A gentle black man makes his way in a ruthless white world

McElhinney is typically convincing playing a well-meaning hypocrite who’s prepared to chase funding from any source, however repugnant. She makes us both like Linda and cringe for her.

Glenn, however, wins the cringe-worthiness stakes at a canter, and is perhaps Gillick’s ultimate creation. Retreating from a failed marriage, Glenn hires Jacky as a call-boy, whereupon he gradually reveals his naked racism, which becomes intolerable for both Jacky and a vocal first-night audience.

Yet Stone ensures Glenn is never just an archetype, but a complex misanthrope searching for his own needs, however depraved.

Some repetitive scenes between Jacky and Keith put a drag on the building tension, yet at its best the play is a warmly sympathetic insight into a queer black man trying to make his way in a ruthlessly white world.

MUSIC
DIONNE WARWICK
Star Casino, January 18
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★

The band wore tuxedos, she was in black, red and sparkles, and a chap in front of me was in a gold paisley brocade jacket. They played discreetly, she was elegantly reclined on a high stool, and we filled the not-insubstantial room.

Not bad for an 84-year-old who hasn’t had a hit since the Reagan years. Ah, but what hits Dionne Warwick had had before then. Some of the classiest, cleverest, poppiest songs known to woman, mostly written by the great Hal David and Burt Bacharach.

And in the modest 14-song set – done and dusted in not much more than an hour, including a couple of rambling, charming, not always accurate chats – we got a fair selection of them. Done well? Hmm, that’s trickier.

Warwick’s voice, not surprisingly, is not anywhere near what it was. The range isn’t there, the breath is clipped and it was a worrying sign at the start that she was encouraging us to sing along at any opportunity we chose.

But, thankfully, the phrasing and remnants of the tone remain, power emerged at times, such as the climax of I Say A Little Prayer and I’ll Never Love This Way Again, and Warwick worked the lines with grace. And, it should be noted, some courage.

Some veteran singers beef up the stage sound with extra vocalists and more instruments to compensate for a voice that isn’t what it once was. Warwick eschews this with just percussion, drums, piano and bass.

The issues mostly fell in what was likely accommodation for that faltering voice. Walk On By, Anyone Who Had A Heart and Message To Michael were too slow; This Girl’s In Love With You and You’ll Never Get To Heaven were ponderous (and the latter beyond her range), robbing these gems of the Bacharach rhythmic flair.

More successfully, a new arrangement of I Say A Little Prayer moved it further into Latin territory with a fluid rhythm, Albert Hammond and Hal David’s 99 Miles From LA worked a lovely little groove and, best of all, Do You Know The Way to San Jose? really nailed the movement, taking it into Cuban realms, and the band metaphorically loosened those bow ties.

We could easily have done without the pallid but popular That’s What Friends Are For when a genuinely great song like Trains And Boats And Planes was ignored, and even at this reduced level, a couple of more songs would not have been out of place, but it was a nice way to say thanks and farewell.

OPERA
THE BARBER OF SEVILLE
Opera Australia, Opera House, January 18
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★★

No less a figure than Giuseppe Verdi said Rossini’s The Barber of Seville was “the finest opera buffa ever written”, and this classic production by the late Elijah Moshinsky, which is 30 years old this year, retains its inventive brilliance and explosive absurdity, even though the opening night performance started slightly under top gear.

Soprano Serena Malfi, a newcomer, sang the part of Rosina with melodic grace in simple melody and immaculately even, rapid precision in galloping cabalettas. She adopted an insouciant, sometimes sullen characterisation which seemed to shrug off the role’s virtuosity with a raised eyebrow and a glower.

In the first cavatina, Ecco ridente in cielo, there was a slightly tense edge to John Longmuir’s tenor sound as Count Almaviva, as though the comic mask fitted a little tightly. But in the later ensembles the incisiveness of tone gelled with the self-entitled and self-obsessed anxiety of the character he built, and his sound cut through brilliantly in ensembles.

Also new to Opera Australia audiences was Samuel Dale Johnson who portrayed Figaro as an eager, over energetic factotum, the articulation crisp, the tone amiably light. Andrew Moran as Dr Bartolo, on the other hand, spat out syllables like machine-gun fire when needed, while inhabiting the character’s bad-tempered pomposity with dyspeptic spleen and vocal grit.

