The skin’s still perfect, but maybe it’s time Lloyd Cole mixed things up a bit

MUSIC
Lloyd Cole
Metro Theatre, March 15
Also, Factory Theatre, March 19, 20
Reviewed by GEORGE PALATHINGAL
★★★½

For a visitor from England, Lloyd Cole has played in Sydney a fair few times, relatively speaking, in the past decade alone, usually at the City Recital Hall. The ’80s indie cult hero-turned-venerable singer-songwriter has performed as a duo with his son, William, and on another occasion with frequent collaborator Neil Clark. On his last visit, in 2023, Cole (snr) was solo, with an acoustic guitar.

This tour’s point of difference extends beyond the venue change to the fact he’s gone electric, plugging in one of the two guitars he has on stage to accompany his still-rich croon as he plays many of his gorgeous, erudite songs. (But sadly not on this night, for example, Cut Me Down. Though Cole has certainly structured his two sets to some extent, such is the feeling of spontaneity, as he sometimes flicks through his songbook, that you might get it later in the week in Marrickville.)

Two sets? Oh yes, as he wryly acknowledged, he is his own opening act as well as headliner and, having played justifiable ’80s crowd favourites Rattlesnakes, Speedboat and an especially sublime Perfect Skin in the first half-hour, he teases latecomers telling them what they’ve missed.

It is always lovely to hear all of these songs, and more, again. There’s also strong material from Cole’s two albums from either side of the pandemic, including the waltzing melancholy of The Afterlife, and the sweet, playful The Idiot, from his most recent album, 2023’s On Pain, with its “stop being drug addicts” sing-along bit.

But in spite of all this there is a sense of overfamiliarity and, for returning visitors, a touch of dissatisfaction. He made the gag about latecomers, and probably used other lines, last time. While it’s joyful to watch his fingers dance across his electric guitar strings to, say, No Blue Skies, let alone hear him sing it, it isn’t really that different from the acoustic version of the last tour.

Cole himself notes, on this night, that On Pain was made with a different (synthesiser-led) approach but playing its songs on an electric guitar made him realise the songwriting is much the same. While few, perhaps, would want Lloyd Cole: The Synth Tour, if he’s looking for a fresh framing device for his mighty tunes – and we understand the expense – maybe next time he could temporarily hire a few local musicians in the odd city for a full-band tour.

MUSIC
Shanghai Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House, March 15
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra began the Sydney leg of their Asia-Pacific tour with a quick toss from the orchestra and sizzling crackle from percussion. This was the amusingly graphic start to Deep Fried River Prawns, the first of four culinary portraits in Elliot Leung’s Chinese Kitchen. It sputtered with frenetic energy before ending with a soft folk-song-like melody from oboe.

The next course, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, began with a smooth clarinet solo, a sentimental melody later developed on strings with cinematic swoons. The third movement evoked Vegetables in Soup with a watery flute solo while the last movement completed the menu with Deep Fried Sesame Balls, returning to the pulsating spatter of the first movement, with rapid dexterity from the xylophone.

Under conductor Long Yu, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played with discipline, firmness and an edge to the sound that gave the textures well-etched outlines. For their Melbourne concert on this tour, the program had continued with Qigang Chen’s Er Huang, a work of tender nostalgia for piano and orchestra, making an all-Chinese first half.

Since Chen’s work was, by coincidence, played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra only two weeks ago, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra replaced it in Sydney with Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, Opus 33 with cellist Jian Wang (no stranger to Sydney audiences, who heard him play Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Ashkenazy more than a decade ago).

Wang played with mature mastery and shaped Tchaikovsky’s faux-eighteenth-century melody with a deep amber tone and mellow thoughtfulness, establishing a wistful mood that evolved gracefully to feats of effortless virtuosity.

In the second half, Yu led a weighty and impressive reading of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Opus 27, creating impassioned drama in the introduction through expressively shaped phrasing. The upper string sound was radiant and forceful in the Largo, and the Allegro moderato was urgent and insistent, all the while maintaining vividly edged definition to the motivic fabric.

The development section combined restless striving and textural clarity, building up to a powerful and arresting climax, leading to an emphatic close from violas and lower strings (the violas also gave rich substance to the close of the third movement).

The second movement bristled with scintillating scurrying energy, and, in the Coda, where the activity subsided to a warm chorale from the brass, Yu created a subtle blend of repose and agitation.

In the third movement, the violin tone was full-bodied and rhapsodic and maintained astringency even in warm chords, a contrast to the lean expressiveness of the woodwind solos and haunting roundness of the horn.

