Musical of beloved film a bonanza of ‘wow’ moments at the outer limits of the possible

MUSICAL THEATRE
BACK TO THE FUTURE THE MUSICAL
Sydney Lyric, until January 2026
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

You knew in your bones that a musical hatched from a sci-fi film would have at least one eye-bulging, jaw-dropping moment, and it didn’t disappoint. Forget Phantom’s chandelier or Miss Saigon’s helicopter: what the DeLorean does in Back to the Future is in a different stratosphere of wonderment. I won’t spoil it for anyone who goes, but it’s worth sitting through two-and-a-half hours of uneven show to see the car at “speed”, and then … flying!

For anyone who’s been hiding under a rock for 40 years, the story tells of Marty, an all-American student in 1985, who hooks up with Doc, a scientist who solves (most of) the problems of time travel. Marty shoots back to 1955 and meets his parents before they were an item. It’s a cute premise, whether at face value, or withstanding anything from philosophical to quasi-Oedipal scrutiny.

Earlier this century, the movie’s writers, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, hit upon a musical, and brought some wide-screen thinking to the production, which, in design terms, is a bonanza of “wow” moments at the outer limits of the possible.

If we’re nearly halfway through the review without talking about characterisations, performances, music or choreography, that tells you where the show’s priorities lie – with notable exceptions. Roger Bart originated the role of Doc in London, took it to Broadway and now he is Sydney, where his first appearance gives the show a shot in the arm. Bart ensures that, like Marty, we fall for the Doc’s eccentric ingenuity, madcap daring, intellectual hypothesising, moral compass, humour and benevolence.

Axel Duffy’s performance as Marty grows on you as it becomes more multifaceted. After all, how many sons have to deal with their mother (ignorant of the son’s identity) trying to seduce them? Duffy brings a boy-next-door likeability, and he can sing his socks off when required.

Ah, yes, the songs. These were crafted by the movie’s original composer, Alan Silvestri, in collaboration with Glen Ballard, and they flit quirkily between 1955 and 1985. They also range from ballads that you wish you could fast-forward to songs as thoroughly engaging as Gotta Start Somewhere, For the Dreamers, and Teach Him a Lesson.

Ashleigh Rubenach, Ethan Jones and Javon King are commendable in the minor roles, and both the ensemble work (choreographed by Chris Bailey) and Daniel Griffin’s nine-piece band are as tight as a wound clock.

At the end, global producer Colin Ingram, director John Rando and writer Bob Gale came out, with the latter recounting how the original idea had come from his seeing school photos of his father, and wondering, had he been able to meet him then if they’d have been friends. He also told us about the rejections they received before the first movie was made, and the repeat process with the musical. As the song says: “This one’s for the dreamers/Who never stop believing”.

MUSICAL
RENT
Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Until November 1
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★

Jonathan Larson once envisioned his embryonic musical as “Hair for the ’90s”. He hoped it would bring music theatre to the MTV generation.

His tale of impoverished artists struggling to survive in New York City’s gritty Alphabet City amid the HIV/AIDS pandemic would go on to capture the zeitgeist in the way the earlier rock musical channelled the rebellion of the Vietnam era.

Not that Larson lived to see his hopes realised. He died unexpectedly in 1996, aged 35, as previews were about to begin. His demise has been forever intertwined with a show in which the spectre of untimely death, the fragility of life and an emphasis on living for the day are its dominant themes.

It’s loosely based on Giacomo Puccini’s sweeping La boheme, its setting of 19th-century Paris replaced with 20th-century Lower East Side Manhattan.

The show feels more like a work-in-progress than a fully formed piece with more than its share of bumpy storylines and segues.

It’s a show with humanity, and it is this that director Shaun Rennie has drawn out in his energetic Opera Australia production. It emphasises difference, friendship and community within a fractious but compassionate tribe of artists, addicts, drag queens, dykes and down-and-outs.

But in the long first half, it’s difficult to determine whose story is central as so many characters come in and out of focus. This was not helped on opening night by an uneven sound balance that at times drowned out the lyrics in this fully sung-through show.

The stronger second half, which kicks off with the melodic Seasons of Love – beautifully sung by the large ensemble – was more compelling, its narrative clearer. Its less frenetic pace gives space for the characters to cohere.

At the emotional heart is the gender-bending Angel, a playful and galvanising force played with presence and warmth by Jesse Dutlow in the production’s most moving performance. As Angel’s lover Collins, Googoorewon Knox’s caramel voice leaves you longing for more.

Angel and Collins were a more convincing pairing than lovers Mimi (Kristin Paulse) and Roger (Harry Targett). Calista Nelmes was a standout as the flamboyant, combative Maureen.

Musical director Jack Earle set a strong pace leading the five-piece band through a mix of rock, ballad, blues and anthemic pop. It’s a pity the music itself is more serviceable than memorable.

Dann Barber’s set dominated by scaffolding gives an appropriately grungy, makeshift feel as do Ella Butler’s sombre, ragtag costumes.

