This barking mad romp is the most bonkers show of the year

Although the play has its roots in ancient Greek, its comedy feels very British, with echoes of innuendo-laden Carry On films, Monty Python absurdity and, in Dionysus’s appalling treatment of his sidekick, Fawlty Towers’ Basil Fawlty and Manuel.

There are in-jokes about the price of foyer wine and audience members whose phones go off during plays. Hades has a special place for them.

Despite the title, the Frogs make only a short albeit memorable appearance in a burlesque-style number.

Mandziy was a bold, arch Dionysus and together with O’Leary as Xanthias, the pair were an entertaining high-camp double act. With his strong physicality and comic timing, Berecry as Heracles delivered the night’s most compelling performance.

Josh Carter’s economical costumes evoked the Frogs with little more than simple green gloves and headbands. Tom Bannerman’s set created an industrial looking underworld.

Some of the gags didn’t land as well as they could, while a couple of the musical numbers would benefit from greater projection. Most problematic was the new ending that shifted the tone and felt tacked on.

But this is an imaginative reworking of a classic. It’s as barking as hellhound Cerberus – but a lot more fun.

Takacs Quartet with Angie Milliken
Musica Viva City, Recital Hall
August 18
★★★★★
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM

Musica Viva was founded 80 years ago by emigrants Richard Goldner and Walter Dullo. Their flight from Jewish persecution in Vienna to Sydney was Austria’s great loss and Australia’s great gain, notwithstanding some shabby treatment here during the war, which neither ever dwelt on.

It is difficult to think of a better way of celebrating Musica Viva’s vision of promoting the world’s finest chamber music than a tour by the Takacs Quartet, which has been doing exactly this through its performances for half a century.

It was clear from the spiky opening notes of Haydn’s String Quartet in F minor, Op. 74, No. 3 that this concert would reach deeply into Musica Viva’s heartland territory of discerning excellence in the performance of Austro-German masterpieces. Each phrase was sculpted with distinctive thought, careful shades, and playful wit. Leader Edward Dusinberre played Haydn’s second theme, marked sul’una corda (“on one string”), with an insinuating slide as though telling a risque joke.

Second violinist Harumi Rhodes, whose part is marked simply dolce (“sweetly”), wasn’t having a bar of such vulgarity, and played the same notes with neat separation. Such attention to detail and stylish imagination abounded in every utterance to create a performance of unassuming sophistication and delight.

Emigration was the central theme of Cathy Milliken’s specially commissioned Sonnet of an Emigrant for narrator and string quartet, in which Angie Milliken, the composer’s sister, recited poems by Bertolt Brecht (himself an emigrant to the United States before being pushed out by McCarthyism) against quiet, finely textured music from the strings.

The work began with a tender, high violin melody, to which the cello quickly added darker sounds before the reciter entered with lines recounting the simple things she/he will not see again. Brecht’s words, sometimes heard in both English and German as though in parallel translation, provided the narrative journey. The score also repeated spoken phrases like musical themes, and this dual narrative and musical role for the words was only partly successful, sometimes prolonging sections that felt like they wanted to move ahead.

The Takacs Quartet ended the program with one of the most vivid and superbly crafted performances of Beethoven’s third “Razumovsky” quartet, in C major, Op. 59, No. 3 that I have ever heard. From the assertive opening diminished seventh chord that gained tension even as it receded into inner thoughts, to haunting eloquence in the Andante, grace in the Menuetto and the astonishing boldness and unbridled energy, not to mention fun, of the final fugue, it held listeners spellbound throughout, and it was only after the final bar that one shook oneself at the astonishing feat of collective musicianship just witnessed.

MUSIC
Lost Birds
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, August 16.
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★

Higher than any cathedral, the lofty ceilings and soaring industrial majesty of White Bay Power Station proved a surprisingly effective setting for the Sydney Philharmonia’s elite Chamber Singers and a small instrumental ensemble of string quartet and piano.

Positioned near gigantic coal crushers, beneath a canopy created by the floor above, the sound, from my position on the ground floor, was quietly glowing, cohesive and warmly balanced, allowing for both delicacy and strength.

