Pain and sensuality abounds in revival of Italian classics as British rockers deliver chaotic experience for the apocalypse
By Kate Prendergast, Peter McCallum and Michael Ruffles
MUSIC
HEAVENLY SOPRANOS
Australian Haydn Ensemble ★★★½
City Recital Hall, April 16
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
Like the poet John Keats and the composer Lili Boulanger, Giovanni Pergolesi belonged to that rare category of artists who, after dying in their mid-twenties, left a legacy of near-perfect gems and hauntingly unfulfilled promise.
Soprano Celeste Lazarenko and mezzo-soprano Helen Sherman drew out poignant harmonies.Credit: Oliver Miller
Written in 1736, the year of his death, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater achieved instant and enduring popularity for its delicate representation of tender sorrow heard in luminous sensual textures woven by two female voices intertwined in painful dissonance and melodious comeliness.
Soprano Celeste Lazarenko and mezzo-soprano Helen Sherman drew out the poignant harmonies of the opening with rich sustained clarity against the Haydn Ensemble’s mournfully plodding bass.
Each singer had a different expressive personality. Lazarenko emphasised tonal brightness and created a still point of spare simplicity in Vidit suum dulcem natum (She saw her sweet son).
Sherman brought out deeper drama with rhetorical force and edge in the lower register in Fac ut portem Christi mortem (Grant that I may bear the death of Christ). These differences balanced and complemented one another in duet sections, such as the lightly energised Inflammatus et accensus, the serenely fading closing number Quando corpus morietur and the urgently animated Amen.
The first half featured two works by Pergolesi’s longer-lived but older contemporary Johann Hasse, a composer of high repute and developed craft, who created well-made textures from familiar Baroque figures, though with some limitations in terms of charm and inventiveness.
The first bracket was a pair of recitatives and arias from his oratorio Sanctus Petrus et Sancta Maria. Sherman began with a still sound drawn from the depths, welling into almost convulsive expression. Lazarenko introduced a calmer note livened with bright agility.
After two trimly-executed movements from a concerto by Pergolesi’s Neapolitan teacher Francesco Durante, Lazarenko negotiated the virtuosic passages of Hasse’s motet for soprano and ensemble Alta Nubes Illustrata with fleet precision, rich sound and a spirited, energised voice.
The repeated quick-rising motive of the first movement resembled the movements of an adventurous fledgling always on the verge of taking flight and, for brief moments, actually succeeding. The Haydn Ensemble, led by director and violinist Skye McIntosh, with single players on each string part and theorbo and chamber organ filling out the harmonies, played with crisply articulated stylishness, strong bass, and attentively unanimous ensemble playing.
THEATRE
A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD ★★★
Seymour Centre, April 13
Reviewed by Harriet Cunningham
Two men sit in a small office cubicle under the flattening glare of a fluorescent tube. Ryan is a factory worker. Keith is a mortgage broker. Both are new and single dads. While that’s about all they have in common, it’s enough to build a spindly bridge of empathy, paved with shared hopes and fears. But is it enough to sustain 95 minutes of existential male banter?
Anthony Gooley, as Ryan, the truck-driving, gun-owning, yoghurt factory worker with a dream of buying back part of his grandparents’ long-forfeited farm, brings a light touch to his character, a classic tragic antihero, leaning into some well-timed humour and wistful longing.
Anthony Gooley and Elijah Williams in A Case for the Existence of God playing at the Seymour Centre. Credit: Marnya Rothe
Elijah Williams, as Keith, lover of early music and the architecture of Tallinn, is a little more distracting, lurching from successful, can-do professional to self-indulgent, self-fulfilling prophet of doom.
Veronique Benett’s set, a cramped office cubicle, is a simple and effective space, which amplifies the knee-jerk defensiveness and prickliness of two men thrown into a maze of vulnerability. It is also a potent symbol of transformation. In the final scenes of the play, the actors step outside the box as Keith and Ryan relocate to the park for a play date with their two-year-olds, and it’s there we finally fall for these characters, just a couple of everyday dads taking pictures and calling out “Share, honey!” with touching love and concern.
