Music: Lily Allen performs West End Girl ★★½
TikTok Entertainment Centre, October 25, also October 26
In her brutal narrative album of marital discord and disaster, West End Girl, Lily Allen has the perfect vehicle to merge several elements of her career and appeal into something new.
There’s the frank feminist who bridged aspiring-cynic teens with seasoned-cynic adults and the hook-tastic pop singer who made that sound like a hoot; the hedonist-who-tried-it-all and the romantic-despite-it-all; the latter-day stage actor of other people’s words and the life-long diarist who will share her truth.
So turning last year’s record firstly into a small theatre creation and then into this year’s arena pop show – to which you can add a solid bit of sisterhood bonding over male treachery, with women near me regularly yelling out affirmations (“you’re too good for him … get him Lils”) and condemnations (“he’s a c—” and, to the marital interloper Madeline, “f— you bitch”) – didn’t just make sense, it was excitingly different for an artist who has not always found live performance a particularly interesting exercise.
The theatre-basis for the show is clear, from its fixed-points blocking and a handful of other props to Allen staying in character and not talking between songs, and you can see how impactful it would be in a small room.
But scaled up for arenas it feels more static than dynamic, not helped by the choice to eschew a wireless body microphone of the sort musical theatre performers use, which would have freed her hands and allowed more substantial “acting” of this kitchen sink-meets-f—pad drama.
To stick instead to a handheld microphone mixed the message that this was a piece of theatre not a pop concert, something blurred further when Nonmonogamummy was performed in concert mode with a microphone stand.
Flipping that, the use of taped sounds in lieu of a band and backing vocalists feels odd when that fixed element still gave us a bottom-heavy mix that saw her almost drowned out on the story-setting West End Girl and Ruminating, and after that often absorbed into the sound. Consequently, the fact she is probably singing live became almost irrelevant.
There is real potential for a show that isn’t just leaning into but fully embracing the theatre of this storyline, and given the good notices she has had for her straight acting roles in recent years, Allen is more than capable. But this halfway house undersells that.
Lily Allen also plays Tik Tok Entertainment Centre tonight, Monday October 26
Music: The Voice of Bryn Terfel – Presented by Sydney Symphony Orchestra ★★★★
Concert Hall, Opera House. October 26.
With a voice of robust strength, echoing depth and broad-grained complexity, bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel launched into the jaunty rhythms of Idris Lewis’s Cân yr Arad Goch (Song of the Red Plough) with the expansive openness and generous spirit that are his trademark. For the mournful phrases of the next song, Owen Williams’ Sul y Blodau (Flowering Sunday), the tone mellowed, and, in the refrain, the voice of thunder shrank to a delicate filament of whispered quiet.
Terfel called these, respectively, the happiest and the saddest songs from Wales and they staked out the terrain for the first half, which was primarily Welsh, with a brief excursion across the River Dee for Frederick Keel’s Three Salt-Water Ballads (to words by John Masefield). There was a natural ease around Terfel’s sense of accent which seemed to flow from the confluence of speech rhythms and arm gestures like the tussling torrents of a river. In Port of Many Ships from the Salt-Water Ballads, the phrases eddied with quiet agitation until the urgently sighing declamation, “I wish, I wish that I was there”. In Trade Winds the phrases ebbed gently before Terfel opened out the peak of the verse with warm, honeyed radiance.
Although the program helpfully provided the words for Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn, harpist Hannah Stone played this in an arrangement for harp alone, starting out with full resonance and later picking out the melody quietly against brightly swirling arpeggios.
Music: Lily Allen performs West End Girl ★★½
TikTok Entertainment Centre, October 25, also October 26
In her brutal narrative album of marital discord and disaster, West End Girl, Lily Allen has the perfect vehicle to merge several elements of her career and appeal into something new.
There’s the frank feminist who bridged aspiring-cynic teens with seasoned-cynic adults and the hook-tastic pop singer who made that sound like a hoot; the hedonist-who-tried-it-all and the romantic-despite-it-all; the latter-day stage actor of other people’s words and the life-long diarist who will share her truth.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