In this context, the pert cheer and cosiness of the first movement of Joanna Forbes l’Estrange’s choral adaptation of Autumn from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons seemed almost to mock the site’s gritty grandeur. While preserving the piece as a violin concerto, professionally dispatched by violinist Fiona Ziegler, Forbes L’Estrange has selected religious and secular texts (including Emily Bronte’s Fall, Leaves, Fall for the mournful second movement) to create a playful choral version of one of music’s most widely re-arranged works.

For his choral song-cycle, Timeless Land, composer Joseph Twist selected Australian poets to chart evolving views of the landscape, from 19th-century mythologising, through quirky 20th- century humour to environmental alarm and righteous indigenous anger. The cycle started with wispy atmospherics for Banjo Patterson’s Sunrise on the Coast and continued with a sentimental ballad style for Henry Lawson’s Andy’s Gone With Cattle.

Judith Wright’s Wonga Vine was woven through a texture of irregular metre and modal melodies and Leunig’s Magpie maintained irregular rhythmic edges in a quick spry setting. The spare stillness of Ashes (using text by the composer’s father Jack Twist) ended with devastating statistics of the wildlife killed in the 2019/2020 Black Summer fires, leading to declamatory defiance in a setting of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Time is Running Out.

To the envy of many in the chilly cavernous expanse, the choir donned beanies and scarves for Forbes L’Estrange’s arrangement of Vivaldi’s Winter ending the first movement with shivering vocalisations that extended Vivaldi’s graphical instrumental writing.

Christopher Tin’s The Lost Birds – An Extinction Elegy used poems by Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Edna St Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale, to chronicle the loss of species, using caressing regular phrases, soft melodic arches and a pastiche of nineteenth century harmonic styles, boosted by occasional cinematic modulations.

A theme of romantic yearning, heard on strings at the start, and recurring in the middle and end, unified the narrative, though the tempo, phrasing and expressive mood of the twelve movements could have tolerated moments of slightly greater contrast.

MUSIC
FRED SMITH
Paddo RSL, August 15
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

August 15 marked not only the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, but also four years since the fall of Kabul. Fred Smith saw the potential in tying together these two events, and strengthening the knot with songs and stories from other conflicts to create an epic show called Unforgotten: Songs of Australians at War.

Smith knows more about this subject than most songwriters, having been the first Australian diplomat deployed to Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province during that interminable war. There he socialised with soldiers who were suddenly in a metal coffin rather than the canteen, and with others who went home with parts missing.

One left the show feeling shaken rather than stirred. Smith doesn’t deal in glory any more than he proselytises, but he does deal in hard-edged realities and diverse emotions. Beyond his own acoustic guitar and occasional banjo, the songs were accompanied by an expert band and by streams of images on a big screen, some of which were harrowing enough without a word of commentary.

He began with Henry Lawson’s bitter narrative poem of the First World War, Scots of the Riverina (set to music by John Schumann), Smith’s four-piece band displaying an exemplary sense of how to maximise drama and restraint simultaneously. This flowed into the racking despair of Eric Bogle’s And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, about Gallipoli.

Via his own Say a Prayer, telling of a sailor aboard HMAS Canberra, which was sunk in the Solomons during WWII (and which featured a twilit guitar solo from Dave O’Neill), Smith dug deep into Schumann’s I Was Only Nineteen. This Vietnam setting was sustained through Don Walker’s Cold Chisel hit, Khe Sanh, rendered so different by Smith’s light tenor, with its edge of vulnerability, rather than Jimmy Barnes’ gravelly screech.

Thereafter, Smith concentrated on his own material: songs such as Dust of Uruzgan which, crucially, are entirely worthy of standing beside Bogle’s and Schumann’s. Just as important were the stories behind the songs, with Blue Guitar, for example, spawned by Smith’s time monitoring peace in the Solomons in 2000, and the rest drawing on his time in Afghanistan.

Smith has a knack of talking about political decision-making as an impartial historian, while, simultaneously, his unique set of experiences made us feel privy to the inside story. He was, of course, appalled by the handling of Kabul’s evacuation, yet thought the international mission (or invasion) had been worthwhile, given for instance, the number of school students increased nine-fold over its duration.

