Starry cast redeems problematic, pie-in-the-sky plot in Waitress

MUSICAL
Waitress ★★★
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Opening May 7

Trailblazing Broadway musical Waitress is noted for being created predominantly by women – Jessie Nelson wrote the book, Sara Bareilles composed the music and lyrics, Diane Paulus directed and Lorin Latarro choreographed the show.

Musical theatre boffins will have been beguiled by the soundtrack already, and in a production where even the reminder to switch off your mobile phone is sung – Andrews Sisters-like – in smooth three-part harmony, it’s the mellow, honeyed seductions of Bareilles’ score that provide major highlights in this long-awaited Australian premiere.

Based on the 2007 indie film, the story follows a waitress, Jenna Hunterson (Natalie Bassingthwaighte), who works at an out-of-the-way pie diner in the American South.

When Jenna finds she is unexpectedly pregnant to her abusive husband, Earl (Keanu Gonzalez), she decides to have the baby, begins a torrid affair with her obstetrician Dr Pomatter (Rob Mills), and hides money from Earl. Hoping to save enough to enter a national pie-baking contest, she dreams of using the winnings to escape her husband’s coercive control.

Meanwhile, fellow waitresses Becky (Gabriyel Thomas) and Dawn (Mackenzie Dunn) have romantic travails of their own. Sassy Becky finds solace in an affair with her boss Cal (John Xintavelonis); the nerdy, neurotic Dawn is pursued by equally eccentric Ogie (Gareth Isaac), with wedding bells in the offing after an assist (and a makeover) from her friends.

As Jenna’s plight deepens and the baby is born, it’s the elderly owner of the pie diner, Joe – played with cantankerous charm by John Waters – who comes to the rescue.

That pie-in-the-sky ending feels like a particularly American evasion of the social issues and inequalities that blight the chances of the musical’s working-class heroine.

Intimate partner violence isn’t taboo in musical theatre – witness the brutality in Tina, the musical based on the life of Tina Turner – but here Jenna needs a rich male benefactor to help recover her power. The fantasy is Daddy Warbucks thin, and jars with the realism of the abuse portrayed.

It’s hard, too, not to be disconcerted by the love affair between Jenna and Dr Pomatter. Bassingthwaighte and Mills might have a duet called Bad Idea, but that isn’t enough to dispel a squeamish romcom vibe, or to fully recognise the clear and troubling abuse of trust baked into the relationship.

And yet, Waitress does excel at full-throated female friendship and solidarity.

The diner bustles to life with water-cooler humour made to order. There are buoyant numbers led by the female trio, and each waitress gets a vocal moment in the sun, from Thomas’ soulful apology for adultery to Bassingthwaighte’s soaring rendition of She Used To Be Mine, as Jenna becomes determined to reclaim what she’s lost of herself.

Musical theatre fans shouldn’t miss the opportunity to see Waitress. Certain aspects of the plot may be off-putting, and there are some strange flavour combinations on offer, but it’s a significant Broadway musical with a starry cast, plenty of energetic comedy, transporting vocal harmonies, and a delicious score that rises crisply from a country and folk music base.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Ball Park Music ★★★
Northcote Theatre, May 8

I wasn’t sure if Ball Park Music’s two Melbourne gigs were going to go ahead this weekend. The Brisbane five-piece postponed the first show of its 2026 Australian tour earlier this month after guitarist Dean Hanson, in what could be a lyric from one of the indie rock outfit’s jangly, inoffensive tunes, broke his collarbone playing cricket. Thankfully for the band’s Melbourne fans, the show went on.

Opening with the 2014 single She Only Loves Me When I’m There – which, I was surprised to find, actually goes quite hard live – chatty frontman Sam Cromack promised a set full of deep cuts and fan favourites. As the electric guitar was replaced with an acoustic, sentimental Millennials sang along with equal enthusiasm to 2017 single Exactly as You Are and Like Love from last year’s chart-topping album of the same name. There was no “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff” (to quote another Brisbane band) purism here.

Thanks to years of regional touring, regular releases and consistent appearances on the triple j Hottest 100, Ball Park Music has fostered a devoted following that has grown steadily over the past 15 years. One might think that at their fifth appearance in Melbourne in 12 months – the band toured last year as well, and supported Oasis for all their Australian shows – the enthusiasm might have diminished. This felt somewhat true, as the packed crowed remained low on energy well into the set. It wasn’t until an hour in, with the upbeat, count-and-clap-along All I Want Is You that the audience really warmed up.

As Cromack announced the final song, Please Don’t Move to Melbourne – of course – I found myself wondering how many people here tonight had done just that. Evidently, the frontman wondered that too, posing the question to the crowd. The ensuing cheer revealed that a substantial portion of the attendees were indeed Brisbane expats, showing up to see their home-town heroes.

