This feel-good show brings the joy and hope we all need right now

THEATRE
THE PROM
Teatro, March 28, until April 19
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★½

There have been signs and rumours, that a cultural revolution is afoot in Sydney’s inner west. Further evidence has now been furnished with The Prom – a self-funded Australian premiere at new musical theatre venue Teatro, tucked in Leichhardt’s Italian Forum.

A shimmering feel-good triumph with scrumptious wit, a talent-studded cast, and a queer coming-of-age love story at its heart, by curtains close you’ll want to leap into the night air, bursting with joy and tender hope. As one character himself sings on the subject of theatre magic: “it feels as if we’re coming home again”.

Though Nick Fry’s fabulously glitzy set makes us feel we’re in a multicolour disco ball, the story takes place in Indiana, which is, in its progressive values, not New York. A homophobic parent-teacher squad has cancelled high-school prom rather than allow Emma (Sophie Montague, with a Disney heroine voice) to invite a same-sex date.

Meanwhile, via social media winds, two acclaimed and utterly self-absorbed actors called Dee Dee Allen (Caroline O’Connor) and Barry Glickman (Brendan Monger) hear about her plight. With their latest show panned, they’re looking for a cause celebre by which they can restore their reputations
and hence return to the limelight.

With two ambitious actors and their PR man in tow, they sally forth on their chosen moral crusade: “thespians saving lesbians”. Naturally, their opportunistic meddling does more harm than good.

The Prom premiered on Broadway in 2018, and you feel O’Connor and Monger would not have been out of place in that hallowed district. Evoking a little Liza Minnelli and Nathan Lane respectively, they use every instrument at their disposal – tone, timing, movement, “zazz” – to give flair to the book (Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin) and lyrics (Beguelin), warm-heartedly lampooning their vainglorious roles.

O’Connor’s The Lady’s Improving, in which she tries to win back the heart of the principled school principal, was a particular hit. Equally delightful: Matthew Sklar’s spirit-soaring music and Craig Renshaw’s direction; the splendid costumes whipped on and off between scenes (by Cornelia Cassimatis); appropriately “extra spry” choreography; and the large ensemble cast, predominantly made up of high-school bullies.

A fair number of this cast derives from Teatro’s THEatreBRIDGE program, an incubator of emerging artists. Bella McSporran, a last-minute swing, was exceptional.

The play delivers an important message, too. Emma may adore her four camp ‘heroes’, supposedly coming to her rescue, but – a reserved gentle butch – she doesn’t have their extroverted dramatics, and doesn’t benefit from being used as a pawn in America’s culture wars. As she sings to her closeted sweetheart, it’s not her style to be a trailblazer. She just wants to dance with the ones she loves.

Adults do have a habit for masquerading opportunism as righteous intervention. (I was reminded of the real-life 1999 incident in East Texas, when a school production of Angels in America became the political battleground of adults, to the discomfort of the kids – even Tony Kushner got involved.)

This production makes endless entertainment out of misguided agendas, gifting us at the end with a vision of an ideal, compassionate, unselfish world. Grab a cute date, head to The Prom. Up next at Teatro: Tootsie.

THEATRE
BETTE & JOAN
Ensemble Theatre, March 27
Until April 25
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

Acting is a challenging art. Playing real people – especially those with whom the audience is readily familiar – is tougher, still. Now the actor is torn between mimicry and shooting for something that blends reality and artistry. The audience, meanwhile, easily becomes preoccupied with the accuracy of the representation.

So it was at the start of Anton Burge’s Bette & Joan, set during the 1962 filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, when Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were fighting a rearguard action against Hollywood’s insistence that female stars had a use-by date.

They wanted to keep working, for both artistic and financial reasons, and Crawford found the vehicle for them to do that – if they could just suppress the poisonous rivalry and personal antipathy that had dogged them for three decades.

