Olivia Ansell kicks off program of music, dance and theatre
Olivia Ansell’s summer program keeps the tone upbeat but not insubstantial, with storytelling through music in the foreground.
Sydney has many natural splendours but being a natural festival city isn’t one of them. There have been too few venues, too far apart, for the city to enable the kind of show-hopping that is possible in, say, Edinburgh or Adelaide – two of the world’s great cities for performing arts jamborees.
Even with the majestic Opera House at its front door, Sydney has lacked a natural town square or a meeting place that can be designated a festival “hub”.
Olivia Ansell, delivering her fourth program as director of the Sydney Festival, has an attractive solution to the problem. The recently redeveloped Walsh Bay Arts Precinct and its two adjacent piers – home to Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Dance Company, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and others – is an almost ideal location for the festival to call home. It will become even more so later this year when the Sydney Metro underground train line is due to open, with a convenient station at nearby Barangaroo.
For the festival’s duration, the precinct has been decked out as the “Thirsty Mile”, with pennants and colourful beach umbrellas, an inflatable art installation called Hi-Vis, and the all-important festival bar. People are out and about, seeing shows across the program, then having a drink and talking about them afterwards. That’s what a festival should be.
“We are one week into the festival, and having the hub with eight or nine theatres going at once is a real success and a real home for the festival,” Ansell says.
“The Harbour Bridge behind us, the harbour in front, the fact all these arts organisations sit beautifully side by side – what a way to show off Sydney in summer, and be that distinctive summer asset that the Sydney Festival is.”
As may be appropriate for a summer festival, Ansell’s program keeps the tone upbeat but not insubstantial. Storytelling through music – whether dance, opera, musical theatre or cabaret – is very much in the foreground; deep-dive epic theatre, not so much. The festival opened at the Sydney Opera House on January 5 with a crowd-pleasing Brazilian dance company in Encantado, by renowned choreographer Lia Rodrigues. A joyous celebration of movement and improvised play, the piece had 11 exuberant dancers twirl, sculpt, and wrap themselves in an array of 140 colourful, patterned blankets.
Ten days in, the festival has proceeded without the disruptions of recent years from pandemic, rain and the 2022 boycott by pro-Palestinian protesters. Ansell says the festival team has been proactive in talking with different community groups and stakeholders. Indeed, it’s encouraging this year that the program can include, for example, both a Palestinian artist, Aseel Tayah, and a Jewish artist, Deborah Conway, who has spoken recently about the frightening rise of anti-Semitism.
Making its world premiere at the Roslyn Packer Theatre is Big Name, No Blankets, a jukebox musical about the rise to fame of 1980s group Warumpi Band – the first rock act to record a song in a First Nations language.
A band that hits the big time and then crumbles under the weight of personal and artistic differences is a story familiar enough. What’s different here is that Warumpi Band was forged in the remote community of Papunya, its core members being Sammy Butcher and his brothers, along with singer George Burarrwanga from Elcho Island and whitefella Neil Murray.
Their music will take them from the outback to the pub rock scene in the big cities, and eventually to Europe. When Dire Straits come calling it would seem Warumpi Band has truly hit the big time – but for some in the group the lure of home is too strong to resist.
It all unfolds in about 100 minutes, no interval, on a single set with a live band on stage, evocative projections and roadies’ crates standing in for mountains or canoes as required. On stage throughout is the tin humpy and campfire that is the desert home and emotional beacon for the Butcher brothers, who only ever wanted to have fun making music.
The energy flagged in the spoken-word scenes on opening night but the musical numbers were terrific. Baykali Ganambarr plays Sammy with quiet assurance as the “peacemaker” of the group. (No pressure with the real Sammy Butcher in the audience.) Googoorewon Knox steals the show as charismatic frontman George, whose encore of My Island Home – sung in his Yolngu language – and Blackfella/Whitefella bring the audience to its feet. Cassandra Williams is very good playing all the female roles, and the ensemble is rounded out by Teangi Knox as Gordon, Aaron McGrath as Brian, Jackson Peele as Neil and Tibian Wyles as Ian.
The show has been five years in the making with substantial input from Sammy Butcher – the sole surviving Aboriginal member of the group – and his children and kin. It may not be immediately evident to outsiders, but the producers are proud of the show’s cultural integrity, having been developed by First Nations people including writer Andrea James, Butcher and his daughter, Anyupa, and director Rachael Maza.
It has backing from all the major capital city arts festivals, so expect to see it in other cities across the next year or so.
Another festival premiere about a black Australian artist is Send for Nellie, the story of singer and entertainer Nellie Small, who worked the nightclub circuit in Sydney beginning in the 1930s, and who appeared on tour with the Port Jackson Jazz Band.