Samuel J. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God took out Best Play in the 2022 New York Critics’ Circle Awards, but in this, the Australian premiere from Outhouse Theatre, directed by Craig Baldwin, the brilliance does not quite translate. Part of this was, no doubt, due to a medical event that brought the first night to a crashing halt for half an hour, snapping the taut thread of connection unfolding through the play.
Up to this point, we had been witnessing an unlikely friendship beginning to bloom between the two men, with shafts of hope. It’s hard to tell how much impact the unplanned break had on the overall effect of this intense drama, but it cannot have helped. In spite of the humanity and hope embroidered into the final scenes, from that point on, the eponymous case for the existence of God felt both more laboured and ultimately, more ironic.
Until May 4.
MUSICAL
THE SUNSHINE CLUB, ★★★
Sydney Coliseum Theatre, April 12
Reviewed by Kate Prendergast
Race relations in Australia very often make grim subject matter. Our history and present are full of violent acts and unjust realities. Yet at the turn of the century, Noonuccal Nuugi man and acclaimed theatre-maker Wesley Enoch chose to tell a story of radiant hope.
Sweethearts Frank (Garret Lyon) and Rose (Claire Warrillow) in The Sunshine Club.Credit: Paul Dodd
The Sunshine Club, with music by John Rodgers, embraces the optimism and energy of musical theatre for a feel-good, hip-swinging romance. Set in 1946, it centres on an Indigenous serviceman called Frank Doyle (Garret Lyon, with a honeyed voice that hits high) who returns to his small Queensland town to find not a hero’s welcome, but the same old prejudices.
Barred from the whites-only dance hall, and falling hard for the white Reverend’s daughter Rose (a flawless Claire Warrillow), Doyle creates his own place for folk to come together. Inside this haven called The Sunshine Club, he and his community celebrate their right to work, dance, and love.
It’s a simple story borne along by 28 upbeat tunes, which encourages the audience to think about how dreams and sacrifices depend a great deal on the privilege you’re starting from. The courtship between Doyle’s sister Pearl (Tehya Makani) and a slimy travelling salesman (Rune Nydal) is a piercing foil to the main romance. With Aunty Faith (played by the much-loved Roxanne McDonald) and the ostensibly open-minded Reverend (Dale Pengelly) full of their own respective fears, it’s also an intergenerational tale that proposes even youth’s naivety can motivate change.
The Sunshine Club won multiple awards and an original place in the nation’s storytelling canon. Twenty-five years later, it is riding an Australia-wide tour under Enoch’s hand, with an Indigenous-led cast and a five-piece live band.
After shows in Dubbo, Burnie, Melbourne and dozens more, it landed at Rooty Hill’s new Sydney Coliseum Theatre, an architectural marvel with a 2000-seat auditorium. Such a grand space demands a great deal, and Friday’s show didn’t have the requisite dynamism or vocal might to equal it.
This can be fatal in musical theatre – present anything less than the full gusto, and its magic trembles. That several actors (Colin Smith and Leeroy Tipiloura) didn’t feature in this performance also gives a clue.
When the band is revealed behind a shimmering curtain, the play is at its lively best.
Crowd-pleasing and defiantly positive in the post-referendum gloom, The Sunshine Club had just one night in Rooty Hill. It travels to South Australia next.
MUSIC
BRING ME THE HORIZON ★★★½
Qudos Bank Arena, April 12
Reviewed by Michael Ruffles
This is not your father’s deathcore band. In a world only slightly more twisted than this one, Bring Me The Horizon would be pop stars.
The British rockers bombard with metal riffs and driving rhythms, all led with Oli Sykes’ alternately wild and guttural screams and with a backdrop of apocalyptic imagery, lasers and pyrotechnics. They explore the depths of human loneliness and pain, and offer catharsis through a chaotic and contagious crowd experience.
Oli Sykes, frontman of British band Bring Me the Horizon.Credit: AP
But they do it with variety, pace and humour, and some memorable tunes to boot.