The finale bristled with precision, building to a gleaming return of the second theme and a clamorous close. This was a most welcome visit. Perhaps when they return they might consider programming Qigang Chen’s Iris Devoilee with its subtle blend of Chinese opera, traditional instruments and Messiaen-like orchestral textures.

MUSIC
Peach PRC: Wandering Spirit Tour
Horden Pavilion, March 15
Reviewed by NICOLE ECONOMOS
★★★1/2

Opening a set with three unreleased tracks (the first, sultry-toned Piper, while pole dancing) could seem risky, but Peach PRC hasn’t earned her legion of fans by playing it safe.

Gen Z Australian singer-songwriter Sharlee Jade Curnow has used the power of unfiltered lyrics, online virality, and her signature pink glitter-pop persona to build rapport. But a glimpse into debut album Porcelain (released April 3) sees her plant the first seeds in a new era of authenticity, theatrics, and relatability live - blending her past aesthetic with her raw self more seamlessly in this celebration of growth and queerness.

It’s all signposted by naturescape visuals, an earthy-toned purple ensemble, and a return to brunette.

The performance often veered into album release party territory, rather than a usual gig, which made audience connection waver at times, given several tracks have only been teased as TikTok snippets. While there is no denying the emotional impact of her vocals, a few of the more heavily produced, less performed tracks swamped her voice, making it difficult to decipher lyrics and live vocals over the intensity of a two-piece band and backing sounds.

Those moments felt like she was experimenting on how best to perform new material like I Wouldn’t Mind and Pink, creating a subdued ambiance in an otherwise high-octane set.

Regardless her vocals have strength, balanced between an ethereal delicacy and soaring power. Prime examples included her spine-tingling ballad, Out Loud, and electric crowd-favourites Forever Drunk and Miss Erotica, a cheeky and choreographed modern nod both to her roots and the 2000s electro-pop of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Peach interpolates a song from the latter on her track Perfect For You, another glossy, nostalgia-inspired pleaser.

Peach stopped swiftly to introduce each song with an endearing natural flair, feeling like a sincere conversation shared with friends rather than overly rehearsed sentiments.

The encore of Blondes, Josh, and Like a Girl Does felt a little hasty, but still commanding, and met with a boisterous crowd reception. Peach PRC is unapologetically ready to celebrate a more mature and boundary-pushing era, joy clearly at the forefront.

Fans will doubtless continue to embrace whatever risks she’s willing to take.

THEATRE
JULIUS CAESAR
Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, March 11
Until April 5
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Julius Caesar was my childhood pathway into Shakespeare: a heady mix of history and gripping verse. I skated over the curious plotting: not so much that the titular character’s dead – if not quite gone – by halfway, but that this vacuum is filled by Antony (who’s barely said a word until then) and the utterly arid Octavius.

Brutus and Cassius are constants, and both are finely drawn – although not enough for Brutus to be “the noblest Roman of them all” or Cassius “the last of all the Romans”. Nonetheless, if you can paint them vividly enough on the stage, and add an Antony who sells us the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” oration, the play can work.

As it does here. Mark Leonard Winter so excels as Antony that his great speech dwarfs the rest of the production. He delivers it variously at the bloody body of Caesar or atop a moveable stairway; using a microphone or addressing us without. These changes in Winter’s physical and acoustic presence amplify every nuance of the rhetorical games Antony plays in manipulating the throng – and us: stirring and moving us by constant turns.

Alas, this exceptional work is partly undermined when Winter holds his microphone to Caesar’s body when referring to the wounds’ “dumb mouths”, provoking laughter that leaked some of the emotive tension away.

Of course, Antony doesn’t monopolise the play’s illustrious speeches. Leon Ford’s Cassius is the first to strike a chord of truth matched to the verse’s splendour when delivering his epic Act One words to Brutus about Caesar’s mock-majesty: “… he doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a Colossus, and we petty men/ Walk under his huge legs and peep about/ To find ourselves dishonourable graves.”

Director Peter Evans’ Bell Shakespeare production has Brigid Zengeni playing a gender-swapped Brutus, and she, too, gives life to the verse. She trips too lightly across the exhortation to her fellow conspirators (“Let’s kill him boldly...“), but certainly finds the core of her crucial soliloquy when deciding the republic needs no man who would be king. To back up Brutus’ decision, Septimus Caton presents such an insufferably pompous Caesar who even throws a tantrum.

Peter Carroll is an amusing Casca and James Lugton a typically reliable Decius Brutus. Unfortunately, the actors playing Portia (Jules Billington) and Calphurnia (Ava Madon) waste those characters’ two momentous speeches: Portia’s plea to Brutus to confide in her and Calphurnia’s hallucinogenic warning to Caesar (“A lioness hath whelped in the streets;/ And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead…”). The latter stands near the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s art, and should never be squandered so wantonly.

