By Cameron Woodhead, Tony Way and Nadia Bailey
This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes the long-awaited return of a theatrical touchstone, a ’90s film reborn as a musical, a snappy adaptation of an unfinished Dostoevsky story, the life of Virginia Woolf brought to the stage, a work of protest theatre, a brilliant night of music from the MSO, and a chameleonic gig by Marlon Williams.
THEATRE
The Mousetrap ★★★★
Agatha Christie, Comedy Theatre, from February 17
A show doesn’t run for seven decades straight without being reliable entertainment, and Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, The Mousetrap, is such a theatrical touchstone that there’s more than one way to celebrate its diamond jubilee.
Alex Rathgeber, Laurence Boxhall, Anna O’Byrne, Tom Conroy and Adam Murphy in a scene from The Mousetrap.Credit: Brian Geach
You might have seen last year’s droll cinematic homage, See How They Run, in which a fatal plot unfolds behind the scenes of a West End production, with Christie herself caught up in the mess. It’s good fun, but you can watch it anytime.
This sharply tuned stage revival to mark the 70th anniversary of The Mousetrap, however, tours Australia for a limited season, and you should catch it while you can.
The play thrives on light comedic technique and well-calibrated suspense. It has the conspiratorial air of the best whodunits. You’ll relish trying to guess who the murderer is during the interval, and spectators are made complicit in the show’s longevity.
Gerry Connolly and Geraldine Turner are part of the eight-strong cast of The Mousetrap.Credit: Brian Geach
At curtain call, famously, there’s a longstanding injunction – first issued generations before the command to “Keep the Secrets” at Harry Potter and The Cursed Child – not to reveal the twist.
So, no spoilers from me. (I’d forgotten the plot anyway since the 60th anniversary tour in 2012, and the less you know, the more you’ll enjoy yourself.)
What I can say is that Robyn Nevin directs a talented cast superbly. She’s an exacting director who gets the best out of actors – her 1995 production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll made me fall in love with theatre as a teenager – and here she constructs an ensemble performance in which each role is assiduously carved into a piece of Christie’s puzzle.
Anna O’Byrne and Alex Rathgeber appear in The Mousetrap, a masterpiece of both comedy and drama.Credit: Brian Geach
There’s an impressive list of musical theatre and comedy stars – among them Gerry Connolly, Anna O’Byrne, Alex Rathgeber and Laurence Boxhall – but no star turns in sight. Instead, we get a masterclass in unselfish acting, full of restrained comedic touches that don’t undercut the submerged drama behind the mystery.
Delivery, timing and English accents are near-perfect. Design and costume evoke an effortless period atmosphere, and the movement and blocking make the show look like a drawing room painting, or a Cluedo board, come to life.
Another reason to see it, not that you need one, is that the luxury of an eight-strong cast is rare on the (chronically underfunded) Australian theatre scene. That’s a shame. As The Mousetrap shows, ensemble theatre is something we do terrifically well when the chance arises. We can only wish more new Australian works had access to the same craft, talent and onstage body count.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
The Crocodile ★★★★½
Tom Basden (after Dostoevsky), fortyfivedownstairs, until February 26
The night after watching a surprisingly bloodless production of one of the most famous vampire tales in history, I needed a show with teeth. Something ready to chomp into the deepest veins of social satire, willing to gorge itself on the vitality of live performance.
The Crocodile at fortyfivedownstairs is a wild, frenetically funny adaptation of an unfinished Dostoevsky short story. Pictured from left to right are Joey Lai, Cait Spiker and Jessica Stanley.Credit: Jack Dixon-Gunn
Enter The Crocodile, based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky short story about a bureaucrat who gets swallowed whole by a croc, only to survive and thrive inside it.
Tom Basden’s wild, frenetically funny adaptation updates the tale from Tsarist Russia to the dark capitalist funfair of the attention economy, and it couldn’t have received a better indie production.
Director Cassandra Fumi has drawn together an inspired harlequinade: every element of stagecraft merges with guillotine-sharp synergy.
Cait Spiker brings predatory comic intent to the production of In The Crocodile.Credit: Jack Dixon-Smith
Our croc-bait is jobbing actor and performance artist Ivan (James Cerché), whom we meet peevishly defending his vocation from his friend Zack (Joey Lai), an uninspired clerk (and rather mean-spirited critic).
