It wasn’t until the set was almost over that I realised the band hadn’t spoken a word

Speer and Ochoa pace slowly, and occasionally do something that looks almost like choreography. During the percussionless Farolim de Felgueiras, Johnson gets up from the drums and walks around in the shadows a bit.

Towards the end of the set, the pace picks up with the groove of Lady and Man, and I realise they haven’t said a word yet. Perhaps an American-accented “thank you” or “this next song is called” would spoil the atmosphere they’re working tirelessly to create.

The run of songs Lady and Man, Evan Finds the Third Room, and Time (You and I) usher a welcome vibe shift into funk. And the rhythm of the final encore People Everywhere (Still Alive) is still ringing in my ears hours later.

Then they depart the stage a final time, and we’re booted back into the overlit hallways of the MCA. I’d go back to Khraungbinland in a heartbeat, wherever it is – Kabul, Bamako, Houston, or Margaret Court Arena.
Reviewed by Will Cox

THEATRE
Avenue Q ★★★★
The National Theatre, St Kilda, until March 16

Hardcore puppet sex had a cultural moment in the early 2000s, just as internet pornography began to conquer the world. Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Thunderbirds parody film Team America: World Police (2004) featured marionettes engaged in frenzied jiggery-pokery, though the prize for the funniest fornication in the genre goes to Avenue Q.

Nude hand-puppets going at it hammer and tongs, with no substance below the waistline. A perverted monster puppet breaking from secret compulsive masturbation just long enough to sabotage an optimistic song about the internet. It’s all as much fun in this revival as it was at the show’s 2009 Australian premiere.

Avenue Q remains outrageously funny, and despite the undergraduate humour, it does more than titillate as a musical spoof of Sesame Street or The Muppet Show retuned for jaded adult audiences.

The social satire brazenly mocks structural inequality – whether through race, gender, sexuality and socio-economic status – by importing it wholesale into the most wholesome of frames, but the cynical veneer does fall away to reveal idealism and a compassion for human flaw and failing, a plea to help others, even a catchy memento mori in the finale.

Whether Avenue Q could have been written in 2025 is an open question. Would you really get away with a song called Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist? Or be able to lampoon misogyny with a sexually voracious puppet character called “Lucy the Slut”? You could have your toxic comedy cancelled, given the puritanism and polarisation that have flourished since the musical premiered.

Regardless, this production rides high on low comedy in a way that doesn’t feel dated. The performers bring the motley neighbourhood to life with infectious and irreverent energy, and you’ll get a comedic form of double vision watching the puppeteering.

There’s the aimless English graduate Princeton (Harley Dasey), monster educator and love interest Kate (Zoe Crisp), mismatched roommates Rod (Jonathan Shilling) and Nicky (Andrew McDougall), the porn-loving Trekkie Monster (McDougall, Darcy Harriss) and the sex-loving Lucy (Cassie Ogle). All create hilarious visual synergy between puppet and performer, with some amusing voice acting, and brisk vocals for the songs.

They’re joined by plain old humans – an Asian American therapist (Chiew-Jin Khut) and her white, unemployed fiance (Matthew Tomlin), as well as ageing child star Gary Coleman (Stephanie Lacerna) – who lean shamelessly into caricature and absurdity.

Pip Mushin directs the show with an ear for musical comedy, an eye for visual gags and a sixth sense for dynamic ensemble humour.

If you love Avenue Q, this indie production will reaffirm your devotion, and those who’ve never seen it before are in for a treat.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Nijinsky ★★★★
Regent Theatre, until March 1

John Neumeier’s ambitious homage to the legendary Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky is almost too much to bear. It’s a sprawling nightmare of a ballet, complicated and crowded with incidents, heavy with expressions of pain and loss and pitiable confusion. It enthrals and it alienates, enchants and exhausts.

The Australian Ballet hurls itself into this difficult material. Despite its efforts, however, there remains a disconnect; the dancers grapple earnestly with the work’s intense demands, but Neumeier’s intricate and tormented artistic intentions resist full realisation.

