Trump in a dumpster plus a little bit of opera? This is a Christmas show with a difference

Director Susie Dee somehow whips the creative chaos into dramatic and emotional shape, holding it all together with an offbeat carnival of queer pageantry featuring lip-synching, killer choreography and flamboyant costumes to a soundtrack packed with perverted Christmas bangers.

F Christmas ends with liberating nudity, the whole cast bouncing together in the buff on Giant Space Hoppers. The artists bared all at curtain call, and the audience was just as naked in its enthusiasm for this irreverent, all-inclusive Christmas spectacular.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
The Kid Laroi ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, November 29

The Kid Laroi starts playing the beatmaker on stage to deafening cheers. “Oh Melbourne, what the f--- is up?” he says, before launching into Baby I’m Back off his debut studio album The First Time as pyrotechnics fire up around him.

The Indigenous rapper and singer-songwriter – real name Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard – derived the moniker from his mother’s Kamilaroi heritage. Melbourne is the last city in the Los Angeles-based star’s First Time Australian tour.

The show is well-paced, starting with harder tracks like Sorry, about the familial pressures and stresses that come with being a recording artist, before switching to a melancholy mode with Bleed, then a sexier club vibe with Aperol Spritz, and closing out with mainstream songs like Without You.

He cups one hand to his ear to encourage the crowd to shout louder, yelling “bounce”, to which the standing section responds by jumping to the music.

There’s a maturity to the young performer, who talks about grief before launching into Tell Me Why: “This next song … it’s about losing people, and I’ve experienced a bit of that.”

He acknowledges the mentors who got him to where he is. He encourages the crowd to chant “long live Juice” to celebrate the life of the now-deceased rapper Juice WRLD. He gives a nod to Justin Bieber for “making the biggest song of my career together”, before singing Stay.

The overall production is slick and The Kid Laroi’s stage presence demonstrates a level of professionalism beyond his years. He pays forward the support he’s received throughout his career by bringing the support act – Western Sydney drill group Onefour – on stage, helping to raise the profile of other up-and-coming artists.

“Can I dedicate a song to you guys?” he asks before playing Love Again and saying that Melbourne was fast becoming one of his favourite cities in the world.

The acoustic rendition of Without You is a highlight, with the darkened stadium illuminated by a sea of smartphone torches.

As The Kid Laroi disappears behind a wall of confetti towards the show’s close, he shouts out, “You guys are f---ing awesome”.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

THEATRE
A Christmas Carol, adapted from Charles Dickens by Jack Thorne ★★★★
Adapted from Charles Dickens by Jack Thorne, Comedy Theatre, until December 29

A Christmas Carol returns to Melbourne’s East End theatre district to charm audiences for the third year running. The show has become a festive tradition, and it’s such a delight you could safely stuff anyone’s stocking with a ticket. Children’s eyes will shine with wonder at the enchanting introduction to theatre; more hardened eyes will twinkle too; and the most inveterate grinches among us will at least tingle in discomfort.

Theatre critics? Well, if I can see something three times without a hint of grumpiness, it’s a winner.

This production remains unchanged – why tamper with perfection? – but there’s a new celebrity Scrooge each year, and each gives a different inflection to Dickens’ seemingly irredeemable miser.

David Wenham’s Scrooge (2022) had a heart as crusty and hard as a piece of forgotten toast, the caricature melted by a ghost of glamour and romance. Last year, Game of Thrones star Owen Teale was gruff and sour – seething with misanthropic rage, he looked as if he wanted to behead Christmas and couldn’t find the neck, leaning into redemption with a nod and a wink to its absurdity.

This time Erik Thomson plays to Dickens’ vision of Scrooge as “solitary as an oyster”. His Ebenezer is an emotional shut-in. All the grasping and clenching and clutching at money racks his mind and has left every muscle contracting in torment – he can’t even bring himself to look at people, let alone himself.

