A grim truth is spun into a compelling and scathing new story

This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party, a striking new work that takes on racism head-on, a night of music and comedy, a challenging solo show written by Samuel Beckett, a performance by Mike Nock, Stephen Magnusson and Julien Wilson, MSO’s evocative First Voices Showcase, the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative’s 40th anniversary celebration, a new production of The Rocky Horror Show starring Jason Donovan, and a sharply compelling play about the realities of aged care.

THEATRE
Crocodiles ★★★★
Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre, until June 4

An elderly woman named Helen (Marta Kaczmarek) lies on a single bed. She is in a nursing home. Her children are beside her, trying their best to cajole her. Her memory is rapidly fading. She’s making incredibly absurd remarks while still seemingly retaining her faculties as brutally honest insights slip into the fray – it’s as though she’s taking advantage of her dying days to finally allow for true dementedness.

Crocodiles is compelling, scathing and humorous.Credit: Cameron Grant

Before long a support worker, Sandhya (Rachel Kamath), wheels her trolley in. She’s generally ignored, treated like a robot of sorts – a little distracting but totally necessary. The scene changes, and we’re witness to a hauntingly intimate conversation between Helen and Sandhya, who confide in each other even as they remain strictly within their socially-sanctioned roles.

Later, we encounter more private vulnerability: between friends and ex-colleagues Sandhya and Neela (Shamita Siva), as well as between Indian-Australian doctor Priya (Siva again, doing impressive double duty) and her white Australian boyfriend James (Tom Dent). Something bad is brewing under the surface.

This is multidisciplinary artist Vidya Rajan’s new play, Crocodiles, which takes a central conceit – how careworkers, international students, migrants and the dying are continually made invisible in Australian society – and spins it into something entirely compelling, scathing, humorous.

Rachel Kamath and Shamita Siva in a scene from Crocodiles. Credit: Cameron Grant

It’s Rajan’s trademark by this point. Her extensive experience in screen and comedy writing comes in handy here: the dialogue is terrific and timed to the T. At one point, Helen remarks, “They look like turnips,” referring to her breasts as Sandhya bathes her. When Neela expresses horror at how the elderly are treated in Australia compared with India – “We would never do this” – the pacing is akin to a repartee.

Of course, it’s not just good writing that makes a play enjoyable. Kaczmarek, Kamath and Siva play their roles with aplomb – we are completely immersed in their interiorities as they go about their (non-)lives: whether that’s simply speaking gibberish in bed, fretting about the future in an isolating yet stifling sharehouse or feigning optimism as temporary residents experiencing a state of limbo.

When Crocodiles enters its final scene and ends, it takes one by surprise. There’s a sense it’s not quite finished. Director Marcel Dorney warns before the show begins that it’s “still very much a work in progress”. Yet, it doesn’t appear as if the producers cut it off for lack of content. I’d love to see a next episode.

Reviewed by Cher Tan

MUSIC
Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party ★★★½
Cherry Bar, May 24

The word “indulgence” springs to mind while watching Russell Crowe’s band Indoor Garden Party play live in the cramped confines of Cherry Bar – and not just because he has so recently been on the big screen as the Pope’s Exorcist.

There’s a sense that Rusty is indulging his long-held rock god fantasies, that the band is indulging him, that the crowd of devotees and the merely curious is party to the whole exchange, and above all that this is only happening because Crowe has the means to bankroll it.

Russell Crowe is clearly having the time of his life at Indoor Garden Party.Credit: Carbie Warbie

To all of which I would add, well, good for him.

This show is way more fun than it should be. A mix of originals from this line-up and Crowe’s old unit, TOFOG (Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts) and an eclectic bunch of covers holds the interest, even if Rusty doesn’t always hold the note for which he is striving.

He departs the stage regularly for a break, and to give Irishwoman Lorraine O’Reilly the space to exhibit her considerable vocal chops. When he does, the vibe lifts from ambling pub rock to aspiring stadium.

The five-piece band is tight, and the four female backing singers (O’Reilly and three others Crowe introduces only as “The Lady Garden”, to the chagrin of one woman in the crowd who yells “they have names, you know”) smooth over the cracks in Crowe’s delivery.

Russell Crowe performs at Cherry Bar on May 24, 2023.Credit: Carbie Warbie

The trumpet and keys add a level of production you might not expect in a room of this size. The choice of covers – Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet, Nick Cave’s Into My Arms, Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade of Winter, Leonard Cohen’s Take This Waltz – are played brilliantly by the band, and make the whole thing feel like the most high-end karaoke night a man could wish for.

