A nostalgic return to the death that broke a nation’s heart

THEATRE
HOW TO PLOT A HIT IN TWO DAYS
Ensemble Theatre
September 2, until October 11
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★
The writers of a long-running TV series have been called together for a special meeting. They all expect the worst. No, not job cuts. Worse. Someone’s going to die.

Melanie Tait’s new play, How to Plot a Hit in Two Days, takes us into the writers’ room of A Country Practice to re-imagine the moment a team of writers orchestrated the (voluntary) exit of actor Anne Tenney, aka Molly, the sweetheart of Wandin Valley.

Tait is a self-confessed A Country Practice tragic. She even has a podcast devoted to watching the 1980s TV series with an overlay of commentary from herself and fellow tragic Kim Lester. So when Mark Kilmurry, the Ensemble Theatre’s artistic director, was seeking a playwright to dramatise a piece of television history, Tait was the obvious choice. The result, How to Plot a Hit in Two Days, is a gentle comedy full of the same best-friends-watching-TV-on-the-couch energy.

The set and costumes, by Simone Romaniuk, are an instant blast from the past. From the table, littered with notepads, pens, Minties and ashtrays, to the big cathode-ray TV stacked with hand labelled video cassettes, and the back wall, with its storyboard, all topped by a shelf with a casually-placed line of Logies trophies, it is clear we are in for a heady dose of nostalgia. Show runner Sharon with her big back-combed hair, and matriarch Dell in feature jackets reinforce the period setting.

The dialogue, meanwhile, is fast-paced and full of in-jokes and writerly references, interspersed with character-defining mini-monologues. Some don’t quite hit the mark on opening night, with trips and slips which will no doubt resolve across the season. Some – like Bert’s love song to writing jokes, and Sharon’s climactic ode to TV – are engaging. And other behind-the-scenes insights, like the writers’ sense of duty to addressing social issues, dodge preachy do-gooding with well-pitched sincerity.

While we are encouraged to invest in the characters of the TV show, the real story is in the writers themselves, five characters with backstories that inform their writing. Bert (Sean O’Shea) is the lovable clown, writing jokes between sobs. Amy Ingram and Julia Robertson, as the very loud Sharon and the very quiet nurse Sally, make strong Ensemble debuts, with Robertson landing some tricky deadpan punchlines.

Genevieve Lemon, as Dell, is a dignified and playful professional, in spite of personal tragedy. As for Georgie Parker, she plays Judy, “Australia’s most wanted serial killer”, with a light touch and genuine emotion, as she prepares a good death for a character close to her heart.

How to Plot a Hit in Two Days is not a play to change the world. It’s a mostly fun period piece of fantasy fiction about a make-believe world which, true to its inspiration, touches on contemporary issues and everyday tragedies, before going to the pub. A Country Practice lives on. And on.

MUSIC
NORTHERN RHAPSODY
Lennox Theatre, August 31
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

On a day when mobs demonstrated against immigration, particularly the non-white variety, Hamed Sadeghi offered the perfect riposte. Not that this was his intention: he merely works towards refining his gentle art. But for a decade he’s enriched Australian music, bringing Iran’s ancient culture to our ears via his reflective and evocative compositions, his assemblages of musicians and his own playing on the Persian tar.

Northern Rhapsody, the album he was launching, is the latest from Eishan Ensemble, the band with which he first sprang to prominence, and which he’s gradually honed to a quartet of alto saxophonist Michael Avgenicos, double bassist Max Alduca and percussionist Adem Yilmaz. Conceptually, the new compositions draw on his Australian experiences and observations, the upshot being that they are sometimes populated with fewer notes and broader horizons.

This is music you don’t so much listen to as bathe in. The melodies float on the rhythmic buoyancy, and you sit there mesmerised by the sounds and the relationships between the instruments. The combination of tar and alto saxophone is a singular one: when they play a unison melody, the tar, with its metallic, banjo-like bite, gilds the edge of each saxophone note, so they sound like one instrument, with more attack than a saxophone, more sustain than a tar.

