Rose meets Jack (Drew Weston), who admits his costume is from Newsies and sketches his “French girls” as breasted stick-figure cats. Jack is accompanied by his Italian friend Luigi from Mario Kart (Matt Lee), who also doubles as Victor Garber (the actor who played shipbuilder Thomas Andrews in the movie).

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Lee as Garber steers the Titanic like a Mardi Gras float, busting impressive dance moves and showcasing some serious singing ability as he pirouettes across the stage.

Abu plays Garber’s naval assistant “The Seaman” (cue crass puns), and also the iceberg anthropomorphised as Tina Turner hosting a lip sync battle (yes, you read that right). Finally, there’s the vocally talented Abigail Dixon as sex-crazed Molly Brown, whom the other characters refer to as “Kathy Bates”.

Despite being consistently energetic, Titanique takes a while to set sail. The first half’s script feels frenetic yet theatrically disjointed, making you think the whole show will be no more than a barrage of kooky one-note gags.

But everything eventually coalesces as Titanique accelerates to its increasingly absurd, happy-go-lucky ending. As a finale, McQueen bursts into My Heart Will Go On, and a genuinely reverent hush falls over the audience.

As much as Titanique parodies Dion and the film, at the end of the day, it’s the ultimate fan love letter.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

Parkway Drive
Qudos Bank Arena, September 22
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★½

If Parkway Drive unlocked a portal to Hell in their eponymous Byron Bay backstreet 20 years ago, the net effect must be to have let chill sunshine and Buddha Bowl wellness into the underworld, more than bringing darkness into ours. Despite their guttural death growls, flamethrowers and ferocious guitars, these surfer dudes fill the arena with goodtime vibes and fellowship.

There is a religious quality to the experience. Not only in the obvious ways – the monastic chanting on Crushed, the talk of the Devil and God on Wishing Wells, the religious imagery on punning Prey – but also in a frenzied, congregational coming together that defies description.

Eschewing the slow-build-up school of gigology, they bring wild intensity with set opener Carrion and refuse to relent. Variation comes not in the constant chokehold on audience engagement but in the evolution of the band’s style over their storied career, every era of which gets an airing in the set.

At its core is a medley of the best cuts from 2007’s Horizons, the album that set their course towards what they are on this night – Australia’s biggest metal band and one of our biggest musical exports.

While lead screamer Winston McCall’s vocals have controversially become more intelligible in recent years, on this night they have, if anything, gained in the menace that is an unbroken thread in their musical story. Similarly, Ben Gordon’s double-pedal bass drumming underpins all of the band’s work and reverberates through the arena and crowd with borderline brutality.

And yet that brutality is undercut by a palpable, vital spirit that moves both band and crowd. That spirit finds voice as metalcore becomes sing-along in set closer Wild Eyes, a spirit summoned and directed by McCall as he orchestrates a floor-wide pit from a podium in the midst of the throng.

Not content with his conductor role, as the set climaxes he crowd-surfs, singing on his back as he rides the adulation. That he is joined by, and hugs on those raised hands, a crowd-surfing wheelchair user, is all the testament you need to the purity of the church of Parkway Drive.

Fire Songs and Madrigals
The Song Company
Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
September 21
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

Elite vocal ensemble The Song Company has sustained an artistic existence for 40 years on an ethos of championing the new, treasuring the old and giving outstanding performances of both. That would probably be sufficient if one didn’t have to eat, though they appear to have managed that also.

This program epitomised that philosophy (not the eating), taking Madrigali: Six “Fire Songs” on Italian Renaissance Poems (1987) by venerable American composer Morten Lauridsen as its backbone. These works recreate the sensuous flexibility and white-hot expressive intensity of 16th- and 17th-century madrigal composers based in Northern Italy (notably Gesualdo and Monteverdi) in a 20th-century harmonic style (though Gesualdo himself anticipated many 20th-century innovations).

Lauridsen’s command of vocal texture, variety of mood and sincerity of expression make these works more than Renaissance madrigals in modern dress. The first bracket moved from urgent agitation (Ov’ e, Lass’: Il Bel Viso?), mellifluous lines (Quando Son Piu Lontan) to lively light flexibility (Amor, Io Sento L’alma). In the second bracket, Io Piango combined sensuous rhythm and sweet dissonance, Luci Serene e Chiare sprang in spirited animation and Se Per Havervi, Oime was full of passionate declamation, bordering on the convulsive.

Each of the brackets of Lauridsen’s Madrigali was followed by one of Monteverdi’s in five parts revealing that composer’s mastery of expressive structure. In a similar spirit, but using a different historical reference point, were three numbers from the series Laude Cortonese by English composer Gavin Bryars.

Based on 14th-century hymns of praise and emulating that century’s spare harmonic vocabulary, these gems exemplified the beauty of austerity through the simple and vulnerable medium of two unaccompanied solo voices.

Heal You by Scottish composer Anna Meredith explored soothing vowel sounds moulded into comforting shapes. Australian composer Sally Whitwell’s Lightness of Being set up a beguiling repetitive accompaniment pattern to expound on the happiness of swinging on a trapeze.

