Angry old men: You can’t take your eyes off The Cult

Julius Caesar
Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall, November 21
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

The set is a large pyramid, clad in gold and angled across the City Recital Hall’s small stage like a beached whale, while inside is the Orchestra of the Antipodes, not mummified, but glisteningly alive under conductor Erin Helyard’s exacting direction.

Neil Armfield’s production of Handel’s Julius Caesar, first performed 300 years ago, is a vintage Pinchgut Opera creation for its cheeky boldness, superb musicality, freshness and delight.

Tim Mead as Caesar and Samantha Clarke as Cleopatra are world-conquering leads, who, after traversing arias of dizzying virtuosity, fiery passion, languor and despair, come together in a final duet of golden mellifluous grace. These are exciting voices to follow.

Mead cuts loose early in a rage aria of bristling, rapid fire agility when he hears of the murder of Pompeo. In his subsequent funeral meditations he displays the opposite quality in long notes of glowing rounded depth. In Va tacito in Act 1, he sustained notes of dignified implacability and firmness over a game of chess, while Carla Blackwood played a horn obligato of velvety burnished smoothness, impeccably controlled from the gallery.

Clarke’s first aria burst forward with fire and colour in her voice and a thrilling ring across the entire range. Singing from the balcony in Act 2 with a delicately balanced ensemble of nine instruments (the nine “muses”) she created seductive hues of caressing beauty.

When desolation struck in Act 3 she sang doleful descending arabesques with transparent pastel shades on each note, like moonlight on a falling leaf, before leaping back with unbridled youthful joy and coy playfulness.

As widow Cornelia, Stephanie Dillon sustained a first aria of distant stillness and a second of measured solemnity, with subdued sweetness of tone as she sings over Pompeo’s body. As Sesto, her son, Helen Sherman, singing a travesti or “pants” role, projected a dramatic voice with vivid colour and weight in the lower register as she cries for vengeance.

As the villain of the piece, Hugh Cutting sang Tolomeo with fluid lightness and a voice of insinuating energy, characterising the part with wit and cynical irony until it turns to cruelty. Andrew O’Connor’s bass baritone as his general Achilla was smooth and beguiling, if insufficient to charm the grieving Cornelia. Michael Burden brought a twinklingly fresh vocal frisson to the role of the discreetly effective servant Nireno who saw nothing and everything, while Philip Barton had reliable vocal strength as the servant Curio who bursts in at the most inopportune moments.

The stage placement of the orchestra prevented direct contact between singers and conductor, and Helyard led instead through a kind of musical telepathy, transmitted by minute concentration and closely attuned listening. The pyramid, however, did not prevent the timbres of the Orchestra of the Antipodes from blossoming.

Violinist and leader Matthew Greco escaped onto the main stage for a brief and shining moment in the sun in a witty duet with Mead that amounted to a small violin concerto. With lighting by Damien Cooper, Armfield’s direction is full of inventive moments that not only sustain the da capo passages of each aria but create a narrative of continuously creative diversion.

In addition to the pyramid, Dale Ferguson’s designs create shifting points of reference – camouflage greens and battle fatigues, mummified ghosts, Cleopatra’s seductive siren and Cornelia’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunglasses.

People Will Think You Don’t Love me
KXT on Broadway
November 20
Until November 30
★★★½

Mild-mannered Michael has just received a transplanted heart.

But he seems to be taking on the characteristics of his boorish, but talented rocker donor.

When an organ is transplanted, can the donor’s traits also be transferred to the recipient?

This phenomenon, known as cellular memory, has long been perceived among heart recipients. Numerous anecdotal accounts exist of recipients assuming aspects of the donor’s personality, although the scientific jury is still out.

Joanna Erskine’s thought-provoking chamber piece explores the curious phenomenon as she poses big philosophical questions – within a domestic setting – about where our identity lies.

The three-hander opens with an awkward encounter. Conventional thirtysomethings Michael (Tom Matthews), newly recovering from his operation, and wife Liz (Grace Naoum) have arranged to meet Tommy (Ruby Maishman), grieving partner of the late donor Rick.

