Plenty of moments to fill your soul or make you gasp with awe

MUSIC
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
Opera House Concert Hall, January 23
Until January 25
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★★

Sometimes it really is the little bits, what might for others be afterthoughts, that serve to explain it all – to sneak under your guard and seal the deal.

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch performing at the Concert Hall.Credit: Daniel Boud

And Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – stage bare but for a table, guitars unplugged, harmonica and banjo the only extras, and a show broken up with an old-fashioned interval – are the gods of small things. In these two hours there were plenty of moments to fill your soul or make you gasp with awe.

Maybe it was when, with Rawlings in full Neil Young high and vulnerable mode, and Welch the croon beneath, they seemed to hover above the pools of sadness in What We Had. Or any of those times his guitar-playing simultaneously operated as lead and rhythm and engine and caboose and dancer and mourner.

Possibly it was how, in Wayside/Back in Time, Welch’s voice was languid and deceptively effortless, drawing out each word like a molasses drawl and yet levitating it like it was a puff of air. Or when, in the wandering vine of a folk song that is The Day the Mississippi Died, she almost made physical the lines “Way up on the Erie, they like their chops so fat/I’ve seen the League of Women lick their fingers like a cat”.

And definitely it was found in the way they made Revelator a wind coming through the trees, distant then tender then disquieting, building to a storm – her head bowed over her guitar, his body twisting around the guitar that was itself twisting in his hands, sparking flares – that blew itself out in exultation rather than exhaustion.

But with even less fanfare there were these little wonders that accumulated. The way their voices slotted into each other like dovetailed wood in Orphan Girl; how Make Me a Pallet on the Floor was the gentle aftermath of the Revelator storm; the joy on their faces and ours when Welch cleared the floor for body percussion and boot dancing in Six White Horses; the way his bent strings made for a skipping energy you could see reflected in her right foot doing a swishing step throughout Midnight Train.

Yes, they sent us out on a cloud of satisfaction and connection and pleasure with the emotional lift of I’ll Fly Away, but the win was already theirs. In the big and the small things.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL
JACKY
Belvoir St Theatre, January 18
Until February 2
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Most of us balance ambition with the fear of biting off more than we can chew. Jacky has begun to conquer his fear; to believe that he can find his place in the world both figuratively and literally; to carve out his own niche of lifestyle and adequate income in a white world, and eventually afford to buy his own flat in Melbourne.

But at what cost?

Danny Howard, left, and Guy Simon in Jacky.Credit: Stephen Wilson Barker

Declan Furber Gillick’s play places Jacky in a tight situation then it squeezes his tolerances and his principles, scene by scene. Having left his mob “up north” somewhere to try his luck in the city, he’s open-minded about work and if selling his body if the most profitable option, then sell it he will.

Meanwhile, his loser brother lobs penniless on his doorstep, his primary client ties weirdly racist knots into his sexual fetishes and his white fairy godmother requires him to masquerade as someone he’s not, to attract mining money to her conscience-cleaning philanthropic programs. Hypocrisy begets hypocrisy, Gillick says, and Jacky must discover where he draws the line.

Directed by Mark Wilson for Melbourne Theatre Company, the play is funny, confronting and wearing by turns. Jacky is the axle around which it revolves, and Guy Simon gradually wins us over in the role, as both his black family, represented by his brother Keith (Danny Howard), and the white world, represented by his client Glenn (Greg Stone) and mentor Linda (Mandy McElhinney), demand he not be true to himself in their varying ways.

Jacky is therefore constantly juggling moral compasses and material gain.

The play requires a performance from Simon that’s challengingly multifaceted; one to which he mostly rises as the gentle Jacky deals with being pushed, pilloried and bullied, while trying to cling to his dignity and retain his good humour.

Of the others, Keith is initially one-dimensional, and Howard is sometimes hard to understand delivering Keith’s lines, yet he still locates the right tone to elevate the character into credibly being the one who helps Jacky understand his true place in the scheme of things.

McElhinney is typically convincing playing a well-meaning hypocrite who’s prepared to chase funding from any source, however repugnant. She makes us both like Linda and cringe for her.

Glenn, however, wins the cringe-worthiness stakes at a canter, and is perhaps Gillick’s ultimate creation. Retreating from a failed marriage, Glenn hires Jacky as a call-boy, whereupon he gradually reveals his naked racism, which becomes intolerable for both Jacky and a vocal first-night audience.