The theatrics were amped up from the outset, making the shortcomings of recent single Darkside more forgivable, and the crowd-surfing and mosh pit really kicked into gear for the anthemic one-two punch of Mantra and Teardrops.
The best moments were from 2020’s excellent Post Human: Survival Horror and 2013’s Sempiternal. Kingslayer is frenetic and electrifying; Obey is equal parts bitter and subversive; the chest-pumping call and response of “we’re going nowhere” in Shadow Moses speaks for a generation; Can You Feel My Heart? is slowly turning into a classic.
The new material is more mixed in style. Die4u is essentially a pop song with a few metal edges, it could be on the soundtrack to an animated Spider-Man film.
Then there’s Strangers: with its sad singer-songwriter vibes and (gasp) acoustic guitar, it might have fallen out of one of Ed Sheeran’s better albums.
Skyes singled out a crowd member to join him on stage. The last time I saw this trick, it was Justin Bieber making one girl less lonely (and I’m not sure whether that says more about them or me).
The evolution of Bring Me The Horizon from hardcore metal subgenre specialists to alternative turncoats to rock-star stadium sensation is complete. The next stop may well be the pop charts.
Sykes and co cover themselves in metal and spiky attitude, but their best trick is writing hooks that stay with you even after the ringing in your ears has gone away.
Bring Me The Horizon play Qudos Bank Arena again on Sunday.
THEATRE
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ★★½
Centennial Park, April 11. Until April 28
Reviewed by Kate Prendergast
Under the chilly black dome of an autumn night, down the grassy steppes of the Centennial Park amphitheatre, a Nickelodeonesque production of Shakespeare’s 400-plus-year-old Midsummer Night’s Dream japes. Aside from the goofball merit of some individual performances, the muddled sum of Glenn Elston’s three-hour show’s parts is chintzy, uneven and patience-trying. There is a difference between making the bard more accessible, and swaddling his wit in juvenile faff.
The magic was missing in this Midsummer Night’s Dream.Credit: Ben Fon
The Duke of Athens here and his betrothed are classless high-rollers, and the four entangled lovers not much more than privileged brats. In mortal and divine realms, the costumes are garish – from gold-threaded couture tracksuits, to Hermia’s hideous hot pink ensemble, to fairy diadems that look like something you’d buy half-drunk off a charlatan vendor at Vivid.
The stage gives a lot of echoing space to the natural surrounds, with tiered scaffolding draped with fake foliage framing the stage. The most impressive production gambit is the vehicles (buggies and boys’ toys) which zoom up and off ramps, at times with a thrillingly reckless bounce.
Zeitgeisty add-ons reach for easy laughs, like when Puck (played by Jonathan Freeman as a kind of raggedy, bow-legged fool) lures one of Titania’s servants away with a gigantic Taylor Swift ticket.
Another grating modernisation, my pet hate in crowd pandering, is the way in which worn-out tracks like James Brown’s I Feel Good, the Pink Panther theme, and Zorba the Greek are summoned and scrapped in just a few bars, all for a cheap jolt of recognition.
The music composition has an uninspired whimsy, making use of xylophone zings. Some cringey choreography involves a conga line and an aborted group dance.
The stage gives a lot of echoing space to the natural surrounds of Centennial Park in the Australian Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Credit: Ben Fon
You can still walk away with a good impression of some of the cast. Alex Cooper is a fine buffoon as both a love-struck Lysander and muscle-bulging Tom Snout.
Larissa Teal is a sulky, ditzy Helena. Jackson McGovern goes all in with “mummy’s boy with wandering knight aspirations”, and Tane Williams Accra amuses playing cowardly and camp.
Madeleine Somers (a bumptious Peter Quince) and Elizabeth Brennan (a blokey Red Bull-chugging Bottom) stand out in their gender-flexed roles. The significant edits to Shakespeare’s script are best during the “play within a play” scenes, if mostly in service of bum jokes.
In a tighter, abridged version, this Australian Shakespeare Company’s Dream could be a delight for kids. But what child is out and shivering until 10pm?
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