Playwright Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) has tweaked Scrooge to be haunted by the brutality Dickens’ own father meted out to his son, with a spidery shadow of Miss Havisham’s broken heart into the bargain.

If Thomson hasn’t yet relaxed into an effortless and emotionally refined incarnation of Scrooge, his oyster opens to reveal the comedic pearls, and there’s an enjoyable pantomime whiff of improbability to the miser’s metamorphosis.

A smattering of theatrical effects spooks up the Victorian-era ghost story, and notable performances from the supporting cast include Anthony Cogin as Marley’s ghost, Sarah Morrison as Scrooge’s lost love, and Aisha Aidara as his optimistic little sister. The child actors playing Tiny Tim (Mira Feldman on opening night) are, as always, gorgeous to watch.

But the entire ensemble throws itself into the irresistible joy of Matthew Warchus’ production, delivering the classic parable through rapid-fire choric narration, carols sung in uplifting harmony, a spot of low-key audience participation, lively music and dance, and the tintinnabulations of a bell-ringing version of Silent Night to close the show.

A Christmas Carol is so popular it’s playing every day except Christmas Day itself, and you’d have to out-scrooge Scrooge to leave with your spirit untouched by goodwill and festive cheer.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Pieces 2024 ★★★★
Union Theatre, Parkville, until November 30

The Lucy Guerin Inc annual showcase of new work continues to flourish. Now hosted at the University of Melbourne’s sleek new Union Theatre, the event has come a long way in the two decades since its launch.

This year’s program begins with a duet created by Tra Mi Dinh to a coolly atmospheric composition by Tilman Robinson. Shrouded in billowing stage smoke, the dancers move like blank-faced cloud creatures: fluid, graceful and a little menacing.

The fascination of this work is its restlessness. The upright deportment and quick steps, the constant movement and high arms give the performance a sense of lightness and clarity, even as the mists swirl and jet.

The theme is not always apparent, but there are memorable moments. In one scene the dancers use isolations to create the illusion of limbs smoothly disassembling and reconfiguring, drawing apart and expanding.

Joel Bray’s solo is performed mostly naked. It combines stylised birdlike gestures – a reference to his totem animal, the welcome swallow – with explicit but nonetheless stock images of homoerotic display.

What is interesting about Bray’s work – when it is interesting – is not so much the gestures and images as how he transitions between them and how the work develops. In this sense, his talent is dramaturgical rather than choreographic.

Here it is the interplay with composer Marco Cher-Gibard, who performs live on stage, that holds our attention. Their ambiguous glances and playful role reversals create layers of intrigue and humour.

Closing the program is an absurdist animatronic arrangement by Alisdair Macindoe, featuring two dancers with remote-controlled robotic drums – designed, built and programmed by Macindoe – strapped to their backs.

It has the feel of a sci-fi satire in abstract, with the dancers controlled by their automated dorsal drum kits while medieval harp music tinkles in the background.

In one unforgettable scene, the dancers crawl across the stage, silhouetted against a stark background, their robot lords riding high in the saddle – slaves now and forever to the burden of the rhythm.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
Blak in the Room ★★★★
Gunawarra Re-creation, by Isobel Morphy-Walsh
A Wake – A Woke Mob, by Maurial Spearim
Emu in the Sun, by Phoebe Grainer
MTC x Ilbijerri Theatre Company, Southbank Theatre, until December 7

Ilbijerri Theatre Company has been around for more than 30 years and the MTC for a few decades longer than that, but of course First Peoples have told stories for many thousands of years. European drama – which has been around since the Ancient Greeks – is a newcomer in comparison.

Blak in the Room is the result of a historic creative alliance between Ilbijerri and the MTC and the resulting three short works are illustrative of the range and scope of Indigenous dramaturgies.

Gunawarra Re-creation adapts the Taun Wurrung story of how Gunawarra, the black swan, came to have black feathers – a myth of transgression, violation, compassion and healing involving a young woman who falls foul of Bunjil, the eagle creator spirit, and is restored by Waa, the crow.

