The hare-brained plot might have a few screws loose, but the performances fit together perfectly. It’s a joy to see musical comedy so alive and well-paced, so attuned to the technical demands of farce, so full of vocal and musical highlights (including duels on the grand piano), and so confident and secure in its power to give pleasure to an audience.

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One of its charms is the way it enlivens, through supreme professional skill, an infectious spirit of amateurism. Murder mysteries invite us to become amateur sleuths ourselves, after all, and a deep love of musicals often begins humbly, with involvement in high school productions.

Neither Agatha Christie nor musical theatre fans should miss Murder for Two, which is such ebullient fun I’ve already forgotten whodunnit. Guess I’ll have to see it again.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Griff ★★★
Northcote Theatre, August 17

In January this year, the British pop star Griff made her live debut in Australia as a part of Heaps Good festival. Only half a year later, she returns for a headlining tour. The rapturous crowd cheering lets the singer, born Sarah Griffiths, know she’s more than welcome back.

Griff trades in the increasingly ubiquitous brand of confessional electro-pop: big songs with big feelings.

The 23-year-old’s debut album Vertigo, released last month, wears its influences on its sleeve: the give-it-all belt of Adele, the Scandi-pop of Robyn and one-time collaborator Sigrid. These songs are well-crafted, if a little by the numbers, traversing the classic landscape of mental health and relationships.

Live, Griff is backed by a two-piece band. Her voice sounds great – it’s often distorted with effects, as on Vertigo and Where Did You Go – but unadorned, it soars. She’s an expressive and physical performer, bounding and spinning across the stage, and wading into the crowd for a three-song acoustic set in the middle of the show. The crowd matches her word for word, and the backing music frequently cuts out to let the collective voice take over.

Griff switches between earnest soul-baring and more upbeat numbers – Cycles pushes the mood into a more club-like atmosphere, and the Sigrid collaboration Head on Fire, a little poorer with a single voice, nonetheless provokes a mass clap-along.

It’s all very competent pop showmanship, down to the dramatic spotlighting, crowd waving hands in the air and predictable banter (Melbourne is her favourite place to play here, but don’t tell any of the other Australian cities).

What’s missing is an edge, something to set her apart from the hordes of other similar musicians playing similar shows to similar crowds. Judging by the feeling of euphoria in the room, though, the fans got exactly what they came for.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

THEATRE
Milk & Blood ★★★
By Benjamin Nichol, 45downstairs, until September 1

Benjamin Nichol follows in the footsteps of Patricia Cornelius in adopting terse play titles. Cornelius brought us Shit, Slut and Runt, while Nicols’ recent spate of character pieces for solo performers includes kerosene, SIRENS, and now the double bill of Milk and Blood.

The two playwrights also share a need to remove the bourgeois blinkers that constrain our theatre, and a concern for how gender and class (and more prominently in Nichols’ case, queer sexuality) can shape character and perspective.

Milk explores maternal love under immense strain. Disability worker Mummy (Brigid Gallacher) raised her two sons alone. She became pregnant with Boy as a teenager and had his younger brother Doug nearly a decade later.

In her eyes, Boy can do no wrong. Even though, at 19, he has been convicted of a terrible crime, she still believes he’s innocent, visiting him in jail every week with his little brother in tow.

Abuse and ostracism from other mums at Doug’s school don’t dissuade her from her delusion, and the scales don’t fall from her eyes until she becomes pregnant again and confronts Boy directly.

Is Mummy’s love unconditional? Should it be? Was she a “bad mum”, and what role, if any, has parenting played in how Boy turned out?

Brigid Gallacher gives a poignant performance, embodying a defiant but deeply vulnerable woman who rejects some forms of misogyny while internalising others. The script can sound a little too sculpted and feels more akin to a short story than drama, but Gallacher gets the best from it, opening our eyes to how families of perpetrators are secondary victims.

Blood, meanwhile, introduces us to Daddy (Charles Purcell), a middle-aged gay sex worker who specialises in BDSM. Daddy appears to be a paragon of secure masculinity. He often takes on a paternal role with clients, and his found family in the queer community. When a former lover contacts him out of the blue, however, Daddy’s prized stoicism won’t save him from the past.

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Purcell has a more sharply observed script to work with; his vigorous performance seems tailor-made to explode common misconceptions about masculinity among men who have sex with men.

It also – gingerly – tackles sexual violence between men. That’s a taboo subject almost no one will touch, despite LGBTQIA+ people suffering from such violence at a greater rate than the general population, because it’s bound up in a traumatic history of shame and severe discrimination. No one wants to inflame latent homophobia.

But the problem must be confronted – in the queer community as in society at large – and Purcell impresses with an incisive portrait that reveals the torment of being an invisible victim, the tragedy of not even being able to think of yourself as one, and the counterintuitive ways people can find to lay claim to agency. The spiritual dimension to Nichols’ writing is stronger, and starker, in this second work.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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