THEATRE
Cock
Flight Path Theatre, May 9
Until May 18
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★

The Flight Path Theatre stage is a simple suggestion of a boxing ring for Cock, the 2009 play by Mike Bartlett. This is by design: the work is a favourite of independent theatre-makers because it focuses on dialogue and specifies “no scenery, no props, no furniture.” It’s a perfect match for scrappy venues.

However, in 2024, Flight Path – nestled in progressive Marrickville – might not be the right fit for a play that demands its characters “pick a side”: gay or straight?

John (Stephen Schofield) and M (Andrew Lindqvist) are ending their seven-year relationship as John meets W (Grace Stamnas) and unexpectedly falls for her. He leans into the confusion – getting involved with both W and M, lying about the depth of his feelings, ruminating on his identity and his future. As he agonises, M and W wait for a decision: who will John choose? What will he be?

The play is reluctant to offer answers, but this production’s audience is unlikely to demand them. In the 15 years since this play premiered in London, bisexuality is slightly less demonised in the public eye. So too are non-traditional relationships; in Marrickville, queer ethical non-monogamy is a common practice.

Director Darrin Redgate has clearly tried to account for the changing times by doubling down on comic beats: broad line readings for laughs are encouraged, and the language is slowed and softened to allow for it. On opening night, those laughs came (Lindqvist in particular has a persistent knack for these droll punchlines, sparking up scenes and keeping them alight).

Going bigger is one solution, and often not a terrible one, but this often demands flattening and simplifying your work. In the audience, you feel that flatness. Cock is built on sharp words and even sharper timing; the script demands frequent interruptions and overlaps.

It luxuriates in the power of words to shape a scene, and when the words are softened to make them less arch and more easily accessible, they also become less potent. The cast commits to the action (the company also includes Richard Cotter as M’s father), but John’s inability to answer for himself becomes an absence of self, and W and M are forced towards caricature.

Inevitably, the production, pitched at this one consistent level for much of its just under two hour running time, begins to drag. At least the clearly-telegraphed punchlines give us a good chuckle.

THEATRE
Parade
Seymour Centre, May 11
Until May 25
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★½

Just over a century ago, a 13-year-old girl was raped and murdered at the pencil factory where she worked in Atlanta, Georgia.

The factory’s manager Leo Frank, a Jew, was convicted and jailed when a mob broke into the prison and lynched him.

Frank almost certainly did not commit the crimes. But his trial on trumped-up charges and his brutal death came amid a rising tide of antisemitism. It was fuelled by a yellow press, ambitious politicians and concocted evidence from witnesses with axes to grind.

The case once riveted and divided America. It prompted the formation of the Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League on the one hand and a revival of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan on the other.

This 1998 musical - with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown and book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) - revisits the horrific tale.

As the show opens, the city is poised to celebrate its annual Confederate Memorial Day parade. It’s 1913, less than 50 years since Georgia, a pro-slavery Confederate state, was on the wrong side of history.

The opening number swiftly establishes the forces swirling around the Deep South. Atlanta’s white citizens mythologise their lost cause in The Old Red Hills of Home and children wave Confederate flags, a symbol of white supremacy. (Yes, the same flag carried by the mob who stormed the US capitol in 2021).

The musical is off to a chilling start even before we meet Frank. When we do, it’s clear he is an outsider. He’s a college-educated Yankee Jew from Brooklyn – a northerner married to a local Jewish woman, Lucille. Frank’s disdain for the south is palpable.

He’s not an easy guy to like; he’s dismissive of his wife, work-obsessed and patronising. He’s also a difficult character to know.

When the girl’s body is discovered in the factory, a pandora’s box of horrors is unleashed. There’s a reporter in need of a sensational story to revive his flagging career and a corrupt prosecutor: “You want evidence? Look at those clothes and that big fancy talk.” By interval the prosecutor has his “evidence” and a conviction.

The second half opens with the searing A Rumblin’ and a Rollin’ - an acknowledgement of the reality that crimes against blacks have never attracted the public outrage crimes against whites have: “There’s a Black man swingin’ in every tree, but they don’t never pay attention.”

The musical pits black and Jewish characters against each other, it also suggests hatred of Jews and blacks is intertwined in the white supremacist playbook.

A counterpoint to the bigotry and hatred is the unfolding love story between Frank and Lucille. It culminates in their moving picnic as Frank realises he has underestimated the “mousy wife” who has fought for him.

This helps round out the main characters. A weakness of the piece is that the other characters are mostly two-dimensional mouthpieces.

Director Mark Taylor elicits strong performances from his two leads, Aaron Robuck as Frank and Montana Sharp as his steadfast wife. They are also vocally well matched.

While there was some unevenness in this large cast of 18 performers, Guillaume Gentil was outstanding as conniving convict Jim Conley, delivering a showstopping Blues: Feel the Rain Fall. Nic Davey-Greene brought humour and a moral compass to his role as Governor Slaton.

Mark Bradley nimbly conducted the 10-piece band performing a blend of ragtime, ballads and blues.

Harry Gill’s abstract set, with timber floor and sturdy beams, evoked a courtroom as rough-hewn as the justice it dispensed, a factory and gallows.

The musical has flaws but it parades before us the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence and intolerance; the toxic forces that are again tearing the fabric of society.

MUSIC
Audra McDonald
Opera House Concert Hall, May 11
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

Some talented kid could mimic Audra McDonald; could maybe catch the incandescence of her soprano range and the huskiness warming the edges of her chest voice. They might even replicate the translucence of her softest high notes, and the earthiness of her lowest ones. But the quality that would forever evade them is her spirit.