It says everything that when Crowe comes back onstage and gives the audience a choice of a song or a story they overwhelmingly opt for the latter.

He delivers a rambling but well-told tale of having a tarantula crawl up his body and into his mouth, over and over, on a film set. It gets a big laugh and then he’s off singing again in his raspy way, clearly having the time of his life.

By the time the night wraps with a rollicking rendition of Folsom Prison Blues, which Crowe informs us he used to play regularly as a busker in Sydney in his teens, it’s pretty obvious everyone else is having a ball too.

Reviewed by Karl Quinn

THEATRE
Jacky ★★★½
Fairfax Studio, until June 24

The rich minefield of familial relationships is the lens through which Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick explores the tensions of living as a First Nations person in so-called Australia.

Jacky (Guy Simon) and Keith’s (Ngali Shaw) easy camaraderie falls along familiar fault lines – gig worker Jacky is the responsible, serious older brother; Keith is the rebellious, light-hearted layabout, the humorous foil to Jacky’s straight-edged persona.

Where this dichotomy is complicated is in the different ways Jacky and Keith experience the world – Jacky is a light-skinned Aboriginal man, “the right kind of black”, accustomed to being treated favourably by white people who are quick to claim him as their token black friend. This same treatment isn’t extended to the darker-skinned Keith, who struggles to keep down a job.

In Jacky, playwright Declan Furber Gillick explores the tensions of living as a First Nations person in so-called Australia.Credit: Pia Johnson

The play’s simple set is a picture of domesticity – a kitchen, replete with a fridge, stove and oven, sits alongside a couch and coffee table, with the protruding power boards adding a pleasing touch of verisimilitude. A double bed sits in the corner, where for moonlighting sex worker Jacky, it’s a site of business and leisure.

Two transactional relationships with white people take centre stage in Jacky – the one between the eponymous character and his sex work client, Glenn (Greg Stone), and between Jacky and Linda (Alison Whyte), who works for a recruitment and training organisation. The most galling instances of racism in the play happen in the context of relationships mediated by the spectre of money, relationships that aren’t easily severed. While Glenn is much more overt and explicit in his racism, Linda’s is cloaked in white saviourism and institutional power.

The racial slurs Jacky is subjected to are shocking and painful, but they never feel gratuitous. Furber Gillick adroitly depicts the nuances of living as an Aboriginal man, from the code-switching Jacky employs in his daily life to the slow, gradual erosion of personhood that accompanies pandering to the white gaze.

In a testament to Furber Gillick’s writing, each character is complex and multilayered – never once descending into caricature. The acting is exceptional – each actor holds space for the multiple selves and possibilities encapsulated by their characters. Simon undergoes a metamorphosis as Jacky, while Stone performs Glenn with a striking mix of venom and affection. As Keith, Shaw effortlessly shifts from providing comic relief to acting as the embattled Jacky’s moral conscience.

The play’s simple set is a picture of domesticity.Credit: Pia Johnson

What simmers beneath the surface of the play is finally thrust into the spotlight in Jacky and Keith’s spectacular fight. Questions of victimhood, being a model minority, the performance of one’s culture for the benefit of a white audience – an irony not lost on Furber Gillick as he recounts in the post-show Q&A the difficulty of writing a play for a culturally white institution in front of a mostly white audience – are raised.

If there are any criticisms, it’s that the pacing is slightly uneven throughout and the rejoinders are, at times, predictable.

But ultimately, Jacky is a play about seeing and being seen. For the longest time, Jacky can’t see Keith, and in turn, isn’t seen by Linda or Glenn as a person that exists beyond a reflection of their needs and desires.

Reviewed by Sonia Nair

CABARET and COMEDY
Jens Radda | Skank Sinatra ★★★
The Butterfly Club, until June 3

Skank Sinatra is performer Jens Radda’s sultry take on the discography of the titular Frank. Over the course of 50 minutes, Radda gallivants through the songbook of the Chairman of the Board while implementing a modern, Melbourne spin.

Performer Jens Radda takes on the discography of Frank Sinatra.

