This legendary band said goodbye years ago – but their future still beckons

MUSIC
CROWDED HOUSE
State Theatre, October 22
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★★

Who better to warm up for Crowded House than a band with all the same members playing their songs?

Sauntering on stage a touch after 8pm needing no introduction, the legendary band led by Neil Finn and Nick Seymour joke about the weather and make a running gag of being a support act named Strangely Hot.

The loose opening set is charming, mixing new material with old gems, even taking Seymour’s miniature bass for a Reservoir Dogs-inspired walk as they “hang shit” on each other.

The music and songwriting are hard to fault: pop-rock pearls of wistfulness and wisdom, and they use the support act gimmick to give their gentler pieces room to breathe. The State Theatre was even treated to new material, so the band who farewelled the world a few hundred metres down the hill approximately a bazillion years ago does have a future after all.

The first act ended with Four Seasons in One Day, sounding lusher and more mellifluous than when it first cracked through the radio in the early 1990s and as spine-tingling as ever.

Could Crowded House do any better in Act II? Well, yes.

They reappear better dressed (Seymour in an orange suit Saul Goodman would be proud of and boasting a full-sized bass) taking up the full stage and rocking harder. But it takes a few songs until the crowd is back in the palm of Finn’s hand, via the warmth and melancholia of Fall at Your Feet.

Finn and co remain a creative force: recent single Teenage Summer is rollicking and romantic and the kind of song any band would be right to show off. But then they dish up a gobsmacking rendition of Private Universe to obliterate all that came before it.

The classics are undeniable; the down to earth Not The Girl You Think You Are, the interstellar crackle of Distant Sun, the infectious joy of Chocolate Cake interlaced with Deee-Lite, Right Said Fred and The Turtles.

They follow that madness with “a slightly obscure song”, Don’t Dream It’s Over, an anthem of pity and pathos that had long cemented its place in the pop pantheon.

Dispensing with the pretence of an encore, they delivered the one-two punch of Weather with You and Better be Home Soon for a finale. Crowded House outdid themselves.

MUSIC
DANIEL MULLER-SCHOTT PERFORMS TCHAIKOVSKY
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Opera House, October 22
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★★

Tchaikovsky is justly renowned for bringing magical colour to child-like stories in his ballet-scores, while Stravinsky is often seen as the architect of Neoclassicism, which placed the musical gestures and forms of the past into new, sometimes incongruous settings.

In this program, the two giants of Russian music in their respective centuries changed places, Tchaikovsky toying affectionately with 18th century phrase structure in his Variations on a Rococo Theme, Opus 33 and Stravinsky vividly bringing a child’s puppet to life in Petrushka.

Cellist Daniel Muller-Schott played Tchaikovsky’s Variations with a smooth, wonderfully glowing mahogany sound, stylistic suavity and virtuosic ease. One problem for today’s performers is that the cellist for whom Tchaikovsky wrote the work, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, added changes Tchaikovsky disapproved, but which have become standard.

They arguably push the piece more into a vehicle for technical display and away from Tchaikovsky’s Arcadian view of the 18th century and create passages which might trespass into poor taste, at least from today’s perspective on 18th century playing.

In the theme and earlier variations, Muller-Schott’s playing adopted impeccable elegant courtly manners which sat easily with a 19th century view of aristocratic propriety. It was in the slow sixth variation, just after the cadenza that Muller-Schott introduced a tone of expressive emotionalism where one glimpses Tchaikovsky’s true feelings peeking out from behind the gallant mask.

By contrast in the second half conductor Lionel Bringuier led a sharply edged performance of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1946 version). The opening tableau was balanced into a picture of swirling chaotic excitement. Pianist Louisa Breen dispatched the difficult piano part with aplomb. The most memorable moments were the many solos from SSO players, where Stravinsky gives simple fairground-like tunes an unexpected piquancy or timbre, or jams them together in unrelated blends and keys in a small, wincing clash, like a tooth smarting sharply while eating an ice-cream.

The concert began with another child’s story, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas, fixed immovably in the minds of a whole generation as Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Fantasia. Bringuier did not rush the tempo, allowing the SSO players to bring out the delicacy of wind and string writing with polish and refinement.

It also maintained a comic, deliberate character to the plodding broomstick whose transformation into an automaton unleashes such unmanageable chaos, giving a foretaste, no doubt, of our own adventures to come with AI.

MUSICAL THEATRE
CALAMITY JANE
Studio, Sydney Opera House, October 19, until November 16
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

Sometimes a show and a venue press each other’s buttons in a way that makes each perspire just a little, and bundles of joy are instantly born in the form of smiles on people’s faces. Calamity Jane and the Opera House’s Studio are such a coupling. The room becomes the Golden Garter saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the 1870s – a place where women are scarce and horses are skittish.

