Lizzy Hoo’s glee is infectious as she milks her dad for best lines

Lizzy Hoo: Deja Hoo
★★★½
Sydney Opera House
Until February 6
Reviewed by Daniel Herborn

Some comedians scan the headlines of the day for inspiration; others gaze inwards, finding gallows humour in the dark corners of their psyche. As Lizzy Hoo tells us, her approach is simpler: she just asks her brother which anecdotes about their father, Chan, she hasn’t told on stage yet.

Along with the slick and affable delivery and a pun on her surname, stories of the sweet-natured and eccentric Chan are the constants in Hoo’s work.

In Deja Hoo, we hear how Chan sought to make some extra cash by offering massage services from his home. Forced to set up his massage table in a dank dungeon-like space under the family’s Queenslander, his venture ended in farce with his very first client.

Hoo gets good mileage out of being single in her early 40s, relaying how she sometimes wakes up spooning her greyhound. She also takes us through some less-than-stellar dates with men her age, like one dud who spent the whole time quoting The Simpsons.

Her direct messages are apparently equally dire, with one would-be suitor proposing assembling a 6000-piece Hogwarts Lego set together for a first date. Stories of her elderly mother struggling to use technology or a cringe-inducing decision to play a Barry Manilow song on an electric organ at a school talent show are slight but go down easily.

There are some flashes of sardonic humour and clever wordplay throughout, but Hoo’s main draw is her effortless and relatable style.

Deja Hoo ends on a high with a surprise that a review shouldn’t spoil, that’s both a clever callback and a novel way to tick off an item on a “bingo list” of goals she and her single friends write at the start of each year. She’s clearly having a great time, and her glee is infectious.

CABARET
Amplified
Belvoir St Theatre, January 30
Until February 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

Long after Chrissy Amphlett’s band Divinyls ground to a halt, she imagined doing a one-woman theatrical show about herself and her songs. Having spent her Divinyls career playing a fiery, racy, pouting, unpredictable schoolgirl, she wanted a character this time, too, reportedly settling on a crow. It was never to be. She died of breast cancer before the half-formed dream took flight.

Enter Sheridan Harbridge, Glenn Moorhouse and Sarah Goodes. Together, they envisaged a ghost of the show Amphlett had contemplated, subtitling it The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett. Harbridge wrote it, with Moorhouse as musical director and Goodes directing Harbridge’s performance. They’ve done a storming job.

Harbridge doesn’t become Chrissy, in the sense that the story is told in the third person, but Amphlett’s spirit is alive and living dangerously inside Harbridge’s performance.

What a range the latter has, from being the best Blanche I’ve seen in A Streetcar Named Desire, to now exploding off the stage with a singing voice I didn’t know she had, that could be brutally powerful when required, yet also sweetly soulful.

Beyond the potency of her performance and the engaging storytelling, the music and spoken word are interwoven so that a Divinyls hit might start, shudder to a stop while Harbridge tells us more, pick up again, and repeat this process.

It’s done so well that you’re not cursing the fact that they won’t get on with the song; you’re engrossed in an ever-growing tension that finally finds release when the song takes centre-stage.

Another strength is the music itself, with Moorhouse (on guitar) joined by Clarabell Limonta (keyboard), Ben Cripps (bass) and Dave Hatch (drums). I never particularly rated Divinyls as a band, compared with their songs and Amphlett’s performance of them. Moorhouse and company have knocked some bricks out of the wall of sound and replaced them with nuance, without losing the kick to the surging chorus of, say, Boys in Town.

The fearless Harbridge, meanwhile, doesn’t just enter the audience, she invades it. She’s also funny, and the humour makes for a completeness of emotional impact, given the inherent sadness of a story of excess, of Amphlett’s repeatedly having to smash the same glass ceiling, and then suffering multiple sclerosis before the cancer hit.

Perhaps it’s also so moving because the show exudes such immense affection for its subject.

If the intensity of grip is released a little in the final phase, it’s certainly reasserted when they launch into I Touch Myself, the song that made the teenage Harbridge a fan.

I suspect Amphlett would approve. She’d have appreciated the absence of hagiography and sugar-coating, and she may have recognised a fellow traveller in the high-stakes game of being audacious on stage. She may have even stood up with the rest of us at the end.

