In another twist, this one unplanned, the play’s centring of a marginal figure has found a real-world echo. Jade Fuda, who was cast as our original heroine and also co-produces, had to step out just two days before opening night due to illness. Understudy Brea Macey stepped up with gusto.
Alex Kendall Robson directs with gusto, too – necessary for both the comedy and 150-minute runtime. Hips are grabbed by large hands; backsides slapped with force, bodies dragged across the floor, heads patted like a digger pats the earth. Perhaps I am a petal, but this roughness felt an uneasy match to Ophelia Thinks. For reassurance, there is an intimacy co-ordinator (Sonya Kerr).
This is a passionate production with a few loose parts. It is also, for a KXT on Broadway show especially, too long. One must suffer for theatre at times, but more than 90 minutes on those hard, narrow, tightly squeezed wooden chairs and the tormented flesh distracts from even the greatest of stage moments.
MUSIC
MUMFORD & SONS
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, 17 March
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★½
It is a brave band, accustomed to filling arenas and headlining festivals, that will step into the Sydney Opera House concert hall, with its acoustic perfection that magnifies not only the best but also the worst of its performers.
Playing to what is mainly a fan club audience and returning after a mid-career hiatus, Mumford & Sons could have been all flawed, and this devoted crowd would not have stinted in its rapture, but these consummate professionals bring their earnest best to the show.
Mumford & Sons were playing mainly to a fan club audience.Credit: Daniel Boud
The night and the encores both kick off without amplification – just a tight spotlight, an acoustic guitar and three-piece harmonies. While it is easy to hide behind the braggadocio and banjos for which they are best known, these renditions of Timshel and Ditmas bring a sincere intensity that isn’t apparent from recordings. So when they inevitably bring on their rowdy stompers, an honest charm lingers, softening the glibness of their formulaic pub folk.
That new single Rushmere is received with audience adulation, and the singalong is more a testament to their retreading of the familiar than a sign that they are penning modern classics. What sets their new material apart – five songs from the album to be released later this month – is a darker tinge, a bit more brood in place of the previous bravado.
Whether those new songs are truly a new direction remains to be seen, but for a band with a good 20 years under their belt, the 90 minutes they play is troublingly repetitive. That repetition is salvaged by how accessible it makes their music and by the adoration of their hardcore followers. There is an undeniable magic in seeing hits like The Cave and I Will Wait performed up close and personal, and at those moments, the room is euphoric. However, this setting is unforgiving in exposing Mumford & Sons’ creative limitations.
Journeying to Finisterre
The Song Company
St Philip’s Church, March 15
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½
As an analogy for inward journeys of the soul, the first concert of the Song Company’s 2025 season explored music associated with the Camino pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Finisterre in northern Spain (Finisterre – “Finis Terra” – was so named because it was once thought the end of the world).
Drawing on the capacious resonance (and ignoring traffic interruptions) of St Philip’s Church, the program, devised and directed by soprano Amy Moore, presented an uninterrupted sequence, in which Mediaeval and Renaissance music and lively Villancicos (secular polyphonic songs, sometimes used in a sacred context) mutated seamlessly into harmonies of our own age like a voyage of discovery in which unsuspected connections fall into place.
The program started with a chant from the Libre Vermell (“Red Book”) of Montserrat, written in the 14th century, to provide pilgrims with something “chaste and pious” to sing and dance to.
The rich four-part Renaissance polyphony of Tomas Luis de Victoria’s O quam gloriosum was followed by I look up to the mountains by Adelaide-based composer Anne Cawrse, a work of mellifluous harmonies seasoned with dissonance though never harshly.
The program moved through music from the twelfth and thirteenth century to pieces by the sixteenth-century composer Francisco Guerrero, whose Ojos claros, serenos had stylised musical representations of weeping and wailing like the images in Renaissance frescos.
Joseph Twist’s Versa est in luctum is one of three motets this Queensland-born composer modelled on works by Victoria. It featured rich harmonic clusters in which the traces of traditional chords were still imprinted, flowing into new and surprising combinations according to the expressive need.
After another chant from the Libre Vermell and 16th-century polyphony by Pedro de Cristo, the Song Company moved to Kaze no uma (Wind Horse) by 20th-century Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. The work is a vocalise without text and evokes a technique used by nomads to determine their next destination by hanging scraps of cloth from a rope.
The piece wove a web of intricate atonal dissonance from which high soprano notes suddenly emerged like a mysterious signal. Paul Stanhope’s Geography VI was a sensitive musical setting of a poem by Australia poet Michael Dransfield that began with quiet phrases that rose and died like the wind, moving to luminous harmonies, featuring, at one point hard silvery soprano sounds to represent “still coldness”.
After two sensuous 16th-century settings of love music from the Song of Songs, the program concluded with a hauntingly tender setting by American composer Edie Hill, Cancion de el Alma, En una noche escura, which evoked the soul’s dark night from anxious quietness at the chord to radiantly luminous declamatory chords, ending with a sense of muted mystery.