Avgenicos was astutely restrained, mostly playing slippery, almost evasive lines, at one with the prevailing candle-lit aesthetic and the music’s innate elegiac poeticism. Just when you wanted extra vigour, on Expressive Orient he broadened his sound and played more expansively, with the tar offering trilling asides.

Most of Sadeghi’s solos and introductions carried a profound melancholy, as of one who’s seen too much of the world before his time. But always he is a natural painter of pictures and teller of stories. His is not an easy instrument on which to do this. Having such bright attack and fast decay, the artistry is deeply embedded in shaping each note’s brief moment of sustain.

Another side to the music, that keeps it a dialogue between moods as well as between instruments, is the vibrancy of the rhythms, with Alduca and Yilmaz closely attuned, and their timing impeccable. The former generally anchored the compositions with riffs or ostinatos, which were then elaborated upon and decorated by Yilmaz, who’s the fizz in the bottle and the drama underscoring the soliloquies.

Sometimes he played with mallets, but mostly with his hands, and his combination of cajon, hand-drums, a little snare, cymbals and hi-hat made for an opulence of sounds and textures such as most regular kit drummers could only dream of. On Black and White he also sang, with an arresting purity of tone.

Finally, a word about the venue, because this was apparently the last regular concert (or play) in the Lennox Theatre. The sound (as ever) was exceptional and the sense of intimacy pervasive. It’s a room that will be missed.

MUSIC
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Sydney Opera House, August 31
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★½

Few can match Lucinda Williams as a storyteller-in-song. And the songs on this night, presented mostly chronologically as they related to her life rather than when they were written, repeatedly drove this point home, helped in no small measure by a superb band of drummer Brady Blade, bassist David Sutton, and guitarists Mark Ford and Doug Pettibone, who held back perfectly and then happily powered forward towards the end of the night.

Using her richly detailed work and some judicious covers, you could map a detailed life on the road, from childhood to career, from Lake Charles to Silver Lake to the ghosts of Highway 20. You could follow a route into and (eventually, though not without scars) out of bad choices in her life and the troubled souls she’s lived alongside, from her brother to her lovers.

You could grasp a chronicle of American music and some of its mythology in her sources and inspirations, whether Blind Pearly Brown and Elizabeth Cotton or the poet Frank Stanford and the unrelated folkie Hank Williams. And most of all, you could see worlds come to life.

But Lucinda Williams as a storyteller-between-songs, as this show built on the foundations of her memoir as much as her back catalogue, and juiced up with home movies, family photographs and other footage, promised? Well, there we ran into trouble.

Williams has never been a wholly comfortable performer or easy raconteur, on stage or in interviews, and though she has loosened up in the past decade, this hasn’t really changed. Seated mostly and without her guitar – pretty much the only noticeable effects of her recovery from a stroke – she told rambling, occasionally disjointed stories in a stiff delivery that sought to contextualise each song and in theory flesh out those narratives.

Natural raconteurs such as Billy Bragg can do this with a loose concept and some planning, but even a well-honed storyspinner like Bruce Springsteen worked up a full script for his Broadway show in this vein. Williams, who was buoyed by the extremely warm reception from an audience clearly happy to be getting her at all, needed, if not a script, then at least a solid plan with stories nailed down, a grip on what “extras” of revelation the stories would bring to the songs, endings/segues worked out, and more rehearsal.

In the seeming absence of all these a potentially tight and rewarding 90 minute show ran for more than two hours and felt simultaneously padded-out and under-delivering. Something her songs never do.

MUSIC
MOZART and BEETHOVEN
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House, August 29
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Japanese violinist, Akiko Suwanai played Mozart’s last violin concerto (“last” sounds fateful: he was just 19 at the time) with well-shaped phrases and immaculate finish, projecting mature musical understanding with elegant ease, bathed in a tone of glowing beauty.

All the great classical concertos differentiate the roles of soloist and orchestra with distinctive originality. In this work, Mozart starts by giving the orchestra a courtly theme that moves up the opening chord in mannered, almost mincing steps. The soloist, when she comes in, clearly has other ideas.