Nearly three decades on, much has changed since Rent premiered – and not just that Alphabet City is not gentrified.

Larson’s musical ran on Broadway for 12 years. Now the fate of Broadway musicals is more precarious than a tribe of impoverished bohemians. Post-pandemic, new musicals have struggled to make money, and even lavish revivals have fizzled.

With Opera Australia increasingly reliant on musicals, it no doubt hopes that this one will help pay its rent. This solid production celebrates values under fire in today’s Trumpland – diversity, hope and artistic freedom. It feels like an act of resistance.

MUSIC
The Wombats
Hordern Pavilion, October 1
reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½

England’s finest marsupial-monikered indie rockers have been turning awkwardness and anxiety into anthems since encouraging the world to dance to Joy Division on their debut.

Six albums and about 20 years later, The Wombats’ latest nugget from that rich seam of unlikely dance-floor fillers serves as a perfect opening to a barnstorming evening at The Hordern. Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come serves as a mission statement: there are tight grooves from Dan Haggis (drums) and Tord Knudsen (bass) as lead vocalist and guitarist Matthew Murphy croons sweetly about hating everyone. (Just hum it in your head at the next management-enforced team meeting.)

The more bombastic, if still jaundiced, Moving to New York and Techno Fan soon have the crowd pulsating, while the explosive Ready for the High brings a manic “seven-foot trombone-playing wombat” to the stage to wreak havoc. It’s a trick they’ve played before, but it’s a fun one.

They are on solid ground tackling tainted love with a metaphorical twist: Pink Lemonade explores jealousy and fears of infidelity, Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves) is a hedonistic escape from demons and lovers, and Lemon to a Knife Fight is as cutting as it is blistering.

The newer material has smoother edges. Can’t Say No emerges as quite upbeat, although Murphy says he hasn’t figured out how to play it; My Head is Not My Friend is downcast but pleasant; Blood on the Hospital Floor ends strongly to arrest the set from something of a lull in the middle.

Method in the Madness builds from a moody low to a placebo-esque rock explosion, a reminder that the trio can pack a powerful punch. This propels the night on to a rousing climax, via knife fights, Greek tragedies and adorkable stalkers (If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You). Life can be tough, but you might as well dance.

The Wombats may not have wanted to come, but few in the crowd would be sad they went.

MUSIC
MOONSTRUCK
Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Centre Ultimo, September 28
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★★

When asked what she liked about Picasso’s paintings, Gertrude Stein is reputed to have said, “I like to look at them.” This is the opposite of composer Laura Bowler’s reaction to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire which she said she admired (sort of) but didn’t like listening to.

Personally, I enjoyed listening to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) more than Bowler’s Deconstructing Pierrot (2024) in this imaginative collaboration between Ensemble Offspring (celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year) and Sydney Chamber Opera, but the impact of such works also lies in the way they live in the memory. Both received superb performances.

In the first half, soprano Jane Sheldon joined with actor Mitch Riley, director Eugene Lynch and a quintet from Ensemble Offspring under artistic director Jack Symonds to create a wonderfully stylised presentation of Pierrot lunaire which laid out its structure and narrative trajectory with cogency and engaging theatricality.

Hinting at a number fetish, Schoenberg called the work Three times seven poems from Albert Giraud’s “Pierrot lunaire” and through lighting and costume change the logic behind these groupings became manifest as the work moved through phases of ghostly, macabre and inter-personal imagery.

Although it was unfortunate that the nature of the presentation necessitated amplification, Sheldon, brought intimacy and swirling nuance to Schoenberg’s sprechstimme, a style of spoken singing with which he created a sense of expressionist delirium. She varied the mix of spoken and sung elements judiciously and acted out the nightmarish narrative with impressive versatility and flair.

Mitch Riley created a silent alter-ego as moonbeam, lover, doppelganger and executioner with elegance, wit and a highly sophisticated theatrical instinct. Although not ideally placed for sound, Ensemble Offspring created moments of carefully shaded mania.

In Bowler’s Deconstructing Pierrot in the second half, singer Jessica Aszodi, in quasi-Pierrot costume, blended her voice with diffuse instrumental writing and digital sound (controlled by Benjamin Carey) with poise and masterly control of pitch and tone even in the most exposed and extreme passages.

Bowler makes the voice perform as though it were an instrument, repeating dismembered textural blocks like an old vinyl record jumping a groove to create a desiccated style of obstinate banality. In the closing section Aszodi obsessively and impressively repeated the interval of the tritone (the “devil’s interval” and notoriously hard to pitch) while moving ever upwards in range without flinching or a hint of imprecision.

The tone of angry and irreverent rejection was pointedly underlined theatrically when Aszodi ended one song by squashing what seemed to be a perfectly good tomato.

THEATRE
RUINS أطلال
Seymour Centre, until October 18
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★

As it was told to a son by his father before their departure from Lebanon, the goddess Baal – from which the city of Baalbek is named – demands such loyalty from her citizenry, she exacts a sacrifice from those who leave. A piece of their heart must be cut out and buried in the earth by her temple. The emigrant’s toll, then, is eternal heartache – a separation of self lodged in the abandoned homeland.