When Lucia Mastrantone (Joan) and Jeanette Cronin (Bette) enter a set depicting their dressing-rooms (separated by an invisible wall), we scrutinise their looks, voices, accents, deportment, clothes and more, as though their performances are exercises in exactitude. That most of the first act consists of monologues rather than interaction only lessens the distraction from this scrutiny, which is disconcerting when one wants to be absorbed by the characters and story.

Slowly, the actors win us over, but it was not really until we returned from the intermission that those factual obsessions flew out the dressing-room window. Now Cronin and Mastrantone were Bette and Joan. It was partly a process of becoming accustomed to their performances and partly the fact that they spend most of Act Two conversing, increasing the play’s intrinsic engagement.

Director Liesel Badorrek probably found the two best actors in town for the roles, and designer Grace Deacon has arranged the dressing-rooms more cunningly than in Burge’s stage directions, and dressed the actors to perfection.

Mastrantone gives us a Joan who would be glamorous if she were vomiting, and Cronin embodies the hard-nosed professional actor that was Bette, and looks uncannily like her, especially her eyes. We see these clearly because, in a masterstroke, Badorrek has opted to use both live and prerecorded black-and-white videos (designed by Cameron Smith) of the women, projected on the rear wall.

The videoed versions might soliloquise, converse with their live counterparts, or provide live close-ups of the actors, now seen as though in a movie, aided by Ross Johnston’s musical choices. It is not just a trick: it dramatises monologues, and cleverly suggests the characters’ inner worlds are their professional lives as stars.

Both Bette and Joan are capable of being petty and nasty, yet Burge and the actors ensure we like them, whether because they make us laugh or because of their complexity. As the play deepens psychologically, it becomes more and more engrossing, until we are moved and fascinated by exemplary performances of intriguing characters caught in the predicament of ageing.

MUSIC
Wu-Tang Clan
Qudos Bank Arena, March 28
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★

Promoted as “all living members in one room for the final time”, the Sydney leg of Wu-Tang Clan’s global farewell tour quickly becomes a test of how far audience goodwill can stretch when faced with a series of fumbles from the iconic New York City hip hop group.

“We flew 20 hours on the plane to f---k wit’ you,” says de facto Clan leader RZA early on, failing to mention that Method Man, Raekwon the Chef, Cappadonna and Young Dirty Bastard (filling in for his late father, Ol’ Dirty Bastard) all failed to make the flight, leaving us with around half the Wu.

Pre-show ads pushing Wu-Tang’s clothing line compound the sense of things being a bit cash grabby, but the sour taste mostly dissolves once RZA hits the stage with high energy and rock star charisma, his Clan brothers Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck and GZA joining him one by one for Wu classic Bring Da Ruckus.

Rounded out by U-God and Masta Killa, the group then tear through rousing renditions of early favourites like Shame on a N----- and Protect Ya Neck.

The show suddenly hits a momentum killer 25 minutes in, as the Clan take a break and a trailer plays for a new film directed by RZA, which seems neither the time nor place for it.

It’s not the only moment of distracting self-promotion, with audience members asked to scan a QR code on two different occasions to vote for Wu-Tang Clan to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame – a reminder of why it’s sometimes far cooler to be nonchalant about such things.

Still, when the Wu are in full flight, all missteps are mostly forgiven.

A section of solo songs featuring Ghostface and GZA remind us why they’re regarded as two of the Clan’s breakout stars, the former especially rapping with the kind of infectious, cocky swagger that almost matches the vibrant energy of his younger self.

The seven-piece band on stage may signal “fancy arena show”, but they’re not always successful at translating the Wu’s grimy beats into a live setting, with an often-muddy sound mix not helping.

It’s as mixed a bag as shows get, but when they get in the zone on classic cuts like Tearz, C.R.E.A.M. and Triumph, it solidifies why Wu-Tang Clan is, as they like to remind us, forever.

MUSIC
Concertos & Sonatas: Bach and Telemann
Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall, March 28
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Between 1729 and 1741, citizens of Leipzig could meet once or twice a week in the evenings for a coffee and a chat at Zimmermann’s and catch some music from one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen.