Anya (Jessica Stanley) – a former actress turned bespoke cushion entrepreneur – completes the love triangle, and Cait Spiker pounces with predatory comic intent on all remaining roles, from a money-grubbing crocodile owner to the pompous monarch who brings the satire to a close.
The actors are hilarious, and extremely skilled. The performance style they’ve created feels much fresher for being rooted in, and finding, a modern Australian inflection on various traditions of European performance – notably the stock characters and savagely exaggerated clowning of commedia dell’ arte (and particularly its 18th-century descendent, the harlequinade) although there are nods to Russian modernism, too.
James Cerché as Ivan in The Crocodile at fortyfivedownstairs.Credit: Jack Dixon-Gunn
Elaborate costumes – designed by Dann Barber; constructed by Alexandra Aldrich – play a significant role in both visual gags and satire. I don’t want to give too much away, but some fun highlights include a baroque-fantasy hair tower with a Melbourne special inside, and a rude Darwinian flourish as the artist in the crocodile succumbs to the devolution of newfound fame.
Woven throughout are spiky hot takes on rentier capitalism, social inequality, celebrity and cancel culture, fake news, the purpose of art, and much more, but they’re so organically entwined in the unfolding absurdity that you’ll be too busy cacking yourself to catch them all.
Gabriel Bethune’s sound design strikes just the right note of carnivalesque menace. It could use slight tweaking to avoid unnecessarily drowning out the actors ... though that’s done deliberately, too, to evoke the chaotic over-stimulation of contemporary life.
It’s the merest quibble in a production that takes Dostoevsky’s unfinished economic satire and reimagines it as a brilliant, and aesthetically complete, political burlesque for our own times.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Not All Dictators ★★½
Tiffany Barton, Natali Blok and Kate Smurthwaite, La Mama, until February 26
No one topples tyrants like the three witches from Macbeth, and this antiwar burlesque sees the Weird Sisters hatching a plan to bring down Vladimir Putin.
Pru Daniel, Victoria Haslam, Melina Wylie in a scene from Not All Dictators.Credit: Darren Gill
The performance cleverly adapts Shakespeare. When the witches (Melina Wylie, Victoria Haslam, Pru Daniel) begin their toil and trouble, their cauldron’s exotically horrible ingredients are replaced with dictators’ body parts, in a dire charm powered not by “finger of birth-strangled babe” or “tiger’s chaudron”, but Stalin’s nose and Kim Jong-il’s wrinkled foreskin.
Stories of civilian suffering from the war in Ukraine fuel their vengeance. In piteous scenes from Ukrainian playwright Natali Blok, each witch transforms into a casualty of the conflict.
There’s a woman old enough to remember Holodomor – the deadly famine Stalin inflicted on the people of Ukraine in the 1930s – distracting herself from hunger and isolation with a sock puppet. A mother cradles the corpse of her child. A young woman suffers war rape and human trafficking.
A scene from Not All Dictators.Credit: Darren Gill
Grim testimonial is backed by war footage projected on bloodied strips of cloth; a Ukrainian song is sung in solemn three-part harmony. And the escalating rage of the witches again meets Shakespearean text, as they scheme to bewitch Lady (Mac)Putin into becoming an agent of her husband’s destruction.
The irreverent black comedy of the witches and the tragic fate of innocent Ukrainians make a striking dramatic contrast. Some burlesque interludes – notably a blustering drag incarnation of Donald Trump – disrupt the emotional intensity of the piece. These should be cut or better staged.
Burlesque requires the embodiment of total authority from the performer. More focused lighting design and/or a podium could assist. A similar difficulty undermines the climactic revelation, which may be better shifted upstage and performed as silent physical theatre.
Not All Dictators is a strong concept; some elements of performance are eerily effective. More honed direction and design should sharpen its power as protest theatre.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSICALS
Cruel Intentions the ’90s Musical ★
Athenaeum Theatre, until March 5
I tried to enjoy myself, I really did, but the more I think about Cruel Intentions the ‘90s Musical, the angrier and more disgusted I become. Problematic doesn’t begin to cover it. This show crosses a red line. It repeatedly trivialises, rather than simply representing or satirising, toxic attitudes and behaviour that cause real harm to vulnerable social groups. That’s grotesque, and I daresay it isn’t most people’s idea of fun.
Rishab Kern, Kirby Burgess and Drew Weston in Cruel Intentions the ’90s Musical.Credit: Nicole Cleary
But hang on a moment, this is Cruel Intentions we’re talking about, right? The hyper-cynical 1999 teen movie was supposed to be grotesque. It was based on the horrific sexual power games in the 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, transforming the twisted libertines of the ancien régime into sociopathic trust-fund kids at an elite New York school, and adding an incestuous flourish.
