This euphoric gig was one for music nerds. And regular nerds.

MUSIC
Thundercat ★★★★★
PICA, May 15

Thundercat doesn’t play bass. He wields it. His fingers dance along frets like spiders, his quick fills fluid and bubbling.

It’s a euphoric, full-body performance, mouth flicking wide in Cheshire Cat grins as he riddles out melodies across six strings. Bass becomes a vocalist harmonising with his distinctive falsetto. In the cathedral-like warehouse of PICA, we move with awe and electricity. “Feel free to start a mosh pit,” he says.

Whatever song Thundercat (aka Stephen Lee Bruner) and his band start with, it travels somewhere else entirely, a spectacle of improvisation and instrumental conversation. Flurries of bass notes tangle with twinkling keys of Dennis Hamm, and Justin Brown’s percussion is so complex as to be melodic, tumbling furiously as his disco ball helmet sparkles.

The further the band deviates from recorded tracks, the more the crowd cheers. Within the sprawling potential of experimental jazz and Thundercat’s myriad other genre badges, we are hearing sounds likely played for the first time.

This is one for music nerds. And regular nerds. Thundercat wears his Lord of the Rings hoodie, expounding theories on Revenge of the Sith leading into Anakin Learns His Fate, dropping geek refs in Walking On The Moon (“My Barbarella, you’re my Uhura”).

After the full throttle improv, it pulls back into pop storytelling. He’s earnest, charming and genuinely funny, his songs vignettes of sensitive, fumbling masculinity. Dragonball Durag injects the funky seduction song with silliness, I Love Louis Cole comes with embarrassing anecdotes, I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time is pared-back and vulnerable, and his encore honours lost friend and rapper Mac Miller with the posthumous collaboration, She Knows Too Much.

More than just a live run-through of hits, Thundercat is an unpredictable demonstration of virtuosity, blissfully beholden to no genre. Thundercat is, simply, Thundercat.
Reviewed by Kosa Monteith

THEATRE
Pride and Prejudice ★★★★
Malthouse Theatre, until May 23

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the word “fortune” precedes any mention of the word “wife” in the opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Bloomshed’s lively stage adaptation may be bookended by a classic romantic image – Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy lean in to kiss one another, like figurines of a bride and groom atop a matrimonial layer cake. Yet between those scenes lies an anti-romantic skewering of the nuts and bolts of the marriage game that veers between wild lampoon, patterned clowning, and an affectionate homage to Austen’s gift for social satire.

Mrs Bennet (Emily Carr) strides onto a stage shaped and decorated like a wedding cake. She’s carrying Mr Bennet – in this version, a silent role played by a potted monstera – and lays out the dire situation. None of the five Bennet daughters can inherit their father’s property. When he dies, they’ll be homeless and destitute and at the mercy of a distant heir, odious clergyman Mr Collins (Syd Brisbane), who’ll inherit the Bennet estate. Only the prospect of a wealthy husband can keep a roof over their heads, and Mrs Bennet’s obsessive and domineering need to marry off her daughters generates cruel humour and a meat-market mentality.

The Bennet sisters erupt into heightened paragons of feminine conformity and rebellion. Silliness ensues as matchmaking commences for the pretty, biddable Jane (Anna Louey), impulsive Lydia (Laura Aldous), butch goth Mary (Lauren Swain), and Kitty (also Brisbane), the runt of the litter, who undergoes an Antipodean drag metamorphosis.

Cross-gendered clowning runs in all directions. Swain caricatures the raffish Wickham in drag king mode, riding a slimy shtick of swagger and seduction that’s hard to resist and contrasts well with the deadpan humour of the cisgendered male roles – good-natured but oblivious Bingley (John Marc Desengano) and arrogant “whale” Mr Darcy, played with poker-faced understatement and exquisite timing by James Jackson.

But it’s Lizzie Bennet who anchors the madness, and Elizabeth Brennan lends an implied perspective, an ironic eye, to every scene in which she appears. It’s a winning performance that’ll please Janeites for succeeding on both romantic and comedic levels.

Bloomshed’s Pride and Prejudice offers a slick period parody full of brilliantly executed comic scenes. It delights, as Lizzie Bennet does, in the ridiculous. And if it skewers the regressive gender politics and social expectations underlying the story much more abrasively than Jane Austen does, it doesn’t mock romance as a genre, nor the joy to be found in Austen’s empathic wit.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Split Enz | Forever Enz Tour ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, May 13

Nostalgia acts are supposed to take you back to a specific time in your life, but Split Enz disbanded in 1984, before I was born, so I guess I am nostalgic for my entire life. Their music permeated every inch of my upbringing in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and this reunion tour, their first in almost 20 years, didn’t disappoint.

Split Enz takes the stage under the cover of a golden cloth. Out burst four of the band’s early members and two newer recruits, all dressed in outrageous two-piece suits. On the stage there is double everything: two percussionists, two pianists, two guitarists, two brothers, in an ever-rotating musical arrangement that demonstrates the extraordinary capabilities of everyone in the band.

Tim Finn, still very much a frontman, swaggers about with a youthful insouciance. The opening songs are all hits – Shark Attack, History Never Repeats, Poor Boy – and then Tim stops to reminisce about the band’s earlier years in Victoria, including playing to a crowd of zero people in Shepparton.

Split Enz’s repertoire ranges from eclectic art rock to heartfelt power ballads and pop bangers. Every song feels big and full.

Lead vocals are alternated between Neil Finn and Tim, and there is an endearing big brother-little brother dynamic on stage. One high-energy rendition of Double Happy is set to a montage of the suits designed by Noel Crombie, the band’s percussionist and art director. A piano solo by Eddie Rayner leads into a rendition of Six Months in a Leaky Boat that brings the entire seated section on the floor to their feet.