Were some omniscient history of theatrical depictions of the fabled Jane penned, three would surely rise to the top like so many whiskey-laden burps: Doris Day in the 1953 movie, Robin Weigert in TV’s superlative Deadwood and Virginia Gay in this ongoing production of the musical derived (in 1961) from the film.

I missed it at Hayes Theatre (where it was initially in Michelle Guthrie’s Neglected Musicals series), at Belvoir, and in its gallops around Australia, so join the hoedown seven years late, but forever grateful finally to witness Gay giving the performance of a lifetime. The show’s also a supreme example of Richard Carroll’s art as director, including making the audience so many extras in the Golden Garter, and the way the production keeps poking itself in its own theatrical eye.

The musical is basically the movie with a stagecoach full of extra songs, though Carroll tweaks the characters and story-telling, while musical director Nigel Ubrihien slims the orchestral score down to just piano (plus the cast playing a bunch of stringed instruments for The Black Hills of Dakota). They found no solution to saving the saccharine Love You Dearly, however.

Gay is a force field of charismatic energy as Jane, roaming the stage and audience, looking for trouble, confused about what her heart’s telling her, and discovering her “female” side with all the wonder and suspicion of a child being given a shiny new bicycle. When she sings the show’s famed Secret Love, she doesn’t compete with Doris Day’s pristine sweetness, but rips the song apart, and, in the process, performs some amateur cardiovascular surgery on us, too. Gay’s Jane is almost a female Falstaff in her scope.

Like Carroll, choreographer Cameron Mitchell, designer Lauren Peters and lighting designer Trent Suidgeest give the cast a handful of aces with which to play. While Andrew Cutcliffe may not have the strongest singing voice, his idiosyncratic Wild Bill Hickok is a worthy foil for Gay. Victoria Falconer (usually a musical director) is sassy and feisty as Susan, the “niece” of saloon owner Henry Miller, played with bravura by Phillip Lowe. Kala Gare is an ideal Katie Brown, the woman who, deliciously ambiguously, moves in with Jane, and then snares Lieutenant Gilmartin – admirably played by Kaya Byrne.

Whether you loved the movie, adored Deadwood or saw this production before, see it in the Studio. It’s the funniest, whip-crackingest, shot-drinkingest, heart-warmingest show in town.

MUSIC
CONVERGENCE, AUSTRALIAN STRING QUARTET
Utzon Room Opera House, October 21
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★½

After the Australian String Quartet’s current leader, Dale Barltrop, had given a quick gloss of the Quartet’s 40-year history, cellist Michael Dahlenburg noted wryly that he also was turning 40 this year.

Since it was founded by then leader, violinist William Hennessy, in 1985, each of the quartet’s positions has been occupied by seven different players. However, the vision of performing nationwide and championing Australian music remains. As my former colleague, the late SMH critic Fred Blanks, once quipped, it is still the same old axe, it is just that the head and handle have been replaced seven times.

This concert began with the String Quartet No. 1, Elegies & Dances (2008 revised 2012) by Sydney-based Paul Stanhope, a single-movement work with wide expressive range. The piece began in deep and thoughtful mourning with wailing motives that became transformed into vivid expressions of life and energy as they became more active. The quicker section involved sharp irregular rhythm and rapid textural evolution, until, at its most frenetic point, the propulsive urgency started to dissolve. As the music returned to its opening mood, it acquired warmth, acceptance and seemed released from anguish.

Elegies & Dances proved to be an effective pairing with Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2 in C major, Opus 36 (1945) which followed. Both are works of high craft, develop their ideas with clarity, and position themselves cogently but unselfconsciously within their respective historical and cultural contexts.

In Stanhope’s case that included references to the sounds of Indigenous culture, while for Britten, it involved building on forms and gestures from before the time the string quartet was developed and paying homage to English composer Henry Purcell. After a concise first movement and a scurrying, quietly energetic second, it reached its central point in the third movement, Chacony. As with some works of Beethoven and Mahler, it is a slow movement whose expressive profundity overwhelms the rest of the work to the point where any continuation is impossible. The repeated bass on which the movement is built contains an obsessive iambic rhythm like an insistent limp which eventually was smoothed out, leading to a glowing close of ringing C major chords.

Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, Death and the Maiden, opened incisively, but the ASQ eased up on ‘hammerblow’ articulation, to allow longer phrases to cut a deeper swathe. Lyricism and ornate melodic expressiveness adorned the second movement and the finale raced with hypnotic precision, accelerating at the end to make a lemming-like dash to the final bar.