David Parkin, as Don Basilio, sang the “slander” aria, where he plots malicious rumours against the Count, with a rich sound and oleaginous relish (in the next play of Beaumarchais’ trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro, these slanders, of course, turn out to be true). Jane Ede was wonderfully accomplished in the role of Berta, highlighting bright flashes in the ensembles and making a cameo of her drunken aria Il vecchiotto cerca moglie.

It is in the ensembles and choruses where the chaos and hilarity of this production are brewed. Michael Yeargan’s dolls-house sets and Howard Harrison’s lighting exert voyeuristic attraction, while Dona Granata’s costumes subtly push each characterisation into slightly exaggerated absurdity.

The Opera Australia chorus carried moments like the close of the Act 1 finale, where police officers enact a Keystone Cops routine, with slapstick aplomb, and film gags of the same historic vintage enliven the storm interlude in front of a scrolling panorama.

Synchronisation between stage and pit was generally smooth though occasionally slipped a notch. Conductor Daniel Smith pushed the Opera Australia Orchestra to a brisk pace in the overture which, however, didn’t quite leave enough acceleration space for the coda.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL
LOTTE BETTS-DEAN
Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, January 16
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★½

In a blackened auditorium, except for a green backdrop and frivolous overgarments, mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and pianist Ronan Apcar performed a continuous playlist of music from Baroque to Björk, Clara Schumann to Schoenberg, recitative to rap without break or back-announcement, creating a de-historicised sequence linked only by the logic of chance association and contrarian juxtaposition.

They opened with the first of Bartok’s Eight Hungarian Folksongs, with a flourish on the piano, richly rounded vowels and weighty declamation, leading seamlessly to the simpler delicacy of one of Madeleine Dring’s Five Betjeman Songs. Caroline Shaw’s Rise introduced a hymn-like part on electronics with recitative and chanteuse-like vocalisations, while Courtney Barnett’s Kim’s Caravan moved inside the piano with initially gentle strumming, building to pulverising stridency against whimsical vocal ruminations.

In Giancinto Scelsi’s Hô 1 for solo voice, Betts-Dean modulated the tone through calibrated changes of vowel and mouth-shape, with stuttering and convulsive vocalisations that explored the very notion of inarticulacy. In Barbara Strozzi’s L’Eraclito amoroso (1651) Betts-Dean indulged seventeenth century ornamentation though the piano accompaniment that was unduly dry.

The high tesitura of Lili Boulanger’s Parfois, je suis triste stretched her mezzo range but was well-controlled while Messiaen’s Prière exaucée from Poèmes pour Mi captured angularity and declamatory drama. Linda Buckley’s revelavit part 1 for voice and electronics showcased dreamy wispy lines over a remote, constantly changing background, conjuring unidentified instruments and distant voices.

John Adams Am I in your light? from the opera Doctor Atomic explored intimate erotic moments fading to nothing. After a song by Schoenberg, Clara Schumann’s Warum willst du and’re fragen? balanced 19th century phrases against an under-projected piano part that lacked legato.

Björk’s Jóga and Charli XCX’s I think about it all the time expanded the amplified sound world with ethereal and plucked sounds, sampled bass and rapid rap-style delivery. After the folk song style of Josephine Stephenson’s Rosemary Lane, Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece whistled, clicked and vocalised, before Sinead O’Connor’s Jackie returned to a ballad style for a slow build-up of ever-increasing intensity.

In Isabella Gellis’s I wish I could speak to you the accompaniment was improvisatory and delicate against whispery vocal lines, while in Luke Abbott’s Revelations of Divine Love, the electronic accompaniment matched and echoed Betts-Dean’s changes of vowel and nasal tones in real time.

A song by Ligeti recalled the opening Bartok in ferocious terms while Mathis Saunier’s Cannibal used quiet, rapid rap singing, though without sharp edge, to create a vision of a fractured reality. Songs by William Bolcom and Blossom Dearie brought the extended sequence to a surprisingly sentimental close.

Though I prefer hearing music in the composer’s context to this curated mix of excerpts from everywhere, Betts-Dean displayed generous versatility, stamina and ambitious range.

THEATRE
HAMLET CAMP
Carriageworks, January 16
Until January 25
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

What to do when “H” is coursing through your veins, and you constantly crave more? Where to go? If the “H” stands for Hamlet rather than heroin, help is at hand. Ex-Hamlets can attend Hamlet Camp, a rehabilitation facility for those poor souls who’ve play-acted the Dane, and since that day have never been quite sane.