Yet Stone ensures Glenn is never just an archetype, but a complex misanthrope searching for his own needs, however depraved.

Some repetitive scenes between Jacky and Keith put a drag on the building tension, yet at its best the play is a warmly sympathetic insight into a queer black man trying to make his way in a ruthlessly white world.

MUSIC
DIONNE WARWICK
Star Casino, January 18
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★

The band wore tuxedos, she was in black, red and sparkles, and a chap in front of me was in a gold paisley brocade jacket. They played discreetly, she was elegantly reclined on a high stool, and we filled the not-insubstantial room.

Dionne Warwick at the Star.Credit: Sunflower Sessions Photography

Not bad for an 84-year-old who hasn’t had a hit since the Reagan years. Ah, but what hits Dionne Warwick had before then. Some of the classiest, cleverest, poppiest songs known to woman, mostly written by the great Hal David and Burt Bacharach.

And in the modest 14-song set – done and dusted in not much more than an hour, including a couple of rambling, charming, not always accurate chats – we got a fair selection of them. Done well? Hmm, that’s trickier.

Warwick’s voice, not surprisingly, is not anywhere near what it was. The range isn’t there, the breath is clipped, and it was a worrying sign at the start that she was encouraging us to sing along at any opportunity we chose.

But, thankfully, the phrasing and remnants of the tone remain, power emerged at times, such as the climax of I Say A Little Prayer and I’ll Never Love This Way Again, and Warwick worked the lines with grace. And, it should be noted, some courage.

Some veteran singers beef up the stage sound with extra vocalists and more instruments to compensate for a voice that isn’t what it once was. Warwick eschews this with just percussion, drums, piano and bass.

The issues mostly fell in what was likely accommodation for that faltering voice. Walk On By, Anyone Who Had A Heart and Message To Michael were too slow; This Girl’s In Love With You and You’ll Never Get To Heaven were ponderous (and the latter beyond her range), robbing these gems of the Bacharach rhythmic flair.

More successfully, a new arrangement of I Say A Little Prayer moved it further into Latin territory with a fluid rhythm; Albert Hammond and Hal David’s 99 Miles From LA worked a lovely little groove and, best of all, Do You Know The Way to San Jose? really nailed the movement, taking it into Cuban realms, and the band metaphorically loosened those bow ties.

We could easily have done without the pallid but popular That’s What Friends Are For when a genuinely great song like Trains And Boats And Planes was ignored, and even at this reduced level, a couple more songs would not have been out of place, but it was a nice way to say thanks and farewell.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL

DARK WITH EXCESSIVE BRIGHT
Omega Ensemble, Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, January 18
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★½

Omega Ensemble’s program for the Sydney Festival provided a thoughtful retrospective on American minimalism, starting with selections from the Etudes for Solo Piano by foundational figure Philip Glass and ending with Lighthouse by Samuel Adams, the son of another founding father of minimalism, John Adams.

Omega Ensemble perform at Sydney Festival.Credit: Victor Frankowski

When Glass himself played his Etudes for the Sydney Festival in 2011, I wrote that he played the piano with great affection and very badly, at one with the music but unconcerned that he lacked the finger evenness that etudes notionally aim to develop. For this program, pianist Vatche Jambazian gave well-prepared performances of three of the Etudes, the first with hypnotic directionless harmonic progressions, the second slower and introspective, and the third in a more traditionally virtuosic style with hazardous leaps.

All of them use reiteration and repeated rhythms, motives and harmonies insistently, subtracting notes, juxtaposing textures without elaboration or development, cutting off to return to something previously heard in order to head off any sense of forward movement.

Bryce Dessner’s Aheym (2009) for string quartet was more driven and tense, the length of its variegated patterns continuously chopped and extended to create nervous irregularity, just as the rapidity of figuration increased. The performance (Zoe Black, Mark Ingwersen, Neil Thompson and Paul Stender) was concentrated and taut.

However, while listening to its torturous deviations, I started to wonder whether minimalism’s resources and potential had been played out. Missy Mazzoli’s Dark with Excessive Bright (2018) for solo double bass (Jaan Pallandi) and string quintet began with chords that quickly splintered and ricocheted, while the double bass explored sliding melodies that sought inner shadows.

In contrast to the mechanical note patterns of much minimalism that seem modelled on machine synthesis, Mazzoli’s piece dealt in swirling textures, with chords flowing like water spilling into rock pools.