MUSIC
New Order
Sydney Opera House forecourt
March 14
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½
How does it feel to play songs you wrote in your 20s when you’re on the far side of 60?
If they are the quality of the synth-pop bangers of New Order and the post-punk gems of Joy Division, it can’t be that bad.
And when you look from the stage straight out to the sails of the Opera House and across to the Harbour Bridge, little wonder singer Bernard Sumner described Friday night as brilliant.
Those of us down the front with the second-best view had it pretty good, too, as Sumner and co. launched into a thunderous rendition of Joy Division’s debut single, Transmission. A frenetic and fuzzy Crystal kept up the momentum, and made a strong case to be considered the band’s best song this century.
Bernard Sumner was at his most electrifying on guitar.Credit: Ken Leanfore
The set ticked through a reliable roll-call of classics. The bright Age of Consent had the crowd dancing, while Bizarre Love Triangle was so deliciously ’80s even the accompanying vision was reminiscent of Pac-Man and Rubik’s cubes.
Being pioneers means New Order songs are both ahead of their time and trapped in the past. But they surprised with an urgent rendition of State of the Nation, flashing warnings about tariffs and conspiracy that suits 2025 almost too well.
There were a couple of misfires: Plastic was not so fantastic, and in this set, Be a Rebel felt pedestrian.
Sumner occasionally resembled rock’n’roll’s answer to Anthony Albanese, most notably when crankiness flashed across his face in the heat. Like the PM, there were times his voice failed to cut through the noise, but his everyman delivery mostly worked. He was at his most electrifying on guitar.
Gillian Gilbert on keyboards has been to the Pet Shop Boys school of standing still and looking uninterested; Stephen Morris remains an energetic force on the drums; and relative newcomers Phil Cunningham (guitar) and Tom Chapman (bass) seemed right at home.
Before the fan-pleasing Joy Division encore, a trio of big tunes served as the highlight. True Faith is New Order at their most imperious, Blue Monday’s squall of synths and hooks is undeniable all these decades later, and Temptation proved hard to resist.
There were many pluses – and bonus points for sticking to the hits and not faffing around – even if it fell short of spectacular.
Catriona Morison & Aura Go
Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, March 16
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Scottish mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison sang Brahms, Mahler and a bracket of folk songs with rich warmth, ivory finish and a wide dynamic span, which ranged from transcendent quiet to overwhelming power and intensity.
All of this became evident in her first two numbers, Brahms’ Dein blaues Auge, and Mädchenlied, in which she showed exactingly subtle nuance that allowed the underlying musical ideas to emerge with polish, refinement and free-flowing naturalness.
Catriona Morison with Aura Go accompanying.Credit: Jay Patel
She and pianist Aura Go started Auf dem Kirchhofe with portentous tragic drama, but, in the coda, Morison hushed the sound while still retaining smoothness of line, like a distant dream.
In Meine Liebe is grün, they captured a sense of turbulent elation, Morison’s voice flashing with surging vividness at the peaks of phrases. She began Die Mainacht with the stillest of sounds, threading the line like fine silk. It was a feature of her performances that from such stillness, power and intensity would suddenly well up without a hint of distortion or stertorous breathing, born only of the music’s inner logic and the singer’s musicality and humane expressive instinct.
Go then played a bracket of three of Mendelssohn’s Songs without words, those lyrical pieces in which, as Go explained, the piano does service for both voice and accompaniment. Morison’s German vowels in the Brahms songs had been so musically rounded that the lilting Scottish accent of her spoken voice when introducing the folk-songs was a surprise, though it lent vernacular authenticity and sometimes humour to the Scottish numbers.
She began Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of Ca’ the Yowes (with words by Robert Burns), with arresting sound and expansive breadth, colouring individual notes and hushing the last verse with distant sadness and sweetness.
Go then played an intriguing bracket of three piano pieces by neglected 19th-century Swedish composer Helene Tham, whose music displayed lively freshness and virtuosity, sometimes recalling the salon style of Chopin’s waltzes.
The final bracket, Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, was outstanding for its musical depth. The first song was still and flowing, while the third, Um Mitternacht, began solemnly with apt emphasis until it opened out with overpowering intensity.
In Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, Morison quietly insinuated the line with delicate shades. She ended the cycle with a serene glow of resignation that anticipated some of the sublime endings of Mahler’s late style.
OPERA
Dido & Aeneas
Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, Circa
Opera House, March 13.
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
This combination of musical and circus artistry creates a twin pull on one’s attention, the two strands sometimes working harmoniously, sometimes in tension and occasionally in internecine subversion.
First, there is the musical seductiveness and clarity of Purcell’s great score, as fresh today as it has been for more than 300 years, conducted with refined musical discernment by Pinchgut Opera’s Erin Helyard.
