Jack White returns to the grimy intimacy of the Melbourne venue where he wrote one of his hits
By Will Cox, Vyshnavee Wijekumar, Cameron Woodhead, Andrew Fuhrmann and Tony Way
MUSIC
Jack White ★★★★
Always Live, Corner Hotel, December 7
It’s Saturday night. The floor is sticky. There’s a pole in the way of the stage, one of the city’s great design flaws. I can’t see much. The support band, Licklash (two guitars, a drum machine and three chords), have an EP out, with a hand-printed cover, but it’s not on the merch table. You have to come find singer Kahlia Parker and she’ll sort you out.
Jack White performs at the Corner Hotel on Saturday night.Credit: David James Swanson
Jack White, rock and roll royalty, could fill a much bigger venue than the Corner Hotel several times over – and he has, he’s playing two sold-out dates at the Forum on Monday and Tuesday – but this grimy intimacy is what he prefers. And he’s right.
He appreciates the theatre of rock and roll. You can see his team around the venue because they’re all dressed in suits and bowler hats. The band are all dressed in leather, with White (on guitar) flanked by drums, bass, and I think, keys (not sure, it’s behind the pole).
I’ve never seen someone stride onto stage as confidently and purposefully as White. He opens with Old Scratch Blues, the first track from his new album No Name, which has been compared to his old White Stripes material.
He’s never been about the new, or the innovative. He carves new shapes from the old. The sound is dense, an intensely loud sludge pouring down the walls, over which White wails and shreds for an ear-blistering 90 minutes. His guitar playing is a sight to behold – it’s an act of puppetry, ventriloquism. For 90 minutes the thing is alive.
A pole obscures the view of the Corner Hotel stage, but it doesn’t detract from the intimacy.Credit: David James Swanson
White leans heavily on the new material, but with plenty of the old thrown in, including some Raconteurs and White Stripes numbers like Black Math, Ball and Biscuit, Little Bird and Hotel Yorba.
I still miss (his former White Stripes bandmate) Meg, of course. Her simple, solid drumming gave the sound some tension and offset the guitar-bro of it all.
And then, in the encore, the bit we all knew was coming. “This particular song I just so happened to write in this room, 20-something years ago,” he says.
It is, of course, Seven Nation Army, the most muscular riff of the century, which, the story goes, he wrote right here at the Corner during a soundcheck in 2002 (“It’s OK,” White remembers his friend and label co-founder saying). The drummer four-to-the-floors it, the (mostly male) audience shout themselves raw, the lights strobe. The screaming simplicity of it. It’s more than just OK.
Reviewed by Will Cox
MUSIC
Grace Cummings ★★★★
Athenaeum Theatre, December 5
Grace Cummings casually walks on stage barefoot, taking a seat at the piano. She says dryly: “I wrote this song the other day. I played it the other day in Sydney, but I’ll play it now. It’s self-explanatory, I suppose.” The audience laughs.
Grace Cummings performs at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre on Thursday night.Credit: Richard Clifford
After touring the UK, US and Europe, Melbourne-based Cummings returned to Australia for a national tour, and her Athenaeum Theatre show was her last of 2024. She played songs from her third album, Ramona, its title a nod to Bob Dylan’s 1964 track To Ramona.
The singer-songwriter exudes just as much power performing solo on stage, playing the piano or guitar, as when she is accompanied by her band. The floor vibrates when the guitars, drums and backing vocals come into full effect, creating an electrifying ambience in the theatre. A theremin brings a piercing, haunting sharpness that complements Cummings’ gravelly vocals and the Irish folk and blues nodes in her performance.
Cummings is as captivating whether she is performing solo or with her band.Credit: Richard Clifford
There’s an earthy vulnerability to her onstage demeanour. Cummings takes a swig of her glass bottle between songs while carrying on a dialogue with the crowd about the inspiration behind her music.
She describes Work Today (and Tomorrow) as a “song about gambling”, and doesn’t hold back in explaining how Everybody’s Somebody is about a person who has done her wrong. Cummings also performed Something Going ’Round with the band and Help Is On Its Way solo on the piano, staying faithful to its Ramona version.