Lighthouse (2024), premiered by Omega last year, began with crystalline piano notes before being joined by a string quintet plus clarinet for a series of irregular textures which would build up to a breaking point, after which the music would collect its shattered fragments and begin again.

The piece has a slightly frightening edge. Towards the end, the ensemble unfolded billowing chords against a hammered emphatic bass, and I couldn’t help wondering if this wasn’t a representation of minimalism’s last breath.

OPERA
THE BARBER OF SEVILLE
Opera Australia, Opera House, January 18
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★★

No less a figure than Giuseppe Verdi said Rossini’s The Barber of Seville was “the finest opera buffa [or Italian comic opera] ever written”. This classic production by the late Elijah Moshinsky, which is 30 years old this year, retains its inventive brilliance and explosive absurdity, even though the opening night performance started slightly under top gear.

Simon Meadows as Fiorello and John Longmuir as Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville.Credit: Keith Saunders

Soprano Serena Malfi, a newcomer to Opera Australia audiences, sang the part of Rosina with melodic grace in simple melody and immaculately even, rapid precision in galloping cabalettas. She adopted an insouciant, sometimes sullen characterisation that seemed to shrug off the role’s virtuosity with a raised eyebrow and a glower.

In the first cavatina, Ecco ridente in cielo, there was a slightly tense edge to John Longmuir’s tenor sound as Count Almaviva, as though the comic mask fitted a little tightly. But in the later ensembles, the incisiveness of tone gelled with the self-entitled and self-obsessed anxiety of the character he built, and his sound cut through brilliantly in ensembles.

Another newcomer was Samuel Dale Johnson, who portrayed Figaro as an eager, over-energetic factotum, the articulation crisp, the tone amiably light. Andrew Moran, as Dr Bartolo, on the other hand, spat out syllables like machine-gun fire when needed while inhabiting the character’s bad-tempered pomposity with dyspeptic spleen and vocal grit.

David Parkin, as Don Basilio, sang the “slander” aria, where he plots malicious rumours against the Count, with a rich sound and oleaginous relish (in the next play of Beaumarchais’ trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro, these slanders, of course, turn out to be true). Jane Ede was wonderfully accomplished in the role of Berta, highlighting bright flashes in the ensembles and making a cameo of her drunken aria Il vecchiotto cerca moglie.

It is in the ensembles and choruses where the chaos and hilarity of this production are brewed. Michael Yeargan’s doll’s house sets and Howard Harrison’s lighting exert voyeuristic attraction, while Dona Granata’s costumes subtly push each characterisation into slightly exaggerated absurdity.

The Opera Australia chorus carried moments like the close of the Act 1 finale, where police officers enact a Keystone Cops routine, with slapstick aplomb, and film gags of the same historic vintage enliven the storm interlude in front of a scrolling panorama.

The synchronisation between the stage and pit was generally smooth, though it occasionally slipped a notch. Conductor Daniel Smith pushed the Opera Australia Orchestra to a brisk pace in the overture, which, however, didn’t quite leave enough acceleration space for the coda.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL
LOTTE BETTS-DEAN
Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, January 16
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★½

In a blackened auditorium, except for a green backdrop and frivolous overgarments, mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and pianist Ronan Apcar performed a continuous playlist of music from Baroque to Björk, Clara Schumann to Schoenberg, recitative to rap without break or back-announcement, creating a de-historicised sequence linked only by the logic of chance association and contrarian juxtaposition.

They opened with the first of Bartok’s Eight Hungarian Folksongs, with a flourish on the piano, richly rounded vowels and weighty declamation, leading seamlessly to the simpler delicacy of one of Madeleine Dring’s Five Betjeman Songs. Caroline Shaw’s Rise introduced a hymn-like part on electronics with recitative and chanteuse-like vocalisations, while Courtney Barnett’s Kim’s Caravan moved inside the piano with initially gentle strumming, building to pulverising stridency against whimsical vocal ruminations.

In Giancinto Scelsi’s Ho 1 for solo voice, Betts-Dean modulated the tone through calibrated changes of vowel and mouth shape, with stuttering and convulsive vocalisations that explored the very notion of inarticulacy. In Barbara Strozzi’s L’Eraclito amoroso (1651) Betts-Dean indulged seventeenth century ornamentation though the piano accompaniment that was unduly dry.

