Immensely popular in Mozart’s lifetime, the three-act singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio) presents a distinct problem for contemporary interpreters. Its Orientalist plot concerning the kidnapping of a European noblewoman and her maid by a Turkish pasha paints a portrait of the East, as the musicologist Daniel Sheridan has written, ‘as a sonic and scenic spectacle for Western spectatorship’. 

Since appearing on the Australian arts scene in 1989, Indigenous dance company Bangarra Dance Theatre has established itself as one of the nation’s most innovative and important performing arts collectives, creating and touring theatrical productions that deftly combine dance, music, poetry, culture, and design. Its latest production, the multidimensional Illume, is perhaps its greatest achievement yet.

Publicity notes for The Orchard outline the questions that provoked Pony Cam’s loose adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904): ‘You’ve inherited a redundant cherry orchard, a crumbling climate, a failing economy and the final play written by Anton Chekhov. What will you salvage? Will you survive the adaptation?’ As far as this audience member is concerned, the answers to those questions are indisputable: ‘Nothing’ and ‘No’.

In the December 2024 issue of ABR, I reported that my cultural highlight for that year had been a screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 film, The Hawks and the Sparrows. Much of that film was narrated by a Marxist crow who explains ‘I come from far away, my country is called ideology, I live in the capital, the city of the future, on Karl Marx Street.’ Pasolini’s crow is weird, mordant, and scary. It will either eat you or school you in dialectic. The poet Ted Hughes also spent some of his 1960s thinking with corvids, publishing his poetry collection Crow in 1970. One of his poems has the crow realising that ‘God spoke Crow’, that the bird is the word, so to speak. These examples testify to the murky potency of the crow as an idea, as an animal that conveys sacrality, predation, and power. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers presents a different crow altogether, albeit one which acknowledges a debt to Hughes.

Sydney has had its coldest July in decades, and the rain it raineth every day, but this did not deter operagoers from savouring two further offerings in the winter season: a fine revival of what must rate as one of Opera Australia’s best Mozart offerings, and a new production of Antonín Dvořák’s melodious fairy tale.

We seem, bobbing in the slipstream of mega musicals like Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera, to be living in the era of the chamber musical. Small scale, single-set productions with high concepts and minimal staging dominate the musical theatre landscape now, from Hamilton to Hadestown. Kimberly Akimbo, composed by Jeanine Tesori with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, follows the general shape and emotional contours of Tesori’s previous chamber musical, an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home. 

A woman loses her friend to suicide and inherits his dog, by his wish. The dog is a Great Dane, the size of a pony, who grieves for its companion, the woman’s friend, steadfastly. It has none of the embarrassment that people can sometimes feel about their own grief, its depth and insistence, its noisiness. The dog lies on the woman’s bed, taking up space, and though the metaphor is obvious – a big grief, a big animal – it isn’t only a metaphor. Apollo, for such is his name, is real enough, and dog enough, to cause a mess.

Among the plays of William Shakespeare, Coriolanus has garnered more respect than love. William Hazlitt, writing in 1816, in the wake of the French Revolution, thought that the play could spare its audience the trouble of reading Edmund Burke or Thomas Paine. The play’s depiction of class division fascinated Bertolt Brecht, who worked on his own adaptation, seeing in the play’s protagonist a figure consistent with the alienation effects of his own theatre. But if such recommendations inspire fears of a drama more didactic than entertaining, they can be dismissed: Bell Shakespeare’s production embraces its audience, ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’ alike. 

A week ago, on the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, a desperate tenor killed his soprano lover in a blind, frustrated fury. This week the tenor hero is killed – if that is the right way to characterise it – by the soprano who loves him, but a different complex of emotions accompanies this operatic death as he dies blessing her.