Glimpses of greatness as plucky first-timer tackles epic role
By John Shand, Michael Ruffles, Peter McCallum and Shamim Razavi
THEATRE
HENRY 5
Bell Shakespeare
The Playhouse, March 5
Until April 5
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
There are glimpses of greatness here. In making his professional stage debut, JK Kazzi doesn’t just perform Shakespeare; he tackles this play’s epic title role. Plucky. While his performance is flawed, when he spears the part, he humanises Henry and lifts him far above the pompous warmonger he’s often been.
Director Marion Potts’ vigorously physical production (in which a punching bag can become a hanged man) is often allied to a muscular way with the language uncommon in recent Bell Shakespeare productions. Then there’s her decision to have the French characters speak a French translation of the text (with subtitles), instantly making England’s adversaries more substantial and less like malevolent puppets.
JK Kazzi humanises Henry V in his professional stage debut.Credit: Brett Boardman
Potts’ radical edit of the text requires just 11 actors and lasts less than two hours. It tosses the Chorus role between several characters, thereby realigning the story-telling in terms of perspective, and rattles along at cavalry-charge pace, so you’re suddenly at the Battle of Agincourt (now Azincourt, in French) before you’ve fully adjusted to the staging and actors.
We lose, for instance, the affecting description of Falstaff’s death. But, given we’ve not just been watching Henry IV, and Falstaff (rightly, on Shakespeare’s part) is not a character in this play of action and war, the gain in momentum seems worth the loss in elegiac poetry.
Anna Tregloan’s set primarily consists of box steel modules that change function scene by fast-moving scene, including, ingeniously, being a tunnel when the English besiege Harfleur. The modules form a downstage dais when Kazzi delivers the “Once more unto the breach …” speech, so he looms above us like a god, and his voice grows in proportion. If his soliloquy before the battle lacks inwardness and is too declamatory, his “St Crispian” speech takes flight.
Kazzi is blessed with a quality that can’t be taught: presence. He excels at the big moments but could invest more conviction in the casual exchanges. He succeeds, nonetheless, when conversing with his soldiers on the battle’s eve and is captivating wooing Katherine (a commendable Ava Madon) at the end. Here, he mingles excruciating awkwardness with soldierly bluffness, culminating in being struck dumb when they kiss.
Two much smaller performances are even better. Odile Le Clezio makes such a complete being out of so very few lines as Alice, and gently illuminates the words with her eyes. Mararo Wangai’s Montjoy is far removed from the usual effete intellectual vision of that diplomat, instead being a warrior who engraves the very air with the force of his speeches.
For the battle, Tregloan has the stage covered in a sludge (like chocolate icing!) to represent mud, in which the French cavalry charge is metaphorically enacted, and the slipperiness symbolises perfectly the futility of the (mostly male) lust for war, while Jethro Woodward’s score is replete with such bassy thumps and rumbles, it’s as if the Earth is grumbling at this futility.
MUSIC
KHRUANGBIN
Hordern Pavilion, March 5
Also March 6, 7
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★
Album shows can be challenging even with the best of material and the most atmospheric of venues. A La Sala and the Hordern are neither of those things, so pity poor Khruangbin as they soldier on with a top-to-toe rendition of their latest album.
The clue is in its title, which translates as “to the living room”. It is a work best savoured on vinyl - not only for the textured reverb of Mark Speer’s Stratocaster but also so its unmemorable B-side can remain happily unplayed. Even the A-side takes its time to get going, with the night’s first four numbers serving as a warm-up for a fiesta that only truly begins with Pon Pon and stretches across another two songs to conclude with Hold Me Up – a joyous but brief chapter bookended by pieces more arty than party.
Lost in space: KhruangbinCredit: Jackie Lee Young
The show’s second wide-ranging half is far superior, even if it opens with an unintended wobble to Speer’s melodies on Como me Quires and The Infamous Bill. Wobble overcome, the party restarts with Pelota and builds with mounting intensity, climaxing in Maria Tambien’s masterful channelling of Iranian ’70s disco through the band’s psychedelic funk filter to deliver something at once political, beautiful and fun. These pieces from earlier albums are no less artful than the show’s more minor first half, but they are more accessible and fully formed.
That accessibility resonates with an audience transformed from respectful nodding silence to gyrating funksters but a noticeable chunk of the crowd has headed for the exits well before the band is done.
Which is a great shame. Devoid of obvious ego, Speer and bassist Laura Lee do their best to put on a performance, slinking across the stage with a feline elegance, their footsteps synchronised both with each other and the rhythm as they personify the groove.
You can’t fault their commitment to communicating their vision – even the A La Sala cuts are adapted for the show so that more minor pieces are trimmed to deliver their delicate main idea before outstaying the audience’s welcome – but it is an intimate vision too nuanced and too pretty for this cavernous setting.