Peering wide-eyed into the darkened room, Cummings tries to draw a connection with her fans by meeting their gaze, and retorts, “I’ll claim that” to an audience member who calls her sexy.
The warmth and appreciation Cummings has for her band is obvious, as she often looks over her shoulder and smiles at them while playing piano. This extends to her opening act, Gareth Liddiard. She performs a duet with Liddiard, and describes him as a “a big inspiration to me, and I’m extremely happy he’s here”.
It’s clear she believes in the deeply profound impact music can have, saying “it’s for future generations. Music is a way we pass on our stories, pass on our feelings, pass on the history of the world.”
After her final song, Cummings stands before the crowd. They rise, whistling and cheering, for a standing ovation.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar
THEATRE
Ilarun: The Cutting Comb ★★★★
Amarantha Robinson, fortyfivedownstairs, until December 15
Naturalism never seems enough to refocus the lens when it comes to the nightmare of history. Ilarun: The Cutting Comb invents novel dramaturgy, and forms part of a much larger cultural project from black artists of African descent to interrogate colonial narratives and stage counter-stories of ongoing resistance.
Amarantha Robinson in Ilarun: The Cutting Comb at fortyfivedownstairs. Credit: Dre Chez
The play joins other eminent recent works in throwing a spotlight on black women relegated to the historical margins. Here, Amarantha Robinson invokes Queen Nanny, a legendary guerrilla leader (now celebrated as a national hero in Jamaica) who led escaped slaves in a successful revolt against colonial authorities during the First Maroon War.
She was said to possess mystical Obeah powers, and the mythology and magic of West Africa underpins Robinson’s entire theatre trilogy. Ilarun: The Cutting Comb is the second of three works inspired by orishas – West African nature deities – following her solo show Oshun (named for the Yoruba goddess of rivers) at La Mama in 2022.
In this story, Oya – goddess of the weather – makes her tempestuous powers felt. Enslaved on sugar plantations in Jamaica, Juicy (Robinson) and her sister Hetty (Rufaro Zimbudzi) face different ordeals.
Juicy has been spared her sister’s back-breaking labour harvesting sugarcane – but only because she has been selected as a “milk slave” and gets sexually abused by the plantation owner.
Ilarun, with Rufaro Zimbudzi (left) and Amarantha Robinson, is charged with mysticism and surrealism.Credit: Dre Chez
Ilarun begins as lively period costume drama on the streets of colonial Jamaica, where the sisters and another slave Jabari (Alpha Kargbo) strain under the yoke of colonial authorities (played by a periwigged David John Watton and Will Hall). We soon descend from the foyer into the bowels of fortyfivedownstairs to go behind the curtain of oppression and resistance.
What follows is a quest charged with mysticism and surreal moments. Juicy becomes invested with power after finding an African hair pin (the ilarun of the title), reconnecting with ancestral knowledge through her sister, facing betrayal from fellow slaves, meeting the eccentric Nanny, and reclaiming agency over her body and sexuality.
Director Effie Nkrumah wrestles some eclectic theatre magic into the cauldron. Colonial exploitation and horror are often portrayed through inane pantomime. Scenes in Jamaican creole can swing from deeply felt agonies into exaggerated comedy that plays with anachronistic mischief; there are bewitching eruptions of choreography, drumming (Kwame Tosuma) and masked performance as Juicy reconnects with West African culture.
Anchored by research and liberated by experience lived and imagined, this is probing, propulsive and rebellious theatre, charismatically performed.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Air play Moon Safari ★★★★★
Always Live, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, December 4
The atmosphere is impeccable: the members of Air (the core duo of Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, plus touring drummer Louis Delorme) stand equidistant in white, amid banks of synthesisers.
Air perform at Sidney Myer Music Bowl on Wednesday night.Credit: Richard Clifford
A simple but effective light show turns them into silhouettes coiled with smoke, at least some of which isn’t weed from the audience. It’s the after-dark bits of Pink Floyd’s 1972 Live at Pompeii, but with the controls set for the silvery moon, and full in-flight drinks service.
Tonight Air play their debut album, Moon Safari, in full, in a show billed as an Australian exclusive (though they did it at the Sydney Opera House in May).