That was the period that Johann Sebastian Bach agreed to take on directorship of the Collegium Musicum, a group of musically able university students that his good friend George Philipp Telemann had founded at the beginning of the century.

It seems to have been a casual affair without tickets or printed programs (frustratingly so for later historians) but Pinchgut Opera’s Orchestra of the Antipodes under Erin Helyard created, in this selection of concertos and sonatas, a stylishly plausible reconstruction of the music.

Beginning with Telemann’s Sonata a 4 in A major, violinist Matthew Greco set the tone that is a distinctive feature of the orchestra’s approach: gracious fluency of line, transparent clarity of texture, light tone and spontaneous ease with ornamentation.

In a concerto by a less well known Leipziger, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Simon Martyn-Ellis played Pinchgut’s most recent instrumental acquisition, a gallichon (a lute like instrument) with delicate intimacy which, however, would have struggled to reach the back of the hall.

Against muted string accompaniment, Martyn-Ellis never pushed the tone but rather let it inhabit its own quiet sweet spot. The performance was musically sensitive but lacked soloist projection, and the reality is that this instrument either needs inauthentic amplification or a smaller hall.

Telemann’s Sonata a 5 in E minor, had a subtly richer depth of sound with the addition of bass viola (Rafael Font), bringing out the long line of phrases in the slow movements and becoming rewardingly energised in the quicker ones. Greco avoided unwanted jabbing of attack in Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, playing the outer movements with buoyant spring and an insouciant, elegant way with ornamentation.

The audience response confirmed that the program’s standout item was Helyard’s performance of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, which had rhythmically gripping inevitability without ever being rushed or unduly accented so that the outer movements established irresistible momentum while the inner movement drew the audience in to the same close listening practised by the players.

Surrounding this were two Sonatas a 6, in G minor and B flat major, by Telemann. Subtly richer still in texture, the players shaped and swelled the phrases persuasively in the slow movements and allowed the quicker to run with the wind. It was an authentically congenial afternoon’s listening (though I didn’t sample the coffee).

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Opera Australia, March 27
Until May 3
Mrs Macquarie’s Point
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★★½

Down jackets mingled with dinner jackets as patrons arrived amid rain, wind and unseasonable cold.

It seemed the Phantom was about to cast a stormy curse over this outdoor production.

Yet by the time that thrilling opening riff thundered out, the skies had cleared.

It was the start of a night of theatrical magic – an inspired production to equal the splendour of the harbour backdrop.

Much of its impact lies in Gabriela Tylesova’s ravishing, imaginative design that combines the grand and the intimate.

A tower of ornate theatre boxes and a broken proscenium arch are at one side of the stage, with an enormous staircase across the width. The famous chandelier dangles above the stage to the right. Tylesova’s costumes are a riot of colour, sparkle and excess.

Yet this is a dark interior drama – or melodrama – as the deformed, mask-wearing Phantom who stalks a 19th-century Parisian opera house becomes obsessed with a young singer, Christine.

This “angel of music” reveals himself as quite a devil: a manipulator, murderer and something of an incel living in a grand gothic equivalent of his parents’ basement – a subterranean lair beneath the Paris Opera.

It’s a lair reached here not by a foggy lake but a burning ring of fire, and it works beautifully.

When the chandelier falls, it does so gently but is accompanied by that Opera on the Harbour set piece – fireworks.

This is a return of the 2022 Opera on the Harbour production. Simon Phillips again directs Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 40-year-old musical with energy and style, and it is accompanied by Simone Sault’s elegant choreography.

Sound quality is exceptional as musical director Guy Simpson conducts the orchestra concealed beneath the stage. Shelly Lee’s sound design meant the Phantom’s voice was heard at times from different directions, amplifying a menacing sense of his omnipresence.

The famous riff is repeated at key points and its shiver-inducing power is undiminished – even if Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters reckons Lloyd Webber took it from the band’s 1971 track Echoes.

Jake Lyle’s rich baritone delivers a Phantom full of menace, while eliciting sympathy for his damaged, diabolical soul. This is a compelling professional debut from the 22-year-old.