That son, Joe, is now dead, his own heart giving out in his grandchild’s room in Australia. His daughter Amelia, out of filial duty, is returning for the first time to her ancestral home. It’s a city of ruins – of the ancient, venerated kind, but also those of the more tourism-repelling, history-amnesiac kind.

In Room 27 of the storied Palmyra Hotel, Amelia (Randa Sayed) will trace her father’s own secret return decades ago to uncover a vital part of herself. Her father (Tony Poli) haunts the edges of a veil-shrouded figure (Madeline Baghurst), appealing to Baal. Amelia’s own daughter is present during her journey, too, a disembodied voice on the phone.

Rich in mythical symbolism in mirrors and gods, with a stage that whirls bodies and objects through a phantasmagoria of intergenerational turbulence and ethnic violence, the powerfully conceived Ruins أطلال emerged in its first iteration last year through Belvoir’s 25a program. An already astonishing ensemble work then by Clockfire Theatre Company, a visionary indie principled in exploring new forms of collaboration and new methods of dynamic storytelling, the original has been expanded upon for the Seymour Centre’s main season.

This co-production has greater technical ambition, an updated cast, and sharpened politics around the Beirut massacre of Palestinian refugees, carried out by Israel’s proxy militia in 1982.

Under Emily Ayoub’s superb direction, time and space are slippery, riddles in a glassy metaphysics. We are in the ’80s, where a young Joe (Youssef Sabet) goes from detached hedonist, to witness, to documentarian, until love springs him into an involved citizen in the chaos of a city under attack. Then, the stage breathes in, and the hotel manager (Adeeb Razzouk) knocks on Amelia’s door. Another intake, a live flute adding its breath, and we are somewhere out of place and time altogether, Baal (Sayed) hunched on a high throne, eye sockets as bottomless pits.

Ayoub and Baghurst are behind this tale, but credit themselves as ‘devisers’, not playwrights. As they write in their program note, “together we have researched, improvised and explored memories and stories, some personal, some imagined. Every scene is a gesture we hope will honour these fragments of experience.”

The ‘fragment’ is a richly expansive concept, used in staging, too. Scenes come magically alive with minimal props through movement and suggestion, as visually arresting as they are ephemeral. Cast members will, for instance, evoke a hotel room by summoning a dresser, a door and a shining dish held aloft, with video and text projections layering their own textures on the back wall. The blocking demands an exacting choreography, and it is achieved with an almost miraculous grace. Clockfire are students of the Jacques Lecoq school, and its pedagogy of rhythm is ever-present.

Opening night had a few technical snags (sound drowning out a patch of dialogue, for instance), but doubtless these have had a swift redress. Despite some nostalgia for the original, in its immersive intimacy at Belvoir’s downstairs, this timeless yet immediate story of displacement and return remains a must-see in its full-scale debut.

MUSIC
Sydney Chamber Choir
Verbrugghen Hall, September 27
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★

Sydney Chamber Choir was formed in 1975. Fifty years on, it continues to thrive. As part of year-long celebrations, this concert brings together the most recent three artistic directors, an ensemble of current choristers and alumni, and a program packed with touchstone works.

Et Misericordia, for example, was commissioned by the choir in 1986 from Clare MacLean, one of its own choristers, who here rejoined the choir as an alumna to sing her own spiky counterpoints and rich harmonies. A more recent commission, Evening Star by Harry Sdraulig, set Edgar Allan Poe’s poem with deceptively diatonic melodies. Both works were dispatched with the well-articulated, blended tone that is the hallmark of this ensemble.

The concert opened under the baton of Paul Stanhope, conducting Nigel Butterley’s Surrexit Dominus, an early work sounding disarmingly straightforward at first, but with flashes of harmonic and rhythmic complexity that give tantalising hints at the composer’s emerging voice. Stanhope also navigated the choir through the joyful rhythms of Estonian composer Urmas Sisask’s Benedictio and the extended techniques and textures of Aija Draguns Dawn of Creation.

Stanhope passed the baton to Nicholas Routley for two settings of Sicut Lilium from the Old Testament’s Song of Songs: an exquisite miniature from French Renaissance composer Antoine Brumel, and Routley’s own setting, just as beautiful, but with a knowingly sensual overlay.

The choir’s current director, Sam Allchurch, began the final lap with Meta Cohen’s uplifting Meteora, and finished with another commission, Joseph Twist’s Sunrise on the Coast from Timeless Land. The combined forces of current and past choristers, including some of the original members, filled the Verbrugghen Hall with blazing sound.

A choir is not a constant thing: it changes as people change, as artistic directors come and go. The thing about Sydney Chamber Choir, as this concert so ably demonstrated, is that every work, every chorister, every conductor and composer involved with the ensemble across five decades has left their mark. Sydney Chamber Choir is not just an ensemble; it is a community.

Sydney Chamber Choir performs Bach’s Mass in B Minor at the City Recital Hall, Sydney on November 22.