Beware! This is the handsiest opera you’ll see in Melbourne all year

OPERA
The Coronation of Poppea ★★★
Victorian Opera, Palais Theatre, until July 4

Pearl-clutching ladies, avert your eyes – this is the handsiest opera you’ll see in Melbourne all year.

Director Sam Strong has trimmed much of the extra plot from the mid-1600s opera by Monteverdi, focusing on key relationships in Nero’s Rome in the first century AD. Nero is enamoured with his mistress, Poppea, and wants to get rid of his wife Ottavia. There’s some side romances, a murder plot involving mistaken identity (isn’t there always) and various other sexy schemers and plotters.

This iteration, with re-orchestration by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, was first mounted by Australian director Barrie Kosky for the Komische Oper Berlin. It was Kosky who said, in this opera, “there is essentially not a single truly positive figure”.

For a 2026 audience, that’s not really an issue. We’re used to seeing all sorts of deplorable, selfish behaviour play out in the world around us, and see monstrous narcissists rewarded for it. Parts of the Poppea plot feel uncannily contemporary.

Kats-Chernin’s jazz infused orchestration has been made anew by conductor Chad Kelly, who – along with intimacy co-ordinator Amy Cater – has worked industriously hard to cash this gig cheque. Kelly play-conducts from the piano, leading the VO Chamber Orchestra who excel at this funky early music/1980s-groove hybrid, while occasionally sliding over to play the bongos. Yes that’s right, bongos. It’s all very impressive.

So too is designer Anna Cordingley’s creation of director Strong’s vision: a combo of Miami Vice and Scarface. It’s camp, fun and effective. The choice to make some characters queer or tastefully gender-bent also worked well.

What is difficult to love about this early style of operatic writing is the “heightened speech” continuous singing. It provides almost no opportunity for any cast member to really shine.

Everyone did generally well across the board; Samuel Dundas a masculine Nero – best when slightly manic. Once a charming Rossini baritone, Dundas’ voice has some real heft behind it now, his future roles will be juicy.

Sydney-based Puerto Rican soprano Meechot Marrero as Poppea was passionate and provocative, with a warm, pleasing voice. Baritone David Greco’s coloratura was fantastic, as was bass-baritone Jeremy Kleeman’s depth of colour.

The most poignant moment though, belonged to young soprano Rachael Joyce, towards the end of the second act. Her voice possesses a delightful elegance that will serve her strongly in Mozart roles that are surely in her future.

These burdens will not be faults to all, but this Poppea is something of a niche experience that caters to a more, operatically adept and appreciative, audience.
Reviewed by Bridget Davies

THEATRE
Eddie Izzard performs Shakespeare’s Hamlet ★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until July 12

Solo adaptations of theatre classics come with a readymade selling-point: they’re the ultimate histrionic flex. If playing Hamlet is regarded as a difficult feat for an actor, try playing all 23 characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy by yourself, on a bare stage, without props or costumes…

That’s the challenge Suzy Eddie Izzard has set herself in this internationally touring production, and it’s fair to say that she takes the play seriously.

This isn’t some parody Hamlet, despite comedic flourishes, and it isn’t some gimmicky project, like Forced Entertainment’s The Complete Works, which saw each of Shakespeare’s plays narrated solo by a performer at a table, using kitchen utensils to represent the characters.

Nor is Izzard’s show more radically condensed, or shorter, than some productions of Hamlet with a full cast.

No, it’s a proper stab at Hamlet which respects the text and, whatever else might be said about it, the magnitude of Izzard’s acting is impressive to behold. You need a lot of technique, and still more stamina, to deliver coherent storytelling, to differentiate character, and to invest the drama with some shade of the storminess and ambiguity that make it a touchstone of early modern tragedy.
Even remembering all the lines would be impressive (and the occasional lapse, forgivable), but Izzard has a command of language that allows her to land famous soliloquies and to suggest an interpretation of most major characters.

That said, Izzard is at her best when she has a filigree of humour to work with – Polonius’s pompous gasbagging, say, or the gallows humour of the working-class gravediggers, or even an acidic remark from Gertrude – even if the liveliness of such moments never quite leads to the pathos which should attend the play’s tragic sweep of events.

Sweeping tragedy is a hard ask, solo, and the limitations loom largest in action sequences (which paradoxically slow things down) or during rapid-fire exchanges between multiple characters.

Nothing wrong with doing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as hand puppets, of course, and I suppose conducting a mock-fencing match with yourself was always going to look a bit ridiculous.

Still, direction of physical aspects of performance could be sharpened to reduce the amount that Izzard circles the stage for character switches, and to tighten the pace of various scenes, among other things.

Probably the most shortchanged character is Ophelia: the scene where she descends into madness is suitably piteous but the misogyny she suffers – Ophelia’s mistreatment by pretty much every man in her life – gets glossed over.

Theatre lovers hankering for a deep read of Hamlet may find it wanting, and artistically, the show doesn’t have the same flair for invention as Simon Stephens’ solo adaptation of Uncle Vanya starring Andrew Scott on the West End a few years back.

None of that is to deny Izzard’s talent, or the scale and ambition of the acting challenge, or the fact that this Hamlet is handled with wit, charm and seductive vocal clarity, and a rhetorical mastery that mainstream Australian Shakespearean performance doesn’t always deliver.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Losing Face ★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, Southbank Theatre, until July 25

Billed as “a perimenopausal Weekend at Bernie’s”, Marieke Hardy’s Losing Face should be funnier and more edifying than it is. And with Hardy’s well-known gift for spiky banter, smart production design and a wealth of comedic talent in the cast, that’s a disappointment.

