This compelling work charts the God of Dance’s descent into hell
By John Shand, Peter McCallum, Cassie Tongue and Chantal Nguyen
DANCE
Nijinsky
Sydney Opera House, April 4
Until April 22
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★
Nijinsky is about Vaslav Nijinsky, an early 20th century ballet dancer and choreographer who stunned Europe. Called the “God of Dance”, Nijinsky - with his superhuman athleticism, sensuality, and mesmerising presence - danced to screaming, packed audiences across the continent. Even today the photographs of him posing in costume are iconic.
Nijinsky was choreographed in 2000 for Hamburg Ballet by John Neumeier, a heavyweight dance name in his own right. It bears many of Neumeier’s hallmarks: refined musical taste, elegant and complex choreography, and a rather European, abstract focus on psychodrama.
The ballet starts and ends with a frame story of Nijinsky’s final performance in 1919, aged 29, at a St Moritz hotel just before his mind succumbs to schizophrenic psychosis. The St Moritz crowd fades, giving way to Nijinsky’s memories of the colourful characters from his ballets and life. But his memories - and the choreography - become increasingly splintered, finally descending into nightmarish torment.
Grace Carroll (Romola) and Callum Linnane (Nijinsky).Credit: Daniel Boud
Neumeier is one of the few living choreographers who can create a coherent drama about one man’s descent into incoherence. Despite lags in Act 2’s flow, the acting demands Neumeier creates are so high-level that Nijinsky becomes a litmus test for its large cast: which dancers are merely theatrical, and which are true actors?
Callum Linnane as the increasingly erratic Nijinsky is a revelation, with beautiful, clean dancing and burning eyes. Linnane has a talent for playing tortured characters, making his name in this role in 2016 when Neumeier plucked him out of the corps de ballet.
Jill Ogai as Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava and Elijah Trevitt as Njinsky’s schizophrenic brother Stanislav are standouts, melding gorgeous dancing with heartbreaking emotional depth. Ako Kondo brings her star power as Karsavina, and Marcus Morelli excels as the Spectre de la Rose.
Nijinsky’s lovers, his boss Diaghilev (Maxim Zenin) and his wife Romola (Grace Carroll), are outstandingly refined but on opening night did not showcase the acting range to match that elegance. Carroll in particular is almost perfectly graceful but two-dimensional and unengaging as Romola.
Under Jonathan Lo’s baton the music pours like a rich siren song, with tear-inducing solos from concertmaster Matthieu Arama, violist Virginia Comerford, and pianist Kylie Foster.
Nijinsky will appeal most to those familiar with the imagery of his iconic roles - for others the references might be puzzling. But ultimately this is an emotionally deep psychological thriller of a ballet, wrought with Neumeier’s exquisite taste.
MUSICAL THEATRE
Annie
Capitol Theatre, April 3
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★½
That little redheaded orphan is back again. The comic strip-turned-musical has spawned three films, a live TV staging, and more than one sequel. No matter the decades that roll over the show’s Depression-era cultural references and sweetly offered optimism, Annie might just be an inevitability.
Australia has its own rich Annie history. This revival was last seen here in 2012 and 2001. It begins with a dedication to the 1978 original Australian production, which starred legends such as Nancye Hayes, Jill Perryman and Kevan Johnston (Perryman and Johnston’s granddaughter, Mackenzie Dunn, is playing an appealingly funny Lily St Regis).
The story of Annie has become American contemporary myth.Credit: Daniel Boud
And then there’s Anthony Warlow, returning here in the role of Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, which he played to such acclaim in 2000 that a new song, Why Should I Change a Thing, was written for him and added to the show. This production is a victory lap for Warlow, who also played the role here in 2012 and, later that year, on Broadway. The production moves with an ease that’s all Warlow: warm, confident, rich-voiced and a little bit playful. When he’s on stage, the energy settles and resets; he knows how to guide this audience, stacked with families and fans, into a good time.
The story of Annie (Dakota Chanel on opening night; she shares the role with Beatrix Alder, Matilda Casey, and Stephanie McNamara) has become American contemporary myth: the plucky young girl suffering at an orphanage under the so-called care of Miss Hannigan (Debora Krizak, a hoot) gets a lucky break when Grace (Amanda Lea LaVergne, lovely), selects her to stay with billionaire Warbucks over Christmas.
As Warbucks and Annie grow closer, a scam starts brewing – courtesy of St Regis and Miss Hannigan’s brother, Rooster (a charismatic Keanu Gonzalez) – to get some of that Warbucks fortune. It’s no surprise that the good guys win, and Annie’s indefatigable optimism even inspires President Roosevelt (played here by a folksy Greg “Original Yellow Wiggle” Page) to create the New Deal.