MUSIC
JEAN-EFFLAM BAVOUZET CELEBRATING RAVEL
City Recital Hall, October 20
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★★★

Maurice Ravel wrote music of exquisitely blended harmonic tartness and sweetness, clothing old forms with new colours and gradations of light and shade that bathe imaginary structures with magic and mystery.

In the case of his works for piano, he also wrote some of the most difficult music ever written, although in the hands of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet that challenge was as nothing, like a dancer also being able to walk.

Celebrating Ravel’s sesquicentenary, Bavouzet played, in one recital, most of his major keyboard music, including the haunting, Pre-Raphaelite Pavane pour une infante defunte, his scintillating evocation of fountains, Jeux d’eau and his three major keyboard collections, Miroirs (1904-5), Gaspard de la nuit (1908) and Le tombeau de Couperin (1914-17).

To cap it off, as encore, he gave an astonishing rendition of Ravel’s solo piano arrangement of his orchestral work La Valse (1919-20), a trap for many due to its impractical difficulty, but heard here with outstanding clarity of gesture in all its passion, distortion and excess. Bavouzet spanned Ravel’s wide range of textures with affinity, subtlety and mastery. He began with an early rarity, Serenade grotesque, which seems to evoke Punch-and-Judy masks, mixing leering taunts with an expressive melody of touching simplicity. The piece anticipates Ravel’s interest in the grotesque that was to reach such towering heights in Scarbo (from Gaspard de la nuit) and La Valse.

Between the appearances of the strangely beautiful melody the Pavane, Bavouzet created softly voiced episodes of transparent stillness. His performance of Jeux d’eau contrasted swirling limpid movement with a climax of glistening intensity. In Noctuelles, the first piece of Miroirs, Bavouzet created fleeting, impulsive lightness which glided into ethereal invisibility at the close. Oiseaux tristes was layered with a murmuring background cut through by incisive bright points of painful colour. In Une barque sur l’ocean Bavouzet set up multiple different velocities, counterpointing a solemn majestic theme with rapid glittering eddies and broader waves of threatening turbulence which erupted in a moment of frothy peril.

After the quick virtuosic energy of Alborada del gracioso, La vallee des cloches returned to layered stillness. While it was disappointing not to hear Bavouzet’s superb pianism in Ravel’s tender and flirtatious Valses nobles et sentimentales which was originally advertised, the shimmering beauty, ominous distant echoes and fizzing virtuosity of the three movements of Gaspard de la nuit more than compensated.

Of the many highlights in the neo-Baroque masterpiece, Le tombeau de Couperin, I will just mention the delightfully piquant astringency he created in the forlane, the tender delicacy of the menuet and the brilliant radiance at the close of the toccata. It is hard to imagine a better way to honour Ravel’s genius.

MUSIC
GREGORY PORTER|
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, October 20
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

Gregory Porter’s voice is like a log fire on a winter’s night. It doesn’t just radiate warmth, it has a comfort factor. It’s the voice of someone who’s worked out a thing or two about this very temporary exercise called life, and wants to ease the suffering and spread a little beneficence with a generosity of heart that’s the opposite of those people who win talent quests by impressing. Porter has bigger fish to fry than merely impressing.

A mere nine years ago he was at the old Basement. Now he’s packing out the Concert Hall with fans who know all the songs, having been seduced by the voice of this barrel-chested man in the trademark hat, who can fleetingly remind you of singers ranging from Nat King Cole to Marvin Gaye, yet sounds only like himself. He lets jazz flow into soul as naturally as two rivers meeting, so it’s impossible to define where they merge.

Most of the songs are his own, with lyrics about coping, loving, hoping and improving. The latter’s quite an attractive idea, given most of us seem to believe that bemoaning our lot is a form of conversation. You feel the truth of the magnanimity with Porter, not just via the lyrics and the amusing between-song chat, but via the voice itself, which seems to proclaim that goodness is possible, and you leave the two-hour show briefly believing it.

His long-term quartet has been augmented by organist Ondrej Pivec, who maximises the inherent drama of a Hammond B-3, and provides another soloing voice to join tenor saxophonist Tivon Pennicott and pianist Chip Crawford. Bassist Jahmal Nichols anchors the music, while also providing the night’s most engrossing solo feature, which builds into a groove so wicked it must be barely legal, and then morphs into two rare covers: The Temptations’ My Girl and Papa Was a Rolling Stone. Drummer Emanuel Harrold remains the joker in the pack: unusually busy for the soul side of the idiom (if not the jazz), and ensuring the music is energised and studded with surprises.

