Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

It looks so weird on paper: The Production Company, largely set up to mount forgotten gems of musical theatre, whose recent highlights have included Oklahoma and Brigadoon, taking on the otherworldly genius of David Bowie. There’s a long, and often disastrous, association between musicals and rock/pop, but surely this would have to be the most awkward merger since The Who’s Tommy. And previous productions of Lazarus – including the original directed by famed theatrical iconoclast Ivo van Hove and starring Michael C Hall – have largely confounded critics and audiences alike. We have absolutely no doubt this production will divide opinion too. Which is why you should see it for yourself. Based on the character of Thomas Jerome Newton – who Bowie played in Nicholas Roeg’s haunting, if rather dour 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth – the musical concerns itself with an alien stuck on our planet, in a kind of reverse of Major Tom’s situation in Bowie’s famous song, ‘Space Oddity’. It’s a curious point, that whether you’re an astronaut trapped out in space or an alien stuck here on Earth, it amounts to the same thing. Alienation is ultimately the final bonding agent of the universe. Bowie and Irish playwright Enda Walsh have hit on this sense of alienation, of isolation and of existential drift, and centred an entire show around it. And if that sounds like a drag, or worse a slice of indulgent navel-gazing, then you haven’t figured in Bowie’s incredible songs, which function he

A new batch of tickets to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child are going on sale on Tuesday May 7 at 11am. The tickets are for dates from February 5 to March 22. The first rule of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is that you don’t talk about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Safeguarding spoilers is an expected responsibility for anyone who attends the Potter-verse’s first on-stage outing. There’s even a hashtag: #KeepTheSecrets. But in truth (as far as theatre critique is concerned, at least), JK Rowling needn’t have worried. This marathon, five-hour spectacle has a plot so dense and sprawling, so wonderfully, unashamedly elaborate, it would take many thousands of words more than any theatre review to even scratch the surface. While we may have been sworn to secrecy about Cursed Child’s plot, we can reveal that the hype – and rarely has a piece of theatre ever generated such fever-pitched buzz – is entirely deserved. And not just because of the quality of the production. The masterminds behind the show – led by Rowling, playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany – have not merely set out to put on a play, but rather craft a rich and detailed immersive experience. To this end, Melbourne’s Princess Theatre has undergone a top to bottom $6.5 million makeover, transforming its interiors to match a Hogwartsian, Potterfied aesthetic. If this sounds like an unnecessary extravagance, it’s probably an indication this play isn’t for you. The success of Cursed Child, which has

Adapting a canonical Australian film into a stage musical? Who you gonna call? Simon Phillips! He pulled it off with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; surely the director could do the same for that daggiest of screen heroines, Muriel Heslop. Both films leant heavily on internationally famous pop songs from the ’70s, both virtually burst at the seams with the kind of kitsch that cries out for a musical number, and both have remained adored cultural touchstones, even for those who only recall them from their original cinema release, back in 1994. So the question sits large on this production’s shoulders: is it as good as the stage adaptation of Priscilla? The answer is no. No, this one is way better. Perhaps it is the source material. PJ Hogan’s film, despite the superficial similarities to Stephan Elliot’s more raucous and frankly crasser sibling, is a finely balanced dramedy, often profoundly sad and sharply satirical amongst all the comic mayhem. Hogan and Phillips are responsible for the adaptation, and they’ve very carefully modulated the tone and shifted the emphases so that Muriel’s journey from zero to hero fits more snugly into the traditional structure of a Broadway musical, without sacrificing the film’s nuance and edge. The first major change we notice is the look: where the film was drenched in the pastels of a past decade, the stage show pops with block colours, blindingly sunny and over-lit. Muriel (Natalie Abbott) sticks out immediately among the buff bods and p

He was the world’s greatest shonk, its most famous flimflam man, the original master of the alternative fact; when one character tells him he doesn’t belong in politics because “politics is no place for humbug”, the audience audibly gasps. We don’t need to imagine what PT Barnum would have been like if his run for office had been successful; he’s already in the White House. Which gives this new production – by Storeyboard Entertainment in collaboration with NICA – a veneer of relevance that the show can’t quite fulfil. It’s entertaining as hell, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that, where it counts, it’s having us on. The real Barnum, who was famous in his time for his dubious taste as much as his knack for drawing a crowd, is almost impossible to separate from the ludicrous self promotion of his legend. He made his name with a garish, and incredibly popular, museum in New York, but perhaps his greatest claim to fame was his collaboration with James Bailey that became “Barnum and Bailey’s Circus”. He’s been a recurring figure in popular culture pretty much from his death, most recently as the subject of the Hugh Jackman film The Greatest Showman. Every age interprets him through a different lens, but he’s mostly seen as a loveable rogue, a dreamer who dared to dream big. This is pretty much the way Barnum: The Circus Musical (how awkward is that official subtitle?) wants to see him too. The program notes talk a big game about the character’s darker side – and with a lega

