Mitski pushes through fan frenzy and false start, plus reviews of other big shows this week

Concert Hall, Opera House, May 29
Until June 1

You can understand why Mitski is a little unnerved by her fanbase. As she walks on stage, gothic eccentric in red stockings and black tulle, the American indie-rock singer-songwriter is swallowed by a frenzied shriek of parasocial recognition, from 360 degrees in this Concert Hall set-up.

The sound is less “cheering crowd”, more “Beelzebub has a throat tickle”. With a grimace, Mitski meaningfully puts her hands over her ears. At a previous concert, when a fan yelled “we love you”, she politely replied “you don’t know me”. Fair. Fan service can be not just degrading, but discordant. You feel the 35-year-old will never stop fighting that monstrous reality-hoover of the fame machine.

Still, it’s not the best start. Nor is the tech flub that shuts our star down before she can get out two words of In a Lake, her opener to this concert and her latest album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. She and her five-strong band, which includes long-time producer Patrick Hyland, with guitars, keyboards, drums and a gong that occasionally shatters all other sound to oblivion, begin again.

Whether from these unfortunate early-show events or something else entirely, Mitski struggles to find a centre in this, the first of four Vivid shows. Her signature performance theatrics of overwrought intensity are besieged by surges of sardonic lugubriousness. During a brief interval, she reminds us – and herself – that she’s playing at the Opera House. “Let’s try to live in the moment!” she urges. “Because it’s very special!”

Teatro at the Italian Forum, May 29
Until June 21

Just as Michael Dorsey becomes confused masquerading as Dorothy Michaels to play the Nurse in a fruitcake musical called Juliet’s Curse, Tootsie is confused about what sort of musical it is. Most of the time it’s a comedy, and often a very funny one, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek (of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels fame, now at Hayes Theatre) and book by Robert Horn. Then, just when you least expect it, it starts lathering up the soap, and these otherwise comedic characters sing soppily of their (gulp) feelings.

This 2018 musical derives from the 1982 film starring Dustin Hoffman as an actor who’s so opinionated as to be unemployable, and who shoots for a female role out of desperation. The film had Dorothy winning a part in a TV series; here, it’s in a Broadway musical.

Just as Hoffman’s performance made you gradually forget that a man was playing Dorothy, so Andrew Bevis pulls the same trick here – which is a bigger challenge: Bevis doesn’t just have to act as Dorothy, he has to sing as her. He pulls it off with verve, polish and charm.

Directed and choreographed by Cameron Mitchell, this was the show’s Australian premiere, a feather in the cap of Leichardt’s still-new Teatro, a bold venture fulfilling a much-needed function, which deserves to succeed.

Opera House Concert Hall, 28 May

The problem is that voice. As The National have grown in popularity and ambition, lead singer Matt Berninger’s honeyed baritone – the thing which, above all others, sets the band apart from the indie-rock melee – has become increasingly distant in the cavernous venues and musical complexity that have become their métier. How to remain The National when your fame has gone global?

Berninger’s solution is the dreaded solo side project with all its attendant risks of unchecked self-indulgence to which band-tension had been the antidote.

Mercifully, Berninger is far better than that. Pretty much every song he plays on this night is introduced with a co-writing credit, whether to a bandmate from The National or another collaborator – no moody solo sulk, this. The pains he takes to give the backstories to his music, the clarity with which he enunciates every lyric, the mimes he enacts to embody those lyrics: it is his audience being indulged, not the artist himself.

Opera House Concert Hall, May 27

You can see the bones – actually, to be fair, a good bit of the flesh too – of a special show in this tribute to the work of poet/proto-rapper/singer/activist Gil Scott-Heron.

The material is a given, especially in a tight setlist of about a dozen songs from a productive decade beginning in the early ’70s for the late Scott-Heron and his chief collaborator and cowriter, Brian Jackson.

Now 73 but a bald ball of energy and positivity, the rather under-eulogised half of that team, when not shining melodically with his flute, led the show from his Rhodes piano at centre stage, offered vocal counterpoint in Lady Day and John Coltrane, and in Winter In America provided a liquid jazz vocal in the key of acceptance that “an empire must fall” – something which might have given comfort to NSW Blues players who at that very moment were being smacked mightily at the other end of Sydney. His work holds up.

Opera House Concert Hall, May 23

For more than 30 years, Mogwai have made an art out of lulling listeners into a blissful sonic daydream, only to blow their heads off with a burst of volume so sudden and ear-shatteringly loud it’s like sticking your head inside a jet engine.

Take, for example, epic set-closer Mogwai Fear Satan. No matter how many times you’ve heard this highlight from the band’s 1997 debut album Mogwai Young Team, when guitarists Stuart Braithwaite, Barry Burns and Alex Mackay step on their distortion pedals in unison, the impact still shocks, violently shaking the room from the warm cocoon of sound spun by the band only seconds before.

Though this night’s set leans heavily on last year’s The Bad Fire album, it’s also a celebration of the Glaswegian instrumentalists’ 30th anniversary and visits all corners of their career. It begins in understated fashion, the four-piece (plus touring guitarist Mackay) ambling onstage as the pre-recorded spoken word intro of Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home wafts through the room.

Pinchgut Opera, Roslyn Packer Theatre
May 23,until May 31

Originally written as an oratorio rather than an opera, The First Murder (1707) by Alessandro Scarlatti tells the story of Cain and Abel through six characters: the two brothers, Adam, Eve, God and Lucifer. Rather than setting it in timeless biblical history, director Dean Bryant’s production for Pinchgut Opera has it take place on a modern Australian family summer holiday on an isolated beach, thus drawing out the tension between foundational archetype and family drama.

The obvious danger of this approach is that it over-dramatises everyday situations, such as sibling rivalry, and tries to give them more depth and weight than they can take (aren’t you overreacting a bit there, Cain?). That danger was mollified (if not entirely eliminated) in this production by imaginatively stylised staging, a tightly constrained performing circle (designer Jeremy Allen), ‘doppelganger’ portrayal of the two boys by both actors and singers, judicious live video (Morgan Moroney) and serene musical direction from conductor Erin Helyard that drew tenderness and emotional complexity.

Helyard’s approach never stressed the voices but rather nurtured their natural tone and demeanour. When Adam (Kyle Stegall) and Eve (Sara Macliver) enter with esky and beach chairs, one’s curiosity is aroused even as scepticism remains. Stegall’s voice was smooth with subtle colour and he sang slower reflective phrases with fluid shape while delivering agile passages with energy but without ever distorting the line or pressuring the voice.