By Shamim Razavi, John Shand, Joyce Morgan, Em Meller and Michael Ruffles
MUSIC
Yaeji ★★★★
Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre, May 28
Yaeji is wielding a hammer on stage at Sydney’s Opera House. Her target: a projection of her own face, filtered pink and looking benevolently down over the crowd. As she swings, the image shatters to the sound of falling glass.
Yaeji leans back on her chair during Fever.Credit: Jordan Munns
Fans will know this hammer from the music videos she made for her debut album, With a Hammer. She has had two made, with pink handles and aluminium heads. On the side of one she drew a cartoon face. This hammer, as she tells the audience, resembles her anger. But it would be a mistake to think her exploration is obvious or simple.
Her performance, like her album, explores how rage can be transformed or can be transformative. Sometimes rage is dressed as sorrow or shows up in deeply loving relationships. And sometimes rage is not an individual experience but borne of intergenerational cycles of trauma and experiences of racism.
Rage keeps taking on new shapes on stage. There are waterfalls, sweet animations and pulsating red discs. Sometimes the musician is alone, other times she has two back-up dancers performing choreographed combat behind her.
During For Granted, Yaeji is alone, her vocals soft over a sparse arrangement. As the song builds, something is weighing on her, until the moment where the stage goes dark – and then she unleashes. Repeating “Let it flow and I’ll see”, she transmutes anger into focus and energy. Later, performing Fever – written a day before a white man killed six Asian women in Atlanta – she leans back in a chair, making her body stiff as she sings.
Yaeji’s demeanour and joy are often in tension with her words, especially the lyrics she sings in Korean. These are generally more intimate or express a more intense anger, such as in Done (Let’s Get It) – with its video clip featuring Yaeji and her grandfather in dog onesies – where she chants something that, to a listener fluent in Korean, sounds (in part) like “wreck it” over and over.
When the hammer finally comes out, Yaeji smashes her own image. But then she gives the hammer a little kiss before swinging it towards the audience.
Reviewed by Em Meller
MUSIC
Birdz and Fred Leone ★★★½
Opera House Utzon Room, May 28
Birdz and Fred Leone started a fire at the Opera House, metaphorically.
By turns smouldering and explosive, the cousins debuted their upcoming collaboration and ran through a handful of hits in an hour-long Vivid Live set.
Nathan “Birdz” Bird and Fred Leone have each had solid solo output, but working together in recent years they have mined a rich seam of creativity, most famously with the hip-hop hit Bagi-la-m Bargan.
Birdz played songs from Girra, his project with his cousin Fred Leone.Credit: Mikki Gomez
They have continued with their project titled Girra, meaning fire, which again blends Birdz’ biting raps and Leone’s soulful singing in ways that feel both part of an ancient tradition and modern, urgent and immediate.
The proud Butchulla men’s music and lyrics pair a painful history with the struggles of the present, with Birdz spitting bars skewering the national anthem and Leone crooning about yearning to be free. One lyric puts it bluntly: they’re trying to “sing our pain away”.
Their messages are wrapped in pulsating, powerful songs. All the new songs are incendiary, but Leone shines at the start of All On My Own, while title track Girra is a slow burn at first that erupts into bursts of rap courtesy of Birdz.
As a double act, Birdz and Leone bring contrasting styles. Birdz is a lyrical demon with rough edges and an infectious energy, while Leone, as a songman, brings mellifluous vocals and charm along with ancient knowledge of Butchulla culture. They have an easy rapport and seem to bring out the best in each other.
Of the other work they showcased, 2017’s Testify was spiritual and cathartic even as it detailed the horrors Birdz’ family experienced at the hands of priests.
There was a lot of uplifting energy too. Leone’s latest solo single Yirimi Gundir is an absolute banger, and he leads a Butchulla singalong that turns out to be about an emu hunt.
The closer was naturally the big hit, Bagi-la-m Bargan. It was especially moving to witness them retelling the arrival of Cook from the perspective of Butchulla warriors on K’gari, in a space where the crowd can look past the band and see the waters where the invasion took place.