There’s plenty to enjoy: an adorable rotating cast of young orphans (the opening night audience had thundering applause for their rage-cleaning number It’s the Hard Knock Life); dancer and presenter Nakita Clarke’s solo as the Star to Be; and Sandy the dog, who on opening night gave himself a good scratch as Chanel sang the show’s big number, Tomorrow (might be worth the price of admission alone).
As you’d expect of a show from 1978, it’s a bit creaky in 2025. Some lines and lyrics turn on dated stereotypes; its darker themes are played for easy laughs; the so-pleasant songs spark mostly nostalgia. But for families, this is still a safe bet for a good solid few hours of entertainment, and still a great on-ramp for discovering the magic that can happen in a theatre. That’s likely why we keep bringing Annie back: we’re passing her down, offering her promise that better things could arrive tomorrow to our children and loved ones.
Lise de la Salle in Recital
Presented by Sydney Symphony Orchestra
City Recital Hall, April 7
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★½
Even among his prominent admirers, Liszt’s Reminiscences of ‘Don Juan’ (a fantasy on Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni), remains problematic for the way it manipulates Mozart’s themes with the same cavalier disregard that Mozart’s lubricious anti-hero coerces women.
As the pianist storms through fusillades of scales and chords in Liszt’s variations on the seduction duet from that opera, La ci darem la mano, some listeners have felt more assaulted than seduced (which may have been the point Liszt was trying to make). Among pianists, the piece remains popular as a proving ground for virtuosic technique.
Lise de la Salle at the City Recital Hall.Credit: Craig Abercrombie
Lise de la Salle concluded the first half of her Chopin/Liszt recital with just such proof, although the continuity of line and shape of Mozart’s themes was obliterated by charmless pianistic acrobatics. In Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Opus 52, which began the recital she indulged a wide range of tempi, playing the opening with foreboding slowness and the haunting melody with expressive freedom before quickening the pace as the brilliance of the piano writing increased.
In Liszt’s Cantique d’amour from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, storming virtuosity dominated the continuous melodic line. However, there was no denying her technical accomplishment.
In Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Opus 23, which began the second half, de la Salle played the main theme with rhythmic freedom and simple quietness increasing the tempo as the music becomes agitated (as Chopin indicated). Chopin marks use of the pedal carefully in his scores though on modern more resonant pianos, these can cloud the texture, as occurred on occasions in this performance and in the Coda of Ballade No. 4.
De la Salle ended the recital with Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, which in some senses, offers the balancing alter-ego to Liszt’s musical personality to that heard in Don Juan Fantasy, striving for seriousness, complexity and the resolution of opposites within a classically-conceived form. De la Salle’s approach was again rhythmically free but her tempi moved the work forward nobly without dragging and the virtuosity was sublimated to the underlying musical purpose.
Marshall McGuire and Simon Martyn-Ellis
Utzon Room, April 6
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★
Baroque music enthusiasts would often have heard a harp and a theorbo (arch lute) play together, alongside a harpsichord, viola da gamba, and perhaps a bassoon, organ and diverse other instruments to form the accompaniment group for singers in Baroque opera.
In that context their delicate plucked sounds provide graceful ornamentation in a twinkling harmonic background, like the sky and scenery in a Renaissance painting. For this concert, harpist Marshall McGuire and theorbo player Simon Martyn-Ellis extracted those fine points of sound to create a program that placed these quiet attendants at centre stage, highlighting their distinctive differences and requiring each in turn to do service as melodists and bass players.
In an intricate polyphonic piece, Capriccio detto cerimonioso (originally for two lutes), by Bellerofonte Castaldi, the lute created a delicate twang with silvery metallic edge against a halo of resonance from the harp (though rhythmic definition and articulation on the lute was not always clear).
The Miller’s Tale for solo theorbo by Stephen Goss began with the sepulchral sound of one of the theorbo’s low bass strings whose length necessitates the instrument’s long giraffe-like neck. The second movement, Estampie, is deliberately ungainly though even in the intimate space of the Opera House’s Utzon Room, had difficulty projecting rhythmic clarity.
Mike Marshall’s December 29th was darkly reflective, and Toccata prima by Giovanni Kapsperger started with decoratively embroidered theorbo lines with foundational support from the harp. Liza Lim’s Rug Music, for solo harp explored pulsating chords, wispy harmonics, metallic buzzes and small contortions, while the Pastorale from Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Sonata for solo harp articulated lines with nuanced grace.
In another Capriccio by Castaldi, the two players established a musically intimate dialogue around short imitative phrases. Alice Chance’s Old Ground was arranged by the composer specifically for this combination and was the most effective in exploiting their different musical characters. Low notes sounded throughout with awe and solemnity to create a long lonely pulse while the theorbo etched filigree in the spaces between.
