Before Hamilton there was In the Heights. Here’s why you can’t miss it

The beauty of In The Heights lies in how it functions as a microcosm for the exploration of racial and class divisions, diasporic dislocation and gentrification while never compromising on the authenticity and charm of its characters.

The diversity of the characters – Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Chilean – is mirrored in the casting of mostly Latinx actors.

The biggest source of narrative tension in the musical perhaps lies in the secret identity of a lottery winner in the neighbourhood, but each character struggles with different stressors as they navigate questions of love, livelihood and flights of fancy. The stakes feel heightened, the emotions run deep. Resolutions at times feel slightly pat, but the characterisations never suffer.

In The Heights is a love letter to the Latin American migrants who have come to call their adopted homeland home, for whom the motherland represents a mirage of safety and belonging. For us, it’s an indelible reminder of the regenerative power of culture, community and celebration and the resilience of immigrant communities. Above all, it’s a rollicking good time.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

THEATRE
The Orchard ★★★
Malthouse Theatre, until August 16

In Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – his final play written in 1903, a year before his death – a wealthy family risks losing it all. They return to their land after a long absence and find themselves in heavy debt; the titular orchard – their most prized asset – hangs in the balance as a new social order emerges and threatens their status.

Like many classic plays, it’s eerily prescient. Chekhov’s ideas are as relevant now as ever – today, they take the form of crises surrounding capitalism, class and labour, as technological advances blur the lines ever further and we, too, risk losing everything.

Who better to take this on than Pony Cam? The experimental Melbourne theatre company previously tackled similar themes in productions such as Burnout Paradise, their weird and wonderful show that involved running on treadmills while trying to complete a list of tasks within a time limit. It was raucous, chaotic and anarchic but also thematically serious, illustrating the impossibility of artistic survival.

At the opening night of The Orchard, performer William Strom takes audience questions. When asked about the significance of Chekhov’s play, he says: “It’s to do with people adapting, or failing to adapt.” He also says this version is “an honest attempt at recreating [the play] as accurately as possible – without using any of its dialogue”.

In the spirit of the intrigue and surprise that’s crucial to experiencing a Pony Cam performance, I won’t give too much away. But there are highly imaginative elements at play in The Orchard, incorporating audience members as peripheral characters, lottery tickets, champagne fountains and hydraulic machinery, as well as demanding physical sequences, as is characteristic of the troupe.

The cast members take turns taking centre stage to narrate a wider social context, including philosophical musings. The others stand on a smaller stage behind and largely improvise dialogue, in chorus and individually, to the refrain: “What are we going to do about the orchard?” It’s a series of non sequiturs canvassing everything from climate change to interpersonal relationships and whether to have children – eventually creating a kaleidoscopic view of the tensions, anxieties and chaos driving modern life.

Slowly, it becomes evident that the orchard is an allegory for art: its creation, consumption and valuation. If art has become a commodity, the show asks, and money is the driver behind everything, what happens when the art is no longer seen as lucrative? What if it was never lucrative at all? Can it survive on its own on the outskirts, or is it destined to only be made and consumed by those who can afford it?

These are all pertinent questions, asked with Pony Cam’s signature audacity and wacky humour, but there is a cumulative effect of overstimulation and overwhelm, particularly as the performance’s physical landscape is violently destroyed. Perhaps that’s the point. The Orchard is ambitious and clever, holding a mirror to the deterioration of the world as we know it, but some points hit harder than others.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

MUSIC
The Used ★★★
Forum Melbourne, August 7

You probably shouldn’t wait almost 20 years for a show. That’ll colour your experience.

The Forum’s unbalanced bass is another matter.

Emo-screamo pop-punk icons The Used kick off their 25th anniversary tour in Melbourne with a three-night play-through of their first albums: The Used, In Love and Death and Lies for the Liars.

Lies for the Liars opens with a black-and-white projection, untuned TV static and historic behind-the-scenes vignettes. We’re told to prepare for the best band in the world. The veil drops, the lightshow pierces the darkness, and we jump into The Ripper. Heavy heartbeat drums, a squeal of guitar and then tsunami-like bass swallows Bert McCracken’s vocals.

“Time takes us all,” he wails to his ageing fans.

McCracken was renowned for throat-shredding screamo, and while guitarist Jeph Howard’s backing vocals retain their rough texture, McCracken’s are less raw and visceral. New, smoother melodic tones are unfortunately no match for tonight’s mixing, where unbalanced bass smothers nuance. The old serrated edge is blunted by vibrational fuzz. It’s the same with the support act, Canberra’s Hands Like Houses: voices and detail are drowned.

Lies for the Liars is the album The Used have performed least, and was their most heavily produced, with sound effects and theatrical string swells that lose something in translation.

But they do their best. The drumming moves impeccably through the idiosyncratic set, as much guitar as can be heard hits every familiar note and McCracken stalks the stage and headbangs.