Guest director Christie Anderson framed the program with works by two composers from her home town of Adelaide. Carl Crossin’s Part Needle, Part Thread spoke of love in flowing textures and caressing lines and Anne Cawrse’s Afterword, in four parts, set an understated intimate poem by David Malouf with luxuriant and sensitive shades.

Donald Runnicles conducts the Durufle Requiem
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall
September 20

Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

The textural clarity and transparency of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s clarinets, bassoons, oboe and cor anglais under the always-welcome principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles at the opening of Debussy’s Nocturnes was, in one sense, paradoxical.

The first piece is Nuages (Clouds) but the music spoke only of light. In subtly shifting layers, tinged with murmuring depths and quick rays of brilliance, the movement unfolded with masterly delicacy and understatement. By contrast, the second movement Fetes (Festivals) quivered with buoyant energy and excitement kept just below the surface and always on the verge of bursting forth.

At one point, Debussy introduces a distant march and his sophisticated mutations of piquant texture over a quietly insistent beat anticipate the idea Ravel famously exploited in Bolero by about 30 years. The last movement, Sirenes, evokes the sirens of dreams, and introduced the women of Sydney Philharmonia Choirs in wordless beckoning calls, echoed by flutes, their outlines traced in pinpoint by the harp. Runnicles had thin black curtains draping the side-walls of the stage but, from the audience perspective this did nothing to muffle or dampen the fine acoustical astringency of the balance.

This period, the 1890s in Paris, is often called fin-de-siecle (end-of-century), but it ushered in music that shaped the next epoch. The next work, a rarity on our concert platforms, Debussy’s La Damoiselle elue (The Blessed Damozel) is more grounded in its time, exploring the Pre-Raphaelite spirituality of the poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The narration is split between women’s choir and a narrator, which mezzo-soprano Anna Dowsley sang with rich depth, bringing in shades of purple and cavernous echoes. As the Damozel, Camilla Tilling had a brighter sound, arching above the orchestral textures like clear sunlight.

The second half leapt forward about half a century albeit to a more backward looking work, Durufle’s Requiem (1947), respectfully modelled on that of Faure from the 1880s, and heard here in a magnificent version for full orchestra, organ, choir and soloists (a first for the SSO). The overriding mood of the work is one of warmth and liturgical restraint, its melodic lines quoting or imitating plainchant, which make its break-out moments all the more striking.

After a quiet Introit and Kyrie, with brass solemnly intoning plainchant lines, the full philharmonia choir and orchestra surged during the Christe to arresting moments of welling magnificence. A haunting cor anglais solo from Alexandre Oguey introduced the Hostias, which baritone David Greco articulated with a sculpted clear edge.

A particular highlight was the enveloping dark smoothness of Dowsley in the Pie Jesu. This is a voice which of late has grown from strength to strength. Runnicles shaped and balanced the work with the same care he brought to Debussy’s refined orchestration and, although it has been heard before from other groups, this performance was a revelation in the way it connected the work to the subtleties of the French tradition.

COLDER THAN HERE
Ensemble Theatre
September 20
Until October 12
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★★

Myra has bone cancer and about six months to live.

It’s a bleak premise for a play, and an unlikely starting point for one billed as a comedy.

British playwright Laura Wade’s 2005 debut is an unsentimental, bitter-sweet work about a fractured and fractious family unwilling to face the impending loss of its matriarch.

And Myra (Hannah Waterman) is not about to go gently into that good night. She’s busy ordering a cardboard coffin, visiting potential woodland burial sites and insisting her family watch her PowerPoint of her funeral plans – to the dismay of husband Alec and adult daughters Harriet and Jenna.

“You have to find things to do when you’re off work with dying,” Myra says.

Meanwhile the cat is missing, the boiler is broken and the house is freezing. But it’s the frigidity in the family relationships that is the heart of this play.

This is stiff-upper-lip middle-class English family where evasiveness rules.

Myra and Alec (Huw Higginson) haven’t shared a bedroom in years. Harriet (Charlotte Friels) is cool, and apparently together, while Jenna (Airlie Dodds) is a hot mess with boyfriend troubles and an eating disorder. All four struggle to communicate with each other. Can Myra effect a thaw? Is it even her job to do so?

In this buttoned-up family, the role of the more emotionally available Jenna is pivotal. It’s she who eventually reaches out to her father, laying a head on his shoulder even as he cringes at the awkwardness of her action. And it’s Jenna who makes it clear she is prepared to become her sister’s. Dodds invests her character with bravery and honesty.

She is well-matched with Friels as the older, understated sister Harriet, who reveals a vulnerability beneath the composed veneer.

Waterman captures the pathos in the deteriorating Myra, moving from a no-nonsense micro-manager to effect a tentative and tender reconciliation with her coolly detached husband.

As Alec, Higginson’s desperate phone call to get his boiler repaired was among the most heart-rending moments in Janine Watson’s production.

Michael Hankin’s simple set – sofa, lounge and green carpet – is aided by Mark Bolotin’s bucolic video design as the play moves from the family living room to woodlands. Jessica Dunn’s sound design, with its birdsong, helps shift the atmosphere.

The humour is wry, pointed and on the black side, with Myra’s PowerPoint being the laugh-out-loud peak. But beneath the humour, it is the interplay of life’s mundanity with death’s harsh reality that lingers.