Step-siblings Kathryn (Kirby Burgess) and Sebastian (Drew Weston) have been warped by a poisonous combination of obscene wealth, emotional neglect and regressive gender politics.
Sebastian isn’t just a callous lothario – he’s a sex addict with the biggest little black book in town – and he’s celebrated for it.
Kelsey Halge plays Annette, who is drawn in to a battle of wills between two stepsiblingsCredit: Nicole Cleary
Meanwhile, Kathryn can only enjoy casual sex if she maintains a veneer of purity. Underneath it, she’s a compulsive manipulator, a vicious queen bee who seethes with resentment and jealous rage and connives to slut-shame and emotionally destroy other girls on the way to dominating her brother.
Drawn into her web are the religious Annette (Kelsey Halge) – a virgin publicly “saving herself for marriage” – as well as the impossibly sexually naïve Cecile (Sarah Krndija) and her black music teacher (Rishab Kern), and two gay classmates – one a flamboyant if amoral stereotype (Ross Chisari), the other a closeted jock (Joseph Spanti).
One of the problems is that Cruel Intentions always had a more tenuous claim to nihilistic social satire than, say, Heathers. The way these rich white teens ruthlessly exploit systemic misogyny, racism, and homophobia felt gratuitous to me at the time, let alone two decades of social progress later.
That the stage show is marketed and performed (as the film was) as glossy, darkly seductive romantic drama doesn’t help, and the exuberant spectacle and entertainment value intrinsic to the jukebox musical form makes it worse.
Fem Belling and Rishab Kern in a scene from Cruel Intentions the ’90s Musical.Credit: Nicole Cleary
A playlist of ’90s pop bangers attempts to retrofit some kind of social conscience. That’s occasionally funny, but often backfires into facetiousness. Sometimes, it’ll spoil much-loved songs for you forever.
Two hideous examples. There’s a scene in which a closeted student is threatened with being outed and then almost compelled to fellate his tormentor: it is “redeemed” by a chipper rendition of iconic boy band NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye. In another, a black music teacher gets fired by his racist employer, only to sing a duet with her … of TLC’s catchy feminist R&B classic, No Scrubs, no less. I mean, for pity’s sake. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes would be turning in her grave.
None of this is the performers’ fault. They’re all extraordinarily talented, give it everything they’ve got, and I wouldn’t judge anyone for finding Cruel Intentions the ’90s Musical a hoot.
It might be worth asking yourself, though, why you can afford to laugh. For a show that trades on the nostalgia Gen X and older millennials feel for their youth, it’s a trip down memory lane that will be unexpectedly painful for some.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Virginia ★★
Edna O’Brien, La Mama, Until Feb 26
This is a passable production of Edna’s O’Brien’s poetic, meticulously researched biographical play about one of the legends of modernist literature, though a quick glance at the gender composition of the audience would seem to confirm what most suspect. Men are still afraid of Virginia Woolf – and frankly, if more of them took time to read her work, the world would be a better place.
Marc Opitz and Heather Lythe star in Virginia at La Mama,Credit: Darren Gill
For Woolf readers, Virginia holds some pleasures. They’re limited by a central performance that only rises to the foothills of what is, admittedly, an immense histrionic mountain to climb.
Heather Lythe speaks in an Australian accent – and fair enough, Woolf’s real voice and accent sound very strange to modern ears. She holds the stage for the lion’s share of 80 minutes, and handles the cadence of the dialogue with some delicacy.
Beth Klein and Heather Lythe in a scene from Virginia.Credit: Darren Gill
The performance is at its best conveying the close but unconventional marriage, and literary partnership, the writer had with husband and publisher Leonard (Marc Opitz), and the affair Woolf pursued with Vita Sackville-West, played with tart and alluring understatement by Beth Klein.
Lythe is too limited in range and technique, though, to fully capture the contradictions Woolf stretched herself to breaking point trying to contain, and the performance can be too one-noted – and ultimately, too fey – to convincingly portray the writer’s mental illness. (A few tacky directorial decisions – like starting the show with Virginia waving her hands in the air as if drowning – don’t do the actor any favours there.)
There are flashes of the intense ambivalence – the attraction, the revulsion – Woolf felt in life for both sides of the gender binary and captured in the transgressive novel Orlando.