The piece was inspired by meteorites collected in a French research laboratory, displaying matrices of fine lines and black rock from Mars whose journey to Earth Chance evoked with awe-struck stillness. The final work, Isabella Leonarda’s Sonata duodecima alternated slow and fast music with mellifluous grace in characteristic seventeenth century manner, ending with a chaste Gigue.
MUSICAL THEATRE
Bloom
Roslyn Packer Theatre, April 2
Until May 11
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★
Like some of the residents in the Pine Grove Aged Care Centre, Bloom can be a bit lame. Handed caricatures rather than characters, the actors sometimes grasp after laughs, rather than trusting material that’s punctuated with genuinely funny lines. I’ve seen this phenomenon in comedy before, but not usually from people of this calibre: familiarity breeds doubt in the jokes, and everyone starts trying too hard to compensate, when what was really required was a lighter touch from all concerned.
It’s rather odd because Bloom, a new Australian musical that premiered for Melbourne Theatre Company in 2023, boasts some considerable talents. Tom Gleisner, long-established among our top comedy writers – in film, think The Castle and The Dish; on TV, Utopia and the timeless Frontline – here makes his first splash in the musical theatre pond, with music by Katie Weston. Then there’s Dean Bryant, one of our finest directors of musicals, and actors including John Waters, Christie Whelan Browne, John O’May and Jackie Rees.
Bloom boasts some considerable talents among its cast.Credit: Daniel Boud
The story concerns the tyrannical Mrs MacIntyre (Whelan Browne) running Pine Grove to gouge profits against her residents’ wellbeing. She finds an unqualified student, Finn (Slone Sudiro), to enjoy free board in return for helping share the care. He becomes chummy with rebellious new resident Rose (Evelyn Krape), and from there we meet the rest of the tribe, their carers and their quirks.
But the story can seem stuck in a spiral, like the residents’ lives. Rather than being heavy-handed with types, Gleisner could have brought his usual deftness to three-dimensional characters – a flaw magnified at every turn. Weston’s music is routinely so busy that the main area of conflict is not in the plot, it’s between the words and the music.
Weston opted for pop songs, and Zara Stanton has orchestrated them for a sextet led by Lucy Bermingham, when had they just been played by say, a piano, bass and clarinet, they might have achieved some buoyancy and possibly even pathos as a counterpoint to the comedy. When the songs do try to be deep and meaningful, they merely become mawkish.
Easily the best is The Story of My Life, in which each resident gives us a snapshot of their rich pasts, contrasting with their current hollowed-out existences, and which also gives us a reminder of Rees’ lustrous voice, as she plays Lesley, an artist who has the hots for Waters’ tongue-tied Doug.
Then there are exquisite little cameos, as when Rose tries to give Finn, a music student, some idea of the point of music, beyond getting the notes in the right order. And Gleisner being Gleisner, gags abound, as when the aged care inspector (Eddie Muliaumaseali’i) arrives, and McIntyre hisses to her staff, “Look caring!”
Finally, there’s the poignancy that the music misses. “Do you know what the hardest part about being in this place is?” Doug asks Finn. “No one needs you.”
MUSIC
Abel Selaocoe, Australian Chamber Orchestra
City Recital Hall, April 5
Reviewed PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Cellist, singer and composer Abel Selaocoe started the program with an improvised introduction, singing freely and clearly in the high register, then moving to an abrasive throat sound that cut the air like a saw, before blending vocalisations and open cello sounds into a texture of layered richness.
In an innovative joining of vocal and instrumental artistic practice, he explored plucked patterns, wispy sounds and virtuosic arpeggios on the cello, and falsetto, rasping rhythms and multiphonic shouts from his voice, closing with a remarkable alternation of high and low vocal phrases in which one could imagine his voice was actually a cello string being unwound.
Abel Selaocoe’s performance style is audacious, energised and fun.Credit: Christina Ebenezer
Pulling together cultural strands from South African church practices and the European classical tradition, Selaocoe’s performance style is audacious, energised and fun. In Qhawe (a Sesotho word for “hero”), the ACO players sang in harmony while Selaocoe pitched visceral vocal interjections over the top. For Tshepo, Selaocoe used hand gestures and exuberant assertiveness to teach the entire audience a short modal hymn that accompanied his own vocal riffs.
In between, he played an 18th-century Cello Concerto in D by Giovanni Platti. His cello playing was breathlessly fast in the first movement and crisply energised in the third, although the line in the slow movement swelled distractingly, impeding expressive simplicity. Percussionist Sidiki Dembélé added taut rhythmic punctuation and colour on the djembe and a variety of other instruments and led an improvised introduction to the concerto’s slow movement.