Conceived by Brendan Cowell, and written, directed and performed by Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz, Hamlet Camp is January’s highlight. Played in the round on a bare stage in a smallish space, it spotlights performance rather than director-driven conceptions. Part of the point, in fact, is to poke fun at directors who will not let well enough alone; who forget “the play’s the thing”.

It begins with poems penned and delivered by each actor. Autobiographical, each is bravely candid and brilliantly performed, drawing us in, not to people who played Hamlet, but to people whom Hamlet consumed. Schmitz’s Skip Retail Therapy looks back at his time selling second-hand books, a world so far from reality that a customer could ask for “the non-fiction fantasy”.

Cowell’s Storage tells of disencumbering his life to move to London and discovering his hired storage unit gave him his greatest sense of home. Leslie’s rhyming Ship to Shore, is about becoming an actor, that fateful calling demanding “the thickest skin with an open heart”. Claudia Haines-Cappeau then performs a little dance as Ophelia, and much later returns as a fourth (“she/her”) Hamlet.

Now in asylum garb, Cowell plays Stephen, Schmitz is Marcus and Leslie is Cameron – the latest to be committed, he maintains he’s still Hamlet, a stage the others have outgrown. But something is rotten in the state of their treatment. To be cruel only to be kind, every time they begin to quote from Hamlet they receive an electric shock to the neck.

“To be” becomes a dangerous way to start a sentence. Despite this ever-present threat, they compare their forays into this pinnacle of psychological and philosophical insight. Poor Cameron was condemned to play all the roles in a cine-theatre production, while Stephen’s director had a bet each way, incorporating both swords and mobile phones.

Along the way a disembodied voice tells them it’s time for such compulsory workshops as “Off-Stage Women” or “Breathing”. Cameron must also be “purged” of believing he’s Hamlet, a semi-surgical operation the others have already survived.

Ultimately, there is no recovery and there’s the rub. You’re hooked for life – except you become too old to play the role, the predicament in which they now find themselves. That may sound glum, but the show’s wildly funny, these three fellows of infinite jest volleying off one another in hugely engaging fashion, and enjoying the therapy of an excuse to revisit the great Dane. Well, almost. Brevity being the soul of wit, it flashes past in 90 minutes. The rest is silence.

DANCE
KATMA
The Neilson Nutshell, January 16
Until January 19
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★

You don’t queue in a subdued ticket line for Katma. You crowd into the Neilson Nutshell’s vestibule, the ushers directing the excited crowd like bouncers. A muffled “doof doof doof” DJ beat (Jack Prest’s music) leaks from behind closed doors.

These swing open and the Nutshell no longer looks like a Shakespearean theatre but a post-industrial warehouse-turned-club. Only a few high stools fringe the room’s edges, so we spread out and stand, some moving to the music as downlights form little wells of brightness. The most tangible thing is that beat. Then the dancing starts.

Katma is the creation of Sudanese dance artist and educator Azzam Mohamed, aka Shazam, and arts company PYT Fairfield where Mohamed is artist-in-residence. He never studied dance formally but trained in the places that form the beating heart of street dance: the underground and community scene.

Bringing that energy, depth and culture to Walsh Bay, the epicentre a mainstream festival, Katma brims over with a raw, euphoric authenticity that is infectious and culturally rich. It immediately pulls the mask off any pretentious modern art you might have recently seen.

Katma is immersive: the audience becomes part of the dance scene as Mohamed and his six dancers move around the room. The audience follow excitedly, whooping and cheering with each new improvisation. It peaks as the dancers lead the now-insatiable audience in a dance-off.

Katma is advertised as a fusion of street and club styles: breaking, hip-hop, krump, waacking, locking, house and Afro dances. On opening night it was dominated by house, emphasising freestyling and vibing, and – as in any improvised work – varying in energy and interest. All the dancers are transcendental, but keep a special eye out for Angelica Osuji and Naethiel Lumbra.

From its Western Sydney base, PYT Fairfield emphasises inclusivity. In this respect, Katma is remarkable. For many in the usual inner-Sydney crowd, there’s little opportunity to experience the richness of the street dance scene unless you happen to know the right dance people or move in certain multicultural communities.

Katma breaks these socioeconomic barriers, exposing greater Sydney’s rich, joyous multicultural fabric. If nothing else, in Raygun’s cringeworthy wake, it’s a reminder of Australia’s authentic street dance scene. To the point where, after the show, a couple of ecstatic audience members panted: “That was amazing – even better than therapy!”