Source : the age
MUSIC
Gracie Abrams | The Secret of Us Tour ★★★
Rod Laver Arena, May 9
If you were at the Carlton versus St Kilda match on Friday night and aren’t familiar with the work of Gracie Abrams, you could be forgiven for wondering if an under 18s craft convention was in town.
Gracie Abrams performs at Rod Laver Arena on Friday, May 9.Credit: Abby Waisler
Where Taylor Swift’s fans have friendship bracelets, Abrams’ devotees show their support by wearing bows in their hair. TikTok videos dedicated entirely to documenting this phenomenon across her various shows around the world have racked up millions of views, not least because Abrams’ fan base is predominantly teenage girls native to the social media platform. And so looking out across Rod Laver Arena on Friday evening, it’s a sea of (mostly white) ribbons.
The first of Abrams’ three sold-out Melbourne shows for The Secret of Us tour, the 25-year-old kicked off with crowd favourites Felt good about you and Risk before announcing her intention for the evening: “My goal for the show is that it’s kind of a big duet.”
To her credit, Abrams achieved this easily and then some. For much, if not all, of the performance, the crowd matched her word for word and filmed themselves “being loud about our feelings”, as Abrams had encouraged them to be, when their favourite song was played.
In some ways, it felt like high-school camp on steroids, with the nicest, most polite group of teenagers you’ve ever come across. She asked fans to smile for polaroids and played from a B-set designed to resemble a teenage girl’s bedroom – a wrought iron bed adorned with a floral bedspread, fairy lights, a leather book filled with lyrics held open by a claw hair clip – for a solo portion of the show. Her genuine delight and connection to her fans was apparent every time Abrams waved, smiled, nodded to confirm she’d seen the waves of the girls wondering if it was indeed them she was looking at.
But the things that make Abrams’ music so appealing to a mass market – lyrics filled with sincerity, an internal intensity, a longing to be the object of desire, and references to the modern era – are the things that fail to set her apart distinctly enough from her contemporaries.
This tour marks the first time Abrams is headlining an arena show. To anyone in attendance older than her primary fan base (read: parents on chaperoning duty), you could feel it. By around the 60-minute mark, the omnipresence of her influences and collaborators – Taylor Swift, Lorde, The National, Bon Iver, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush – had settled in, so much so that my friend asked if she was playing a Swift cover during Us (her duet with Swift).
An encore of That’s So True (which has been streamed over 1 billion times to date) and Close to You, easily her most upbeat pop offering, drove home the show for one last mass sing-a-long before the sea of ribbons moved into the night, leaving middle-aged footy fans bemused and confused in their wake.
Reviewed by Katy Hall
THEATRE
The Black Woman of Gippsland ★★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, until May 31
Real-life First Nations heroes have fuelled the drama in a couple of playwright Andrea James’ previous works. Sunshine Super Girl told the inspiring story of tennis great Evonne Goolagong, while the brilliant rock musical Big Name, No Blankets traced the rise to fame of the trailblazing Warumpi Band
Chenoa Deemal, Zach Blampied and Ursula Yovich in a scene from The Black Woman of Gippsland.Credit: Pia Johnson
The Black Woman of Gippsland marks a turn to historical mystery and the disastrous arc of “first contact” history. Its fictional heroine is an aspiring academic, a young Gunaikurnai woman devoted to exploring truths behind a haunting colonial myth with a destructive legacy.
Doctoral candidate Jacinta Pepper (Chenoa Deemal) lives with her Auntie Rochelle (Ursula Yovich) and her teenage cousin Kyle (Zach Blampied). She has become obsessed by the subject of her thesis – the legend of “The White Woman of Gippsland”, an unverified sighting of a white woman, possibly a shipwreck survivor, who was reported to have been living among the Gunaikurnai in the 1840s.
Was the woman kidnapped, or running away from an abusive husband? Did she exist at all? No reliable trace of her was ever found, though the missions mounted to rescue her became a pretext for murder and land theft, an undeclared genocide on a terrible scale.
When a distracted Jacinta fails to pick up Kyle from basketball practice, an argument with her auntie prompts her to vanish and pursue her work alone. A panicked Rochelle tries to file a missing person report. It’s a traumatic experience, as the sergeant (Ian Bliss) represents a system blind to its own structural racism; he bears responsibility for yet another Indigenous death in custody.
L-R: Chenoa Deemal and Ian Bliss.Credit: Pia Johnson
Meanwhile, Jacinta pores through biased colonial sources, probes the mystery from every angle, attempts to collect and preserve her mob’s oral histories, and works to counter the intellectual vanity of her academic supervisor – and the primacy given to the written word that suppresses the voices of her people.
The Black Woman of Gippsland is thoroughly grounded in the present. It shifts through fly-on-the-wall domestic drama, an academic puzzle being solved in a motel room, and tense encounters at police stations and in halls of scholarship.