Other elements are underdrawn, if not outright feeble: Woolf’s colossal snobbery, acidic wit and piercing intellect, the way she seemed to notice everything with a biographer’s eye.
For those who enjoy Woolf’s writing, Virginia holds some pleasures.Credit: Darren Gill
The last is a particular letdown, as the playwright is at some pains to incorporate sharp observations from the diaries, such as Woolf writing that Katherine Mansfield “stinks like a civet cat” on meeting her, before becoming her close friend and literary rival.
It’s a valiant effort. Still, O’Brien’s portrait of the artist deserves more than this scratch production can offer.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Marlon Williams ★★★★
Palais Theatre, February 18
In 2022, Marlon Williams released My Boy, an album of shimmery indie pop-songs that was remarkably free from the darkness and melancholy that defined his first two releases. The album is as goofy as it is sincere, dabbling in drum machines and drawing on 1970s disco and ’80s soft pop, yet underwritten with appealing earnestness and feel-good charm.
Marlon Williams performs on stage at Palais Theatre in Melbourne on February 18, 2023.Credit: Rick Clifford
Both that earnestness and charm were on full display throughout his show at the Palais Theatre. Though Williams came up as a modern take on an old-school crooner, he has a unique ability to shapeshift. Throughout the show, he skates between genres and personas, segueing effortlessly between the sunny, pop-confection tracks of My Boy, to his moodier back catalogue, and back again. He has a knack for embodying different characters and different perspectives. Everything he does is a pose, or perhaps nothing is. You get the feeling that Marlon Williams is playing himself.
The show, like Williams, contained multitudes. He performed a swaggering performance of Don’t Go Back, that danceable anthem for the socially avoidant. There was a haunting rendition of Make Way for Love’s (2018) Beautiful Dress, which flowed into Come to Me, which transformed into a cover of Björk’s song of the same name. There was a sweetly laidback version of Aua atu rā (named for a Māori phrase meaning “who cares” or “it doesn’t matter” and sung in te reo). Party Boy, followed by the deliciously campy Vampire Again, got the audience up and dancing.
At the tail-end of their Australian tour, Williams and his band were perhaps not quite at their peak, concentration-wise. There was the occasional missed cue or fudged note. Yet the performance was no less enjoyable for its slightly bruised energy: a little bit loose, occasionally overwrought, but utterly charming nonetheless.
Reviewed by Nadia Bailey
MUSIC
Carmina Burana ★★★★½
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, February 18
Fine weather complemented fine music-making in the final concert of this year’s Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Sidney Myer free concerts. Celebrating 20 years’ association with the MSO, conductor Benjamin Northey led the orchestra in highly spirited accounts of two 20th century masterworks before a large and audibly appreciative crowd.
Hannah Shin performs with the MSO at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on February 18, 2023.Credit: Mark Gambino
Young Melbourne pianist Hannah Shin clearly relished the prospect of engaging with the virtuosic pyrotechnics of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.3, meeting its considerable technical challenges with a prodigious pianism that seamlessly wove together the score’s rhythmic and rhapsodic strands.
In the central theme and variations, Shin graced the dream-like fourth variation with admirable depth of colour, while dispatching the showy outer movements with an engaging freshness and panache.
Warwick Fyfe enlivened the often raucous and randy texts with an abundance of personality and good humour.Credit: Mark Gambino
Northey presided over a vibrantly characterised performance of Orff’s famous Carmina Burana, eliciting highly committed playing from the orchestra, as it brought to life the score’s meditations on fate, spring, drinking and lovemaking inspired by medieval lyrics.
The MSO Chorus brought plenty of vigour and clarity to the score’s arduous vocal demands, even if the male chorus might have been a little more abandoned in the tavern scenes.
Most notable were the contributions from the three fine Australian soloists. Confirming his status as a master storyteller of world renown, bass-baritone Warwick Fyfe enlivened the often raucous and randy texts with an abundance of personality and good humour. Tenor Paul McMahon’s brilliant portrayal of the roasted swan brought to mind the classic performance of this role by Gerald English, the late, great, Melbourne-based British tenor. Soprano Kathryn Radcliffe radiated steamy sensuality as a lovelorn maiden.
Stylishly and amiably hosted by radio personality Mairi Nicolson, this truly festive program was a cut above average summer concert fare and splendidly engaged with the public’s enthusiastic embrace of this much-loved Melbourne tradition of open-air concerts.
Reviewed by Tony Way
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