Porter’s anthemic Musical Genocide drops away to just Crawford’s piano, which slips into Waltzing Matilda. Although Porter doesn’t sing it, the audience does, and what could easily have been corny is actually quite touching. More moving is Porter’s Water Under Bridges, ostensibly about a break-up; more pertinently about how his brother helped him cope: a brother who died during the pandemic. Sung with only piano accompaniment this allows us to immerse ourselves in his voice’s richness. Seldom does he unleash its full magnificence, but when he does, as on the spiritual Wade in the Water, you are physically pushed back by its power.

The sound was second-rate to start, and never became quite as sharply focused as it can be in this room, although it did keep improving, right through to the second (genuinely demanded) encore.

MUSIC
Karnivool
Enmore Theatre, October 19
Reviewed by ROD YATES
★★★★

When Karnivool guitarist Mark Hosking steps up to the microphone and thanks the audience for sticking with them over the years, he acknowledges that they are a band that require patience from their fans.

They postpone shows, he says – a reference to the fact that this evening’s gig was originally scheduled to take place last July before illness rendered the quintet unable to perform – and they take years between albums.

Indeed, when their new record In Verses comes out in 2026, it will be only their fourth full-length since forming in Perth in 1998 and will drop a whopping 13 years after predecessor Asymmetry.

In the here-today-gone-later-today nature of music stardom in 2025, rare is the band that can treat their release schedule with such disdain yet still command the kind of loyalty that enables them to sell out the 2500-capacity Enmore Theatre with ease.

That they share a special bond with their audience is obvious.

From the genuine glee that flashes across the face of vocalist Ian Kenny when greeting the crowd to the way in which the punters morph into a mass choir during closer New Day and the thundering Themata, the overwhelming feeling from both band and audience is release. Contributing to that sense is the group’s mastery at creating musical tension.

Drummer Steve Judd’s mindbogglingly complex rhythms and the intricate guitar interplay between Hosking and Drew Goddard combine to form a dark, dense, prog-metal symphony that they tease to a thundering climax in the epic Deadman and a gloriously heavy Roquefort.

Of the two new tracks Karnivool have released this year they open with one in Drone and put the other, Aozora, third song in. That they do this rather than go for a cheap win by opening with an old favourite like Cote (which appears later in the set) speaks volumes about the confidence of the band and the trust they place in their audience to go along for the ride.

After almost three decades, though, those fans know the deal – Karnivool will march to the beat of their own drum and indulge their musical whims without any care for the demands of the mainstream. In return, they will deliver a masterful show like this.

MUSIC
BURNA BOY
Qudos Bank Arena, October 18
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★½

Burna Boy’s current tour takes him places no African artist has gone before, and his first Sydney headline show is no exception: it’s hard to imagine that Olympic Park has ever hosted a Nigerian party of these proportions, with even the food trucks putting on their best impersonations of jollof rice and swallows. Inside the arena, the mood was authentic Afrofusion: an Afrobeats base with aesthetic influences from the rest of the world.

That African base was ever present – in the Yoruba-Pidgin lyrics, in the use of the talking drum and shekere instruments, in the infectious familial informality — but fused with global elements ranging from Kingston Town rhythms to Ed Sheeran aesthetics straight from the badlands of Ipswich: a sound as global as it is grounded.

Burna’s studio production is glossy and complicated, which in the hands of a lesser artist might have been a disappointment live. Not so for the African Giant: in his case, less polish and more talent actually improved on his overstuffed recordings. His baritone especially benefited from the concert treatment – with AutoTune dialled back, we were reminded of the charm and intensity that sets his act apart from his peers. In fact, the a cappella intro to It’s Plenty drops the vocal filters altogether and he sounds properly masterful as a result.

The price for this willingness to experiment and mix things up was the occasional misfire. Bank on It was transformed with a smooth-jazz vibe, complete with a sax line straight from the Kenny G songbook: more lounge than Lagos; the CGI screen backdrops were more artificial than intelligent, and the occasional keytar on stage, like an escapee from a wedding band, only highlighted the strange aesthetic choices.

Not that anyone seemed to mind, judging by the assortment of audience underwear thrown on stage. Shirtless from the second song, Burna Boy worked that rich voice and charisma hard, building to a closing climax of Ye and Last Last. And yet, for all the heat and magnetism, there was something missing – a looseness and unrestraint that would have transformed this good night into a great one: the gap between smouldering and fire.

MUSIC
GORDI
Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, October 17
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★½

Though neither of them occurred during the performance, two medical episodes punctuated this show and told us something about Sophie Payten in both normal and Gordi mode, in medical and musical personas.