Nijinsky is a special obsession for Neumeier, but he has fascinated many. As a principal dancer with the Ballets Russes, he captivated audiences worldwide, renowned for his leaps and intense character interpretations that became iconic.

His choreographies, especially for works like The Rite of Spring, Afternoon of a Faun and Jeux, all referenced by Neumeier in this ballet, broke new ground with their expressive potential and angular modernity.

In 1913, an unfortunate marriage led to a break with Nijinsky’s mentor and erstwhile lover, Ballet Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev. With the onset of war, Nijinsky became increasingly frail both mentally and physically and his short but stellar career soon ended.

His last public performance was in the ballroom of the Suvretta House hotel in Switzerland. And this is where Neumeier begins. Before a small but shocked audience, we see Nijinsky (Callum Linnane) twitching and writhing and biting his fist.

Anguish and reverie combine as this solo becomes a parade of memories, with reenactments of his earlier roles. Harlequin (Marcus Morelli), Petruschka (Brodie James) and the Golden Slave (Jake Mangakahia) appear, as does the more sinister figure of Diaghilev (Maxim Zenin).

Neumeier uses the protagonist’s fractured psyche to progress his narrative, moving associatively between past events. This gives the ballet a kind of tragic irony: the descent into madness is terrible, but so is the fascination this madness holds for others.

In the second act, the ballet becomes increasingly abstract, and increasingly difficult to enjoy. The stage is dominated by illuminated circles, a shape that obsessed Nijinsky in his years of confinement. Images of war, always eroticised, constantly intrude.

The achievements of the ballet are undeniable. There are strange and unsettling solo, duo and trio arrangements that cast a creepy light on personal relationships. But there are also sequences that, while visually compelling, may alienate even those familiar with Nijinsky’s legacy.

And yet the influence of the work should be obvious. You only have to look at The Australian Ballet’s recent production of Oscar by Christopher Wheeldon. The parallels are striking, particularly the explicit masculinity and explorations of madness and homosexuality.

Neumeier’s Nijinsky demands a lot from its dancers, but it also demands serious engagement from its audience. Neumeier wants to challenge us to think again about Nijinsky, to recognise his humanity, and not to pigeonhole him as a superstar who went off the rails.

And ballet doesn’t have to be a pleasure. While this work can be exhausting and overwrought, its seriousness and allusive depth make it a necessary experience.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE | ASIA TOPA
Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet ★★★
The Show Room – Arts Centre Melbourne, until February 23

When Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet opens, one is invited to listen to a brief history of the panda – what Beijing- and Utrecht-based theatre maker and performer Ran Chen says is the “indigenous native of China”. Seated next to her is fellow performer Feng Li, who in turn reads off a prepared script as three screens of varying sizes – think Matryoshka dolls – project images of pandas throughout history.

It’s an intriguing premise. The duo go on to question why there haven’t been records of the animal in ancient times, only for it to enter popular consciousness after Europeans began to show it interest in the early 1900s. From there, the panda’s image continued to spread through what Chen calls a “cuteness economy” to finally culminate in how it is received now, particularly through cute videos on social media – “no longer belong[ing] to the forest, but to the data”.

The panda: it is tiny, fluffy, and sweet indeed. The audience is treated to image after image of the black and white creature as zestless music composed by Peishan Xu pipes through the venue. Soon however, the duo’s mild narration quickly pivots to a vulnerable memory from Chen from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that has her sounding nearly in tears.

The scene lingers, then abruptly it’s time for a new act: screens no longer centre stage, Li puts on an inflatable panda costume, the duo entering a domestic yet absurd setting that goes on for almost too long. The dead silence too, lends an alienating effect.

As we observe Chen and Li care for a toy panda through a two-channel live video, the play devolves into incongruity to result in an ending that is bizarrely more entertaining than everything else that came before. Unused props too, suddenly make sense after the show purportedly ends. Chen describes the panda’s body as one that “looks like that of a man who has given up on himself but still has desire”. This may very well be the logline for Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet.
Reviewed by Cher Tan