In 1971, Louis Nowra was fresh out of a Melbourne university when he was asked to direct a Gilbert and Sullivan production at a “mental hospital”. He wrote Così based on this experience and of being a young person during the Melbourne Moratorium protests to end Australia’s support for the war in Vietnam. First performed at Belvoir in 1992 (the real hospital closed in 1991), it reflected on attitudes towards protest, fidelity, theatre, women and mental health, as it mixed nostalgia with a celebration of the transformative nature of theatre, and faced a society that was finding a new line between what is funny and what is offensive. The play is part of the “Lewis trilogy”, which starts with Summer of the Aliens and ends with This Much is True. Neither play is as well known as  Così, in which Lewis (Sean Keenan) directs a production of Mozart’s opera Cosi Fan Tutti with a cast of six hospital patients. It was made into a film in 1996, is always on a school syllabus and is regularly performed on school, community and professional stages. It’s not always comfortable watching jokes about going off meds, stuttering, being locked in cupboards and staff kissing patients. They wouldn’t be made today as our understanding of mental health and trauma has improved. But Nowra takes a different approach when Lewis upsets a performer during an onstage rehearsal. He apologises with “I wasn’t making fun of you, I thought it was funny”. And, more importantly, he changes the joke so that it isn

When Heraclitus said that you can’t step into the same river twice, he may as well have been talking about the Swan as it flows into Perth, the setting for Tim Winton’s seminal novel Cloudstreet. Of course the Greek philosopher didn’t care which river it was; he was making a point about change, about the impermanence of experience. He also said that everything flows, that nothing stays still, and again he could be summing up the novel’s central theme. Twenty years have passed since Malthouse’s previous production of Justin Monjo and Nick Enright’s stage adaptation of Cloudstreet, and so much has changed, so much water – not to mention blood and guts and rage and grief – has flowed into and out of the tributaries of our cultural landscape, that it feels like an entirely different work, the answer to a question we couldn’t even articulate back in the late ’90s. Winton’s novel is a cultural touchstone, and the original stage production, directed by Neil Armfield, is embedded in the theatrical memory. Which makes Matthew Lutton’s decision to program it – with small but significant changes to the script and a design aesthetic that seems diametrically opposed to Armfield’s – a bold and powerful one in its own right. The key shift is in the casting: not only is it racially diverse, the actor playing Fish Lamb, the golden child who drowns at the beginning of the play but who is revived with major neurological trauma, is played by neuroatypical actor Benjamin Oakes. In some ways, thi

Bring It On: The Musical is returning to the Athenaeum Theatre in 2019 with a new, yet-to-be-announced cast. Read our review of the 2018 Melbourne season below. Did we need a musical based on Bring It On, the popular 2000 cheerleading movie that had so much to say it needed five sequels? It’s not the worst idea, but we did not need this iteration of Bring It On, which suffers from turgid dialogue, forgettable songs, a predictable and overdone plot, and at least in this production, a significant lack of pep. That Bring It On is not better is a mystery, since it was written by an A-Team of contemporary musicals, with a book by Tony Award-winner Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q) and a score by Hamilton genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tom Kitt (another Tony Award-winner for Next to Normal) and Tony nominee Amanda Green (Hands on a Hardbody). But while there are flashes of Miranda’s exquisite harmonies and clever wordplay (particularly in ‘Move’, the big number that opens the second act, and in some of the raps), the music is mostly underwhelming. Ballads build but then fade away, and none of the melodies grab a hold of you. In this high-stakes world of competitive cheerleading, the music should rev up an audience, but it’s not distinctive enough to have much impact. The mixing does not help, either; the music overpowers the voices in parts, with critical lyrics difficult to hear. The musical is not a retread of the movie; rather, it features new characters but a plot very similar to the sec