The initial scenario resembles a subplot from The White Lotus more than Weekend at Bernie’s.
Travel writer Jo (Michala Banas) is turning 50.

To celebrate, she books a junket at an exclusive wellness resort with her two oldest friends – harried mum Lauren (Christie Whelan Browne) and knockabout lesbian Simone (Madeleine Sami) – and it isn’t long before they’re lobbing Gen X nostalgia bombs, regaling each other with the debaucheries and adventures of their misspent youth.

Regaling soon turns into reliving: the women will abandon relaxation treatments and collagen injections for a wild, drug-fuelled night on the town.

Before that happens, though, the creepiness of the resort makes itself felt. It’s run by a biohacking guru with a silly accent (Wil King), alongside his judgy nurse sidekick (Genevieve Morris), and the three women are pressured to have gravity-defying cosmetic surgery.

When disaster strikes and extended and escalating grotesquerie unfolds, a secret Jo has been hiding is revealed, and the play attempts to flick a switch from Weekend at Bernie’s to authentic tearjerker, in a way that feels completely unearned.

Scenes establishing female friendship through intimate chat do provide some of the better acting. Banas, Sami and Whelan Browne all bring chemistry to the mix, but there’s not much they can do about the shallowness of the characterisation, or the glib handling of the gender politics – from issues of body image to inequities in ageing – that the play raises.

King choreographs a clownish narcissism into the pantomime male villain, and Morris has amusing moments. Neither character does much to advance the plot, or to create genuine dramatic conflict, and while the hokum of the wellness industry is loosely mocked, it isn’t sharply satirised.

Losing Face also sniffs in the direction of (unbelievably tacky) comedy horror, before pulling back into sentiment. That last shift jars terribly with Hardy’s essentially nihilistic comic vision, and the titillation that the play’s more outrageous and puerile extrusions of humour seem designed to provoke.

I think Losing Face might best be enjoyed by Gen X audiences as a guilty pleasure. We get all the cultural touchstones and references, and might be more forgiving of a play that, often enough, looks more like a live-action midlife crisis than a work of dramatic art.

Overall, though, this is a missed opportunity, given the fact that feminist comedy lies behind some of our finest contemporary theatre.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
MR BIG aka Tatay, a Transwoman and That Tiring Tune! ★★★★
fortyfivedownstairs, until July 5

If MR BIG’s complete title is a mouthful, it’s at least a succinct encapsulation of everything you need to know about this theatre work.

The discordant refrains of Mr Big’s 1991 hit To Be with You chime in haphazardly throughout as two people are haunted by its stanzas: Tatay (Trevor Santos), a traditional patriarch attempting to make sense of his place in his nuclear family and the changes his son Dion (Ken Paolo) is undergoing in 1990s Manilla, and Diana (Dax Carnay-Hanrahan), a trans Filipina woman in the throes of planning her father’s funeral and her engagement party in present-day Melbourne.

MR BIG reaches across time and space to braid an undeniable link between these two people, each trapped in their inability to confront the source of their deepest pain and move forward. A freeloading philanderer, Tatay is the site of the original sin; his weaknesses, foibles and failures are inherited by Diana in a swirl of intergenerational trauma and unresolved pain that transcends continents, estrangement and, finally, death.

Simultaneously the playwright and lead actor, Carnay-Hanrahan, has crafted an expansive, elegiac play that eschews linearity to explore the inheritance of loss, the “Sisyphean debt” shouldered by migrants, and the toll of survival. Which is to say nothing of how funny it is.

Joyously bilingual as it toggles between English and Tagalog – cries of the expletive putangina are manifold – the play oscillates seamlessly between moments of immense pathos and sidesplittingly funny gallows humour. The play abounds with memorable one-liners, brought to the fore most notably by comedic force of nature Ayril Borce, who plays both Tito (Tatay’s best friend) and Alfie (Diana’s best friend) with the utmost pageantry and mirth.

The all-Filipino cast is unfaultable. Santos brings an endearing vulnerability to the maligned character of Tatay, preventing him from devolving into a villainous caricature. Paolo is affecting as a young queer man foisted with a responsibility that far outstrips his years, and Anna Buenaseda shines as the maternal Nanay across two timelines. Aiden Gale Miranda leans into the comedy of being Diana’s diminutive fiance Jerry while rising to the occasion in the dramatic moments, while Carnay-Hanrahan perfects the juggling act of a woman on the precipice of her forever-happy-after ending if the tentacles of past trauma don’t topple her.

Under Beng Oh’s direction, the strictures of time and space are collapsed as the characters inhabit the same plain, proving that the life lived in our heads is as real as the one that occurs outside of us. In one particularly thrilling scene that sees Diana recreating the mistakes of Tatay’s past, we witness two timelines unfurling at once as the characters echo, project and channel one another across decades.

All is revealed around a simple dining table. Christina Logan-Bell’s minimalistic set is backdropped by a gauzy curtain that both mimics the confines of conformity through a projected image of suburbia and acts as the thin veneer separating the alive from the dead.

If certain momentous reveals afforded little airtime beyond their divulgence feel superfluous against the main unfolding story, it’s but a minor quibble. That MR BIG wades into familiar territory while remaining mired in the hyper-specificities of the Filipina migrant trans experience and remaining true to this highly particular story is testament to its singularity as a piece of theatre.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

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