Always there was humour to balance the horrors, and even a good side to be found in war: the camaraderie, as related in Taliban Fighting Man. Smith’s ultimate triumph is that, despite all he’s witnessed in the way of miseries and ineptitude, he’s not become cynical, but maintains a faith in humanity that infused the whole – slightly long – night.

DANCE
INDance 2025
Neilson Studio, August 14
Until August 16
Reviewed by KATIE LAWRENCE

★★★★

Independent contemporary dance has long been a hard sell – often for good reason. Between haze light, partial nudity warnings, and self-serious choreographers, the genre can feel more interested in alienating than engaging its audience. Too often, we’re left clapping out of obligation for fear of being labelled unsophisticated.

Happily, the first week of this year’s INDance, presented by Sydney Dance Company, doesn’t fit that typical stuffy mould – this double bill is unabashedly accessible, refreshingly clever, and actually fun.

The first of the two works, Slip, leans into equal parts truth-telling and absurdity with surprising wit. Choreographed and performed by Rebecca Jensen, with musician Aviva Endean, it’s a chaotic ballet of disembodied arms, glitchy soundscapes, and DJ theatrics, throwing light on how technology has produced an out-of-sync world. It’s a smart, surreal take on the digital mess we’re all swimming in.

The set is a Madhatter’s tech workshop: a melange of mini stepladders, plastic buckets, wooden twigs, and a massive microphone. A Foley-style DJ (Endean) presides, stage left, at a makeshift booth featuring all the gear of a sound effect artist. Jensen rolls out in Elizabethan garb, featuring knee-high brown boots and Princess Leia braided side buns. Why? I have no idea. Is it weird as all hell? Absolutely. Do I dig it? Uh, kinda, yeah.

Jensen and the Lady DJ launch into a pas de deux of tinnitus-inducing soundscape and oddball movement that’s whirlwind and committed to the point of rotator cuff concern. Then – Tap Shoes! Out of nowhere, our Lady DJ whips out an electric guitar and starts shredding. By momentarily disconnecting sound from movement, Slip expertly explores how, even in a noisy and disembodied age, the body still insists on keeping the score.

If Slip is digital chaos, the second work, Gameboy, choreographed by Amy Zhang and performed by William Keohavong and Ko Yamada, is calculated weirdness. The performers are in black underwear, which they layer with rotating accessories (ski goggles, gumboots, and a motorcycle helmet). Zhang’s work plays on stillness and repetition. Some moments teeter on stagnation, but Zhang’s refusal to rush creates space for absurdity to shine. A highlight: a cheeky, expertly choreographed, laugh-out-loud K-Pop infused crowd pleaser.

INDance 2025 is refreshingly unserious while still tackling the big issues. Bold, intelligent, and with just the right amount of chaos, it is proof that indie dance doesn’t have to choose between brains and fun.

THEATRE
The 39 Steps
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
August 12, until August 30
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★

Richard Hannay, at a loose end in London, decides to go the theatre. There he meets a mysterious woman and learns of a plot to steal state secrets. By morning, he finds himself on the run as a murder suspect.

Car chases and close shaves, hats and haddock, milkmen and music halls … You don’t need to be a fan of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 dark spy thriller The 39 Steps to enjoy this stage adaptation, but the bingo card is full of details.

Serial spoofist and theatremaker Patrick Barlow dreamt up this fast-moving, four-person homage to Hitchcock’s original in 2005. Two decades later it has been to London, Broadway and beyond, and now rocks up in Sydney at the start of a national tour.

The lean but luxurious cast amps up the chaos in this comedy, much assisted by the presence of David Collins and Shane Dundas, aka the Umbilical Brothers. Collins and Dundas are masters of quick changes, silly walks and funny voices, and director Damien Ryan employs them to the max, but Ian Stenlake and Lisa McCune more than hold their own.

Stenlake, as straight man Hannay, clicks seamlessly into the physical comedy, while Lisa McCune, playing various femmes fatales, embraces absurdity with a deft sense of comic timing and a quietly hilarious highland fling.