It does not go well as over-eager Liz exudes her gratitude to brooding 23-year-old rock chic Tommy, whose aura of darkness is palpable.

But soon Michael is dropping in on Tommy, bringing milk and replacing light bulbs. His genial demeanour begins to shift. There’s a fractious birthday dinner with Liz, and he becomes increasingly attracted to Tommy, who calls him Mick. The name reflects his increasing similarities with Rick, who combined musical ability with violence.

A couple of elements jar. Liz and Michael’s wedding eve flashback scene feels overburdened with exposition.

The play’s contemporary Sydney setting is also undercut by Liz’s reference to buying her husband “today’s paper”. It seems an unlikely activity for a digitally savvy millennial, as is her reliance on clippings torn from recent newspapers.

This may reflect the reality that it has taken nearly a decade for this work, which won the 2016 Silver Gull Award, to reach the stage, during which technology and news consumption has changed.

Maishman is outstanding as Tommy, slowly revealing the destructive complexity of her relationship with her late partner and tentative attraction to Michael.

Matthews doesn’t entirely nail the delineation of his chameleon-like personality, as the bland Michael morphs into a darker, aggressive Mick. But doubling as Rick he leaves no doubt of the character’s brutishness.

Naoum is creditable as Liz, confounded by her husband’s changed personality and the eternal triangle in which she is enmeshed.

Director Jules Billington creates a strong sense of suspense that unfolds on Sam Wylie’s economical domestic set.

While it misses a few beats, this is a play with a pulse that cuts to the heart of what makes us human.

James Blunt
ICC, November 23
Reviewed by PENRY BUCKLEY
★★★½

“I promise I never meant to be this guy,” James Blunt says at the close of up-tempo ballad All the Love that I Ever Needed, “the sad guy with a guitar, with a tear rolling down his face.”

Blunt, whose tour coincides with the 20th anniversary of debut album Back to Bedlam, and earworm lead single You’re Beautiful, feels the need to explain himself. He wanted to be a rock star, but to be in a band you need friends, he jokes, so he wrote “miserable” songs in his room instead. “Remarkably, your wives and girlfriends then bought millions of copies.”

Recently, the British army officer turned pop star has pre-empted being the punchline to a musical joke by becoming his own greatest critic. This tour saw him promise to legally change his name to one chosen by the public, “Blunty McBluntface”, if Back to Bedlam returned to No.1 in the UK on its October anniversary (its final position was number seven).

On this night, Blunt is no different, half energetic entertainer, half stand-up comic, leading the audience in a Mexican wave during High, joking about the men dragged along by their partners while ribbing that they are secretly enjoying themselves. But despite his well-rehearsed, self-ironic shtick, his fans know there is a deeply personal core to his music, and are often moved to tears.

Solo piano song Dark Thought is dedicated to the late Carrie Fisher, on whose piano Blunt recorded Goodbye My Lover while he stayed with her in Los Angeles during the Back to Bedlam sessions. Blunt later plays Monsters, written as a tribute to his father during a period of illness from which he has since recovered, and the band joins in on bittersweet vocal harmonies on The Girl That Never Was, written about Blunt and his wife losing a child to a miscarriage.

Of Blunt’s self-described “happy songs”, opener Beside You and Robin Schulz collaboration OK veer towards the dance stylings of spiritual successor Ed Sheeran and feel a little forced, but a cover of Slade’s Coz I Luv You, a feature of his live shows, sees Blunt embody his rock-star aspirations, standing at the piano a la Elton John. The ICC’s seated layout prevents crowd-surfing, the singer instead running through the audience.

Nevertheless, it is You’re Beautiful that remains the centre of the show, as parents and now-adult children, lyrics seared into brains from endless play on school runs, launch hard into the explicit version (the radio version substituted the lyric “f---ing high” with “flying high”).

“For 20 years, one song has kept me on the road,” says Blunt.

