This was supposed to be a Wu-Tang gig – so where were the Wu-Tang Clan?

MUSIC
Wu-Tang Clan | Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber ★★★
Rod Laver Arena, March 27

How can Wu-Tang — a group that rewrote hip-hop’s DNA and the very meaning of cool — possibly live up to the nostalgia of their heyday?

They tried – starting by turning Rod Laver Arena into a gargantuan recreation of my bedroom circa 1997, where Wu-Tang was in heavy rotation. I hadn’t been in a room so choked with weed-smoke since my VCE.

And like me doing VCE, there was the distinct feeling of not being prepared to present to the class.

The elephant in the room: half of the group weren’t there. Although the Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber Tour was billed as “all living members, together for the final time”, Method Man, Raekwon, Cappadonna and Young Dirty Bastard were absent, without explanation. Rappers whose voices many of Wu-Tang’s greatest tracks hinge on.

So began a muddled speed run of one of the greatest discographies in history. The remaining members performed the lines of their other members in some songs, and abandoned others halfway through. In the high-energy dance set late in the show, radio hit Gravel Pit ran for a handful of bars until Method Man’s swaggering delivery would have been impossible to salvage through karaoke and simply … stopped.

Wu-Tang famously “form like Voltron” – greater together than the sum of their parts. Strip those parts out and watch Voltron’s wheels fall off in real time.

A few times the Clan walked offstage altogether to run recorded videos and skits. A mid-set in memoriam for fallen rappers set to a Barbra Streisand song? Touching, but baffling. Also: a trailer for RZA’s new movie? A QR code to vote Wu-Tang into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Some kind of raffle? Why the heck not at this point?

GZA’s vocal delivery is as tight and powerful as ever. RZA remains one of the coolest men on the planet, doing incredible heavy lifting for the stripped-back clan. Sadly, the sheer brilliance of his beats – the sparse, iconic production that defined an era – was recreated by a live band that got lost in a sound mix that was both muddy and pitchy.

But when you could hear them, when they were hitting their bars, when the whole crowd bounced on ageing knees to immortal beats, it’s undeniable – Wu-Tang forever.

Messy, chaotic, flashes of brilliance; bad sound but great vibes, this was a show that felt both 35 years and five minutes in the making.

Reviewed by Liam Pieper

MUSICAL THEATRE
Evil Dead the Musical ★★★★
Chapel Off Chapel, until April 12

Splatter horror. Meet jazz hands. Ah, make that jazz hand plus kick-arse chainsaw attachment. Yes, dear reader, Evil Dead the Musical has arrived.

The horror franchise that launched director Sam Raimi’s career has spawned a legion of adaptations, reboots and sequels since the 1981 cult classic. Now musical theatre gets a shot with a show that tickles all the tropes in an all-singing, all-dancing orgy of demon decapitation and general mayhem.

As parody musicals go, this is the only one I can recall with a “splatter zone”. Ponchos are provided at interval to theatregoers seated in the first three rows, and I can vouch for the fact that they’re required to avoid being drenched in fake blood. Things do tend to get spurty once ancient evil has been unleashed on the world, and this show goes all-in.

I won’t vouch for the quality of the songs. Music by Frank Cipolla and three others mines a comically broad range of influences from a two-dude operatic duet What the F--k Was That? that riffs off Bizet’s Carmen to a Grease-inspired shoo-wop lament called All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Kandarian Demons.

Although they’re performed with enjoyably silly gusto and the musical theatre chops of the cast can’t be denied, the musical numbers sometimes act less as highlights and more as glue holding together moments guaranteed to press buttons for fans of the franchise – hilarious horror effects, super lowbrow comedy, and famous catchphrases from the movie.

The plot draws on the original trilogy of films. Five college students break into an abandoned cabin in the woods. There’s Ash (Harley Dasey), his nerdy sister Cheryl (Emma Wilby), girlfriend and coworker Linda (Elaina Bianchi), and his obnoxious, sex-crazed best mate Scott (Jake Ameduri) and Scott’s latest squeeze Shelly (Grace Alston).

Their weekend jaunt goes horribly wrong when they inadvertently summon a vile entity using the Necronomicon, subjecting each of them to demonic possession of a gruesome kind.

Mild-mannered Ash becomes a chainsaw-wielding demonslayer, as his friends are transmogrified into vicious Deadites and even his own hand turns evil. Meanwhile, occult researcher Annie (Alston), her laconic partner Ed (Oliver Clisdell), and their hick guide Jake (Harrison Riley) venture to the cabin, with lost pages of the Necronomicon at hand.

Dasey plays the tortured mock-heroic Ash (and channels shades of Bruce Campbell’s iconic performance) with aplomb, the others lean into caricature of teen movie stereotypes and seem to relish their demonic transformations, culminating in group choreography as the Deadites prove they can dance.

Visual effects and set design allow us to bathe in comedy horror and the show’s often at its finest at its bloodiest. You can expect everything from a chainsaw beheading to a demonically possessed singing moose head.

Evil Dead the Musical might shortchange the musical part of musical theatre, but it’s ridiculous fun and franchise fans will love the gorefest – all the heavy prosthetics and stop-motion effects and blood gags from the movie, revolutionary for the time, are paid due homage through stage magic.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Lighting the Dark ★★★
Monash University Performing Arts Centre, March 27

Lighting the Dark is a cheerful dance fantasy – exaggeratedly cheerful – by South Australian choreographer Chris Dyke. Made with an ensemble of seven from Dancenorth, it’s a chatty and relaxed performance, but full of production razzle-dazzle.

Dyke is also the star of the show. A dancer living with Down syndrome, he moves with his own kind of hustle: slower, gentler movement in the upper body and arms but plenty of strength in the legs and core.

The show begins with a superhero melee and the ensemble has an absolute ball: there are non-stop dime stops, isolations and smooth glides. It’s cartoon movement, jokey and unpretentious, led by the remarkably slick Felix Sampson.

A later section is scored to David Bowie’s Fame and features Banksy stencil images brought to life in comic skits. It culminates with the memorable vision of Tiana Lung and Aleeya McFadyen-Rew locking lips as the kissing coppers.

There are moments of earnestness, with Dyke sharing hugs with the ensemble. Yet he also allows plenty of clowning around. At times – especially in a game-like trip to the movies – it resembles a private concert or green-room wheeze.

It’s all part of the dream. Lighting the Dark is reportedly the first full-length work commissioned by a mainstream Australian contemporary dance company from an artist with an intellectual disability – does that imply a different sort of heroism? Dyke treats this possibility with a kind of ironic good humour. He scrambles up his tower of milk crates, strips to the waist and spreads his arms as Bowie’s Heroes swells behind him. This production knows what sort of tender wish it is staging.

And that is why the line “just for one day” lands so forcefully. The fantasy has warmth because it is bounded. This is a work full of light, but it never quite lets you forget that the darkness persists after the theatre has emptied.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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