Many adaptations are gratuitous. Lyrics are repurposed in order to detail visiting Wet on Wellington (one of Melbourne’s most popular gay saunas), to describe scores of group sex, and sniffing illicit lines at Revolver – the localisation of dialogue is appreciated, although undoubtedly ham-fisted. As are attempts to reappropriate New York, New York to suit the local housing crisis or Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) to depict the hedonistic relationship with a clown from Berlin that ended in murder.

A final medley that encompasses a salsa take on Fly Me To The Moon, The Way You Look Tonight, You Make Me Feel So Young and My Way is delivered with grandeur – but it doesn’t quite land soundly enough.

Radda’s best moments come when behind the Kawai keyboard and not a pre-produced soundtrack. A few notes are missed, but when they hit – they soar. Embedded with a bit more structure, they could reach the stratosphere.

While the show has its flaws, for those looking for an escape from the hatred and bile currently being spewed in the daily discourse, Skank Sinatra is a queer celebration that provides a wholesome antidote.

Reviewed by Tyson Wray

THEATRE
Worstward Ho ★★★½
Samuel Beckett, Theatre Works Explosives Factory, until June 3

Melbourne theatregoers have two weeks left to see Judith Lucy in Happy Days at the Melbourne Theatre Company, and I’d recommend catching it while you can. Those on tighter budgets can still get a live Samuel Beckett experience at Worstward Ho.

Rob Meldrum gives a searching, well-modulated performance in Worstward Ho.Credit: Chelsea Neate

Late Beckett is a difficult pleasure. The artist headed “worstward” with increasing abstraction and intensity. Plays such as Waiting For Godot, Endgame and Happy Days are all striking visions of human futility – we know that Godot will never come, that Hamm and Clov’s post-apocalyptic bickering will end in mutual zugzwang, that Winnie cannot escape being buried alive in the parched earth – but at least their scenarios are comprehensible and vividly delineated.

By the time Beckett wrote works such as What Where or Worstward Ho, the very idea of “content” that so obsesses contemporary culture had begun to seem anathema to the existential pessimism – and stoicism – he wanted to convey.

Language itself disintegrates in this one. The narrator has no name or stable identity and truth be told they probably don’t qualify as a “narrator” at all. No one hears the speaker but us, and no story emerges – only vague memories of an old man, an old woman, and a child. The image of a skull. Everything succumbs to an irresistible entropy. Everything “gnaws to be gone”. For good.

And yet, the speaker continues doggedly on, dredging a piteous and antiheroic kind of beauty from their inarticulacy. You might be reminded of a stroke survivor, or someone living with dementia, and it’s no coincidence, I think, that Beckett’s oft-quoted line, beloved of artists, comes from a monologue that contains a terse acceptance of inevitable failure, and a compulsion to strive on regardless.

Richard Murphet’s direction achieves a no-frills intimacy.Credit: Chelsea Neate

“Ever tried. Ever failed,” the speaker says. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Rob Meldrum gives a searching, well-modulated performance. It’s impressive for an actor to be able to perform Worstward Ho at all. The scattered permutations and recursive phrasing of this hour-long piece seem custom-built to flee from the mind almost as soon as they’re uttered. Meldrum makes them linger, riding waves of pain and confusion with grim persistence – and a few feeble flickers of gallows humour.

Richard Murphet’s direction achieves a no-frills intimacy. Astute lighting design alternately focuses the human form, slices it with shadow, and dimly illuminates the road to oblivion. This challenging solo work will haunt and galvanise those who steel themselves to endure it.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

JAZZ
Mike Nock, Stephen Magnusson and Julien Wilson ★★★★½
The Jazzlab, May 28

Two nights after performing the opening set of the Melbourne Jazz Co-op’s 40th anniversary concert, Mike Nock was back on stage in the more intimate surrounds of The Jazzlab.

Mike Nock performs at The Jazzlab on May 28, 2023.Credit: Roger Mitchell

On Friday at the Recital Centre, the Sydney pianist had improvised freely with Melbourne musicians Julien Wilson (on saxophone) and Stephen Magnusson (electric guitar). Sunday’s gig – also presented under the MJC banner – featured the same line-up, but this time the trio worked through two full sets of beguiling originals.

The lion’s share of compositions belonged to Nock, including a new tune dedicated to the late John Pochee. Nock is 82, and his mastery as a composer and pianist, his desire to make each note count, remain as palpable as ever. To watch him at the keyboard is to witness boundless creativity unfolding moment by moment, whether he is taking a solo – brow furrowed, body hunched forward – or engaging in joyful musical conversations with his onstage colleagues.