The sense of immediacy is deepened, though, by timeless manifestations of Gunaikurnai language and culture. Dance theatre in a possum-skin cloak from performer Brent Watkins haunts the action, and visual and sonic design cast aside the shackles of colonial imagination.
In a climactic scene, reams of academic papers flutter uselessly through the air, and the now Dr. Jacinta Pepper dedicates her thesis to a missing “Black Woman of Gippsland” before returning to Country, silent and tranquil, in a restorative moment of theatrical magic that words alone could never achieve.
Reviewed by Cameron Wooodhead
MUSIC
The Offspring | Supercharged Tour ★★★
with Simple Plan, Rod Laver Arena, May 7
Jeez, we’re getting old. I could have sworn it was just the other week my cousin made us all laugh by thrusting to The Offspring’s Pretty Fly (for a White Guy), or since my little sister was signing her name with the Simple Plan singer’s surname. But blink and I’m in my mid-30s, wearing sensible shoes and not squashed against the barrier but sitting down to see both bands live.
Millennials like me are awash with nostalgia – touring companies know it, and double bills like this seem targeted squarely at us. Looking around you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the early 2000s: flannels, band tees and wallet chains abound.
Todd Morse (left) and Dexter Holland of The Offspring at Rod Laver Arena on May 7.Credit: Richard Clifford
Simple Plan’s innocent pop-punk is frozen in time: life is hard, Dad is mean, don’t tell me what to do, I’m sorry I can’t be perfect! It’s bemusing hearing all this from the now 45-year-old singer Pierre Bouvier, but it’s also charming in its earnestness. The Canadians are an excellent live act, even if some of the older punks are grimacing through it – Bouvier could qualify for the Olympics with his high jump, and drummer Chuck Comeau dives into the audience for a crowd-surf near the end of the almost hour-long set.
An inflatable blimp circles the arena, capturing footage of the crowd as games play out on screen: are you brave enough for the Kiss Cam, Booty Cam or Headbang Cam? It’s another nostalgic trick: we may as well be at the Big Day Out.
The Offspring is an immediate blast of energy, but Dexter Holland’s voice has seen better days – he’s straining in an acoustic introduction to Want You Bad and clamours to be heard above the band through the rest of the set. Fair enough – he’s been at this for over 40 years – but Holland fares much better in the songs where he speak-sings (Original Prankster, Pretty Fly).
An extended section where the Californian band jams instrumental covers – Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King – culminates in The Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop. It seems odd for a band with 11 albums under its belt – surely enough material to fill a set.
The Offspring is an immediate blast of energy.Credit: Richard Clifford
They pull out all the stops – confetti guns, pyrotechnics, tube men and inflatable skeletons – and when they’re on, they’re on. But there’s so much whiplash in this show – the jarring transition from the phone-lights-out, piano-led Gone Away to the bratty 1998 single Why Don’t You Get a Job? is a prime example. Nostalgic, for sure – but maybe some things are better simply remembered.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
MUSIC
ZZ Top | The Elevation Tour ★★★★
with special guests George Thorogood & the Destroyers, Margaret Court Arena, May 7
You know that bit in The Blues Brothers where the car chase starts at night and about seven minutes in, there’s a cut and suddenly it’s daytime, but the car chase is still going? And you think “by any normal metric, this car chase is too long. But I’m still loving it!” Well, that’s what every blues-rocking guitar solo was like from both George Thorogood and ZZ Top on Wednesday night, where it truly felt like too long wasn’t long enough.
George Thorogood strutted on stage at Margaret Court Arena like a man who is the party and kicked things off with: “How sweet it is! Welcome in everybody, there’s a rock party tonight!” then, bam! Straight into Rock Party, because subtlety is for Radiohead.
Elwood Francis (left) and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top perform on stage at Margaret Court Arena on May 7.Credit: Martin Philbey
Thorogood made it clear that words were not the most important part of the evening, shouting “I hope you appreciate my intellectual lyrics” after playing his truck-tastic Gear Jammer. But he and the excellent Destroyers hit all the needed themes of the night, from lust (Mama, Talk to Your Daughter) to liquor (One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer) to licks (Bad to the Bone) while sticking admirably to the night’s overarching theme of boogie-woogie, blues-rockin’, country-smellin’ guitar worship. A truly excellent set that could only be followed by the masters of the genre, ZZ Top.
ZZ Top came on looking like ZZ Top, which is a culturally beautiful thing to witness. Resplendent in beards, cheap sunglasses and rhinestones, they got straight into ’80s classic Got Me Under Pressure and the response was as big as Elwood Francis’ giant 17-stringed yellow bass.
Like a perfect marriage, for 51 years the Top’s lineup was unchanged, making them perhaps the most consistent rock ‘n’ roll lineup of all time. Dusty Hill’s passing in 2021 led to his replacement with Francis, the band’s long-time guitar tech, who is the perfect mix of silly fun and deep groove to step into Hill’s shoes, whilst John Douglas, despite sitting in darkness behind a double bass-drummed metal-style behemoth of a kit, plays an admirable Frank Beard, who is temporarily out of the tour due to medical issues.