We’re a small crowd of diehards. We know each word, chanting the singsong of Bird and the Worm in perfect cadence. When McCracken calls volunteers onstage for Paralyzed, he draws a cadre so large that security turns people away. The band seems genuinely happy, grinning through the finale Smother Me, the kind of macabre love song that was iconic in their early albums.

Then they leave politely. No feigned encore. Considerate for us elderly emos. I’d still try to catch them at the Northcote Theatre, though.
Reviewed by Kosa Monteith

DANCE
Escalator ★★★
Abbotsford Convent, until August 9

The Stephanie Lake Company’s annual sampler of 10-minute works is an escalator going in every direction at once. This year’s program features commissions for company dancers as well as invited choreographers, with each artist on a trajectory entirely their own. The result is an evening of contrasts with only the occasional unexpected connection.

The standout is Slipping into Filth, the choreographic debut of company member Marni Green. It’s an assured, witty piece, well-matched to dancer Mara Gallagher’s crisp footwork and enigmatic intensity. Light, rapid, precise and slyly expressive, Gallagher is highly theatrical and a lot of fun to watch.

Unfolding like a poetic playlet, Green’s piece centres on a derelict figure who transforms under the spell of a half-hidden presence in a bathtub. It’s strange and surprising, with an artfully dilapidated atmosphere and flashes of surreal humour. It also features a cleverly segmented costume by Andrew Treloar.

Thomas Woodman, meanwhile, opened his new work with a deadpan offer: a 15-metre cable found in a cupboard. Objects dominate his world – stolid, impervious, patient, endlessly repurposed. He scurries after them, bashing them about, trying to force an impossible intimacy. In the end, they simply exist, and so too – oddly, beautifully – does he.

Alice Dixon presented the audience with a glittering, fragmentary puzzle. Set to Bartok’s lushly cinematic score for strings, percussion and celesta, the abstract choreography has what Anna Kisselgoff once called “a narrative tone without a narrative”.

Quick slashes and nervous sways suggest restlessness – a sense that something is about to happen – but what? The deft trio includes Dixon, Martin Hansen and Rachael Mackie.

The two other works on the programme are Carmen Yih’s solo satire on the kitschiness and insincerity of citizenship ceremonies, and a piece by company member Robert Alejandro Tinning, who performs with composer Louis Frere-Harvey in an intimate meeting of movement and live percussion.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
Miss Julie ★★★
By August Strindberg, fortyfivedownstairs, until August 17

Relocating August Strindberg’s Miss Julie to the kitchen of a Greek restaurant, Company 16 serves up a stormy version of a classic that continues to perturb and inspire the contemporary stage.

Class, gender, and sexual mores have changed markedly since the Victorian era. Underlying power dynamics are harder to shift, and the play’s gendered battle still speaks urgently to us because Strindberg, despite his virulent misogyny, carved out combatants who were evenly matched, forever locked in an irresolvable human puzzle.

Evenly matched doesn’t mean equal.

A power disparity between the lovers is crucial, and the most stunning production I’ve ever seen – Yael Farber’s Mies Julie – upped the ante by being set in South Africa under apartheid. Miss Julie was the daughter of an Afrikaner pastoralist; John one of his black servants. Racial as well as class inequality were set against the gender divide, amplifying the intensity of the play’s explosive passions and deepening the sense of social tragedy.

The Greek restaurant setting here evokes the bustling, behind-the-scenes world of hospo. It’s performed in the round, amid sinks and stainless-steel benchtops, and one striking feature is the depth of intimacy it establishes straight away between John (Adam-Jon Fiorentino) and his fiancee, fellow chef Kristina (Izabella Yena).

Their bond is more erotic, and more grown-up, than anything that happens between John and Julie, and John’s obvious lapse in judgment in pursuing the boss’s daughter makes you reflect on his self-destructiveness for a change.

A scornful, sylph-like incarnation of the title character from Annalise Gelagotis certainly has a self-destructive side. Julie comes across as so unformed in this portrayal, however, that even her vicious whims and the cruelties she inflicts seem to emanate from her vulnerability.

A piteous desperation attends Julie’s desire for agency, and there’s irony in her abusing the unearned power she does have. Meanwhile, John’s arc feels depressing and familiar from headlines: the brooding romantic lead has a manipulative streak latent in his performance, allowing Yena’s Kristina to provide a window onto what is – however complicated the situation – clearly predatory male sexual behaviour.

I’m not sure about the surprise twist at the end. It didn’t quite land as tragedy and suffered the same issue as the lurid approach to some of the play’s (admittedly blatant) symbolism.

In lieu of decapitating Julie’s pet bird, for instance, John sticks it in a food processor and presses the button. The audience laughed at the gory substitution – a spell-breaking moment in a production which, at its best, summons the moody extremities and intense performances that make Strindberg’s battle of the sexes so compelling.