The legend is elegantly layered into a family history of three generations of women. Tormented by an unspeakable story, Murrun (Carly Sheppard) wants to reconnect with her mother (Kristel-Lee Kickett) on country, as her recently deceased Aunt Aggie (Melodie Reynolds-Diarra) instructed.

Encountering a black swan (Hannah Morphy-Walsh in magnificent costume) by a waterhole, Murrun learns untold stories live in ancient ones that can be retold depending on what you want to say.

Rachael Maza directs beautifully understated performances, feathering unvarnished realism into vivid symbolism. Emotional, psychological and cultural truths emerge; the design is beguiling and the psychology of trauma is handled with compressed insight and such a poetic touch that some text could be trimmed towards the end.

Maurial Spearim’s A Wake – A Woke Mob takes up the baton of deadly First Nations comedy with mischievous glee.

Conflict has riven a Blak family grieving the death of radio host Deadly Dave (Greg Fryer). As his widow (Lisa Maza) erupts into performative wailing, his doctor daughter (Maurial Spearim), sick of being the responsible one, unleashes resentments on her feckless brother (Zach Blampied) a rugby star, not to mention his woke, white hippie influencer girlfriend (Jordan Barr).

The hubbub is stopping Dave from passing in peace, so he haunts them all in an uproarious, silly, and slightly sexy farce that pokes fun at every piety and folly and insecurity.

Most Australian comedy has an irreverent streak, but Blak comedy is next level. Dave from beyond the grave reconciles all parties to respecting the dead through torturing his loved ones with outlandish low humour until they learn to respect one another. Expect unhinged variety with zany musical outbursts, zombie chases, carrot-smoking and coffin sex. Hilarious and heartwarming stuff.

The final play synthesises the first two in aesthetic. Phoebe Grainer’s Emu in the Sun contains traces of Indigenous legend and astronomy – in many Aboriginal cultures the moon is a lazy man and the sun fiercely feminine – and here Etta (Grainer), a young woman bedridden with depression and anxiety, is drawn out of herself into a surreal phantasmagoria.

It’s a dream(ing-ish) play in which Teresa Moore beckons Etta into a dark constellation of cabaret and camp mayhem.

The fantasy quest adventure is enlivened by mischief and glamour and the adorable comic antics of the Moon (Trevor Jamieson) and a dragon (Luke Currie-Richardson), with the two actors doubling as cowboy and minotaur when things get real, and Etta confronts some of what lies under the veil of her dreams and nightmares.

Wildly inventive and unconventional, whimsical and free, this is a gloom-dispelling odyssey that should instil a kind of willed innocence in any heart and mind that’s open enough. It almost feels like an Aboriginal improvement on The Wizard of Oz. Etta conquers the demons of mental illness with courage and comic aplomb and the assistance of oddly loveable companions, the ingredients of her fantasia ancient and modern.

All three of these works are worth seeing, and there’s a contemporary exhibition featuring Blak artists and posters upstairs from Ilbijerri’s history, with other workshops and talks throughout the season.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Edging ★ ★
Aphids, Arts House, until December 1

Australia’s border security policies, bias against those perceived as ‘other’, and the treatment of asylum seekers lie at the core of experimental art organisation Aphids’ new show, Edging.

Helmed by performers Sammaneh Pourshafighi and Eden Falk (and created by them, along with Aphids co-director Lara Thoms, with additional script consultancy with Negar Rezvani), the show attempts to interrogate what it calls “the popular-culture-industrial complex” and how this intersects with queerness, pink-washing and the Australian border regime.

There’s a certain irrealism to Edging – in vogue in the current “post-truth” world – that flirts with truth and fiction. We are provided snippets into the real lives of Pourshafighi and Falk – the former a queer, nonbinary Iranian artist who fled their home country with their mother when they were a toddler, the latter a white cisgender man and acting school drop-out who had previously done voiceovers for three seasons of Border Security.