The lesser of them, told in comic semi-pantomime, concerned Payten at the dentist when one of her songs, Heaven I Know, came on the surgery’s playlist like the universe was helping convince them she really was a musician. On stage, that song built from looped and live vocal layers and slowly accreting instruments until we had an alterna-choir that served as a kind of halo around the simple lines of an ending and acceptance. “Yeah, I got older, and we got tired/Heaven I know, that we tried.”

More seriously, the other story featured a patient of hers – Payten completed her medical studies during and immediately after COVID lockdowns – who confronted news of his imminent death with a level of equanimity that would be beyond most of us, leaving an impact on his young doctor.

The two songs inspired by this experience were not leaden but rather a flow of warm energy that pushed everything forward and a blend of Elliott Smith and Bon Iver as pure pop immersed in hazy winter.

Around these three songs, in material that included all the tracks of her new-ish album, Like Plasticine, and scattered shots from previous releases, Payten/Gordi moved between endings and rebuilding, back and forth from thickened layers to modestly proportioned instrumentation, counter-intuitively guitar-pushed vibrant when crushed and synth-filled solemn when emotionally buoyant, and often distorting her voice through various effects as if not wanting clarity to be confused with truth.

Songs found her uncertain on questing love (“Do you care? Do you care?/Don’t make me your peripheral lover”), falling on a failure (“I made available a portion of my heart/Not anymore”) and rising again on the certainty of comfort (“I know the pressure you feel seems relentless/But everything is fleeting, except you and I”).

And then, closing with Can We Work It Out, on the horns of a dilemma – ready to believe, but bracing for regret – she threw at us the bushiest and brightest song of the night with its solid propulsion and almost fizzing slices of vocals.

THEATRE
DAYTIME DEEWANE
Riverside, October 18, until October 25
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★

In 1980s Britain, after racist club bouncers wouldn’t give anyone with brown skin their share of night, a new underground subculture emerged. These were the Daytimers, day parties run by South Asian collectives, where shunned ravers could congregate on their own terms, to their own DJs, dancing to new music blending bass-kicked Bhangra, Asian garage and diaspora-mixed jungle.

Azan Ahmed sets his award-winning 2022 play at the last Daytimer party, in London in 1997. Sixteen-year-old Farhan (Ariyan Sharma), wonders whether Islam forbids dancing as he scurries nervously in school uniform towards his first-ever rave. His 20-year-old rude-boy cousin Sadiq (Ashan Kumar), bounces about impatiently in wifebeater vest and chains, breaking into rhapsodies on the dancefloor’s true radical principles of defiance, humanism and transcendent release.

Built on the twists in its character foils, Daytime Deewane unfolds as a story about these two very different young Muslim men, each trying to define his means and methods of self-respect against the values and expectations of his heritage. It loses its beat in the last stretch – the time leap to a reunion scene strikes an off-key chord and leaves us with an ambiguous moral takeaway – but there’s a lot to rate highly in this play about migration, masculinity and faith.

Its two leads go point-for-point in endowing Riverside’s Australian premiere with humour and depth. Sharma gives us signature goof as the duty-bound teenage square, cutting Farhan the weirdest of shapes as an aspirational “peacock” bro while asking where the prayer room’s at.

This is Kumar’s first time on a main stage – to the hyper-masculine Sadiq he brings muscular swag, easy style, and an open nerve to the vulnerabilities of someone who has only one clear exit strategy. Between speaker stacks, drenched by neon lights and under director Sepy Baghaei’s hand, we see the cousins’ close bond in boyish joys and tenderness, connecting over the chasm of their diverging priorities.

In common with the sacred space of the rave, their perfect brotherhood is an ideal that’s constantly under siege. The first rupture occurs when Sadiq’s sweet-talking (direct to women in the audience) turns into slut-shaming, prompting Farhan’s first challenge to the guy he grew up idolising. The topic of their fathers is the main trigger point – one is about to be deported, the other is disappointed in his “stupid” son. The baggage they carry means they travel differently through life. It takes a lot for each not to read this as betrayal.

Daytime is the first play by UK poet Ahmed (he’s written and performed in a few more since), who adds rhymes to his characters’ monologues, sliding naturalistic into slam. It’s a bold decision with some pay-off, though not all of it works. Our Daytimer tracklist, by Chrysoulla Markoulli, is electric. If you’re a punter with that special strain of raver blood, it might be hard to sit still.

A modern play that goes back to the old school, Daytime Deewane brings a lost scene of the diaspora’s beautiful rebellion to Parramatta with top-notch leads. Put it on your dance card if you can.