Mike Nock, Stephen Magnusson and Julien Wilson performed two full sets of beguiling originals on Sunday night.Credit: Roger Mitchell

Magnusson and Wilson share an almost symbiotic relationship after decades of playing together. On Sunday night, the pair would often double the melody line, Magnusson’s guitar hovering a fraction behind Wilson’s tenor sax to give the music a marvellously organic sense of flow.

In this bass-less, drummer-less setting, instrumental roles were flexible and the music was allowed to breathe as the players used intuition as their guide. Spaces opened up between phrases, and on some tunes – like Wilson’s Rebellious Bird – the exquisite melody evaporated and the three players drifted on a bed of gleaming chords, hazy resonance and quivering split-tone harmonics.

On Boundaries, Magnusson used an octave pedal to create a loping, dusty saloon-bar bassline, and on Thinking of You, Wilson’s reverberant saxophone surged across Nock’s rippling, expansive piano like a majestic ship at night, leaving a wash of dreams in its wake.

Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

MUSIC
MSO First Voices Showcase ★★★★
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Iwaki Auditorium, May 26

Compared with the rest of the arts, classical music has been slow to give voice to Indigenous artists. This makes the First Nations initiatives of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra all the more significant.

Aaron Wyatt conducting the MSO First Nations Showcase on May 26, 2023.Credit: Laura Wilson

Audiences are now familiar with the engaging acknowledgement of country by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon that launches every MSO performance. In 2021 Noongar man Aaron Wyatt directed this work, so becoming the first Indigenous person to conduct a state symphony orchestra.

These signal statements are reinforced by the MSO’s First Voices program where emerging composers are given the opportunity to have compositions workshopped and performed by the orchestra as well as the residency of Ensemble Dutala, Australia’s first ensemble for classically trained First Nations musicians.

In this concert, works by Vonda Last and James Henry expressed deep connections to country by means as varied as the lands they depict. Last’s Awakening imagines scenes from a day spent in the bush of her native Western Desert, conjuring up its vast expanses, its nocturnal animals and a summer thunderstorm.

In this concert, works expressed deep connections to country by means as varied as the lands they depict.Credit: Laura Wilson

Using the native name for the spotted bowerbird, James Henry’s Widhaa recounts the Dreamtime story of how this creature came to acquire its distinctive pink crest after an altercation with a wedge-tailed eagle.

Ably and empathetically directed by Wyatt, a chamber ensemble brought both works vividly to life, clearly delineating their imaginative timbres, textures and structures. A preview of Brenda Gifford’s Miringama added another distinctive, assured voice to the mix.

Hosted enthusiastically by Yorta Yorta double bass player Allara Briggs-Pattison on the eve of Reconciliation Week, this mix of music and conversation underscored the importance of ongoing pathways for Indigenous musicians, allowing spoken and musical languages to be reclaimed and creative Indigenous voices to be heard. The crucial work of reconciliation cannot be advanced without voices such as this.

Reviewed by Tony Way

JAZZ
Melbourne Jazz Co-operative 40th Anniversary Celebration ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, May 26

In January 1983, the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative presented its first-ever concert featuring a young jazz pianist called Paul Grabowsky. Four decades on, Grabowsky is one of this country’s most acclaimed jazz artists, and the MJC is a vital not-for-profit organisation providing invaluable performance opportunities for established and emerging musicians.

Torrio! perform at Melbourne Jazz Co-operative 40th Anniversary Celebration.Credit: Roger Mitchell

Martin Jackson founded the MJC and remains its tireless creative director, though in typically humble fashion he kept the focus firmly on the music for the organisation’s 40th anniversary celebration. There were no speeches from Jackson; not even an onstage bow. But the calibre of musicians taking part in the event – and the full house it attracted – were a testament to the depth of appreciation for the MJC within the jazz community.

The concert’s first half comprised a series of small-group sets by artists who have a long association with the MJC. Pianist Mike Nock dove into a spellbinding free improvisation with Julien Wilson and Stephen Magnusson, while Andrea Keller and Sandy Evans forged vivid, gracefully intertwining lines in their superb duo encounter.

Barney McAll’s brilliant Non-Compliance Trio paired the shadowy drama of Route 666 with the irresistible gospel fervour of Apple Tree. And Paul Grabowsky – whose trio launched the MJC’s weekly concert series 40 years ago – returned with his current group Torrio!, the musicians’ astonishingly sharp reflexes on display as they veered between sharp flurries, lyrical balladry and bursts of freeform energy.