He is well-matched with Amy Manford’s Christine, who has sung the role internationally. Her vocal clarity conveys the innocence of the young woman wrestling with dark desires.

A dashing, dynamic Jarrod Draper as Christine’s suiter Raoul completes this love triangle.

Notable in the supporting cast are Debora Krizak as Madame Giry, the intimidating ballet mistress, and Jayme Jo Massoud as Christine’s friend Meg.

As the comic duo Firmin and Andre, Brent Hill and Martin Crewes bring a Gilbert & Sullivan humour to their witty patter.

With its bombast and histrionics, this musical feels better suited to this vast setting than shoehorned into the Opera House stage as it was four years ago.

This 40th-anniversary production is the finest Phantom and Opera on the Harbour to date. On a potentially turbulent night, all the elements, including meteorological, came together.

THEATRE
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
State Theatre, March 26
Until April 2
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★½

Ten years after Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that her found diaries were adapted to the stage. Premiering on Broadway in 1955, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s version won a Pulitzer and a Tony. Anne’s father, the only surviving family member, was consulted throughout. In the shadow of unspeakable Jewish trauma, the impact was immense.

It’s an extraordinary undertaking to take that personal document of a teenage genocide victim, one which detailed day-to-day realities of hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and then to dramatically render the entries and the spaces between. With her posthumous Diary of a Young Girl perhaps the most accessible Holocaust story, Anne the girl who at 15 years old is being transformed into her shining legacy: a symbolic figure, representing inspiring resilience, the tragedy of lost innocence, and the irrepressible spirit of the Jewish people.

Anne’s sunny schoolgirl disposition, in spite of her circumstances, is what makes her words so affecting. Their dramatisation, however, can make for a facile viewing experience.

Drew Anthony Creative’s presentation at the State Theatre is almost alarmingly blithe: at intervals between sibling pillow fights, clichéd young courtship and domestic squabbles, one could hear the surreal and terrible sounds of audience members eating popcorn.

The play’s predominantly saccharine tone trumpets from Chloe-Jean Vincent’s Anne, a daddy’s girl with a repertoire of skips, squeals and general precociousness. At intervals, we hear her voice chirpily relate entries over speakers. Holly Easterbrook is Anne’s hands-clasping mother; Phil Bedworth her wise, even-tempered father; Emma Smith her mousey older sister.

The family’s two-year sequestration is complicated by the Van Daans, with whom they’re sharing precious space and food. The arrival of the reclusive and ill-tempered old dentist (Jamie Jewell) compounds tensions. Asha Cornelia Cluer gives the most impressive performance as brassy Mrs Van Daan, while Matt Dyktynski plays a scowlingly aggressive husband, and Nathan Hampson their son, a boy depicted as rather wet and cringing.

The set shows a tiered upstairs space in sepia, with a dining table at the front. Skirmishes and sweetnesses break out across levels. Despite the huge Swastikas floating above, these interactions seem trivial. Aside from when we finally hear the Nazis coming from below, there’s only light-handed evocations of terror or strain; mostly, we’re encouraged to chuckle and paternally coo.

Bafflingly, too, the production often has the cast miming around invisible props – distributing presents, pouring drinks, dealing cards. Why? Shouldn’t our imaginative focus be on the invisible horrors outside?

MUSIC
DMA’S
Metro Theatre, March 27
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★½

Though matters were helped by several nights of unforgiving lashing rain, mixed fortunes in the footy, and what seasoned meteorologists call a really bloody cold March day, creating Manchester-by-the-harbour is no small feat.

In a conundrum as hard as deciding whether you are red or blue, do you go for the swagger and psychedelic dance, or the insolence and big hook rock? Some old school harmonies and maybe meaningful/maybe not lyrics, or songs for the terraces and the occasional beery/teary ballad?

Dammit, say Sydney’s DMA’s, why not some of all of them? For example, with a song like Silver that is made to throw your arms around your besties and say we don’t need naff Sweet Caroline for bonding, and Step Up The Morphine, whose chords are dreamy and vocals at ease. Or Lay Down, where your bass player goes the grooving Mani and your guitarist throws great John Squire lines, and So We Know, which begins as pure languid Oasis and explodes late into Stone Roses groove and waves.