MUSIC
The Whitlams and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
State Theatre, January 31
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★½

The Whitlams were early adopters of the now-fashionable “… and symphony” trend, returning to it intermittently over the past 20 years. It is a format that frontman Tim Freedman freely admits can be reduced to “some strings on top of our chords” – a reduction he spends the evening trying to disprove.

His counterargument opens convincingly with Beauty in Me with the two elements in balance: the orchestra afforded the space to carry the opening lines on their own, with Freedman on piano and daughter Alice on vocals, joining in as the song unfolds. This sets up the template for the night: agreeable, well-balanced and designed to amplify the band’s hallmark pretty tunes.

The effect is more interesting when inverted, the swelling strings pulling counter to the sardonic lyrics of Fondness Makes the Heart Grow Absent, heightening the sleight-of-hand tricksy of the original. The same effect is even more powerful on Melbourne, the tale of righteous outsider contrarianism that gains bite when delivered with the buttoned-up formality of the symphony.

Twenty years of orchestral toying has thrown up the occasional gem, chief among them Out the Back, co-written with distinguished composer Peter Sculthorpe. No mere rearrangement for strings, this is a genuine three-way conversation between guitarist Jak Housden’s languid line, Freedman’s lazy lyrics and the orchestra’s expansive response. On record, it is clever and tight – live, it takes beautiful flight.

The arrangement of Up Against the Wall by the masterful Benjamin Northey similarly transcends the strings-atop-chords formula: a meaningful reworking rather than just pretty ornamentation. In both pieces, the orchestral accompaniment doesn’t merely add depth but illumination, drawing out the Irish folk-inflected lines that underpin so much of the Whitlams’ songwriting.

All of which is to say that too much of the remainder amounted to an amiable but unrevealing run through the band’s back catalogue. Sure, their hits are still fabulous and Blow Up the Pokies sounds even better with 30 more musicians whirling away. For all we are given, we are left wanting: more reimagining, less reupholstering.

MUSIC
The Edge of Zen: Riley Lee, Satsuki Odamura, Chroma Quartet
Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, February 1
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

I won’t attempt to define the Zen that this concert placed itself at the edge of, but I imagine one knows when one is near it.

The Zen-like music, from Scottish, Australian and Japanese composers, explored states of mind that were quiet and reflective and marked by a vivid sense of presence and sometimes pain. Koto player Satsuki Odamura set the tone with Letter from a Stranger’s Childhood by Robin Williamson for solo bass koto. Its simple melody moved around the scale thoughtfully, hastened by occasional impulsive gestures and quivering pauses, as though to recover a breath or thought.

Voice of the Rain by Ross Edwards for shakuhachi (Riley Lee) and string quartet (Chroma Quartet: Harry Bennetts, Victoria Bihun, Elizabeth Woolnough and Eliza Sdraulig) began by blending a freely floating solo on the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) with a quiet wispy fifth on cello, a sonority that returned at the close.

Lee’s playing was ineffably delicate, nurturing pure tones inflected by microtonal pitch bending and ornamental vibrato, as though seized by deep regret. The music to this point had largely explored unmetered rhythms but Haru no Umi (Spring Sea) for koto and shakuhachi, by blind Japanese composer Michio Miyagi, juxtaposed contemplative sections where the ornamentation drove the music to brief moments of madness, with imitative rhythmic passages, reaching a plateau of suspended time and arresting strangeness in the upper register.

Anne Boyd’s Alchera-Jugulba for shakuhachi and string quartet entered a lonely place with sustained shakuhachi tones against plucked notes on strings, which sometimes become unsettled like a chime animated by a sudden gust. With quiet string chords and low howling shakuhachi tones, the work had the stillness of an evening where thoughts turn inwards, sometimes darkly.

Stepping a little further away from the edge of Zen, the Chroma Quartet then performed Debussy’s String Quartet with attentive sensitivity to its textural subtlety.

After the densely compact chords and rhythmic tussle of the first movement, the plucked transparent passages of the second movement flitted by with evanescent lightness. Playing with precision of pitch and sensitive calibrations of softness, the players established the haunting third movement as the work’s expressive fulcrum before an invigorated finale.

To close, Lachlan Skipworth’s Sealight for shakuhachi, koto and string quartet returned to rumination, gently lapping rhythmic patterns and heterophonic elaboration, ending with vibrating shakuhachi echoes and, from the koto, a sentimental twang.

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