Crombie’s stage antics steal the show. He commands a motley array of instruments: bongos, kazoo, triangle, cowbell, penny whistle and pan pipes to name a few, adding an extra element of joy and levity. The encore features one of Crombie’s famous spoon solos. In a feat of manual dexterity, Crombie creates a syncopated soundscape with just two regular kitchen spoons and any surface he can strike them upon: his thigh, his chest, the bodies of other band members.

Watching these men in their 60s and 70s doing what they love, I found myself experiencing whatever the opposite of nostalgia is: a sense of hope that there’s always something fun and exciting around the corner, no matter your age.
Reviewed by Rose Lu

THEATRE
Shoelace Chaser ★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, until May 27

The education season at Melbourne Theatre Company has been super-reliable over the years. One reason could be its strength of focus. Every show has the important goal of producing an engaging introduction to theatre; telling a story for, about and with young people in a way that speaks to the next generation of audiences.

Madelaine Nunn’s Shoelace Chaser races towards that aim in a comic three-hander that lightly explores the bonds of teenage friendship, a growing adolescent awareness of social inequality and its effects, and the difficulties that arise for those who’ve been thrust at a young age into the role of carer.

Talented athlete Thea (Leigh Lule) has returned to track and field at the start of year 12, after time away from competitive sport. At training, she meets Syd (Elliot Wood) – a motormouth queer boy with rainbow socks who befriends Thea, reminds her of her extraordinary prowess, and encourages her to contest the National Championships as a pathway to a university scholarship.

He’s blithely unaware that an athletics scholarship is the only way Thea could afford to dream of that option. Nor does he know that the reason Thea gave running away in the first place was to care for her mother, Fiona (Zoe Boesen), who lives with a chronic hidden disability, never precisely specified.

Thea and Fiona face the financial stress of potentially being kicked off a support program (we’re looking at you, NDIS).

Yet, Fiona – a sunny woman into astrology and palmistry, who gives off strong hippie vibes – isn’t one to complain. She restarts her floristry business online so she can work from home, enlisting Thea’s aid, unaware that this might interfere with her daughter’s training.

How will Thea reconcile the responsibility she feels to care for her mum with her own needs and dreams for the future?

It will be no surprise to anyone who saw director Liv Satchell’s Ballkids that the teen friendship in Shoelace Chaser is beautifully observed. Tender, awkward and funny, the bond between Thea and Syd takes centre stage and provides the bulk of the play’s humour.

Lule and Wood generate a comedic dynamic through their very different tactics for coping with anxiety. Wood’s extroverted chatterbox is super-organised, a nervous talker who can’t go more than a few seconds without some catty aside or restless bit of physical comedy. Lule’s Thea is recessed, sardonic, avoidant – her inner conflict finding temporary release when she’s running but needing a helping hand to find expression and resolution off the track.

Boesen resists caricature as the hippie mum whose optimistic worldview at first fails to register the stresses her daughter is experiencing.

The play doesn’t dig too deeply into the grim reality of various inequities. Instead, we get a brisk survey of the issues wrapped in a bright, amusing and slightly sentimental vision which emphasises adolescent friendship, forging a comedy of recognition that should resonate with and entertain younger audiences.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Slop ★★
Northcote Town Hall, until May 23

Slop is a good word for the present moment. It catches so much that is degraded and disappointing in the way we live now: plastic junk, things instantly delivered but badly made and the newer refuse of computer-generated dross, misinformation and content mulch.

This debased world is given form in a new performance work by sound designer Aviva Endean and choreographer Rebecca Jensen. It’s a study in leakage and excess, where bodies and technologies, memories and deceptions are churned together.

The stage is a pigsty wired for sound. Buckets, straw, microphones and rubbish are strewn about. Jensen enters like a medieval swineherd, a peasant carting slop for the pigs. Endean stands behind a desk covered in bottles and cans.

The work is a sequel to Slip, an earlier duet by these two artists in which Foley sound design became an analogy for the manipulation of reality and its representations: a performer at the edge of the stage expertly altering the experience of what we see.

Slop picks up the idea, but the Foley artist no longer bothers much with deception. Endean is not closely tracking Jensen’s actions so much as adding to the mess and confusion, giving us distortions, glitches and sonic freak-outs.

In one scene, Jensen rubs straw into a large boom microphone while Endean, off to one side, produces another sound for it. Is this redundancy? A joke about representation? A statement about a system that breeds only copies of copies.

There is, at first, a loose narrative: the swineherd becoming swine. Jensen’s body folds, staggers and twists into animal discomfort. Later, she tells a story about slaughtering a pig. Perhaps this is a warning: we are growing too fat on slop.

Perhaps, but the warning is itself a little sloppy. The work develops in fits and starts, with blackouts and scenic transformations that leave the previous wreckage in view. The best ideas arrive early. After that, it’s just more versions of slop.

Slop, of course, is a habit of thoughtlessness as much as it is a product of the attention economy. I’m not sure Jensen and Endean have completely escaped that habit here. The performance feels underdeveloped rather than deliberately excessive.

After Slip and Slop, the obvious third instalment would be Slap. Perhaps that is already gestured to in the show’s extended finale, where the exhausted performers paw at each other as if trying to recover contact with a real body.

The topic is urgent, and the ideas are interesting, but the execution falters. The body will not save us, not by itself. It is already implicated as a prop for sloppy content. What live performance needs here is not more muck, but a more self-critical perspective.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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