Pearl Jam
Engie Stadium, November 21
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★½

In many ways it’s a nice-to-have problem, but after setting a career-high watermark with 1991 genre-defining album Ten, Pearl Jam have fallen further and further short with each subsequent release. They wrestle with that problem all night, but a set list where the only songs written this century are a handful from their latest album suggests the band are happy to keep the audience entertained.

They work hard to keep things fresh within that constraint, albeit with mixed results. Playing an oldie at a weirdly accelerated tempo left it sounding anything but an Even Flow, although the breakneck pace did highlight Mike McCready’s virtuosity – he played that song’s epic solo with the guitar behind his head.

McCready again stole the show on crowd request Black, with a guitar solo from the Marty McFly eyes-closed/down-on-your-knees handbook. However, for all its showmanship it felt out of place and pierced the emotional spell of a song otherwise filled with yearning sorrow.

The key to that sorrow remains Eddie Vedder’s unmistakable voice, which, like the wine he swigs through the show, has matured with age. It is a voice at once intimate and immense, and to see 40,000 strangers join him on every tender intonation, vocalisation and ululation on a note-perfect Jeremy demonstrates he expresses much more than his lyrics suggest.

Similarly, sending a callout to drink-spike victims Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles and dedicating a song to a recently deceased fan who had bought tickets to that night’s show elicits a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck emotional response.

A few innovations from their latest album do make an impact, with Dark Matter and the awkwardly titled Waiting for Stevie masterfully shuffled into the deck of hits in a way that avoids any mid-set drag.

Every show of their tour has a different roster of songs, and the band’s restless innovation has clearly kept them going when many of their fellow grunge pioneers have either died or given up. And while that innovation gives us weird idiosyncrasies like middling buzz killer Indifference to close the night, as long as it also gives us a transcendent crescendo like Alive’s, then who are we to complain?

Pearl Jam play Engie Stadium again on November 23 .

Pixies
Liberty Hall, Moore Park, November 20
Reviewed by GEORGE PALATHINGAL
★★★½
We’ve had the soaring highs of finally experiencing the original line-up on Australian shores on their triumphant, festival-headlining 2007 reunion tour, and the lesser highs of subsequently seeing them without bass player and crucial second singer Kim Deal in venues both traditional and impressive since.

Rarely, however, have we got to see Boston alt-/art-rock mould-breakers the Pixies playing a full, fan-thrilling set in a room this cosy (capacity: 1200). On top of that, the night before their official duties on this visit – of opening for Pearl Jam at stadiums – they fire into proceedings in a way few might have expected.

You can almost hear the crash of jaws on the floor when they open with Where Is My Mind?, get to its fellow would-be encore no-brainer Here Comes Your Man a couple of tunes later, and go on to let more from that late ’80s/early ’90s creative peak dominate the set. (They play only a handful of new songs from this year’s The Night the Zombies Came. Tellingly, their other post-reunion output is ignored.)

Black Francis’ voice has deepened with age, but he can still access his demented shriek and unsettlingly sweet falsetto. He’s true to an early gag that “we don’t have a lot of dance moves, all we’ve got is some songs”, and the whole band focus on their jobs accordingly.

Joey Santiago alternates between squealing riffs and flat-out guitar abuse (though we eventually see some of his playful side during Vamos) and David Lovering is the unshowy but effective drummer at the back. Emma Richardson, formerly of Brit rockers Band of Skulls, takes on Kim Deal’s distinctive bass lines and backing vocals admirably.

Yet the middle part of the show, where these Pixies indulge themselves in their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, goes on a little too long. Some of it is deliciously weird – even the dreaded (but actually OK) new songs – there’s just too much of it, and it dulls the mood.

The band are back this time next year for a couple of shows across the road at the much bigger Hordern Pavilion: one in which they’ll play in full lesser albums Bossanova (1990) and Trompe Le Monde (1991), the other featuring new stuff and classics – which sounds a bit more like this one.

There, at least, a little judicious editing might make up for the loss of intimacy.

Pixies open for Pearl Jam at Engie Stadium, Olympic Park, on November 21 and 23.