Reviewed by Kelsey Oldham

THEATRE
Game. Set. Match ★★★★
Malthouse Theatre, until May 23

Meet-cute. Socio-realistic drama. Retributive fantasy. Gamilaroi playwright and actor Megan Wilding’s debut main-stage play straddles all these genres and more as it crackles with the spiky intensity of swiftly built familiarity, gradually unearthed secrets and accelerated intimacy ceding to something altogether darker and more uncertain.

It’s best walking into Game. Set. Match knowing as little as possible. Unassumingly handsome, middle-aged white man Joshua (Rick Davies) thumbs through the trophy room of the late Betty Hughes, a former tennis star. He’s caught unaware by a vociferous, impudent young First Nations cleaner (played by Wilding), whose name remains withheld from us for much of the play.

Over the course of a single night, their fractious introductions give way to a tentative blossoming of friendship and, eventually, outright flirtation fuelled by alcohol and drugs as the two feel their way around one another, pushing boundaries and baring the innermost parts of themselves. But reality is contingent, we soon learn – both are hiding crucial truths from each other.

Wilding’s two-hander is exceptionally crafted, with dialogue that fizzes with a portentous quality and bleakly funny asides that simultaneously call out and make punchlines of racism, sexual assault and fatphobia. Supercharged with an unmistakeable psychosexual energy, the exchanges between Davies and Wilding directly echo the back-and-forths of tennis, but what’s more scintillating is how lived-in these conversations feel, how smoothly they glide from one subject to the next.

Davies is incredibly effective as the charming Joshua, a man teetering on the edge of a panic attack until overfamiliarity and substances loosen his inhibitions and blur his edges. Wilding, conversely, only grows sharper and more defined as the play progresses – shrouded in layer upon layer of knowing that never overwhelm her; even as they overflow into the play’s third act, Wilding’s performance is defiant, vulnerable and darkly humorous.

Under Jessica Arthur’s direction, the play’s triptych form unfurls with distinct tonal and thematic shifts demarcating the three acts. In transitions aided by the two actors, Isla Shaw’s set deftly transforms from a middle-class residence to a claustrophobically cosy leather banquette in a bar to a bathroom so dank you can almost smell it. Shaw’s costuming is the fulcrum through which key revelations unfold. Rainbow Chan’s sound design ratchets up the tension in frenzied junctures of release and remains conspicuously absent in moments of unbearable tension.

Every disclosure in Wilding’s purposeful script lays the groundwork for what comes later, forcing you to re-examine everything you thought you knew about these characters in a new, unholy light, although the tension in the raucous third act sags slightly as Wilding reveals her sleight of hand.

Questions of class, race and gender are inextricable from this play’s construction, but as much as the story reaches towards a microcosm of broader truth-telling in Australia, Game. Set. Match is most compelling when it’s ensnared in the entanglement of these two superbly realised characters.

Similar in scope to narratives like David Harrower’s play Blackbird and Micaela Coel’s show I May Destroy You, Game. Set. Match confronts a future that has been tainted by misdeeds of the past, and dares to revel in the redemptive power of radical comprehension, physical revenge and violent catharsis.

Reviewed by Sonia Nair

MUSIC
TISM ★★★★
Port Melbourne Industrial Centre for the Arts, May 2

TISM fans don’t cheer to show their appreciation; they boo. They boo as the lights go down, they boo between songs, and when TISM depart at the end of the night, they really boo. When they’re not booing, they’re chanting: “TISM are wankers.”

Perversity is the love language of TISM – the cultish, seven-piece band of semi-anonymous, masked men who have been aerobically performing over tongue-in-cheek electro-rock since 1982.

Tonight, the Melbourne anarchists have packed out the 5000-capacity PICA in Port Melbourne, a warehouse space that feels like a shed teleported from the old Big Day Out – apt for a group that hit their cultural apex in the mid-’90s with the likes of Greg! The Stop Sign!! and He’ll Never Be An (Ol’ Man River).

The festival feel is bolstered by an undercard of six bands, and the afternoon “international theatrical debut” of TISM’s Death To Art Live at Sidney Myer Music Bowl film.

After watching technicians pootle about on stage, the headliners finally emerge – on a smaller stage behind us at the opposite end of the warehouse. We’ve been ambushed. Dressed in silly, angular NFL-style grey jumpsuits, their patented masks augmented by three huge spiked horns flopping about, the band launch into Old Skool TISM, its chorus – “Wisdom’s useless, age a prison / But let’s escape with old-school TISM” – a neat review of the crowd’s intentions.

I’ll Ave Ya sees band members furiously chest-bump each other, then in the catchy Everybody Needs Somebody to Hate, a four-metre inflatable glowing TISM doll walks through the crowd.

Co-frontman Ron Hitler-Barassi launches into a poetic diatribe about class, racism and ketamine, before suddenly the band appear behind us on the main stage, for the acid techno-tinged Garbage. Things have escalated.