McDonald’s humanity elevated ours: refined it; made us nobler, more empathetic people. This is what high art does, perhaps especially when it’s the art of one of the scarce contemporary vocalists who sings with the conviction of a Callas or a Holiday; one who has a way of getting under your skin without you being aware of the incision.

“I don’t want praise,” she sang in I Am What I Am (from La Cage Aux Folles), but I seldom review anything where the areas deserving praise seem boundless. OK, so she could occasionally be too soft when resting her voice by telling us vastly entertaining anecdotes, and she could even more rarely generate a less-than-beautiful timbre when transitioning from chest voice to head voice. But that’s it.

Humour and poignancy were emotions she released from songs rather than performed. When she sang Mr Snow (Carousel), she became a young girl again, the optimism, love and tolerance all fluttering like flags on the updraught of her voice. As when she was last here, in 2015, McDonald sang Summertime unamplified, and it was so startlingly truthful that it made you listen to the words as if for the first time.

She inhabited the Sondheim songs like they were home, articulating the lyrics of The Glamorous Life (A Little Night Music) as if devising them as she went. She remade Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret in her own image so completely that you gasped at the invention, not just from her but from Andy Einhorn’s arrangement, which he realised with bassist Mark Vanderpoel and drummer Gene Lewin.

The audience starred in the most magical singalong I’ve heard. The presence of Nancye Hayes and Tony Sheldon suggested the house was stacked with musical theatre’s royalty as well as its fans, so when she invited 2000 people to sing I Could Have Danced All Night, it was not just eerily potent, it was accurately harmonised! Goosebumps? There must be a stronger word.

Audra McDonald: QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, Wednesday; Hamer Hall, Melbourne, Friday.

MUSIC
Martha Wainwright
City Recital Hall, May 10
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★

Did Martha Wainwright lie to us? She was, she said, not at her best after having lost her voice the day before and functioning now only thanks to the wonders of steroids kicking in. We should probably come for the ride but look towards a return next year with more new songs and a 20th-anniversary celebration of her debut album. We should therefore temper our expectations.

Yeah, nah. We got, if not the full Wainwright, then more than enough Wainwright to fill the space and those expectations: jokes and tender moments; stumbles and reclamations; readings from her autobiography and excerpts from her family’s musical biography; French and English; marvellous song after marvellous song; more, not less.

What we didn’t get was what you might call the rockier end, the “hit that acoustic guitar hard” end of her repertoire as she leaned into the way various shades of jazz have always underpinned her work. It was there in the swing beneath the brisk Hole in My Heart, the double bass a propellant, and tangible through the hypnotic rhythm inside Factory’s pastoral folk. It was heady in the Van Morrison-like swirling ecstasy of Body and Soul, and at the core of her ability to slide around a note or bend it to her will without losing the connection to that note.

She was very well served by a band that felt feather-light but full-bodied and whose best moments could almost be missed, especially the subtle shadings of meditative pianist Edwin de Goeij. Along with de Goeij, Morgan Moore on double bass, drummer Tommy Crane and saxophonist Nicolas Deslis on occasion handled the highway cruising rhythm of Love Will Be Reborn as easily as the increasing darkening of Report Card, which has something of a late-period Elvis ballad to it, albeit one written by Lou Reed. But they really flowered in the slow arcs of Falaise de Malaise and in the suggestions of much more in the arrangement of Bleeding All Over You.

Watching the way Dinner at Eight (one of her brother Rufus’ finest moments) became a Piaf-like burning drama, and her mother, Kate McGarrigle’s Go Leave (written, as is the family way, about the same man three decades earlier), left a trail of devastation was to be reminded of how good Wainwright is as an interpreter. She gets in, bores through, curls up and stays.

We didn’t need more proof but we got it anyway in the night’s final moment, Tom Waits’ Take It with Me: a song of beauty with a seam of sadness, rhythmic but earthy, and wholly inhabited. It was in many ways the full Wainwright, the one she said we wouldn’t get. But who believed her anyway?

COMEDY
Cameron James: Mixtape
Factory Theatre, May 8
Until May 12
Reviewed by DANIEL HERBORN
★★★★½

The year is 2009. A young Cameron James is living it up in the suburbs of Newcastle. Not only is he caught up in a freewheeling summer romance with Alex, he has also snagged a starring role at the city’s hottest horror-themed theatre restaurant.

But he soon faces a crossroads. Should he follow his girlfriend when she moves to Sydney? Or is playing Captain Jack Sparrow in a beauty salon-turned-nightclub too good a “career move” to ignore?

Mixtape, a mix of genre-crossing comedy pop songs and amiable, perfectly judged comic storytelling, tells this chapter of James’ life with a few entertaining detours. It starts by flashing back to his earlier encounters with Alex at a Blue Light Disco and on MSN Messenger.

As with his award-winning Electric Dreams, James’ latest mines a rich vein of nostalgia and nails the tone in retelling his youthful foolishness with a warmly funny “we’ve all been there” vibe. Despite his apparently thwarted musical ambitions, James is capable on guitar and vocals, creating earworms to flesh out his story, like the Gary Numan-aping new-wave of Speeding Ticket or the swaggering You and I, in which our would-be teen lothario is stymied by the fact that his dad has to drive him around on dates.

Eventually, Cameron and Alex’s relationship becomes tied up with the ridiculous goings-on at the “debaucherous, not-quite-legal nightspot”. James teases out every absurd detail of the chaotic scene at the “Koffin” in a tale that takes some wild turns but wraps up satisfyingly (before pivoting to Medium Dick, an R&B slow jam for mediocre lovers everywhere).

Compiled with the same care as a good mixtape, this may be a half-step down from the delirious perfection of Electric Dreams, but it’s still a purely enjoyable hour that’s equal parts romantic and ridiculous.