Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

You’d think, given that it seems we’re actually living the apocalyptic hellscape so often depicted in the creative imagination of the 20th century, we’d be done seeing it reflected in our art. And yet, visions of the end times persist, and we go back for more. UK playwright Alistair McDowall doesn’t so much lead us to his version of a futuristic dystopia in his play Pomona as grab us by the neck and rub our faces in it. So why is the result so entertaining – intermittently depressing, perhaps but strangely exhilarating? We are in Manchester, or a nightmare vision of every city, where the creepiest low-life is the moneyed and connected one; in this instance Zeppo (Dion Mills), who inherits a good chunk of the property, including the mysterious, cut-off concrete islet in the middle of the metropolis, Pomona. Nobody lives here but vans truck goods in, and Charlie (Nicholas Denton) and Moe (Arthur Angel) stand guard at the gates. Ollie (Mona Mina Leon) is searching for her lost twin sister, but the further towards her goal she gets, the more dangerous and perverse the consequences. On her path into the dark recesses of the city, she meets sex worker Fay (Jessica Clarke) and corrupt madame Gale (Julia Grace), who leads her into the troubling world of snuff films and organ harvesting. Pomona, and the world that created it, is particularly nasty for women. Cutting through this grubby, gruesome story is another one that puts the facts in some doubt: Charlie advertises for people

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

Sometimes, St Kilda’s Theatre Works feels like a laboratory, a place for experiment and trial; if the results are not entirely satisfactory, there is still a sense that something valuable is being tested, that something fine might come from the crucible of theatrical thought. Mitch Jones’s Autocannibal is precisely this kind of work, developmental and unfinished, maybe, but also chock full of ideas. It’s the kind of work that gives Melbourne its reputation for considered, influential independent theatre. It opens on Jones hanging upside down, his leg bent to create an inverted triangle. It’s a direct invocation of the Tarot’s Major Arcana card The Hanged Man, a symbol of Promethean self-sacrifice and spiritual equilibrium. But this hanged man is as much a warning as an archetype, a damning allegory of global inaction and human greed. It seems fitting that our future is in the hands of a dangerous clown, dishevelled and desperate. We are told in voiceover that the world is collapsing, and that bans on “human product” have been lifted; it’s disturbing, if nowhere near the baroque disaster porn of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, recently seen at Red Stitch. Jones cuts himself loose from that position as the Hanged Man with a saw, plummeting into the dark, but soon we see him shuffling around the space, running Sisyphus-like up a pole, drinking his own sweat. He’s a creature of disgusting habits and base compulsions, a smeared and sooty parasite of the apocalypse. He’s also h

“Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him”. It’s a gendered response to the overwhelming subservience of belief and the dumb power of the zeitgeist, but it isn’t less true for that. And it’s a direct quote from Stanisław Lem’s extraordinary cult 1961 science fiction novel, Solaris. A work that has had three film adaptations – a rarely seen 1968 Soviet TV play, the seminal 1972 Tarkovsky masterpiece, and Soderbergh’s noble 2002 version with George Clooney – it now comes to us as a stage adaptation for Malthouse Theatre, by Scottish writer David Greig. Every adaptation of this work makes major alterations to the story, which of course are a legitimate response to the times, the age in which they are produced. But not a single one has captured Lem’s intellectual daring, his scholarly penetration into the means and morality of exploration. His imagination is closer to writers like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges than science fiction greats Asimov or Clarke – his expansiveness is meticulous and his questions unanswerable. Whatever you think of the various adaptations, Solaris the novel is a flat-out masterpiece. Kris Kelvin (Leeanna Walsman) arrives at the substation hovering just above the surface of Solaris, the planet covered entirely in ocean that orbits around twin suns, a red and a blue one. The astronauts living on the substation are Dr Snow (Fode Simbo) and Dr Sartorius (Jade Ogugua); the only personal connection Kelvi

Colin Thiele’s 1964 novel Storm Boy took 12 years to become a film. Touching but also blatantly sentimental, it drifted rather languorously into the Australian consciousness, to become a minor classic that’s been filmed twice and adapted twice for the stage. It’s a stark contrast to an English classic that bears significant similarities, Barry Hines’ 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, which Ken Loach filmed two years later as Kes. Both stories focus on the relationship between a young boy and a bird and touch on social isolation, familial grief and the healing power of the natural world.Storm Boy (Conor Lowe) is referred to simply as “boy” by his father, Hideaway Tom (John Batchelor), who has shuffled the pair to the edge of the civilised world in Coorong in South Australia, living a hand-to-mouth existence of fishing and self-imposed isolation. A local itinerant called Fingerbone Bill (Tony Briggs) gives the boy his moniker, as well as introducing him to the local birdlife. This leads to the adoption of three orphaned pelicans, which the boy names Mr Proud, Mr Ponder and, his favourite, Mr Percival. Dad comes to accept the wildlife and eventually even befriends Fingerbone Bill. The only threats to this makeshift life are the storms and the hunters.There must be something about the metaphor of the bird – that idea of flight as freedom but also the notion of tethering and release – that suits a bildungsroman, in particular the coming of age of a pre-pubescent boy; it has an exq

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