Suwanai played the Adagio theme Mozart contrived at this point with insistent introspective quietness. When the orchestra returns with the courtly theme, the soloist contradicts them with a swaggering idea over the top that Suwanai played with spirited flamboyance.

In the slow movement she wove a song of silvery sweetness through Mozart’s ruminative harmonic changes so the expressiveness was neither overdone nor passed over. In the finale she blended the Arcadian grace of a European minuet with rougher downbeats in the “Turkish” section (accentuated by bow noise from lower strings) playing virtuosic passages with fiery vitality.

Before this, Belarusian-born conductor Dmitry Matvienko, making an SSO debut, led the orchestra in Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, Op. 25 with energised focus and a suave sense of phrase, setting brisk tempi in the outer movements, which the orchestra dispatched with vivacious panache.

Matvienko gave the opening upbeat in the Gavotte an extravagant flourish so the downbeats carried a deliberate heaviness like dancing in heavy boots. The violins, under concertmaster Andrew Haveron, played the flitting rhythms of the slow movement with airy whimsy. The start of that theme has a passing resemblance to that of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, Op 60, which made up the entirety of the second half.

Beethoven introduces that work in darkness, drifting into remote keys only to make the home key all the fresher when it returns for the Allegro Vivace, which Matvienko goaded with driving force. In the slow movement, the first violins projected serenity, articulating the long line with careful attention to phrasing, over a heart-beat pulse that intensifies but never varies.

Later in the movement, flautist Emma Sholl and clarinettist Olli Leppaniemi deepened this mood with distinctive colours. After the hyperactive scherzo, Matvienko raised his baton for the fourth movement in a valiant but vain attempt to prevent the interruption of applause that had erupted between each movement of the concert up until then. That interruption didn’t stop him and the SSO delivering a finale of sizzling dynamism.

MUSIC
PAUL KELLY
Qudos Bank Arena, August 30
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★★
Some artists break your heart. Some tear theirs out in front of you. Paul Kelly is more surgical: if the pen is sharper than a knife, he wields his words like a scalpel and performs a triple bypass.

The legendary folk-rock singer-songwriter is on a stadium tour but we could be in any bar in Australia on a Saturday night, being transported along the Hume Highway, or to the Northern Rivers, via Wave Hill and Glenrowan, as 40 years of stories were condensed into two hours.

He opens with the sultry, smouldering Houndstooth Dress from last year’s Fever Longing Still but is soon slipping into the ’80s. The rousing Before Too Long and tender Careless are interspersed with gems from 2017’s No.1 album Life Is Fine.

The newest single (it still has “wet paint on it”, Kelly jokes) is Rita Wrote A Letter, an update 30 years later on the story of jailbird Joe from How to Make Gravy (later introduced as a prequel). The sequel may be a ghost song but is the more rollicking and instantly infectious of the two, while the classic, as presented here with slide guitar, is the more plaintive.

The most heartbreaking moment comes courtesy of They Thought I Was Asleep (from 2005’s Foggy Highway with The Stormwater Boys), told from the point of view of a young boy in the back of a car witnessing an intense, private moment between his parents. The father says something and his mother is left sobbing; what loss, betrayal or careless word led to the tears we are left to guess or imagine.

For those most familiar with Kelly courtesy of dad’s copy of seven-times-platinum greatest hits collection (hey, he’s a legend not a star), this was a particular revelation from the night.

If that was Kelly’s weeping song, the healing could be found with the redemptive low-down guitar of To Her Door, the coming-of-age allegory Deeper Water and anthemic From Little Things Big Things Grow, ably assisted by Jess Hitchcock.

Sometimes the words and music cut deep, but you walk away feeling better for it.

MUSIC
Camila Cabello
Hordern Pavilion, August 30
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★
Camila Cabello is less than the sum of her parts. Her great tunes, expressive voice and clever visuals in the relative intimacy of the Hordern should amount to a superlative night of pop, but the reality falls far short.

