MUSIC
Lewis Capaldi | Australia and New Zealand Tour 2025 ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, December 10
“I’ll rinse my breakdown for all it was worth,” Lewis Capaldi promises the crowd near the beginning of his first Melbourne show in five years.
Lewis Capaldi performs at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday evening.Credit: Richard Clifford
It’s the kind of self-deprecating joke someone who’s two beers deep would say to a mate at the pub. And that’s precisely how a Capaldi concert feels – as if you’re listening to a longtime friend bleed their heart out between drinks.
Everybody loves a comeback story, but there’s something especially endearing about Capaldi’s. Just a few years after bursting onto the scene, the Scottish ballad master announced he was taking a hiatus from touring to tend to his mental health, which had deteriorated since his diagnosis of Tourette syndrome in 2022. Now, two years after removing himself from the spotlight, he’s back on stage and is in top form.
From the first track, Survive – one of his first releases since the hiatus – Capaldi’s soulful, gravelly voice reverberates through Rod Laver Arena, overpowering the thunderous drums accompanying him.
His range astounds, first belting earlier hits like Bruises before crooning airier tracks like Something in the Heavens. With few bells and whistles around him, his raw, rich voice fills every inch of the cavernous space.
No one does a heartbreak ballad quite like Capaldi.Credit: Richard Clifford
“It’s the happiest I’ve been on a tour in my life,” he tells the crowd, many of whom are arm-in-arm or in tears. “I feel buzzing to be back on stage.”
But amid the joy is a sprinkle of disbelief. Capaldi, arguably one of the most down-to-earth pop stars to date, is clearly surprised by his own comeback, continuously thanking his fans for sticking with him and apologising for previous cancelled gigs.
He occasionally pauses mid-song, listening to the crowd chant his lyrics in perfect unison, a look of pure wonder on his face. Incredulous giggles escape him when fans loudly profess their love for him during quieter moments.
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No one does a heartbreak ballad quite like Capaldi, his face contorting with genuine pain each time he describes an aching, all-consuming love. This threatens to overwhelm at times, with sonically similar tracks like Pointless and Leave Me Slowly beginning to blend into one another. However, you don’t go to a Capaldi show for his musical adventurousness – you go for his raw talent and endless banter.
“Bear with me if this goes tits up. It’s just that my testicles are far too low,” he says before launching into a higher register track. Only Capaldi could pair a joke about genitals with a ballad about endless love.
Whether he’s cracking jokes or simply observing the crowd, there’s a deep sense of genuine vulnerability in everything Capaldi does. It’s a quality every pop star probably claims to have, but few actually show it. This is why Capaldi is such a rare gem, and one we can all be thankful is shining once again.
Reviewed by Nell Geraets
THEATRE
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again ★★★★
Bluestone Church Art Space, Footscray, November, and The Bowery Theatre, St Albans, on December 13.
The cultural and artistic vibrancy of Melbourne’s western suburbs is often overlooked, and it shouldn’t be. Westies have a strong creative presence across our performing arts scene and at venues such as The Substation in Newport, or the FCAC and nearby Bluestone Church Art Space in Footscray. And diversity isn’t progressive in the melting pot of the west. It’s the norm, so that stages there tend to reflect more faithfully what we see every day on the tram.
This production of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again is a “post-dramatic” version.Credit: Darren Gill
Wit Incorporated is one notable indie company that calls the western suburbs home. It lobs Alice Birch’s feminist theatre grenade Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again with a renegade spirit, and it seems to fulfil the playwright’s stage direction – “this play should not be well-behaved” – with more grit and gumption than might be the case for a company from bourgeois bastions in Melbourne’s leafy east or its bayside suburbs.
Janice Muller’s 2017 terrific production at the Malthouse set a high bar, but this show proves production values are less important than ideas and theatrical craft. It’s a “post-dramatic” version – the players pace the stage well before the show “starts”; the set is nestled throughout seating banks; the fourth wall strains and occasionally breaks against the weight of performance, exposing the actors’ vulnerabilities and ours – that emphasises our complicity in the systemic oppression of women.