Reviewed by Michael Ruffles
MUSICAL THEATRE
Mamma Mia! The Musical ★★★
Lyric Theatre, until July 30
Here we go again. And again.
This is the jukebox musical that makes dancing queens of us all.
As bride-to-be Sophie pops letters into a postbox in the opening scene – and ignites the improbable plot – the musical feels rather quaint.
Elise McCann stars as Donna in Mamma Mia! The Musical.Credit: David Hooley
That wasn’t the case when the show premiered in London in 1999 – its setting at the time was contemporary.
Since that debut, the musical has played around the world, including several major productions in Australia. This is a revival of the 2017 production.
On a fictional Greek island, Sophie has invited to her wedding three men who might be her father. But she hasn’t told her free-spirited mother Donna, who raised her daughter alone.
The bohemian mother/conservative daughter dynamic is hardly new – think the acerbic Eddie and Saffy Monsoon in Absolutely Fabulous. This is a far more gentle rendering of the relationship.
Sophie and Donna are the heart of the story, but it’s the music that appeals.
Abba’s songwriting duo Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus have created some of the catchiest pop songs ever. Yet not all are as memorable as Money, Money, Money or Chiquitita.
At times the show reminded me of listening to a greatest-hits album. You know there’ll be duds, and a favourite will be missing. What, no Fernando?
Gary Young’s production takes off in the ensemble numbers, which bring exuberance and energy to this warm-hearted musical.
The second half lagged largely because the ensemble was absent for much of it. The encore of Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen and Waterloo belatedly raised the tempo.
Tom Hodgson’s choreography is dynamic and fun. Choreographing a number in which the men dance in flippers was a comic feat. Suzy Strout’s costumes – not least those sparkly jumpsuits – are splendid.
This is not a big-name cast, and some singing felt patchy; some characters ill-defined.
Elise McCann as Donna relished her role as the former girl band singer who reignites an old flame, while Sarak Krndija’s Sophie captured the young woman’s uncertainty and optimism.
In minor roles, two actors stood out: Drew Livingston as one of Sophie’s potential fathers, Harry, for his comic timing; and Donna’s friend Tanya (Deone Zanotto) for her cougar-like delivery of Does Your Mother Know.
This is a solid rather than sparkling production. There’s a dash of girl power and a celebration of free spirits who defy convention. But it’s not so unconventional as to make I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do redundant.
Reviewed by Joyce Morgan
THEATRE
Do Not Go Gentle ★★★½
Roslyn Packer Theatre, until June 17
How to die. With grace? Rare. With dignity? Rarer. And attempting it with courage or good humour may prove difficult – you’re more likely to feel regret. Playwright Patricia Cornelius wonders aloud about how we all die in Do Not Go Gentle, taking her title from the famed Dylan Thomas poem that exhorts us to “rage against the dying of the light”.
The winner of numerous awards, Do Not Go Gentle was first staged as an independent production in Melbourne in 2010 and only now gets a major airing. Perhaps that’s because of the play’s sheer ambition. Where most Australian works explore predicaments the size of backyards or workplaces, this one gives us a predicament the size of Antarctica.
John Gaden, Brigid Zengeni, Philip Quast, Vanessa Downing and Peter Carroll, part of the ensemble cast of Do Not Go Gentle.Credit: Prudence Upton
Cornelius takes us on Robert Scott’s ill-fated 1912 attempt to lead the first expedition to reach the South Pole. When they did reach the pole amid hellish conditions, it was to find the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them by a mere 33 days. Bitterly deflated, they faced a 1400-kilometre trek back to base, which they did not survive.
Cornelius lets her characters dance with death in their own ways: humorously, gloomily, poetically and painfully. The raw material negates a triumph-against-the-odds tale, but the playwright does give us flashes of the triumph of the human spirit, primarily in the camaraderie that makes the characters’ sense of pointlessness and regret almost bearable. Almost.