Perhaps it is that the music is literally eclipsed by the stage show: a great live drummer keeps the dance beat with precision but together with a guitar section is barely visible, pushed to the wings and background.

In theory, that could give Cabello’s vocals the foregrounding they deserve – her voice is so true amid the frenetic production that she could have been lip-syncing (she wasn’t) – but in fact both vocals and music relinquish the foreground to a revolving and evolving platform (part bouncy castle, part mega go-go cage) with dancers and flame cannons.

In a better show the decent set and indecent dancing wouldn’t merit a mention but, sadly, they were the most interesting and creative element of the night.

It is a shame because the music deserves a more focused listening. The hits – from opener Shameless to Senorita midway and Havana towards the end of the night – structure the show, and the lesser tunes flow nicely in between.

That they flow so imperceptibly is in part a reflection of the limited sonic palette, but is also a tribute to a well-programmed setlist that – save for a welcome down tempo interlude that features B.O.A.T. and an excellent cover of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn – maintains a relentless energy.

It is puzzling, then, that she ends the show not with one of those greats but rather the vacuous I Luv It, complete with its soulless repetition of its title line (I stopped counting at 55). Boring the audience is a novel way to stop them asking for more.

The missing element was authenticity. At no point does Cabello come across as genuinely herself. It is all obviously and self-consciously a pouty, posed performance – and she just isn’t a natural enough actor to make us forget we’re watching one.

THEATRE
WHEN NIGHT COMES
Union Bond Store, The Rocks, August 28
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★

With an almost sold-out initial season before its opening night, and a just-announced three-week extension on the cards, When Night Comes – an immersive and multi-roomed theatrical event – is the early breakout success of this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival.

Created by a deep bench of co-directors and co-writers Kirsten Siddle (A Midnight Visit), Scott Maidment (Blanc de Blanc), Mike Finch, (Circus Oz) and Helen Cassidy (Spiegelworld), When Night Comes offers itself as a hedonistic and “distinctly intoxicating” experience. Does it live up to early hype?

There’s certainly a great deal of effort and detail involved in establishing such a sprawling work. There is a dizzying configuration of novelty and party lights to conjure dreamlike moods, shadows and shiny floors to tilt our perspectives, and a room full of DIY vines (that’s where Pan, played by Cyrus Henry with his horns and flute, hangs out).

The show is also part cocktail tasting, and characters will present you with potions and vials to drink (mocktail options are also available, and the cast are diligent with checking your options).

Led through the rooms in a small group – in cloaks and masks (glasses wearers, good luck), you meet a series of vaguely mythic figures in a set of distinct scenes. As a series of images, there’s some room for delight – little sleights of hand, and songs and stories – and it all, I suspect, goes down easier if you’ve chosen the alcohol-friendly option.

These characters deliver monologues in their own ways but they’re all really just about being brave, trusting your senses and pursuing pleasure, rather than being bogged down in the banality and bureaucracy of everyday life. The problem is, they’re all so similar they quickly become banal themselves, the concepts rendered superficial without mounting stakes or story connections.

There are a lot of promised secrets to uncover but not much of a clear narrative to go with them, so it’s hard to buy into the stakes of the show and into the personalities we meet. There’s a puzzle but not one that we need to use the environment, or our encounters, to solve. And when we unlock the darkest layer of this mysterious society and enter their room of ritual, the reveal might not feel worth the journey.

The cast is deeply committed and undoubtedly skilled across a range of performance disciplines. But it all feels a little muted – like the show’s script was happy to gesture at wonder, rather than conjure it. At 65 minutes it’s also a very efficient vehicle: there’s no time to linger, wander or explore, like in open-room immersive experiences. We’re on a schedule.

So it’s all going to come down to what you make it, and if you go, you’ll get the most out of it if you fully buy into the concept. Check your cynicism at the door. The best bet is to assemble a group of friends who are all happy to play along and dance with masked strangers, and you might just make your own night to remember.

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