Throughout the hour-long show, the power dynamic between the performers is continually flipped, but minute ripples of tension are quickly deflated – there’s a tonal instability here that never descends into the bathos its creators hope to foreground.

A lingering uncertainty abounds: juxtaposed with the Albanese government’s recent plan to combine migration policies that would help it deport thousands of non-citizens – which Edging doesn’t mention – the show’s general tone of lightheartedness ironically offsets the gravity of the current situation in a way that doesn’t allow for further introspection around the uses of propaganda.

While what might initially seem nonsensical – questions directed at the audience about horoscopes, a dog cameo – is revealed as part of the workings of the farcical border regime in Australia, there remains a dramaturgical distance as the performers never fully breach the limits the show sets for itself.

Edging cements Aphids’ brand as a performance company that delves into serious issues with an injection of absurdity – we’ve seen them do grief, class, death, capitalism. There is almost always a signature spare, placeless atmosphere; equally placeless “for vibes”-type music; unexpected cameos; and a dash of reality destabilisation. Performers read prepared text, riff, make weird noises with their mouths. Throw in a bit of Australiana to remind the audience where we are.

While the dynamic between Pourshafighi and Falk reflects a distinct inequality, the individualistic mindset embedded within the show’s plot jars next to the literally life-or-death issues that Edging aims to explore. The two performers, as well, embody a particular colourlessness even though they are meant to be playing themselves.

It might be funny to hear the words “daddy issues” on stage, or unexpected mentions of cult Berlin nightclub Berghain in the context of this show. Tried and tested, and perhaps apt elsewhere, but what’s an experimental art organisation saying when risks are not being taken?
Reviewed by Cher Tan

MUSIC
Spring Gala: Beethoven’s Ninth ★★★★★
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Hamer Hall, until November 30

Twelve months ago, few could have foreseen the far-reaching effects the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven Festival would have both on the orchestra and the broader music-loving public. What better response than to play all nine Beethoven symphonies at the end of a year that for the MSO might politely be described as “demoralising”?

Now that this symphonic expedition, with its particularly luminous wind playing, has reached its Everest with performances of the choral Symphony No. 9, the MSO players are far from demoralised; their passionate commitment to the music has shone through at every turn and near-capacity crowds have enthusiastically shown their appreciation for this Herculean effort.

In a world where war and politics seem to have shattered human solidarity to the point of no return, the ninth’s setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy remains a vital injunction never to abandon hope for a united and joyful humanity.

Raising the curtain on this festival finale came Concerto for Orchestra by Scottish composer James MacMillan, a recent co-commission from the MSO. Subtitled Ghosts, it draws inspiration from Beethoven’s Ghost Trio. While also making reference to traditional Scottish music, this colourful and nostalgic music seems laden with American references, whether to Bernstein’s urban jazz or Copland’s rustic hoedowns. In its ample instrumental cameos the orchestra excelled.

Chief conductor Jaime Martín imbued the opening of the ninth with extremes of contrast, unleashing biting ferocity before the Scherzo’s ricocheting figures displayed the ensemble’s razor-sharp reflexes. In a symphonic canon where winds often predominate, the opening of the Adagio provided space for the strings to pour out luxurious tone in the service of one of the master’s most poignant melodies.

Martín did his best to knit together the various episodes of the finale, aided by soprano Lauren Fagan, mezzo-soprano Margaret Plummer, tenor Stuart Skelton and bass-baritone Shenyang. Skelton was clearly steeped in the music, even if at times his Wagnerian instrument threatened to overwhelm his fellow soloists. Singing from memory, the MSO Chorus radiated conviction, even while dealing with the composer’s challenging vocal demands.

A well-considered additional feature of this performance was the participation of the 2024 Auslan Choir whose signing of the text not only acknowledged Beethoven’s deafness but pointed to the composer’s aspirations that all should “hear” his message.

As elsewhere in the festival, Martín ensured an adrenalin-filled dash to the finish line, capping off an extraordinary, morale-boosting journey for all concerned.
Reviewed by Tony Way

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