One of the things I have always adored about ZZ Top is their understated, charming choreography, moving like marionettes handled by an octogenarian. Happily, this means they have lost none of their performance ability, even 56 years into their career. We don’t need to see them running about and climbing speaker stacks, because they never have. We’re all just happy that their fingers pluck and strum on classics like Pearl Necklace, My Head’s in Mississippi, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs as perfectly as when those tracks were released.
Billy Gibbons may have aged, but he has never grown up.Credit: Martin Philbey
After an encore’s fuchsia-based costume change, the band once again keep their banter at a minimum, letting their clothes do the talking and their bass-lines do the walking (except when the bass-lines are more syncopated and groove-driven).
They hit us with the blues of Brown Sugar, the boogie of Tube Snake Boogie and the brilliance of La Grange, bringing the whole floor section to their feet. If there is one lesson to be learned of the evening, it is that while rock ‘n’ roll may age, it never grows up.
Reviewed by Andrew McClelland
DANCE | Yirramboi
Mythosoma ★★★
Chunky Move Studios, May 10
The publicity material for this show, with its talk of soma multiplicity and sophic entanglements, gives little hint as to its content. With such cosmic vagueness – and a title that sounds like a wellness app – you’d be forgiven for approaching with trepidation.
Mythosoma is a carefully composed and visually appealing piece of dance theatre.Credit: Kelly Nash
But fear not. Mythosoma is a carefully composed and visually appealing piece of dance theatre: earnest, yes, but also well crafted, with a sophisticated interplay of spoken text and movement drawn from street dance and contact improvisation.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Although produced by a new company called Body Islands, the show is directed by Kelly Nash, an artist closely associated with Atamira Dance Company, New Zealand’s premiere Māori contemporary dance outfit.
At its heart is the notion of the body as living archive. This is spelled out in Nancy Wijohn’s opening monologue, which evokes the body’s capacity to register pain, heartache and more specific forms of violence.
She insists that it is through movement – and through the sustained development of an individual movement practice – that this archive of trauma can be transformed, and the suffering reclaimed for its expressive potential.
If there’s a drawback to Mythsoma, it’s the brevity.Credit: Kelly Nash
The process is illustrated in three episodes featuring Samoan dancer Ooshcon. It begins with a comic classroom scene where he is triggered by a choreographer’s misplaced attentions. The next scene indicates his distress through images of constriction and breathlessness.
In the final scene, he takes centre stage. His distinctive street style emphasises fluid arm and hand articulations, while the torso remains poised – held back, restrained – sending waves of movement outward.
All the performers – the cast also features Jada Narkle and Moana Ete – bring remarkable strength and presence. And Rob Larsen’s faceted set adds depth, suggesting disclosure, emergence, a gradual movement from shadow into light.
If there’s a drawback, it’s the brevity. At under an hour, Mythosoma feels prematurely resolved. A more sustained dramatic arc would have allowed the work and its dancers the space to more fully unfold.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
JAZZ
Tripudiis Sonis Variis ★★★★★
The JazzLab, May 7
It’s not often you hear a jazz trio perform an entire program of music written 400 years ago. But while the Baroque era might seem worlds away from jazz – geographically, temporally and culturally – Tripudiis Sonis Variis draw connections between the two genres that allow this early music to pulse with a contemporary heartbeat.
Mirko Guerrini, Ilaria Crociani and Stephen Magnusson at The JazzLab on May 7.Credit: Roger Mitchell
As Italian-born, Melbourne-based singer Ilaria Crociani explained to the audience on Wednesday night, Baroque composers expected performers to interpret and improvise on their works, so she and her colleagues (Mirko Guerrini and Stephen Magnusson) “don’t feel guilty” about reimagining this music through a jazz prism.
Not that the trio aims to turn 17th-century arias and cantatas into finger-snapping, swing-laden grooves. Rather, their thoughtful arrangements are designed to underline the timeless beauty of the melodies and lyrics, and the universal human emotions they convey.
Most of the lyrics in Wednesday’s program were in Italian, but Crociani prefaced each song with vivid stories that offered a window into the realm of various composers, characters and emotional states. Her vocal delivery, too, was effortlessly expressive, conveying the anguish of unrequited love or the yearning for divine intervention without a hint of bombast.
Guerrini and Magnusson were equally focused on subtlety and understatement, picking out ravishing melodies or elegant contrapuntal lines that wove around Crociani’s voice like silver threads. Magnusson’s guitar could stride with lute-like clarity or dissolve into wafts of resonance; Guerrini might set up an electronic hum on his laptop, then overlay it with lyrical piano chords or a melancholy extemporisation on soprano sax.
I’m not sure Monteverdi could have imagined his music being played on an Indian harmonium, Armenian duduk and electric guitar, but somehow it all worked perfectly. It felt as though the musicians – and the audience – were tapping into something both ancient and eternal, demonstrating that the ability of this music to invoke both contemplation and elevation is as powerful now as it was four centuries ago.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas
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