Opera, theatre, music and dance: special performances of 2024
Rating the best stage performances of the year is impossible, but here are a selection worthy of special attention.
I love that The Australian doesn’t attach star ratings to live performance. It’s an imprecise business open to much interpretation. When someone demands to know if a critic saw the same show they did, the answer is no. We all take our individual interests and emotions into the auditorium. We have each accumulated a wide variety of experiences and a number of bum-on-seat hours. We may have seen a show on a different evening and two are never exactly the same.
From where I was sitting, these performances in dance, music, musical theatre, opera and theatre were worthy of special attention in 2024. They are in alphabetical order in terms of genre and chronological in terms of show. Agree or disagree as heartily as you like.
Ballet
The Australian Ballet’s Oscar (Melbourne in September; Sydney, November) wasn’t flawless but gee, Christopher Wheeldon’s work about Oscar Wilde’s downfall was an event, swept along by Joby Talbot’s big, theatrical score. Elements of Wilde’s life and art were turned into dreams and nightmares on several levels of reality and Wheeldon went boldly where other ballets fear to tread. The big love pas de deux was for two men. It was gorgeous.
Contemporary dance
Tra Mi Dinh’s Seven Dances for Two People (Melbourne, November) was only 20 minutes long. As is often the way in small-scale contemporary dance, Dinh was herself one of the two people in her work. I could easily have watched it again straight away as Dinh explored the mysteries of the number seven, literally and figuratively, in the University of Melbourne’s spiffy new Union Theatre. In 2025 you can see Dinh’s work at Sydney Dance Company. It’s a big deal.
Music
Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and a rapt audience (Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne in March) added up to sheer heaven.
Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt joined the Australian Chamber Orchestra (Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth in June) for a brilliantly constructed program including Haydn’s glorious C major Concerto. Altstaedt’s connection with the ACO, led on this occasion by Helena Rathbone, was nothing less than scorching.
Musical theatre
It wasn’t a vintage year for musicals but Jesus Christ Superstar came to the rescue (Sydney in November; Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane in 2025). Superstar vibrated with ferocious, pulsating energy, driven by a thrilling arrangement of the score and great rock voices.
Drew McOnie’s pumped-up choreography had the ensemble constantly on the move as the group morphed mindlessly from starry-eyed followers of Jesus to a mob of tormentors. Uncomfortable ideas to do with religion, demagoguery, political expediency and self-interest were made plain. Superstar premiered a half-century ago and the ideas still resonate. Probably more so.
Opera
Opera Queensland and Circa’s Orpheus & Eurydice, in which 21st-century contemporary circus shines a light on Gluck in the 18th century, has rightly being doing the rounds through the year in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. It was a marriage of physical and vocal pyrotechnics that didn’t necessarily look made in heaven on paper but did on stage. Next stop: the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2025. Love, heartbreak and airborne bodies. Makes sense to me.
Opera Australia finally brought Brett Dean’s Hamlet (2017) to the Sydney Opera House (August) in Neil Armfield’s gripping production. The staging was claustrophobic and unsettling in the Joan Sutherland Theatre as Dean’s theatrically dazzling score swirled and prowled around the auditorium. To see Allan Clayton in the title role was to see one of the soul-searing opera performances of our days.
The music of Handel, a crack orchestra conducted by the peerless Erin Helyard, Armfield’s directorial magic – again – and singing to die for made three hours of Pinchgut’s Julius Caesar (Sydney, November) dash by in the blink of an eye.
British countertenor Tim Mead was delicious in the title role and, as Cleopatra, Australian-British soprano Samantha Clarke added yet another triumph to a rapidly growing list. (She’s going to Edinburgh with Orpheus & Eurydice.)
Theatre
I loved, loved, loved The Pool by Steve Rodgers, a co-production between Perth Festival and Black Swan State Theatre Company (February). It was staged at Perth’s Bold Park Aquatic Centre and made the audience eavesdroppers (via individual headsets) on touching personal conversations at a public swimming pool. Yep, there was swimming, a water bomb or two and some unchlorinated moisture may have found its way into the eyes.
Lehman Brothers investment bank went belly up in 2008. The seeds of destruction were planted long before and The Lehman Trilogy (Sydney, March) showed how it happened. This tragic saga received epic treatment in a huge, prismatic piece of theatre that dazzled eye and ear as it charged across place and time. And with only three actors. Remarkable.
Other notables: West Australian Opera and Perth Festival’s Wundig wer Wilura (February) by Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse was a gentle story of love, loss and transcendence from the distant past, sung in Noongar. Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Die Walkure (November) was a feast of stirring singing and music-making with Simone Young in high form.
One can’t see everything (which is why best-of lists are never definitive). I bitterly regret not having been able to make the schedule work for Melbourne Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company’s 37, a play about Aussie rules, community and identity by Nathan Maynard; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, from Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre; and MTC’s much-lauded musical version of My Brilliant Career. Melbourne theatre was certainly kicking goals this year
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