The New Jacksons on George
176 George Street, Sydney – (02) 8027 9997 When landing in Sydney, The Varnished Culture habitually strolled around to Jacksons on George for lunch while our hotel room was made ready. It was a typical old pub: dark, dingy and grungy, beers and sticky table-tops, Irish lasses behind the bar, an air of uncouth lassitude. We liked it. So imagine our surprise when, having been away from the Emerald City for a few years, we strolled into George Street to find a totally new and glamourous Jacksons on George, with a downstairs bar and concourse café, an upmarket bistro on…
Continue Reading →What the World Needs Now
A celebration of Burt Bacharach (Festival Theatre, 22 November 2024) Burt’s songs are deceptively light. Famously grumpy critic Lester Bangs called him “the Master of the Superficial.” But his love melodies, entwined with the lyrics of Hal David, among others, are, in fact, little masterpieces of intimate, intricate concision. He co-wrote 73 US top-40 songs, so he must have been doing something right. On Friday night, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, under Benjamin Northey, was in full lavish-and-lush mode, providing a gorgeous backdrop to accomplished singers David Campbell, Emma Pask, Thndo and Chantelle Ormandy. Unfortunately, vocalist Elise McCann was indisposed, but…
Continue Reading →Simone and the Valkyries
Die Walküre, Sydney Opera House, 15 November 2024 (Simone Young, Conductor /Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Stuart Skelton, Siegmund/Peter Rose, Hunding/Vida Miknevičiūtė, Sieglinde/Tommi Hakala, Wotan/Alexandra Ionis, Fricka, Roßweiße/Anja Kampe, Brünnhilde/ Helena Dix, Helmwige/Madeleine Pierard, Gerhilde/Natalie Aroyan, Ortlinde/Deborah Humble, Waltraute/Margaret Plummer, Siegrune/Kristin Darragh, Grimgerde/Liane Keegan, Schwertleite) The Sydney Opera House does not have the capacity to mount a proper Ring Cycle, but its beautiful concert hall can put on a brilliant concertized version, and Die Walküre offers a chance to savour the key spoke in Wagner’s wheel without the distractions of the monumental amount of staging required for a full-scale production. Instead there were…
Continue Reading →René Magritte
It's raining men ("Golconde", 1953)
(New South Wales Art Gallery, 18 November 2024) René Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was one of the leading Surrealists, along with Chirico, Meret Oppenheim, and (of course) Dali, who tried to represent the “elusive dream of a private person to which we hold no key.” Magritte’s entire oeuvre “is not copying reality but rather creating a new reality, much as we do in our dreams…painted with meticulous accuracy and exhibited with puzzling titles, [which] are memorable precisely because they are inexplicable.”* Magritte at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney is described by the curator as “an…
Continue Reading →An Obvious Disavowal
“Disclaimer” (Directed by Alfonso Cuarón Orozco from Renée Knight’s novel, 2024; Apple TV) Prima facie, this appears to be a clever, intriguing, well-made, beautifully-performed dramatic series, with a cast headed by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville. A revenger’s tragedy, where a woman’s wicked past comes back to haunt her, undermine her marriage, further alienate her son, and damage her career. A series of flashbacks – the default of weak or flawed narratives, real and confected – terminates with cartoon-telescoping straight from a Warner Bros. cartoon, or Happy Tree Friends. These scenarios, unfortunately, are not only…
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