The loungey tones of the French band’s influential, otherworldly 1998 album are much imitated – the whole chill-out genre seems to be built on doing just this – but are impossible to match. While imitators were designed to sink into the background, Moon Safari delved into the sublime.
A simple but effective light show turns the musicians into silhouettes, coiled with smoke.Credit: Richard Clifford
The show hinges on fidelity to the original. Key tracks like Sexy Boy and Remember retain their eerie space-age drama, and original vocalist Beth Hirsch, who performed and co-wrote All I Need, is represented by a few dubby samples. The mellotron and vocoder of New Star in the Sky sum up the sound of the whole record – expressive but confined, intimate but expansive. It’s beautiful.
The staging perfectly captures the album’s, well, airy sound. It’s a cut-down touring version of the set design by Antoine Jorel and Pierre Claude for other legs of the tour, where the band performs in a box that contains and diffuses the lights and projections, James Turrell-style, which look phenomenal. I suppose it was impractical to mount for a single Australian show. A shame.
The second half of the set is given over to Air’s post-Moon Safari career. They open up songs such as Venus, Don’t Be Light and Electronic Performers, letting them flow lava-like into prog-rock jams. It’s a joy. But it’s the perfect symphony of Moon Safari, that stoned, vivid voyage dans la lune, that I’ll treasure.
Reviewed by Will Cox
CIRCUS
Muse ★★★
National Institute of Circus Arts, until December 7
Playing with precarity is part of what makes circus such an appealing and popular form, but you need security to put your body on the line for art. Muse, this year’s graduate showcase at the National Institute of Circus Arts, proves once again that the institution is a reliable incubator for nurturing uncanny skill and imagination.
Third-year student Taylor Vogt performs in Muse. Credit: Cameron Grant
Many in the arts community were shocked when NICA “paused” its 2024 intake for the only dedicated tertiary degree in circus in the southern hemisphere. Our best and brightest aspiring circus artists suddenly had the tight wire pulled from under them; Australia’s global reputation as a leader in contemporary circus looked set for a fall.
Events have swung back, trapeze-like, since. A partnership with the Australian College of the Arts restored the 2025 intake in July, and if this showcase is representative, the competitive course will continue to attract the cream of our circus talent.
Merlene Hutt on the cyr wheel in Muse.Credit: Cameron Grant
Muse channels inspiration through freestyle individual acts. Each performer has chosen an apparatus and built a routine that explores possibilities for physical expression and theatrical spectacle. Each creates a unique mood and is delivered in sometimes quite idiosyncratic style.
There’s some ultra-casual hoop diving (Jesse Holden) – themed around building a modular frame from an instructional manual – that would make for a fun impromptu performance at any IKEA store.
Other ground-based routines include the scintillations of Gemma Jackson’s golden hula-hoop, charismatic diablo from Ty Wallent with mesmeric use of light and shadow, Jasmine Poniris’ flexible contortion handstands, and Merlene Hutt’s momentous and strange sci-fi encounter with the Cyr wheel.
Aerialists take flight into fancies all their own. Three distinctive approaches to straps (Anais Stewart, Rose Symons and Luca Trimboli) show how versatile and characterful the apparatus can be while launching an ugly duckling, creating mid-air gremlin mischief, or falling to earth with the grace of a flower petal spinning in the wind.
Zaelea Nolte dangles enigmatically in Muse.Credit: Cameron Grant
Gabriel Walker sets sail for a nautical adventure on Chinese pole, and Taylor Vogt takes an elegant and aesthetically spare approach to aerial rope.
A grapevine lifts Jasmin Tait to intoxicating heights on swinging trapeze, and Zaelea Nolte dangles enigmatically on the static version (following an opening tight wire act suspended over pebbles thrown onstage by the audience).
Spliced throughout are short grabs from interviews with the artists talking about their creative processes – some fascinating, some boilerplate, some amusingly inarticulate, with a few that sound as if they’re unpaid advertising for NICA. The last is annoying because it is unnecessary: the acrobatic and circus talent on display does a far better job on that score.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
DANCE
Project B ★★★★
Kensington Town Hall, until December 6
Kensington Town Hall has one outstanding feature as a performing arts venue: west-facing clerestory windows. On the opening night of Project B, the airy hall was filled with soft evening sunlight. No other lighting was needed.