And dammit, in a room much smaller than they are used to these days – a trade-off for intimacy that in the end just proves what a good rock room the Metro is when it’s packed and pumping and belting out every line of Tape Deck Sick – don’t they pull it off spectacularly!

But then, given this gig is a tenth anniversary celebration of the debut album, Hills End (yes, band and album name do suggest a freewheeling attitude to apostrophes), which is played in full in the first set, revisiting and remaking one of north-west England’s music capitals is second nature for the core trio of Tommy O’Dell (minimalist vocalist with the baggy gear slouch and lads-with-me delivery), lead guitarist Matt Mason (the flash of aggression under cap) and rhythm guitarist Johnny Took (charismatic showman on acoustic and suit).

The weakest moments of Hills End, such as the far too generic Straight Dimensions and the harmless The Switch, show the perils of album-themed set lists and early days of a band learning who it wants to be. But the best, like Lay Down, Blown Away and Delete, helped in no small measure by unsung hero and tour bass player Jonathan Skourletos, don’t just please the crowd, which is in full voice from first note to the raucous end of the night, they elevate them. Job done, then.

MUSIC
Anna Lapwood performs Max Richter
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, March 25
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Max Richter’s Cosmology for organ, orchestra and choir sketches four episodes in a cosmic journey of the imagination. Each of the first three movements begins in a quiet questing spirit and they build to increasing levels of intensity until, in the fourth, the chorale Wachet auf (by Philipp Nicolai but known through Bach) opens the mind to quiet meditation.

The first movement, Voyagers, began with pulsating sounds from harp, piano, celeste and organ like distant signals through space, as other instruments were added in quiet wonder. Orian Nebula began with warm phrases from the horns, the notes gradually overlapping and drifting into dissonance.

The Pleiades was the most active, beginning with soft glistening arpeggios featuring flute, piano and the reedier stops of the organ. It built in volume and increased in speed, adding the female voice of the Sydney Philharmonia Choir and full organ, while the notes of each motive were varied in length on each occurrence to create a sense of simultaneous movement and stasis. Earthrise was a homecoming, rotating the phrases of the chorale like something precious.

Richter’s technique of superimposing multiple repetitions of simple motifs with constantly varying note durations, and softly colouring them with warm or icy instrumental timbres created a sense of slowly shifting vastness with the choir and organ adding depth and moments of distinctive light.

In case this didn’t provide the showstopping energy that organist Anna Lapwood’s fan base had come for, it was preceded by Kristina Arakelyan’s Toccata for solo organ and orchestra, which applied unexpected note shortenings and additions to the energetic banality of repeated jabbing chords, while the organ responded with rapid figuration.

In the middle section the rhythm became more gnarled, the tone darker as chords were built up in layers on the organ only to be ripped away to leave trickling filaments in the orchestra. The encore was a showpiece of organ colour, an excerpt from her Lord of the Rings symphony.

After interval, conductor Andre de Ridder led the SSO in a richly rewarding performance of Bartok’s masterpiece, Concerto for Orchestra. After a portentous opening from lower strings, with awakening distant phrases from wind and brass, the first movement was measured in speed to allow detailed expressiveness and the musical personalities of individual players to emerge.

The solos in the second movement were tartly pointed until the enveloping openness of the brass sound in the chorale. The third movement, the emotional centre, was still, spare and haunting. It was Sydney-based expatriate pianist, Elizabeth Kosma, who informed me that the poignantly nostalgic melody of the fourth movement was from a popular Hungarian operetta, The Bride of Hamburg by Zsigmond Vincze.

As a Hungarian who, like Bartok, was estranged from her homeland, she saw the words of the quoted song “Hungary, you are lovely, you are beautiful” as a “message in a bottle”. De Ridder took the last movement at breathless speed, perhaps even a little too quick, but the orchestra was in briskly nimble form.

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