Anna Dowsley grows in stature with each appearance.Credit: David Kelly
Rising star Anna Dowsley takes both the role of Dido and that of the Sorceress, who, in a thoughtful touch, is constructed as the negative double of Dido’s personality (“risen star” might be more accurate for Dowsley, but she continues to grow in stature each time she appears).
Alongside this stylish musical realisation, director Yaron Lifschitz places the astonishing skill and strength of the Circa Ensemble. Although Lifschitz adds grace and expressive gesture to their movement, the essence of Circa’s appeal still lies in their gasp-inducing acrobatic audacity, and the voyeuristic anxiety of watching performers walk and climb on the spines of others, and tumble from towers of acrobats piled three-high, each standing on the heads and shoulders of those below.
Gasps sat well enough with some moments, notably the sailors’ song and chorus, full of rollicking intoxicated swagger. They were out of step, however, with the interpolated instrumental number just before it, where the circus feats were dissonant with Dido’s reflective mood and the intricate counterpoint of the music.
The Circa Ensemble performs with astonishing skill, strength and balance.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Before the curtain rose, a series of aphorisms and quotations, some from the opera, some thought-provoking, others pretentious, were scrolled on screens against spectral noise and harmonies far removed from Purcell. The production adds a Prologue and additional musical numbers in compatible musical style to accommodate additional circus/dance routines.
The Prologue developed like an abstract work of contemporary dance with Baroque music and was slightly overextended, but this quickly evaporated when Purcell and Nahum Tate’s music drama took the reins in Act I.
Dowsley’s singing was laden with deep expressive colour, beautifully sculpted melodiousness and flashing fierceness as Dido, and she found a more sinister penetrating tone for the Sorceress. Left alone, stripped of regal garb and statuesque poise at the end, she shaped the expressive gradations of When I am laid in earth to a weighty tragic culmination, the climactic G opening out a world of colour and pain.
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Jane Ede sang her attendant Belinda with bright, often thrilling tone, crisply pert projection and shining aura. As Aeneas, Nicholas Jones had a freshly attractive youthful voice, not yet as powerful as Dowsley’s (though it is not dramatically inappropriate that, vocally, she eats him alive).
Sian Sharp sang the Second Lady with rounded clarity, and Angela Hogan and Keara Donohoe sang the witches duets with spirit and finely edged balance. Cathy-Di Zhang’s voice as Mercury was glowing and smooth, while Gregory Brown led the sailor’s chorus with roistering swagger.
Although their daily bread is the vibrato-coloured resonance of 19th-century opera, the Opera Australia Chorus adapted themselves to the needs of Baroque transparency with finesse, eliminating forceful projection to create warmth of sound and well-disciplined balance from the galleries during the final chorus. Similarly, the Opera Australia Orchestra emphasised delicate tonal discretion and natural colour. Notwithstanding its inner tensions, most will find something (not necessarily the same thing) to make the experience absorbing and enjoyable.
MUSIC
PJ Harvey
Opera House forecourt, March 13
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★½
The colours told us, even before the notes did.
On her most recent tours, as the rooms got bigger, PJ Harvey progressively narrowed the palette. The boldly patterned and cut outfits of yore turned to Victorian simplicity in white, then workmen’s functional garb, widow’s weeds, and increasingly crimping lights, culminating in her and her band in severe black and leather binds in an almost militaristic presentation.
This time, the colours on the men were more autumnal and forest floor, and Harvey was in a white quasi-priestly robe with trees sketched on it. There would be sins and death and sex of questionable provenance, but there was a lot more story to tell than that, beginning with the folkloric creation of 2023’s I Inside The Old Year Dying.
PJ Harvey on stage at the Opera House forecourt.Credit: Daniel Boud
Played in sequence and in full to begin the night, an album that had divided fans even more than the bristling reportage of its predecessor, The Hope Six Demolition, became an enthralling piece of theatre. It was a melange of set-piece staging (PJ sat at a desk or crouched before it), contributed noise (animal squawks and screeches; the scratchy irritant of a reverberation), and the firmer, earthier, beautifully mixed voice she now offers.
And it was carried by a band – drummer Jean-Marc Butty, multi-instrumentalists John Parish, James Johnston and Giovanni Ferrario, and Harvey occasionally on autoharp, harmonica, electric and acoustic guitar – that even when visceral and agitated in A Noiseless Noise played within the songs and lived the invocation in A Child’s Question, “Love me tender, tender love”.
If the show was divided in two – newest album in full; career-wide variety – it was not separated by approach. The theatricality, the exaggerated physicality and moves, remained, as did the plainness of the sonic palette. To Bring You My Love was sinew and bone, taut skin stretched almost to transparency; electric bass sealed Man-Size as a pressing blues cut through by violin; Dress was a properly sinuous experience, from its rhythm to Parish’s trebly soft counter-vocals.
And then, closing the night and closing the circle with the Dorset village voicings of the first half, White Chalk held firm within its ghostliness, forlorn but not forsaken, colours diffused rather than stark.