The Darling by Tim Harbour as part of Project B.Credit: Dominic Steele
And it’s typical of the enterprising M.Collective, led by the Italian-born Arianna Marchiori, to find this out-of-the-way venue. The company works with a host of talented collaborators but operates outside the usual networks for independent dance.
The core ensemble comprises Marchiori, Chimene Steele-Prior and former Australian Ballet dancers Stephanie Petersen and Jessica Thompson. It’s a quartet with an impressive range of professional experience.
The company’s latest double bill opens with The Darling by former Australian Ballet resident choreographer Tim Harbour, a free-flowing piece building from quiet beginnings into something fierce and focused, culminating in vigorous unison.
Tanz der Sehnsucht by Lucas Jervies.Credit: Dominic Steele
In its middle parts, the work contrasts bumbling, almost mime-like material – dancers in socks nudging and knocking into one another – with more intricate partnering: arabesques and complex, almost courtly arm work.
The dancers spend a lot of time gazing about with affected looks of wide-eyed wonderment. This thematic realisation of what Harbour calls a search for the inner child feels too literal, but the piece nonetheless has an appealing spontaneity.
The second work, Tanz der Sehnsucht by Lucas Jervies, is inspired by the expressive physical theatre of the great Pina Bausch. Oliver Northam provides a rollicking piano accompaniment, full of surging improvisations and crushing dissonances.
Sehnsucht, that untranslatable German word for something like longing, informs the piece’s overwrought mood. While it flirts with parody – anguished women in white slips, escapees from Bausch’s Café Müller – it’s hard not to be carried along the storm and strife.
Like Harbour’s piece, Tanz der Sehnsucht, though a little rough and ready, has the charm of immediacy – swift and undistracted.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
MUSIC
Joshua Bell in Recital ★★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, December 4
American violinist Joshua Bell may no longer be a boy wonder, but as a master at the height of his powers, wonder is a quality his playing so often imparts.
In an adroitly programmed recital, Bell, superbly partnered by pianist Peter Dugan, produced a chameleonic range of expression that testified not only to a prodigious technique but to a consummate musicality.
In Mozart’s two-movement Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 21, K. 304, the audience had its first taste of the admirable synergy between the two players, who wove the exchange of melodic material into a seamless whole.
Joshua Bell imparts wonder through his music. Credit: Sebastian Madej
From its tremulous beginnings, Schubert’s wide-ranging Fantasie in C major for Violin and Piano, D. 934 was an excellent vehicle for the well-projected tone of Bell’s 1713 Stradivarius. Its golden tone invested the third movement theme and variations with superb lyricism.
In the dying days of the Fauré centenary year, it was a special pleasure to encounter his rarely heard Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 13. Brimming over with explosive passion and tender reverie, Bell gave a thoroughly immersive account, highlighting the composer’s beguiling melodic and harmonic turns of phrase. Bell dispatched the technically demanding whiplash scherzo with appropriate nonchalance, before plunging into the dramatic finale, ably supported by Dugan’s empathetic handling of the monumental piano part.
Following these three advertised works, Bell further intensified the mood by delivering a scorching reading of the Sonata for Solo Violin No. 3, Ballade by 19th-century virtuoso Eugene Ysaye. After witnessing this utterly assured account of this fiendishly difficult work, it is easy to understand why previous generations thought of virtuosos as being possessed.
After such extraordinary intensity, Bell’s arrangement of Chopin’s beloved Nocturne in E-flat major and Wieniawski’s popular Scherzo Tarantelle provided a lighter, but no less wondrous, conclusion to this profoundly memorable evening.
Reviewed by Tony Way
THEATRE
Love Actually? The Musical Parody ★★
Athenaeum Theatre, until December 23
No surprise Love Actually didn’t make a list of the 10 Best Christmas movies in this masthead recently. The rom-com was a star-studded Christmas turkey when it was released 21 years ago. It’s slathered festive seasons in senseless sentimentality ever since, and you might wonder if the film’s simply too sopping for casual roasting to work by now.
This musical parody gives it a red-hot go, with mixed results. Assuming your tolerance for low comedy is high, you’ll be carried along by at least some of the merriment.