Finally, the restaurant theme has added allure for those who can afford to splash out. Premium tickets include a Greek-inspired immersive dining experience by celebrity chef Conor Curran.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
What’s Yours ★★★★
Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, until August 24

To have kids or not to have kids? A newfound sense of urgency in Keziah Warner’s play What’s Yours is injected into the debate, which is more alive than ever amid the broadening of possibilities that mean more people can have children, even as the ever-deteriorating state of the world complicates the decision itself.

The play kicks off decades in the past, the liminal age of youth and opportunity distilled into a moment of carefree drunkenness at a sharehouse party.

Lia (Carissa Lee) and Jo (Christina O’Neill) are best friends and housemates. Simon (Kevin Hofbauer) is a stranger who first desires Jo, and then, years into the future, Lia. Obscured by a gauzy curtain, the flashback has an ephemeral, otherworldly feel.

When the curtains are pulled back, we’re firmly in the present. Simon and Lia are struggling to conceive, and hear through the grapevine that Jo, whom they haven’t spoken to in years, has frozen eggs that she doesn’t intend to use. They reach out, hoping for a display of magnanimity from someone they’ve hurt deeply. The result plays out over the course of the next few years as their loyalties, motivations and feelings shift and morph.

What’s Yours is a meditation on power, desire, mortality, the ethics of friendship, the limits of possession and the enduring legacy of the choices we make. The minutiae of each of these characters’ decisions are placed under the microscope, as they extort one another for answers and defend their right to live the way they envisioned for themselves.

Warner’s story bypasses familiar beats in favour of something altogether fresh and new. When justifying why they respectively do and don’t want children, Lia talks about wanting to feel a love so enveloping it hurts her. Jo wants to do whatever she wants; if that something is nothing, so be it.

Perhaps due to the contracted nature of the play, Lia and Jo are necessarily cleaved into neat binaries. Lia is so blinkered that she can’t contemplate why someone wouldn’t want a child, while Jo is so disconnected from the prospect that she doesn’t know how to interact with a parent.

The actors expertly inhabit these thorny, complex, highly flawed characters. O’Neill is a highlight as the sardonic, defensive and staunch Jo, while Lee embodies the seesaw of open-heartedness and despair that Lia experiences. Hofbauer, more recently seen in Red Stitch’s Comeuppance, brings to life the agitated, morally vacillating Simon.

Under Isabella Vadiveloo’s direction, the characters pace around a dining table planted in the centre of the stage.

No actor is ever completely off-stage; the ghost of their presence a spectre haunting the other two in their absence as they loom behind a curtain. Bianca Pardo’s set oscillates between being a domestic space and a public space through minute changes to the onstage furniture. The same could be said for the characters’ outfits, which subtly shift as they age and move through different ways of being.

Who you identify with in this piece and how you relate to it will hinge on your relationship to the question of kids. What’s Yours invites projection as it interrogates the necessary sacrifices and payoffs of modern living.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

JAZZ
Troy Roberts Quartet ★★★★
The JazzLab, July 31

Sometimes, life has a way of jolting you into the present with a reminder of its fragility and unpredictability. At the JazzLab last Thursday, just minutes before Troy Roberts and his band were due on stage, a medical emergency in the audience resulted in a venue evacuation and plenty of sombre reflection as we waited outside.

When the ambulance departed an hour later (with the patient in a stable condition) and we filed back indoors, the mood was understandably muted, drained of the anticipatory buzz that typically greets Roberts before every performance. The Australian saxophonist has called New York home for 20 years now, so his legion of fans jumps at the chance to hear him whenever he returns here.

And it’s not hard to see why. Any apprehension that the subdued atmosphere might linger was banished within seconds of the band’s arrival onstage. A burst of cleansing energy from drummer Andrew Fisenden announced the opening tune – Solar Panels – before the rest of the quartet leapt on board.

As a composer, Roberts keeps his bandmates on their toes with elaborate, rhythmically complex tunes. Yet even without a proper rehearsal, Fisenden, Brett Williams (on piano) and Sam Anning (bass) navigated the variable time signatures, tempo shifts and rhythmic fillips with apparent ease, beaming with delight as they moved in lockstep with their animated leader.

Roberts’ arrangements of standards also contained elements of surprise: The Look of Love was taken at an unusually jaunty pace, the rhythm section conjuring a Latin feel beneath Roberts’ agile tenor spirals, while Up Jumped Spring saw the quartet skipping back and forth between a flowing waltz and a breezy 4/4 swing.

On Coltrane’s Transition, Roberts and guest saxophonist Carl Mackey both offered volcanic solos that tapped into the composer’s earthy spirituality. Wise One was gorgeously restrained, with Roberts’ majestic, elongated phrases resting on a bed of rippling piano and shimmering percussion.

A joyously ebullient calypso tune followed, then – as a coda – a brief but heartfelt ballad, sending us out into the night feeling uplifted and reassured.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

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