certainly knew a thing or two about the futility of existence and the perversity of human nature. Watching his work performed, however, is not supposed to fill you with misanthropy or make you feel exiled from the realm of art, just as the titular sisters are forever doomed to eke out a depressing life in the sticks, never getting to Moscow.

It must be said that director Greg Carroll plays from the periphery of contemporary Chekhovian interpretation, which trends towards an almost absurdist minimalism and hyper-focuses on the minutiae of the acting. That tactic has been hugely successful – Simon Stone’s The Cherry Orchard for the MTC in 2013 (on a barren, painfully white expanse girded by astroturf), or Jamie Lloyd’s acclaimed 2022 production of The Seagull in London, stripped-to-the-bone, with only plastic chairs and a chipboard backdrop to compete with Game of Thrones stars Emilia Clarke and Indira Varma.

Costume drama isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker but without quality acting it feels pointless to give the show all the trappings of a museum piece, performing it in Edwardian garb under tarnished candelabra. Indeed, the design choice creates an unfortunate resemblance to pantomime, or to kids playing at dress-ups.

The portrayal of the sisters exhibits wasted potential – Mia Landgren’s pensive and beleaguered Olga traces the outline of an intricate performance, Joanna Halliday’s Masha and Stella Carroll’s Irina chase shadows of stifled possibility. And Belle Hansen’s Natasha is a villain more narcissistic and deranged than reality TV could deliver, but fearfully overplayed, while Chris Connelly’s drunken Chebutykin isn’t far behind.

The rest of the large cast have their moments – Gabriel Partington’s brooding romantic Vershinin and River Stevens’ sociopathic Solyony leap to mind – but Chekhov relies utterly on selfless ensemble drama, and there are all sorts of notes, including thematic ones, this production is too unrefined to hit.

You know the play has misfired when you leave wondering, like the sisters themselves, why you’re still alive. If only we knew.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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