Nothing is sacred in this side-splitting ‘coming-of-clown’ story
By Shamim Razavi, Michael Bailey, Millie Muroi, Daniel Herborn and Kate Prendergast
Working Class Clown
White Bay Power Station, Turbine Hall, May 1
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½
Tommy Misa laughs, and his face splits open. Poised as if to swallow or spit out a universe of truths, with each chuckle a handsome row of teeth jumps out and parades below a pair of sharp, dancing eyes.
Tommy MisaCredit: Joseph Mayers
Misa’s essence as an artist – on irreverent, experimental and costumed display at his new Biennale of Sydney solo show – seems all about splitting sides. It is manifest in his queer identity as a Fa’afafine, a respected “third gender” in Indigenous Pasifika culture, which sunders the myth of the gender dichotomy. And it is alive, too, in his channelling of the Samoan political satire tradition of Fale Aitu, in which clowns are “possessed” by spirits and thereby given the power to thumb their noses at society’s big-wigs and bosses.
Working Class Clown honours with a mocking, self-reflexive bow that invaluable and transcultural right of the Fool. Co-presented with Performance Space, with support from Stereogamous’s Jonny Seymour and performance art icon Emma Maye Gibson (aka Betty Grumble), it cobbles together stand-up with micro-memoir, spoken word and mime.
A queer coming-of-clown story that winds through primary school trials and flapping banana trees, it was also forged in the aftermath of grief for his father, Mefiposeta Misa. On the audience’s seats, there is a slip of paper honouring him. On it are lyrics of Eric Clapton Tears in Heaven, which Mr Misa performed in an impromptu a cappella version at a relative’s funeral.
Wearing a billowy distressed tunic and pants by “demi-couture” label Nicol & Ford, Misa sketches his experimental manifesto within the towering vaults of the newly reopened White Bay Power Station. It is an awe-inspiring setting for the performance; a Willy Wonka factory for contemporary art. In Turbine Hall’s industrial cathedral, huge bark-cloth paintings soar overhead, as Misa’s voice bounces off and interacts with the site’s exposed working-class surfaces – the steel machinery, the vestigial pulleys, the cracked walls.
Using modes of storytelling that prioritise his relationship to the audience and site, there is something really interesting at play in Misa’s performance. He seems to lean into the idea of artwork and self as in a perpetual state of reinvention, while cheekily puncturing the prestige of the very festival that commissioned him.
Niall Horan
Qudos Bank Arena, May 1
Also May 2
Reviewed by MILLIE MUROI
★★★
Forging a solo career after being in a bestselling boy band is not easy. Niall Horan, the Irish component of five-piece 2010 pop-hit machine One Direction, still has a way to go.
Horan was fine. But there was little that stood out about him. Especially during the first handful of songs, he lacked power, presence and stand-alone vocal shine: the blow-them-away factor. If not for the cameras fixed on him, Horan would have almost faded into the stage.
Niall Horan, pictured here in Brisbane, warmed up in Sydney after a slow start.Credit:
But, perhaps having used those songs as a warm-up, Horan picked up the volume, dance moves and energy in last year’s short but sweet If You Leave Me. The highlights were when he dropped to a rasp or hit high notes in songs such as Fire Away from his 2017 debut album.
In a performance punctuated by guitar solos, the star should have been setting the standard (it was only well into the show that Horan began to shine). Meanwhile, curtains draped over the top third of the screens by the stage should have been raised during the gig.
Turning down a crowd request for a “shoey”, Horan said he wanted to do something special for Sydney, bringing out local legends Angus and Julia Stone to entrance with a rendition of their Big Jet Plane (2010).
Heaping praise on Australia, Horan fondly recalled previous visits: “You know how much I love this country,” he said. “If it were up to me, I’d live here.”
Further standouts came with an acoustic take on last year’s Science, and Night Changes: a One Direction-era hit that scratched the nostalgia itch. The home stretch brought more personality, more energy and some technically solid vocals.
Horan promised he wouldn’t let another five or six years pass before visiting again. If he can build his stage presence and dial up the vocal power, he could leave a more lasting mark.
Brodi Snook: Villain
Factory Theatre, May 1
Until May 5
Reviewed by DANIEL HERBORN
★★★★
Discussing his transition from sketch comedy to horror films like Get Out, filmmaker Jordan Peele succinctly summarised the difference between the two seemingly unrelated genres: “the music”.
This idea – that rib-tickling and blood-curdling tales can both stem from the same place of fear and dread – underpins Brodi Snook’s masterful comedy/horror Villain.
Western Australian native Snook sets the scene by detailing her chronic tendency to people-pleasing and submissiveness. She quips that she has the phrase “No worries if not” tattooed on her body and routinely apologises to the doorframes she walks into. It would be a spoiler to say more, but this aversion to confrontation soon lands her in a fiendishly tricky emotional quagmire.
Brodi Snook elicits plenty of laughs with her perfect choice of words.Credit:
Meanwhile, Snook visits a doctor to get some hilariously unhelpful advice for a recurring medical condition. She confesses to him that she has been having violent dreams about murdering people each night. He suggests she record these dreams, and Villain is interspersed with readings from this journal, with Snook bathed in unsettling red light as she recounts these visions in gruesomely vivid detail.