Evan’s towering red walls work well as a universal setting, while Simone Romaniuk’s costumes slide disconcertingly between modernity and two millennia ago – as do the implications of the play.

Poles, portals, singing plant, and powerful vocals: Peach PRC steps into a new era, still celebrating her past

MUSIC
Linkin Park
Qudos Bank Arena, March 14
Reviewed by ROD YATES
3.5 stars
It’s hard to believe that when Linkin Park released their 2000 debut album, Hybrid Theory, the Californian outfit were suspected of being a manufactured nu metal boy band.

So rapid was their ascent, so of the time was their image, and so perfectly sculpted was their angst-laden melange of metal and hip-hop that cynics smelled a Zeitgeist- seizing rat.

In hindsight, such accusations are absurd – any band that can survive nearly three decades, including the death of vocalist Chester Bennington in 2017, is clearly built on more legitimate foundations.

They have, over the course of eight albums, evolved into an act far more genre-less
than their initial releases suggested. Indeed, some of those more eclectic moments – the moody, Depeche Mode-drama of Overflow, the electronic-arena rock hybrid The Catalyst, the lightly uplifting Waiting for the End – are highlights of this sprawling 25 song set.

Those tracks may not receive the rapturous reaction reserved for hits such as One Step Closer, Faint, What I’ve Done or a spine-tingling In the End, but they add balance and a sense that this is more a journey than a show. Throughout, all eyes are on Emily Armstrong, the vocalist tasked with replacing Bennington, one of the most revered rock singers of all time.

Though her clean singing voice is as pure and soulful as it is on 2024’s From Zero album, she struggles a little this evening with her screamed vocals, often holding the mic out to the crowd to carry the weight.

The songs aired from that album, such as The Emptiness Machine and Up From the
Bottom, fit snugly alongside more classic-era material.

If there is a criticism, the show feels very precise, sometimes to the point of sterility.
Of course, that’s an accusation that could be levelled at many arena shows, such are
the technical demands of staging a performance of this size.

But in the rare moments of spontaneity, such as when co-vocalist Mike Shinoda ventures to the punter barrier to talk to members of the crowd, that act of warmth and personality momentarily transforms the event into a more intimate experience. More would be welcome.

THEATRE
MONSTER
KXT on Broadway, March 11
Until March 21
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★ ½

An adult with a background in child psychology on one side of the table. A schoolboy, possibly dangerous, with an unnervingly assured contempt for authority on the other.

For a second, with a title like Monster and an eye to the UK’s public school system, you’d be forgiven for thinking this 2007 work by Duncan Macmillan (Every Brilliant Thing) could play out like a forerunner to Adolescence. In other words: as a parent’s tortured imagining of young male innocence made monstrous by the world of today – pervasive misogyny, internet torture porn, gangsta rap and all.

Though just about as bleakly harrowing as that 2025 miniseries, Monster deviates meaningfully from Adolescence’s fear-blinkered take. Through a concatenation of scenes that devastate and detonate, we see the relationship between “troubled boys” and the individuals and institutions they come up against as far more complex. At every juncture, there’s damage.

Because, as much as the grown-ups delude themselves, there’s no sure place to put responsibility or guilt. And no patronising fallbacks that can save them from becoming – when push comes to shove, when their own animal fears rear up – exactly what they condemn, no matter their background.

With Kim Hardwick’s chokehold direction, nerve-shredding light and sound, and a brilliant cast (extending to Tony J. Black, a calmly last-minute, script-holding step-in), this Sydney premiere from Tiny Dog lays out its case in confronting and compelling form.

It’s 14-year-old Darryl (Campbell Parsons, at the top of his game) who’s our “lost cause” in this story, set in Tony Blair’s Britain. A “pasty little white kid who talks like he’s straight out of Compton”, with a mum who killed herself with a coat hanger, a gran who refuses to change his urine-soaked bedsheets, and a professed admiration for Charles Manson, he’s been evicted from regular lessons and made the “project” of agency-sourced, trainee teacher Tom (Black).

Tom is a former kids’ advertising lackey who’s just moved from the city for a fresh, conscience-cleansing start after a breakdown. Tellingly, both his unreformed pupil and his bougie white partner Jodi (Romney Hamilton, odiously manipulative and ambivalently sympathetic) dismiss him as “not really black” because he grew up in posh Surrey.

Tom makes it his mission to save Darryl before he comes of age. First, he argues for meds, then a residential transfer. Tom’s gran (bitterly crabbed, fascinatingly complicated under Linda Nicholls-Gidley) is having none of it – even when it’s 4am and there’s blood on her head and thunder upstairs.

