Our critics give their verdict on the latest shows around town, including the Human League, Yothu Yindi, Hannah Gadsby, the Song Company, Angelique Kidjo and Bell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Human League didn’t so much emerge from the primordial soup of 1980s pop music as cook it up in the first place. The ingredients were all there in 1981 album, the band’s creative and commercial peak, which they played in full before an appreciative crowd at the Enmore Theatre.
Beaming, dancing and singing her heart out throughout, Creed is an engaging performer who more than balances out the male energy on stage, urging us to celebrate International Women’s Day before delivering a fun lead vocal onwith music that makes you want to move; something the mostly older crowd seem reluctant to do until a lone man starts dancing down the aisles, earning cheers and signalling to everyone else it’s OK to let loose.
It’s singular, deeply funny stuff, elevated as always by Gadsby’s bemused eye for an odd detail and exquisite phrase-turning: they lament being cursed by a “self-choking tongue” and chide their dog as a “pat slut”. The concert begins with an unmistakeable flower, a beautifully balanced and buoyant performance by Susannah Lawergren, Amy Moore and Jessica O’Donoghue of an anonymous English 13th- century conductus, by Australian Michael Whiticker created a sense of alienated strangeness using three poems by Federico Garcia Lorca in crystalline, delicately fragile textures for voice and murmuring percussion, with suppressed eroticism just below the surface.
Not here. Peter Evans’ Bell Shakespeare production ensures it crowns all the comedy that’s gone before. Prior to that, the first bickering exchanges between Oberon and Titania give no clue as to just how good Imogen Sage will be as the latter when she lights the stage with her lust for Bottom bedecked in his ass’s ears or personifies Titania’s unique blend of regality and weightlessness.