You wonder why this show business pioneer isn’t better remembered today. Born in Sydney, she had a West Indian father, took to wearing men’s suits, sang in a manly register and, the show hints, was possibly gay.
Send for Nellie, by playwright Alana Valentine, is presented as a cabaret-style show at the Wharf Theatre, decked out with red drapes and with some of the audience seated at small theatre tables. Elenoa Rokobaro in white top hat and tails gives a very good impersonation as Nellie, singing standards of the era such as On the Sunny Side of the Street and Stormy Weather. Eleanor Stankiewicz plays several roles including Nellie’s landlady, and does a risque version of the Groucho Marx comic number, Lydia the Tattooed Lady. The onstage band is led by Zara Stanton.
Nellie Small encountered the prejudices that might be expected in mid-20th century Australia, but she stood up to bigots just as she fought against restrictive entertainment licences. I left the show wanting to know more about her.
A make-believe band, or bands, is the subject of Bananaland, by Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall, having its second outing at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta after its premiere at last year’s Brisbane Festival. It’s the story of punk band Kitty Litter whose song, Bananaland, is a satirical allusion to Clive Palmer’s incursion into federal politics. When the song becomes a surprise hit with children, it sparks an identity crisis: should Kitty Litter stick with their anti-Establishment rebelliousness, or embrace the mainstream and become, gasp, a children’s band?
The pretentious faux-punk of Kitty Litter is less convincing than the smile-till-it-hurts cheesiness of the reformed band now known as the Wikki Wikki Wah-Wahs. Miller-Heidke and Nuttall – who had a previous hit with Muriel’s Wedding the Musical – have fun in the show’s much stronger second half as the band negotiates the hazards of sudden fame. Max McKenna leads the band as Ruby, supported by bandmates Georgina Hopson, Maxwell Simon and Joe Kalou. Director Simon Phillips keeps everything buoyant and there are very funny character performances from Dave Eastgate, Amber McMahon and Chris Ryan.
Two excellent opera productions opened at the festival last week. Opera Australia is presenting Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice as staged by director Yaron Lifschitz and his Brisbane-based company of acrobats, Circa, in a production first presented by Opera Queensland.
Gluck’s reform opera of 1762 may not seem the most obvious candidate for circus treatment, but Lifschitz’s sensitivity to music and drama makes it a winning combination. It is, after all, a story about love, grief and the power of music. At the Sydney Opera House, Lifschitz stages it on a minimalist set in what could be a morgue or psychiatric ward. The acrobats’ aerial and balancing acts are an exciting counterpoint to the music’s classical poise and virtuosity.
Leading the cast was exceptional French countertenor Christophe Dumaux as Orpheus and rich-toned soprano Sandy Leung stepping in at late notice as Eurydice and Amore. Conductor Dane Lam leading the OA Orchestra brought out the score’s drama and diaphanous textures.
The Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour is the inspired location for an outdoor performance of Puccini’s one-act opera, Il Tabarro (The Cloak), directed by Constantine Costi and presented by Victorian Opera. The action is staged on the lightship Carpentaria, a red-hulled floating lighthouse built in 1917 and in service until 1985. There is certainly plenty of maritime atmosphere: the lightship rocks as the singers move about the deck, the city skyline forms the backdrop, and seagulls fly overhead in the evening twilight.
Costi uses the setting most effectively. In their soaring duet when Giorgetta and lover Luigi sing with nostalgic longing for their home town, Costi has them both on the lightship’s upper level around the lantern, bathed in light.
It was a treat to hear as Giorgetta soprano Olivia Cranwell, who last month appeared as Sieglinde in the Brisbane Ring Cycle. Simon Meadows as her older husband, Michele, and James Egglestone as Luigi brought out their characters’ tenderness and menace. The outdoor performance was necessarily amplified, and the orchestra under conductor Simon Bruckard, playing from a nearby barge, brought Puccini’s score to life.
Still to come in the festival are Mutiara, a dance piece about Broome’s pearling industry by Indigenous company Marrugeku; the visiting GoteborgsOperans Danskompani from Sweden; a mini-festival of the music of JS Bach in Temperament; Sydney Symphony Under the Stars at Parramatta Park, and; a play with a palindromic title, Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era.
Sydney Festival has not released figures about ticket sales and visitor numbers for this year’s event but Ansell is delighted with the reception so far.
“We attract visitors directly for the festival, but we also attract visitors who might be here for other reasons, like New Year’s Eve or the cricket or the tennis, and they find out about us,” she says.
The Sydney Festival continues until January 28.