Friday night saw the premiere of Jumping Yaks.Credit: Roger Mitchell

In the second half we heard the world premiere of Jumping Yaks, a suite written by four different musicians, performed by a specially assembled 18-piece orchestra and conducted with expressive precision by Vanessa Perica. The suite is loosely inspired by Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, with each movement offering wildly divergent responses to the source material.

Erkki Veltheim and Eugene Ball’s movements both featured sections of the orchestra spinning off in different directions, colliding or converging along fractured paths. Niko Schauble and Eric Griswold’s respective movements also featured plenty of rhythmic and dynamic shifts: Schauble’s piece saw the orchestra galloping across exhilaratingly diverse terrain, while Griswold’s wove unexpected flashes of mariachi and other folkloric colours into a fascinating multi-hued tapestry.

Yet as artists and audience paid tribute to the MJC’s achievements, the celebratory mood was tempered by a sad irony: in 2023, for the first time in the organisation’s history, its weekly concert program is unsupported by either state or federal funding. Here’s hoping this public acknowledgement of the MJC’s legacy serves as a potent reminder of the crucial part it continues to play in this city’s flourishing jazz ecosystem.

Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

MUSICAL
The Rocky Horror Show ★★★½
The Athenaeum, until July 23

Why is Rocky Horror still popular half a century on – long after the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation; long after the B-grade films it parodies have faded into obscurity? When I interviewed co-creator Richard O’Brien for the show’s 40th anniversary, he admitted its cult status – the sheer devotion it inspires in fans – was a mystery to him.

I was one of those fans, and it’s a mystery to me, too.

As a teenage goth in the ’90s, I donned fishnets and suspenders and joined a throng of Transylvanians at the Valhalla for live action screenings of the film. The audience knew every line by heart, every move of the Time Warp. Ritual participation was expected, from throwing rice at the screen during the wedding scene to frequent, often lewd, audience interjections during the dialogue.

Loredo Malcolm in a scene from The Rocky Horror Show.Credit: Daniel Boud

This community of freaks is transgenerational, I’m pleased to say, and Myf Warhurst’s Narrator egged us on at the Rocky Horror opening night. Unfortunately, she sometimes sounded like a children’s TV show host or a conscientious year 10 student addressing the class about her school project. Annoying, really.

Even Derryn Hinch knew enough about camp to take the frivolous with utmost seriousness. The Narrator’s faux gravitas is a must: Rocky is, after all, a cautionary tale about the dangers of falling in with narcissistic voluptuaries led by an alien with a God complex. (Or is it?)

The rest of the production is performed with vampy gusto. No one will ever measure up to Tim Curry’s saturnine charisma in the movie, to my mind, but Jason Donovan cuts an intriguing and precarious figure.

Where Curry as Frank N Furter could seduce the nipples off your chest, Donovan’s version of the character struts and leers and gives us an incarnation of a more pathetic creature. He still takes command of the stage during big numbers, but this Frank’s predatory antics inspire much more complicated feelings post-#MeToo.

Myf Warhurst as the Narrator engaged in a back and forth with the audience.Credit: Daniel Boud

The onstage power imbalance is striking and unsettling, and an element of self-critique of the musical theatre industry creeps into the performances.

Here we have a big-name celebrity (arguably a bit long in the tooth for the part) among a cast of young, super-talented up-and-comers giving it all they’ve got. And it’s brave of Donovan to lean into the meta-narrative to alter the show’s balance of sympathy.

I don’t think I’ve seen a production that makes you barrack harder for Frank’s victims than this one. For the muscled himbo (Loredo Malcolm) he creates as a sex slave. For the hapless sexual naifs Brad (Ethan Jones) and Janet (Deirdre Khoo) he molests. For the rock-loving bad-boy (Ellis Dolan) he charms then murders.

Rocky Horror’s enduring cult status is a mystery even to its creator.Credit: Daniel Boud

When crazed alien servitors Riff Raff (Henry Rollo) and Magenta (Stellar Perry) turn the death ray on their master, you’re totally on their side, partly because this Rocky is held together by the supporting cast.

In the end, their infectious energy, vocal ability, and talent for camp comedy do steal the show, and anyone who’s ever loved this subversive cult classic should have fun watching them do it.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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