There’s something of Luke Heggie in Snook’s work, which channels a finely wrought misanthropy and uses a distinctly Australian vernacular. The laughs often come from her perfect choice of words, heard in her bemused retelling of her grandmother’s crass interruptions at family gatherings.
In Snook’s hands, even potentially well-worn comic territory like her anxiety (a “conga-line of self-loathing thoughts”) is a rich source of acerbic laughs. Similarly, her brutal take on Leonardo DiCaprio’s penchant for ditching girlfriends when they turn 25 hits the bullseye.
Throughout, Snook employs her exceptional wordsmithery and wry delivery in service of a complex and unusual story. It won’t be for everyone, but for anyone convinced comedy and horror can co-exist, it’s a rare treat.
The Dandy Warhols
Enmore Theatre, May 1
Reviewed by MICHAEL BAILEY
★★★
The Dandy Warhols have now been around for 30 years, as the band’s charming keyboardist, Zia McCabe, reminded us.
Yet based on this occasionally brilliant, sometimes frustrating gig, one might wonder how much longer their 15 minutes can continue.
There is no denying that the Portland foursome’s frontman, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, has written some of the classic songs of the late 1990s and early ’00s.
But it felt like the band wasn’t always trying that hard to sell them.
On-stage energy is so passe – but Courtney Taylor-Taylor still has some classics in his locker.Credit: Louise Kennerley
It may have been the sound engineer’s fault, or that of a venue prone to a murky mix, but Taylor-Taylor’s vocals were consistently underpowered. One of his few audience interactions was to complain about a camera flash, and neither he nor guitarist Peter Holmstrom nor drummer Brent DeBoer seemed especially energised.
No amount of phased guitar, reverbed microphones or other “psychedelic” trickery could disguise a flat opening third of the gig. The sold-out crowd didn’t quite lift as it should have to hits Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth and We Used to Be Friends, and it stood stoically through the early mediocrity of Ride.
McCabe had been keyboard-prodding and tambourine-bashing while having her hair blown back theatrically by a fan and generally being the main source of banter and showmanship. But then she plugged in a bass guitar, and the introduction of a proper bottom-end transformed things.
They had their moments, but the Dandy Warhols’ performance mostly lacked energy.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Summer of Hate might be from the Dandys’ 12th and latest album, but its ironic surf rock got the mosh pit moving. So did the infectious Plan A and the latter-day classic Be Alright, even if McCabe’s bass duties meant the original’s unforgettable honky-tonk piano riff was missing.
Then, a couple of songs from Taylor-Taylor alone on electric guitar showed that the insouciant star can connect when he wants to. Every Day Should Be a Holiday, in particular, was brilliant: a 56-year-old’s rage against the dying of the light.
Alas, the momentum flagged again with I Love You, an extended jam I’m sure the band likes to think is epic but didn’t really go anywhere except louder. I Will Never Stop Loving You was even worse – an emotive duet with Debbie Harry on the new album, on this night the vocals were barely audible, and the tempo wobbly.
Yet redemption was at hand with You Were the Last High, Holmstrom’s immortally funky riff cutting through, and two bangers that only needed to be played competently to ignite the room in Get Off and the Vodafone-approved Bohemian Like You.
Credit to the band, they stayed on stage to try and top those with a new song, Boys Better, and almost did with a Stones-worthy riff and their most spirited performance of the evening.
But the Dandy Warhols – especially the boys – could do better next time.
Nick Cave
State Theatre, 29 April
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★
That a name as big as Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood doesn’t even get a billing as Nick Cave’s accompanist in this “solo” tour tells you something of Cave’s status as national treasure. The fact the show would have been improved without the gifted Greenwood tells you everything else you need to know.
Greenwood is more effect than cause, but it is no coincidence that the occasions when he steps back and leaves Cave and piano to themselves are the moments that truly transcend. Tellingly, it is the material best suited to this stripped-back format – The Mercy Seat, The Weeping Song, Into My Arms – on which Cave has the confidence to truly fly solo.
Nick Cave lived up to his status as a national living treasure.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Ever the generous collaborator, the solo billing becomes ever more inaccurate in the encores as Beth Orton joins the boys for a surprise spine-tingling take on The Ship Song, which – together with his heartbreaking endless repetition of the exhortation to “just breathe” in the dark at the end of I Need You – is the bereaved father at his most exposed.
Cave’s recent live appearances have spanned from chat show via lockdown intensity to revivalist religiosity, and on this night we get a bit of all three. For the chat, he lingers on the stories revealed by his songs.
We learn that Cave himself is the narcissistic protagonist in Stranger than Kindness, which he acknowledges as “the jewel in the Bad Seeds’ crown”, even if it was penned by his ex-wife Anita Lane. That he is doomed by its brilliance to keep performing it makes her revenge all the more sweet.
Likewise, devotees may already know the conception of Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry, but it is shocking to be reminded that the macabre tale of “warm arterial spray” and babies born without a brain was originally a lullaby for Cave’s own newborn.
Perhaps he couldn’t handle two hours of full dark intensity. Perhaps we couldn’t. What we get instead is a stroll through a flaneur’s songbook. Implausibly, brilliantly, late-period Cave is all love and levity – and that we certainly can handle.
Nick Cave plays the ICC Sydney Theatre on May 3, and the State Theatre May 5–7.