The show has the same rollicking ridiculousness as recent musical parodies (such as the one based on the ’90s sitcom Friends) and combines revolving door farce with university revue humour and a few original songs.
Love Actually? The Musical Parody might tickle those after some cheap and cheerful Christmas laughs.Credit: Nicole Cleary
A couple of songs are quite amusing, while remaining more cabaret-style than full-dress musical theatre numbers, and the silliness is easy enough to take.
Ian Andrew’s unflattering Hugh Grant impersonation sings “He’s the prime minister of rom-coms”. It’s one highlight, and the women in the cast, Belinda Jenkin and Sophie Loughran, have fun mocking underdrawn roles that fail the Bechdel test. (There’s a song about Keira Knightley admiring herself for being Keira Knightley, and another from Laura Linney wondering what the hell she’s doing in this film.)
Jeremy Harland plays Alan Rickman’s character as Professor Snape from the Harry Potter franchise, and Massimo Zuccara and Mitchell Groves round out the ensemble.
It’s such inane fluff, however, that the running time drags, and I don’t think you can hammer every nail into the coffin of something as annoying as Love Actually without exposing audiences to the irritations of the original.
The show has the same rollicking ridiculousness as recent musical parodies. Credit: Nicole Cleary
Perhaps a parody of such a roundabout and anti-climactic source needed to depart more decisively from it, to confect some kind of hare-brained denouement, rather than losing tone and trailing off. Certainly, the pace slackens, the energy and wit tire and running jokes are repeated to the point of tedium – all of which could have been avoided by shaving off 20 minutes or so.
This show’s unlikely to satisfy musical theatre tragics – the vocal and musical quality is too patchy; lyrics and dialogue are occasionally inaudible – but it’s still diverting and might tickle comedy fans who just want some cheap and cheerful Christmas laughs.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Skating in the Clouds ★
Theatre Works, until December 14
Before giving the thumbs down to Skating in the Clouds, it would be remiss of me not to praise the revolution at Theatre Works under Dianne Toulson’s leadership. Her energy and vision over the past few years have transformed the place from an underutilised venue into a thriving indie theatre hub.
Katrina Mathers (left) and Rebecca Morton in a scene from Skating in the Clouds. Credit: Anna Moloney-Heath
Not everything’s good, and Skating in the Clouds is quite frankly excruciating, but giving theatre makers a chance is crucial to a healthy performing arts scene.
Why is this play so bad? Let’s start with the writing. This work wants to be a queer magical realist romance between Summer (Katrina Mathers) and Autumn (Rebecca Morton), two women in their 50s. Alas, it’s singularly unimaginative, the whimsy reducing conflict and complexity, and feeding the emotional and psychological shallowness of two queer stereotypes.
Summer is a dreamy free spirit. A Pilates instructor who wafts around doing the salsa while the world burns, she’s planning a 70th birthday party for 2040 and she dons roller skates – to the title track from Xanadu, no less – as she composes a guest list of prominent female leaders.
Autumn is the practical one, an agricultural climate scientist. Spanner in hand, she keeps hallucinating a tap dripping, and could put her gifts to better use, if her ambition wasn’t trammelled by Summer’s quixotic charms.
Will their relationship survive? Will the world survive? (The world keeps gatecrashing the queer romantasy in satirical news items, or through the plaints of Gen Z youth enraged by the inaction of the generation before them.) These disruptions are underdeveloped, though the talented Shamita Sivabalan and El Kiley make the most of them.
It’s hard to get too invested. The drama is shapeless and the dialogue often vapid, tame and laced with cliche.
Design, too, is uninspired – the stage is dominated by a huge divan, for instance, but the play’s erotic possibility is reduced to a fleeting fumble and there’s little imaginative sexuality in the text.
Recent work foregrounding middle-aged queer women has included Jane Montgomery Griffiths’ subversive erotic monodrama The MILF and Mistress, performed by Jennifer Vuletic, and Anna Breckon and Nat Randall’s magnificent Set Piece, seen at Rising in 2022, which fused live film, fly-on the-wall installation and intimate sapphic mumblecore to probe the domestic textures of two intergenerational lesbian affairs.
Skating in the Clouds looks limp in comparison, and that’s a shame.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
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