James Browne’s modish costumes and stylised sets, all in monochrome, give this new production a stylish edge, with the use of shadows, projections and silhouettes launching us from moving train to the Forth Rail Bridge to the wilds of the Scotland with little more than an outline and imagination. It’s only when we return to the theatre that the action spills off the stage as Hannay takes the climactic shoot-out into the audience.

With all the ingredients for this handsome production of such high quality, it is a shame they don’t quite add up. It’s not that the gags are too obvious – a mistimed sound effect, a door slamming in wobbling scenery and a well-choreographed slow-motion pratfall against a flickering film will always raise a smile – but that they are overworked. The hat-switching routine outstays its welcome and the awkward shuffling in a tight space (“Excuse me; no, no, excuse me …“) goes on past the point of funniness.

One of the best demonstrations of theatrical magic is a sidetrack, a cameo from David Collins acting out Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. In 60 seconds he does it all, from conception to birth to old age and death, earning a spontaneous round of applause.

By contrast, a bullet takes minutes to get from the barrel of a gun to its final destination, in an initially funny but ultimately repetitive string of slow-mo moments. The program refers to an original production of 100 minutes, but this show runs at more like two hours, and it feels in need of more speed.

MUSIC
Circa & The Art of Fugue
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Circa
City Recital Hall, August 12
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★

Musicians have long debated Bach’s precise musical intentions in writing The Art of Fugue, a collection of fugues and canons that he worked on during his last decade that demonstrate contrapuntal resources using a single, carefully constructed theme.

The score layout is not one used by any specific instrument or ensemble (though it was used in textbooks on counterpoint during Bach’s day, and since). While it can be played on a keyboard, it is unclear whether Bach had performance or study in mind – perhaps both.

Nevertheless, two points are clear. First, The Art of Fugue is about the musical and spiritual possibilities of counterpoint. Second, its proper appreciation requires full attention.

Adding the innovative physical theatre group Circa to a performance by four string players from the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra with artistic director Paul Dyer playing harpsichord and organ undermined both of these.

To take one example, during the 10th fugue (Contrapunctus X), Bach combines an inversion of the theme with a derived idea, variants of which occur in two other fugues (Contrapunctus VIII and Contrapunctus XI). One doesn’t need to know the technical details to appreciate the complexity of thought and richness of the resulting musical fabric.

While this was being played, one Circa performer walked carefully over the bodies, backs, hands and shoulders of the others without touching the floor, until she was standing on a pyramid three bodies tall. Given these distractions, one couldn’t blame anyone who didn’t notice the point where Bach starts combining the two ideas in contrapuntally intricate ways.

Although he may have accepted that any single person’s perception would be imperfect, that point of combination, for Bach, was the whole point of the piece, both musically and spiritually. This presentation obscured that point.

The Brandenburg musicians were seated at the back and at the start the texture lacked warmth, though in the final Fugue on Three Subjects, the sound developed a sustained glow when Dyer added organ registrations to the mix. The fugues were distributed among the instruments in various ways, the first being played by strings and the second on harpsichord alone.

Harpsichord and strings combined for the third, during which the Circa performers huddled in warm embraces before bolder movements, including one standing on the heads of two others. Dyer’s tempi were generally drawn out and moments of animation were rare in both music and movement.

Circa artistic director, Yaron Lifschitz, wisely avoided choreographing obvious representational possibilities, such as inverting the dancers when the themes are inverted or halving the speed when Bach augmented the rhythm (though there was a suggestion of mirroring during one of the “mirror” fugues).

Instead, Circa overlaid an implied narrative of loneliness and quest, captured by a single female performer at the start who kept collapsing on the floor and who reappeared, wide-eyed and alone, in the final incomplete fugue at the point where Bach introduces the theme based on his own name.

As philosopher Theodor Adorno notes in his article “Bach defended against his devotees”, performances of Bach should assist in clarifying his lofty purpose. While in other contexts it is inspiring to watch the dedication with which the Circa performers have perfected strength, balance and skill, this presentation tended in the opposite direction.