MUSIC
FONTAINES D.C.
Opera House Forecourt, March 6
Reviewed by PENRY BUCKLEY
★★★★★
“Did you know/I could claim the dreamer from the dream?” go the wistful opening lines of Fontaines D.C.’s Favourite.
It’s a sentiment that seems to linger for fans throughout this show.
Fontaines D.C. in action at the Sydney Opera House Forecourt on Thursday night.Credit: Mikki Gomez
This is the first stop on the Dublin post-punk band’s world tour for their wildly successful fourth album, Romance, and the first time they have played here in two years. And they do not disappoint, despite the rain, with what might be a perfect set.
The band have an affinity with Australia (“I feel like I arrive here and I’m not completely an outsider,” bassist Conor Deegan III told this masthead this week), and the audience, a fair few Irish audibly among them, consolidate the bond by delighting in singing along during the history lesson in I Love You, about the “gall of Fine Gael and the fail of Fianna Fail”.
On the Grammy-nominated Romance, Fontaines reach new heights. Their new and old material feels like a cohesive canon from the moment they open with the title track. Recent anthem of disaffection, In the Modern World, responds to the 2020 tune A Hero’s Death (with its refrain “Life ain’t always empty”), while the new album’s lead single, Starburster, matches the energy of 2022’s industrial, grinding Nabokov.
The new material is gentler as a whole and provides balance with the softer interludes of Horseness Is the Whatness (a nod to James Joyce’s Ulysses) or when guitarist Conor Curley sings the shoegazey Sundowner.
But Fontaines are most at home in the driving Boys in the Better Land (from 2019 debut Dogrel) or the aforementioned Starburster, as fans fizz and bounce off each other in the mosh. Frontman Grian Chatten does not relent, either.
But all dreams come to an end. As the band closes the set with Favourite, before the four-song encore, its opening lines echo joyously around the harbour.
MUSIC
GREEN DAY
Engie Stadium, March 3
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★★
American Idiot has no right to feel this urgent. The song is 20 years old but could have been written last weekend after recent Oval Office antics.
As a mission statement and piece of punk rock, it is as blunt as it is blistering, and Green Day delivered it in searing style on a Monday night in suburban Sydney.
The California trio, expanded for live purposes, played a smattering of hits along with classic albums Dookie (1994) and American Idiot (2004) in full.
Billie Joe Armstrong and that giant mushroom cloud.Credit: Chris Neave
The first comes closest to outright nostalgia bait as men of a certain age bounce around to slacker anthems of their youth; Billie Joe Armstrong a cheeky and charismatic punk pixie, Mike Dirnt taunting with the bass intro to masturbation masterpiece Longview, Tre Cool bringing flair and leopard prints behind the drums.
Under a giant cartoon mushroom cloud from the album cover, Green Day barely pauses for breath during the angsty and relentless Dookie leg: the more alternative, almost poppy When I Come Around stands out in the crowd as a jaunty singalong. It ended on a high note with Tre Cool sauntering about the stage to an orchestral version of the hidden final track All by Myself.
Bringing the set into the 21st century was the rousing Know Your Enemy, complete with an onstage fan going appropriately wild and the arena-pleasing anti-war anthem 21 Guns.
Tre Cool brought plenty of flair and charisma to the party.Credit: Chris Neave
However, American Idiot is the band’s crowning achievement. The hour-long punk opera opus describes a disenchanted generation worried about war, government intrusion and mass media manipulation. It’s as chilling and thrilling now as it was in the Dubya years, and Armstrong injects a rejection of “the MAGA agenda” to the opening title track and references to Ukraine and the Middle East in the rambunctious multi-part Jesus of Suburbia.
“This is for Ukraine,” Armstrong declares before launching into Holiday, the Armageddon-tinged protest song that itself goes off like a bomb.
With Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Wake Me Up When September Ends, the band turns from punk brats to genuine rock stars and even after all these years the band finds ways to make them seem fresh and moving.
Let us pray that 20 years on the songs are just as exhilarating but a lot less chilling. Can I get another amen?
MUSIC
MARIZA
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, March 3
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
The lights go down, and Luis Guerreiro’s dazzling Portuguese guitar splinters the silence. Mariza first appears as a silhouette, only her platinum hair and sparkly gown catching the dim light. Then she unleashes the phenomenon that’s her contralto voice, a voice that may have darkened slightly in the 18 years since she was last in Sydney but that’s lost none of its ear-pinning power. This time, the Mozambique-born Portuguese singer, who has taken Lisbon’s fado music to new audiences around the world, was chattier than I recall, telling us how she began singing in her parents’ taverna when she was five and that her first album, recorded 26 years ago, was intended as a gift for her father, not a commercial release.