The high tesitura of Lili Boulanger’s Parfois, je suis triste stretched her mezzo range but was well-controlled, while Messiaen’s Priere exaucee from Poemes pour Mi captured angularity and declamatory drama. Linda Buckley’s revelavit part 1 for voice and electronics showcased dreamy, wispy lines over a remote, constantly changing background, conjuring unidentified instruments and distant voices.

John Adams Am I in your light? from the opera Doctor Atomic explored intimate erotic moments fading to nothing. After a song by Schoenberg, Clara Schumann’s Warum willst du and’re fragen? balanced 19th-century phrases against an under-projected piano part that lacked legato.

Björk’s Jóga and Charli XCX’s I think about it all the time expanded the amplified sound world with ethereal and plucked sounds, sampled bass and rapid rap-style delivery. After the folk song style of Josephine Stephenson’s Rosemary Lane, Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece whistled, clicked and vocalised before Sinead O’Connor’s Jackie returned to a ballad style for a slow build-up of ever-increasing intensity.

In Isabella Gellis’s I wish I could speak to you the accompaniment was improvisatory and delicate against whispery vocal lines, while in Luke Abbott’s Revelations of Divine Love, the electronic accompaniment matched and echoed Betts-Dean’s changes of vowel and nasal tones in real-time.

A song by Ligeti recalled the opening Bartok in ferocious terms, while Mathis Saunier’s Cannibal used quiet, rapid rap-singing, though without sharp edge, to create a vision of a fractured reality. Songs by William Bolcom and Blossom Dearie brought the extended sequence to a surprisingly sentimental close.

Though I prefer hearing music in the composer’s context to this curated mix of excerpts from everywhere, Betts-Dean displayed generous versatility, stamina and ambitious range.

THEATRE
HAMLET CAMP
Carriageworks, January 16
Until January 25
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

What to do when “H” is coursing through your veins, and you constantly crave more? Where to go? If the “H” stands for Hamlet rather than heroin, help is at hand. Ex-Hamlets can attend Hamlet Camp, a rehabilitation facility for those poor souls who’ve play-acted the Dane and, since that day, have never been quite sane.

Conceived by Brendan Cowell and written, directed and performed by Cowell, Ewen Leslie, and Toby Schmitz, Hamlet Camp is January’s highlight. Played in the round on a bare stage in a smallish space, it spotlights performance rather than director-driven conceptions. Part of the point, in fact, is to poke fun at directors who will not let well enough alone; who forget “the play’s the thing”.

Hamlet Camp is a tough place - every time the inmates begin to quote from the play they receive an electric shock.Credit: Daniel Boud

It begins with poems penned and delivered by each actor. Autobiographical, each is bravely candid and brilliantly performed, drawing us in not to people who played Hamlet but to people whom Hamlet consumed. Schmitz’s Skip Retail Therapy looks back at his time selling second-hand books, a world so far from reality that a customer could ask for “the non-fiction fantasy”.

Cowell’s Storage tells of disencumbering his life to move to London and discovering his hired storage unit gave him his greatest sense of home. Leslie’s rhyming Ship to Shore is about becoming an actor, that fateful calling demanding “the thickest skin with an open heart”. Claudia Haines-Cappeau then performs a little dance as Ophelia and much later returns as a fourth (“she/her”) Hamlet.

Now in asylum garb, Cowell plays Stephen, Schmitz is Marcus and Leslie is Cameron – the latest to be committed, he maintains he’s still Hamlet, a stage the others have outgrown. But something is rotten in the state of their treatment. To be cruel only to be kind, every time they begin to quote from Hamlet, they receive an electric shock to the neck.

“To be” becomes a dangerous way to start a sentence. Despite this ever-present threat, they compare their forays into this pinnacle of psychological and philosophical insight. Poor Cameron was condemned to play all the roles in a cine-theatre production, while Stephen’s director had a bet each way, incorporating both swords and mobile phones.

Along the way, a disembodied voice tells them it’s time for such compulsory workshops as “Off-Stage Women” or “Breathing”. Cameron must also be “purged” of believing he’s Hamlet, a semi-surgical operation the others have already survived.

Ultimately, there is no recovery, and there’s the rub. You’re hooked for life – except you become too old to play the role, the predicament in which they now find themselves. That may sound glum, but the show’s wildly funny, these three fellows of infinite jest volleying off one another in a hugely engaging fashion and enjoying the therapy of an excuse to revisit the great Dane. Well, almost. Brevity being the soul of wit, it flashes past in 90 minutes. The rest is silence.

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