Updated ,first published
CABARET
Amplified
Belvoir St Theatre, January 30
Until February 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½
Long after Chrissy Amphlett’s band Divinyls ground to a halt, she imagined doing a one-woman theatrical show about herself and her songs. Having spent her Divinyls career playing a fiery, racy, pouting, unpredictable schoolgirl, she wanted a character this time, too, reportedly settling on a crow. It was never to be. She died of breast cancer before the half-formed dream took flight.
Enter Sheridan Harbridge, Glenn Moorhouse and Sarah Goodes. Together, they envisaged a ghost of the show Amphlett had contemplated, subtitling it The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett. Harbridge wrote it, with Moorhouse as musical director and Goodes directing Harbridge’s performance. They’ve done a storming job.
Harbridge doesn’t become Chrissy, in the sense that the story is told in the third person, but Amphlett’s spirit is alive and living dangerously inside Harbridge’s performance.
What a range the latter has, from being the best Blanche I’ve seen in A Streetcar Named Desire, to now exploding off the stage with a singing voice I didn’t know she had, that could be brutally powerful when required, yet also sweetly soulful.
Beyond the potency of her performance and the engaging storytelling, the music and spoken word are interwoven so that a Divinyls hit might start, shudder to a stop while Harbridge tells us more, pick up again, and repeat this process.
It’s done so well that you’re not cursing the fact that they won’t get on with the song; you’re engrossed in an ever-growing tension that finally finds release when the song takes centre-stage.
Another strength is the music itself, with Moorhouse (on guitar) joined by Clarabell Limonta (keyboard), Ben Cripps (bass) and Dave Hatch (drums). I never particularly rated Divinyls as a band, compared with their songs and Amphlett’s performance of them. Moorhouse and company have knocked some bricks out of the wall of sound and replaced them with nuance, without losing the kick to the surging chorus of, say, Boys in Town.
The fearless Harbridge, meanwhile, doesn’t just enter the audience, she invades it. She’s also funny, and the humour makes for a completeness of emotional impact, given the inherent sadness of a story of excess, of Amphlett’s repeatedly having to smash the same glass ceiling, and then suffering multiple sclerosis before the cancer hit.
Perhaps it’s also so moving because the show exudes such immense affection for its subject.
If the intensity of grip is released a little in the final phase, it’s certainly reasserted when they launch into I Touch Myself, the song that made the teenage Harbridge a fan.
I suspect Amphlett would approve. She’d have appreciated the absence of hagiography and sugar-coating, and she may have recognised a fellow traveller in the high-stakes game of being audacious on stage. She may have even stood up with the rest of us at the end.
MUSIC
The Whitlams and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
State Theatre, January 31
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★½
The Whitlams were early adopters of the now-fashionable “… and symphony” trend, returning to it intermittently over the past 20 years. It is a format that frontman Tim Freedman freely admits can be reduced to “some strings on top of our chords” – a reduction he spends the evening trying to disprove.
His counterargument opens convincingly with Beauty in Me with the two elements in balance: the orchestra afforded the space to carry the opening lines on their own, with Freedman on piano and daughter Alice on vocals, joining in as the song unfolds. This sets up the template for the night: agreeable, well-balanced and designed to amplify the band’s hallmark pretty tunes.
The effect is more interesting when inverted, the swelling strings pulling counter to the sardonic lyrics of Fondness Makes the Heart Grow Absent, heightening the slight-of-hand tricksy of the original. The same effect is even more powerful on Melbourne, the tale of righteous outsider contrarianism that gains bite when delivered with the buttoned-up formality of the symphony.
Twenty years of orchestral toying has thrown up the occasional gem, chief among them Out the Back, co-written with distinguished composer Peter Sculthorpe. No mere rearrangement for strings, this is a genuine three-way conversation between guitarist Jak Housden’s languid line, Freedman’s lazy lyrics and the orchestra’s expansive response. On record, it is clever and tight – live, it takes beautiful flight.
The arrangement of Up Against the Wall by the masterful Benjamin Northey similarly transcends the strings-atop-chords formula: a meaningful reworking rather than just pretty ornamentation. In both pieces, the orchestral accompaniment doesn’t merely add depth but illumination, drawing out the Irish folk-inflected lines that underpin so much of the Whitlams’ songwriting.
All of which is to say that too much of the remainder amounted to an amiable but unrevealing run through the band’s back catalogue. Sure, their hits are still fabulous and Blow Up The Pokies sounds even better with 30 more musicians whirling away. For all we are given, we are left wanting: more reimagining, less reupholstering.
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John Shand has written about music and theatre since 1981 in more than 30 publications, including for Fairfax Media since 1993. He is also a playwright, author, poet, librettist, drummer and winner of the 2017 Walkley Arts Journalism AwardConnect via X.
