Am I the only one who thinks Nick Cave would be better indoors?

MUSIC
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
The Domain, January 23
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★½

There were so many moments on this night that were sublime, transcendent or just plain marvellous and there was a section of the show which did almost everything you’d want with almost nothing in the way of tools. Connection and collaboration between on-stage and off-stage was instinctive as well as physical, and at least one song that had borne a heavy emotional load on record now felt as if weight had been lifted from it, for us as much as Nick Cave.

With 150 minutes and 23 songs, a loosened and then discarded tie up front and three of the four backing singers in glittering silver robes up back, and at least one droll self-mocking moment (20 minutes into the show which had begun in twilight, Cave, who cliché would have it does not surface in sun or shorts, offered to chuckles from all of us, “I’m unbelievably pleased it’s starting to get dark”), it might feel churlish to find fault.

After all, Bright Horses was a ghostly splendour, like the memory of a feast spread out before us in shadows, and easily the song of the night to that point, only to be matched by Joy, an astonishing song in so many ways, from its tale of a dead son appearing at the foot of the bed declaring we’ve had enough sorrow, now is the time for joy, to the way it didn’t become joy but admitted there was room for it. Then I Need You, performed solo at the piano, followed them, all pain and need and emptiness waiting to be filled with the repetition of “just breathe, just breathe, and Carnage completed this quartet, elevating with sorrow’s weight and a sparseness of sound. But that last point was not a coincidence.

This 11-piece version of the Bad Seeds was for a good portion of the show not given the clarity of sound to do them justice. Song Of The Lake was sonically murky and bass player Colin Greenwood lost, Jubilee Street built from nothing to a barrelling locomotive careering down a mountainside but its individual elements disappeared, and even Long Dark Night, whose simplicity of arrangement gave welcome space to piano and Warren Ellis’ violin to lead, showed us the vibraphone being played by Jim Sclavunos but declined to let us hear it.

Missing too was some of the power in Red Right Hand and From Her To Eternity, the latter’s devilish dervish rhythm relentless but thin even as Ellis contorted himself and Cave danced in echo. Was I the only one grumbling that this might have been better indoors?(Incidentally, staging a Nick Cave show outdoors as night falls in a Sydney summer and not playing Release The Bats is a missed comic opportunity. Hands up who wants to die for missing that?)

Yet, so much of that could almost be forgotten and forgiven by show’s end as White Elephant closed the set with an almost incongruous violence at its core balanced by gospel redemption, as the joyful energy and crowd involvement in Weeping Song opened out the encore for Cave reclaiming the beauty of Skeleton Tree, and as Into My Arms showed again it as hymnal and tender a farewell as one could ask for.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds also play The Domain , January 24.

CABARET
BARBRA
Hayes Theatre, January 22, until February 14
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Now here’s a puzzle. The Hayes’ Theatre artistic directors, Richard Carroll and Victoria Falconer, wanted a show celebrating Barbra Streisand, and asked Brittanie Shipway to direct it as well as perform in a cast of four.

The creative team Shipway assembled has resulted in a sumptuous stage design from Brendan de la Hay (defined by meticulously swagged fabrics and an avalanche of hydrangeas), superbly lit by Peter Rubie, and with well-chosen songs expertly played by Nicholas Gentile and his band.

The glaring question is: Why wasn’t the singing as good as everything else?

The show’s subtitled The Greatest Star, which sounds hyperbolic until you try to name another to match Streisand as a titan of recordings, concerts, stage and screen – smashing glass ceilings and sales statistics along the way. In celebrating her, surely nailing the singing should be central, and while no one would expect Shipway, Laura Murphy, Tana Laga’aia or Stellar Perry to match up to one of the last century’s most acclaimed singers, they could have avoided certain pitfalls.

One of the wonders of a singer of Streisand’s stature is an effortlessness that remains in place across her range. She’s a belter who doesn’t shout, and when she goes high, she doesn’t screech: there is no harshness to her top notes. Furthermore, she brings the emotional story of a song to life without resort to overstatement.

Shipway, Murphy and Perry, by contrast, used every opportunity they could to be big and brassy. Like too many female singers in Australian musical theatre, the imperfections in their technique were exposed when they were loud and high simultaneously. Their voices’ inherent appeal was the first casualty of this, and careful calibration of the differentiation between the drama of the songs was another.

Laga’aia’s instincts were sounder, and he sweetly understated Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered), but the pitching of his falsetto was not always accurate. He was better on The Way We Were, which felt like the first time that the show’s freneticism truly unwound, and yet we were already halfway through its 75 minutes’ duration.

Shipway duetted prettily with Gentile on You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, but, even then, they didn’t quite locate the song’s emotional truth. More convincing were Perry and Laga’aia being soulful on Guilty. Murphy was at her best on the Streisand-composed Evergreen (the love theme from A Star Is Born), ably accompanied by Laga’aia on acoustic guitar.