This discombobulating stage switcheroo continues every five or six songs. Then, after a punky Death to Art, the band (bands?) somehow – hilariously – swell in number to appear on three different stages simultaneously. Playing three different songs, all at once. Chaos.

Throw in another “TISM are wankers” chant, then hectic techno closer Give Up for Australia, performed by two TISMs on two stages facing each other, slightly out of sync for good measure. Then they’re gone and the boos rain down in triumph.

“That was incredible,” someone says on the way out. “Now I don’t need to go and meet up with my idiot drunken friends.” Four decades on, TISM continue to serve.
Reviewed by Marcus Teague

MUSIC
LEONKORO QUARTET ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, May 5

What’s in a name? When four young string players call themselves the Leonkoro Quartet (“Lionheart” in Esperanto), they obviously wish to project a bold, forthright image. Certainly, these talented Berlin-based musicians have won a lion’s share of prizes from London’s Wigmore Hall to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw since they banded together in 2019.

Making their Melbourne debut in the fine acoustics of Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, first impressions were more of an ensemble with a refined, soft-grained tone.

Elegant phrasing and graceful technique suffused the perfumed harmonies of the unjustly neglected 1927 String Quartet of Dutch composer Henriette Bosmans. Although clearly paying homage to the quartets of Debussy and Ravel, Bosmans fashioned something distinctive and appealing. Beautiful as it was, the quartet’s recessed sound signalled difficulty in finding the hall’s acoustic “sweet spot”.

A passionately committed account of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 13 seemed sometimes to suffer a similar fate, despite the players clearly enjoying the wonderfully varied content of this masterful score, the work of a precocious 18-year-old.

It was, however, only in the climax of the fugal section of the second movement that the group’s sound began to galvanise. Leader Jonathan Schwarz’s final-movement cadenza impressed before a touching return to the work’s peace-filled opening material.

Audiences expect Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet to pack an enormous emotional punch. In the end, it did, the Leonkoro discovering its leonine qualities, especially from the exposition repeat of the first movement. From then on, Schubert’s dramatic dance with death assumed a powerful, convincing urgency, taking hold of the space and those within it. With a transformed, robust sound, the concluding Tarantella provided as frantic a finale as could be hoped for.

With so much admirable musicianship to offer, the Leonkoro might take more heart from its inspiring name.

Reviewed by Tony Way

THEATRE
The Glass Menagerie ★★★★
MTC, Sumner Theatre, until June 5

The last time I saw The Glass Menagerie – on the West End, starring Amy Adams – the performances were so lacking in dramatic alchemy that I walked out at interval.

With this vigorous revival at the MTC, director Mark Wilson has crafted the perfect palate cleanser – a moody, playful, memorably performed production of Tennessee Williams’ classic memory play.

True, our narrator isn’t usually as butch-looking as Tim Draxl. His Tom strides onstage, a thin singlet straining to contain his ripped physique, and immediately makes a crude gesture that suggests he’s cruising for sex. For a moment there, we get Tom Wingfield as imagined by Tom of Finland.

It’s the only open acknowledgement of Tom’s homosexuality: as a character in the play, the younger Tom is closeted, cagey and constantly lying to his mother about going “to the movies” at night. He burns to write poetry and seek adventure, but he’s stuck working in a shoe factory to help keep the lights on in the small St Louis flat he shares with his “crippled” sister Laura (Millie Donaldson) and single mother Amanda (Alison Whyte).

A musclebound Tom is also a plausible reaction to the male abandonment hanging over the household.

As Amanda’s smothering maternal anxiety drives her children to distraction, a blurred photograph of Tom and Laura’s absent father dominates the scene, preserving only an idealised outline of masculinity – strong brow and jawline, whiter-than-white smile; nothing human or wounded at all.

There’s not much stage left for human and wounded things when Amanda herself takes over. The faded Southern belle genuinely cares about her children, but her nostalgia consumes her and she’s still geared to a lost world of “gentleman callers” and “gracious living” with lots of “servants”. Ahem.

Whyte effortlessly captures the poignancy and ridiculousness of all that while underlining the driving anxiety which motivates Amanda.

Ultimately, fears for her children’s future – especially for Laura, who lives with disability – plot a course for patriarchal games and inadvertent cruelty, even as Tom plans his own act of abandonment.

Turbulent scenes between Amanda and Tom are electrifying to watch, and there’s a subtle, almost incestuous edge to their conflict that invests otherwise funny and familiar family dynamics with an unsettling charge.

If mother and son bring out the drama queen in each other, the figure of Laura remains aloof until literal darkness descends, when Donaldson lends poise to a doomed and delicate encounter by candlelight, wreathed in sentiment, heavy symbolism and quiet kindness in the face of yearning and despair.

It’s a poignant, faithful, and skilled production of The Glass Menagerie that delivers the play with a clarity ideal for newcomers to Williams, and a distinctiveness that will satisfy aficionados of his work.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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