Mariza amps up the intensity from the very beginning of the show.Credit: Ravyna Jassani
The world had other ideas.
Mariza immediately hits an intensity most singers aspire to reach at their concert’s pinnacle, and then she sustains it for song after song. Sometimes, it could seem as if all the sadness and despair in the world had been given voice or as if she were conjuring up the ghosts of all who have ever suffered. Meanwhile, her willowy arms and saucer eyes emphasised every note, compounding every emotion.
She could discard her microphone and still fill the Concert Hall with her voice, making one suspect that, despite the exemplary sound quality, she and her quintet were slightly over-amplified.
And what a band.
Besides Guerreiro (who was here 18 years ago), Carlos Phelipe Ferreira played equally dazzling acoustic guitar, and Gabriel Salles contributed sparse, apposite bass. Joao Frade’s accordion offered a contrasting, swirling sonic world to the guitars, with its unusually rich low notes particularly evident in the introduction to Meu Fado Meu, and drummer Mario Costa coloured and dramatised the music with a hybrid kit offering a wealth of sounds, which his virtuosity expanded further.
But the band’s primary purpose was to launch Mariza’s spearing voice, to let her bare her heart on songs such as Beijo de Saudade (roughly Kiss of Longing), fado being Portugal’s blues or flamenco. Its slow tempos underline the desolation often present in the lyrics and in the singing of the likes of Mariza and her great predecessor, Amalia Rodrigues, to whom she again paid tribute.
When she has veered closer to pop music on her records, the songs can sometimes seem emotionally limp compared with those in the fado tradition or with those reflecting her Mozambican roots. Yet in concert there’s no sense of this because her commitment is unwavering and her presence compelling, while her band lends to every song the kind of authority that a great orchestra does to classical music.
Besides, she knows the importance of lightening the mood with her occasional party pieces, such as the enthusiastically received encore, Maria Joana. The spell was only broken – and repeatedly so – by those audience members who rudely and fatuously insisted on filming her.
MUSIC
Simone Young conducts Elgar and Vaughan Williams
Opera House Concert Hall, February 28
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Moving from the front desk to the soloist’s position to play Elgar’s demanding Violin Concerto, Sydney Symphony concertmaster Andrew Haveron gave a commanding performance of majestic power, sinewy expression and rewarding musical richness. As might be expected, he interacted with the orchestra he usually leads with a refined ear, picking up the second phrase of the first movement’s main theme so as to continue the thought but gently darken the mood.
Andrew Haveron gave a commanding performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto.Credit: Nick Bowers
When Elgar’s expansive, striving textures called for it, he soared above the orchestral sound with heroic tone and impeccable intonation, heating up the coda of the weighty first movement to create a moment of stirring excitement. In the slow movement he and conductor Simone Young drew out the elegiac long line with tender sweetness, rising to searing intensity towards the end.
With an incisively carved flourish, Haveron brought the finale scintillatingly to life. For the cadenza, Elgar writes delicate tapping textures for accompanying strings to create a magical background of glistening presence while the soloist draws the music back to reflective melancholy for the reintroduction of the first movement’s opening idea.
In addition to its musical rewards, this performance was a reminder of Sydney’s good fortune in having a violinist of Haveron’s calibre leading its orchestra week by week.
The concert opened with a drily, skilfully orchestrated new work by Carl Vine, Dreams Undreamt, which propelled its way through eight minutes duration with energised syncopated rhythms, picking out irregular accents and transitioning to new tempi to ramp up the momentum, while raucous cow-bells barracked noisily at the back (which may be why the dreams remained undreamt).
This was part of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s 50 Fanfares project, though with eight symphonies under his belt, a composer of Vine’s experience might have merited a larger canvas in order to have the space to develop ideas more fully.
The final work was a rarity, at least in Sydney: Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3). Although pervaded by subtly astringent modal harmony and gently billowing wistfulness, this 1922 work, is, as the composer noted, a response to the horrors of World War I.
Avoiding any hint of the Austro- German symphonic tradition, Vaughan Williams seems to block out his own experience as an ambulance driver by evoking the glories of the countryside he cherished around him in northern France even amid the devastation.
Young led the delicate shades of the opening (reminiscent of Debussy’s La Mer), and the piquant solo motives that emerge on violin, viola and woodwind with carefully shaded balance and translucent clarity. David Elton played the offstage natural trumpet solo of the second movement, reminiscent of a military bugler, with coloured and incisive yet softly haunting tone.
The third movement is a heavy-footed country dance followed by a swift, quiet coda that fleets away like something from Midsummer Night’s Dream. To frame the last movement, Vaughan Williams introduces an off-stage wordless soprano solo, which Lauren Fagan delivered from the high organ gallery in phrases of tumbling natural beauty, evoking some invisible deity heard across fields.