To close the first half, Selaocoe and Dembele left the stage and the ACO, under sensitive leadership from Helena Rathbone, gave the premier of a Nigel Westlake’s Ascension. Dedicated to his mother Heather Westlake (an ACO violinist in its formative years), and taking Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending as its model, the work started with finely scored chordal passages before Rathbone commenced tentative upward-reaching phrases that became a symbolic homage to both Vaughan Williams and the dedicatee.
The accompanying string textures suddenly developed quiet, scintillating energy, leading to a reflective new idea played by viola and violin in tender dialogue. The work displayed Westlake’s characteristically refined scoring and touchingly genuine expressiveness.
The second half began with Bernard Rofe’s arrangement for strings of Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka, which were effective in the third piece though slightly thin elsewhere. Selaocoe’s Lerato led without a break to five selections from When We Were Trees by Giovanni Sollima.
Selaocoe and the ACO’s Timo-Veikko Valve created haunting atmospherics in the first and third excerpts and played the second, fourth and fifth with increasingly virtuosic wildness as though possessed. The last work, Selaocoe’s Ka Bohaleng (On the Sharp Side) is named after a Sesotho saying, “a woman holds the knife on the sharp side”, expressed suggestively by the barking edge at the bottom of Selaocoe’s range. With sung response and a clapped beat from both ACO and audience, its frenetic close brought an already excited audience to its feet.
MUSIC
MALLRAT
Enmore Theatre, April 3
Reviewed by CINDY YIN
★★★★
Light is the leading motif throughout this show.
Spotlights flash, bend and illuminate 26-year-old Grace Shaw’s (aka Mallrat) outline, until the beams of light almost take on a life of their own as they waltz in harmony with her frame. It’s fitting, given the Brisbane artist’s second album is titled Light Hit My Face Like a Straight Right.
Mallrat’s whimsical “weirdo appeal” music is charming. As she leaps across the stage in the introspective, mellow, yet hopeful Pavement, her performance captures perfectly the inner turmoil of a 20-something dreamer.
Groceries is undoubtedly the favourite of the night, with its nonsensical and wistful lyrics eliciting a room full of emotions as the audience chants in unison, “I just wanna get groceries/I’ll pray you wanna get close to me”.
The upbeat Surprise, featuring recorded verses from rapper Azealia Banks, provided a welcome change of pace, alongside sugary hyperpop track Hocus Pocus and Mallrat’s feature on R U HIGH, an electric stunner from US duo The Knocks.
Light once again envelops her in the sombre The Light Streams in and Hits My Face, morphing from purple, to yellow, back to violet, underscoring the short yet captivating track. It is a stark contrast to the moodier Teeth – where, as Mallrat’s melodic, sirenlike wails crescendo into something more akin to agitation, the lights flash in jarring sequences.
Horses is indisputably the night’s standout performance. It is the nostalgic closing track on her album, where she reflects on her childhood days in Brisbane catching the train home from school with little sister Olivia - recorded before her death last year. It’s raw, emotional and feels like we are not listening to Mallrat the musician, but perhaps the real Grace Shaw.
MUSIC
The Jungle Giants
Metro Theatre, April 4
Reviewed by NICK NEWLING
★★★½
Jungle Giants frontman Sam Hales, a youthful mix of Peter Garrett and Freddie Mercury, takes charge from the get-go ceaselessly bopping back and forth across the stage and holding his hands to the sky as if leading a congregation.
His devotees are along for the ride and he quickly gets them going with call-and-response and jubilant foot thumping during opener On Your Way.
Early in the concert the Hales addressed the car crash and resulting surgery that meant he had to pull out of Tasmania’s Bass in the Domain festival last month. But any lingering effects of the accident were not apparent in his performance or his raspy, poppy vocals and impressive falsetto.
This tour takes its title from latest single Hold My Hand, whose repetitive nature unfortunately provided the low point of the night. Hales said that writing the song — about the recent breakup of a long-term relationship — was a “cathartic” experience, but for the audience it slowed the pace of a largely upbeat set.
The highs came in two tracks, She’s a Riot (from the band’s 2013 debut Learn to Exist), and Heavy Hearted (a 2019 single tacked on to 2021’s Love Signs). Both numbers showed off the band’s range in a set that otherwise felt a little samey.
She’s a Riot tells an upbeat story of loving a woman who’s “well known to police”, and proved a celebration of chaotic youthful abandon.
And the crowd’s exuberant response to Heavy Hearted, which closed out the set and might be the most musically diverse of the band’s offerings, tested the Metro’s foundations.
Overall, it was a strong return to the stage for the band, especially considering Hales’ recent trials. But with so many songs feeling so similar, this show was mainly one for hardcore fans.
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