Disconnected vignettes ricochet through the space. A woman (Madeleine Magee-Carr) turns the tables on a man’s seduction (Jack Twelvetree) by inverting phallocentric language with playful aggression. Another woman (Lansy Feng) rejects a marriage proposal with unapologetic anger, clear-eyed before absorbing traces of her partner’s confusion as she continues to try to explain herself.
A worker (Aya) who wants a day off each week to get “more sleep” stonewalls her obnoxious boss, who herself tries every argument and inducement to ensure compliance. Tellingly, the one flicker of mutual accord in this deadpan office comedy is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement of the enduring gender pay gap.
The play comprises a series of vignettes.Credit: Darren Gill
Other scenes follow – one a domestic sequence on maternal expectation and abandonment; another at a supermarket, where misogynistic co-workers bully a female customer, whose unusual public behaviour turns out to be an appalling, if bleakly logical, response to the experience of sexual assault.
From there, Birch fires live ammunition with a scattershot approach. The action fragments into a patchwork of anguish and exhaustion, and continued resistance despite the halting progress of feminism. The climax echoes Valerie Solanis’ SCUM Manifesto, a radical feminist tract that advocates the extermination of all men on the planet … before expressing sadness at male expendability, itself a crucial element of the patriarchy in which our society continues to be mired.
Fiercely distilled performance, together with smart direction and design choices, liberate all the humour and the rage undergirding this genuinely subversive play, which exposes how deeply entrenched gender inequality is in our society, and how radically we might need to rethink to change that.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
This review was written from a preview performance
MAGIC
Maho Magic Bar ★★★
Spiegel Haus, until February 15
Melburnians looking for the annual Spiegeltent outside the Arts Centre will find a souped-up replacement at the newly opened Spiegel Haus, on Lonsdale Street in the CBD. It sports not just a travelling “mirror tent” of the Edwardian era, tucked away behind a Chinatown alley, but an al fresco rooftop bar and several upstairs venues.
Maho Magic Bar, is a pop-up Japanese cocktail bar with a magic show inside.Credit: Jeff Busby
One of these, Maho Magic Bar, is a pop-up Japanese cocktail bar with a magic show inside.
Ticket holders gain entrance through a circular black portal surrounded by gaudy neon signs – like some hole-in-the-wall in Shinjuku – and the Japanese flavour continues within.
A lanterned vestibule leads to a large room decorated with sprays of plastic sakura (cherry blossoms), holding a series of bar areas stocked with sake and Suntory and a DJ booth playing a stream of J-pop.
Directed to a barstool, patrons will be welcomed by emcee Jonathan – the only Anglo member of an otherwise Japanese cast of magicians – and informed about the show’s two menus.
If you’re feeling bold, you can choose from the mysterious magic menu and get a special surprise performance; if you want to feel bolder, there’s a Japanese-themed drinks menu with cocktails made to order.
At Maho Magic Bar the magicians move from table to table. Credit: Jeff Busby
None of that is compulsory, and magicians will rotate through every bar stop, so you’ll get to see all the magic on offer.
Each magician comes dressed as a crazy character, and you can feel the cosplay vibes. We started with kimono-clad Kaori Kitazawa, “Kawaii Princess of Illusion”, whose card tricks mix close-up magic with a spot of mentalism.
Wambi is a master of sleight of hand whose cup-and-ball routines weave in the Japanese passion for baseball. E.O. Lee – who grew up in Ipswich, Queensland – gives a bogan twist to illusionism, making items vanish into, or appear from, a goon bag. And “mixologist of mischief” Shirayuri conjures olfactory enchantments with a spritz of queer flirtation.
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Magic aficionados will almost certainly have seen some iteration of the performances on display, but punters should be amazed, and there’s something appealing about the intimacy of interactive magic performed at a bar right in front of you.
If you can’t get enough of Japan, or you want to put a twist on a boozy night out with friends, or you’re an Instagram tragic who simply wants a pic with this colourful posse afterwards, Maho Magic Bar might be just the ticket.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