The concluding songs were sung by the full company, the vocal harshness partially disguised when there was such genuine excitement in the air, compounded throughout by band, in which Gentile’s piano was joined by Matt Reid’s keyboards, Michael Napoli’s bass and Sam Evans’ drums. If the singers could trust themselves to back off a little more often, they would instantly sound better, and do infinitely more justice to the Streisand legacy.
Barbra also shows at Riverside Theatres from February 26-28.

LACRIMA
Roslyn Packer Theatre, January 22, until January 25
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★

Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s LACRIMA is a dense, tense and ravishly beautiful play of ideas.

We are watching the making of a wedding dress for a royal princess, destined to be an instant museum piece. As the dress takes shape, the action unravels the multifarious threads which make up this icon of maximalism: the veil, from a famous lace-making workshop; the jewel-encrusted train, hand-stitched in Mumbai; the dress, constructed in a Paris fashion house. And the non-material threads: the weight of perfection; the rampant costs of globalisation, and the price of secrecy.

Will they complete the impossible dress in time? And will they survive the ordeal?

LACRIMA speaks to an audience well-versed in modern storytelling. The opening scene, for example, is the essential attention-grabber, an adrenalin shot of anguish, sirens and paramedics.

Then, on the screen which hangs centre stage, we see the caption, “three months earlier”. From here, LACRIMA plays out across multiple storylines, acted out on different parts of the cavernous stage, and compiled on the big screen, in a Netflix collage of talking heads and cutaways.

We meet the lacemakers as they are interviewed for a podcast, and sit in on the embroiderer’s compulsory eye test. We see the atelier, the bolts of fabric, the dressmaker’s dummies tricked out in haute couture fantasies and hear people converse in multiple languages. It’s simultaneously a documentary and drama, a live performance and a movie, flicking between formats like a restless couch-surfer flicking between channels.

From the cacophony, ideas and questions emerge like pearls. The silence of workers bent over tasks is interwoven with the silence of family secrets, domestic violence and 100-year non-disclosure agreements. The demands of royal clients and rabid creatives are matched by the obsessive quest for perfection of the artisans, who will only stop working when they stop breathing. Meanwhile, Nguyen salts the action with loaded questions – why use jewels, when crushed CDs are lighter and brighter? Why impose ethical working practices on a slave economy from which you benefit?

Nguyen and her small army of technicians and cast members weave a world of ideas, metaphors and storylines into one intense work of art. The performances, often direct to camera, are utterly compelling, while the staging, which involves the split-second dance of movable partitions to create multiple spaces, is visually spectacular. Add to that the visceral heft of a soundtrack which ramps up the tension with low growls and pulses.

It’s all too much: too many jewels, too many hours of work, and too much going on. Even the play’s length – three hours, with a three-minute break where the audience is instructed not to leave the room – is almost too much to endure, drowning us in an embodied state of overwhelm. But that is the point: this work, which is one of the international showpieces of Sydney Festival, is meant to be too much. Too much to take in, but so much to take away.

MUSIC
David Byrne
TikTok Entertainment Centre (ICC), January 21
Reviewed by GEORGE PALATHINGAL
★★★★½

Loveliness abounds at a David Byrne show. We know this from our extraordinary shared experience in this same room in 2018 but, you know, some stuff has happened since then.

We learn on this night, to some extent, how the pandemic affected the former frontman of Talking Heads, the band that all but defined NYC art rock from the late ’70s to the mid-’80s. Byrne clearly tried to process some of those feelings on last year’s Who Is the Sky? album, so here he continues the exercise, with some of those songs joining the tried-and-true favourites from his brilliant career.

In a nutshell, he’s still seeking connection, and seeing him perform remains among the most life-affirming ways to find it.

Thanks to his exquisite use of screens and lights, we spend time on the moon, looking down at Earth (for the maudlin but warm Heaven); in neon-hued streets to a seamy funk soundtrack of Houses in Motion; at the (hardly hellish, unsurprisingly stylish) abode where Byrne was stuck during lockdown (the jaunty folly of My Apartment Is My Friend); and more cleverly realised locales.

There’s other visual trickery, and sometimes the gimmicks supersede the songs (and distract you from the lesser ones; hello, Independence Day) – but more often than not the aesthetics emphatically enhance them.

This includes the band, a riveting, dozen-strong collective roaming the stage along with Byrne in perfectly choreographed harmony, variously playing their assigned instruments and/or dancing with infectious joy. We join them on our feet, of course, especially for the Talking Heads classics: the meticulously, blissfully building This Must Be the Place; the ever-dizzying perfection of Once in a Lifetime; the cathartic euphoria of Burning Down the House.

At the risk of being That Guy, this tour is not quite as spectacular as the flawless 2018 show – a version of which you can see in Spike Lee’s 2020 concert film American Utopia – though that’s an opinion largely based on my feelings on the likeable but merely fine songs of Who Is the Sky? ousting others I’d rather see and hear. But a David Byrne performance is still quite like nothing else out there, in most of the very best ways.

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