It’s not just Darryl who has a volatile capacity for violence, though. Nor, as we see with Jodi’s alcohol addiction right through her pregnancy, who shows self-sabotaging coping methods and profound cognitive dissonance.

It’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better Darryl than Parsons. The indefatigable inventiveness by which he orientates himself to a chair deserves an award in itself. Off meds, Darryl is uncontainable, nihilistic, incandescent – a relentless wind-up with flat eyes and mile-a-minute energy.

On meds, he’s a zombie. A consummate little shit-stirrer, at times hugely entertaining by the sheer virtuosity of his provocations, Parsons captures a raw, stranded, trauma-swallowed kid with a huge dark void screaming at the centre of his world.

In a schoolroom, a graveyard and two class-divided homes, Monster shows how hate transforms everyone when their safety is breached. The show may have been thrown a curveball days before opening night – Black had just one rehearsal in preview. Ready or not though, this one’s a must-see.

MUSIC
Iranian Music Festival
Leichhardt Town Hall, March 6-8
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★

A festival that starts with a minute’s silence is a first for this reviewer. Yet, the silence - and the joyful noise that followed it - could hardly be more timely.

Explicit mention of politics is kept rightly offstage during the performances, but it doesn’t take a PhD in Persian history to work out which way this collection of dreamers and poets leans: the fact this very festival – with its mixed gender bands and not a veil in sight – would be banned for indecency in Iran speaks volumes.

That is not to say there is any hint of celebration of the unfolding war. Every performance reflected in its own style the suffering across the Middle East. For Sama Ensemble, this meant rearranging a world fusion set instead to focus on ancient Persian melodies. It was a fitting aesthetic choice, for there can be few traditions with more doleful than Persian classical music.

And whether singer Farhad Bozorgzadeh was mourning the ashes of Persepolis or the young innocents mown down by their own government in January, his voice carried that same dignity in the midst of loss.

Sandy Evans’ Magic Music took a different tack. A set inexplicably heavy with Christmas themes and Satsuki Odamura’s Japanese instrumentation may seem an odd choice, yet the jauntiness it brought reflected the mixed feelings to which the diaspora is currently subject – summed up by her ensemble’s master percussionist Sohrab Kolahdooz as “happy and sad, but mainly happy… at this fragile moment”. The ensemble’s multicultural fusion - rounded off and grounded by Steve Elphick on double bass - seemed appropriate for a country where east and west have mingled for so long.

That mingling occurs within Iran’s diverse peoples as well, and so it was fitting that festival closer Pouya Abdi focused on Azeri music, hailing from Iran’s north-western reaches. Rearranged and modernised for his jazz quartet, the result was skilful and genuinely haunting.

For a country and a people that long for change, this thoughtful festival was a reminder that while Iranian regimes may come and go, its art – steeped in centuries of longing – knows how to wait.

MUSIC
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
March 7
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★
The last time the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performed Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Music III, part of a series that changed the way the world thought about Australian music, was in 1996. The conductor then – and now – was Simone Young. In 1996, she was making her debut with the orchestra. Three decades later, she is Chief Conductor.

Thirty years of perspective has transformed Sun Music III from startling newness to the pinpoint portrayal of a moment in time. The evocation of a gamelan orchestra feels quaint, momentarily, but the expanded palette of orchestral colours, not just in the percussion but, across the strings and brass, is brilliantly rendered, then and now.

Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma makes a triumphant return to Sydney performing Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto. Written in New York in 1938, as the composer watched the build-up to war in Europe, the work is shot through with restless anxiety. Lamsma overlays the sense of dread with a fearless, icy beauty of sound, cutting through the orchestral texture with radiant harmonics.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6 bursts onto the stage with a cataclysmic roar, the kind of orchestral tutti you feel in your bones. The shrill of the piccolo, underlaid by spiralling virtuosity across the strings, sets in motion a gripping demonstration of the power of music, live and loud.

Beautiful solos, including from cellist Simon Cobcroft and bass clarinettist Alexander Morris, emerge from the welter of sound, as does the gentle surprise of Alice Morgan’s saxophone. But it is the sustained hush of the final movement that reveals the full range and delicacy of this fine band.

As Chief Conductor, Young’s work with the orchestra naturally focuses on her internationally recognised expertise in the repertoire of Mahler and Wagner. But it is good to be reminded that specialisation does not mean limitation: as the orchestra explores tough repertoire from less-travelled roads Young radiates an assured omniscience – a galvanising “I’ve got this” – that gives the orchestra an unfettered confidence to play fearlessly.