Updated ,first published
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.
Get fascinating insights and explanations on the world’s most perplexing topics. Sign up for our weekly Explainer newsletter.
John Shand has written about music and theatre since 1981 in more than 30 publications, including for Fairfax Media since 1993. He is also a playwright, author, poet, librettist, drummer and winner of the 2017 Walkley Arts Journalism AwardConnect via Twitter.