The play has an elusive tone and an equally elusive poeticism. The latter is not just a matter of the words – although Cornelius plays with those like so many bouncy balls – but of conceptions and visions. When Paige Rattray’s Sydney Theatre Company production catches this elusiveness, play and production spiral together in exhilarating harmony. Sometimes, however, the production doesn’t seem fully committed to the play’s audacity, and sometimes the play over-reaches, falling into little pits of self-consciousness.
Philip Quast is a bearish Scott, whose keep-the-spirits-up joviality can seem plucked straight from British comedy series Ripping Yarns, yet he’s also central to several of the most poignant moments in the play, notably in two beautifully staged love scenes between Scott and Wilson (Vanessa Downing), where the visual poetry entwines with the play’s quirky delight in falseness, with its humour and with its inner truth.
Peter Carroll and John Gaden (with more than 80 STC productions between them) team up, the former playing Evans and the latter an Oates tormented by inner demons. Brigid Zengeni is Bowers the navigator, here beset by dementia, and Josh McConville and Marilyn Richardson play figmental characters, with Richardson, in her first stage play long after retiring as an eminent opera singer, hitting upon a heightened style that perfectly complements the text (she also graces the work with her singing).
Celebrated soprano Marilyn Richardson made her theatrical debut in Do Not Go Gentle.Credit: Prudence Upton
Exceptional ensemble scenes abound, including an amusing one with the expedition members all upright in their sleeping bags, and another in which they complain about their assorted ailments – even Downing’s amusing Wilson, who had previously been a figure of comically incongruous optimism while confronting the jaws of death.
Charles Davis’ design is a thing of wonder: an Antarctica that allows for the play’s shifts to more figurative realms, aided by Paul Jackson’s lighting and James Brown’s chilly score. It’s those shifts that make the play so special. One moment we’re watching the characters, the next we’re tumbling amid the avalanche of thoughts in their heads: thoughts that define lost, brave, loving, lonely souls, all waiting to die.
Reviewed by John Shand
MUSIC
Jose Gonzalez ★★★
Opera House Concert Hall, until May 28
The prospect of playing at the Sydney Opera House will make artists do curious things. Add in its 50th anniversary and the spectacle of Vivid Live and you can just about see why Jose Gonzalez thought a show marking 20 years since the release of his low-key debut album Veneer would be a good idea.
Swedish Argentinian singer Jose Gonzalez opened Vivid Live on Friday night.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
The interesting thought experiment of seeing this accomplished performer reduced to his early, limited material doesn’t make for much fun. It is a faltering Gonzalez who takes the stage, never moving from his chair, missing notes in his opening instrumental and holding back as he insipidly plays every song from that album. He admits in his banter that he has had second thoughts about performing a show built around the slim 30-minute LP, which was written about his inner struggles, much of which he hasn’t played for 10 years. His sleepy renditions prove those doubts to be valid.
Jose Gonzalez’s show was not for anyone feeling sleepy.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
With Veneer duties concluded, the more complex material of the second half of his set demonstrates how far he has come. Teenage-y self-obsession gives way to songs like the high-minded Visions, which explores effective altruism and serves as an advert for the copies of Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, available (and appropriately free) on the merch table, while, in El Invento, the Swedish-born Gonzalez wears his Argentinian heritage confidently, singing in Spanish.
The original Veneer shows didn’t have much of his own work to draw on, and in the spirit of those days, he gives us six wide-ranging cover songs, miraculously making both Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and Kylie’s Hand on Your Heart sound like Gonzalez standards.
But nothing matches his compelling take on Massive Attack’s Teardrop, which achieves the goal of the ultimate cover: being better than the original while tantalisingly giving a glimpse of the beauty that an artist can muster. It is inexplicable, then, that he chooses Tjomme to end the gig: a repetitive, dull, lesser track from his latest album that is, in its way, true to the evening’s patchy show.
Director Abbas Kiarostami once said he prefers films that put the audience to sleep in the cinema. He would have found much to love tonight.
Reviewed by Shamim Razavi
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