Arctic Monkeys melbourne

On a cool night at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, the chameleonic rock band led their audience on a journey through an ever-evolving range of genres and moods.

Indeed, one of the show’s best moments comes in a sudden explosion of queer erotica that Sarah provokes with the click of a mouse. The merry war between the couple – always the main attraction in Much Ado – plays out as raffish banter between a rock god in leather pants and a ferocious rock chick, and there’s plenty of chemistry and physical comedy to go with it. Surprisingly, the set list is more of a career retrospective than one might expect for a tour off the back of a new album – it’s not just the singles, either, with deep cuts from the group’s versatile back catalogue getting a run. The evolution of Arctic Monkeys is one of the strangest in modern popular music. Modern productions usually try to give the near-mute victim of the play more of a voice than Shakespeare could, and Larissa Teale gives an affecting portrayal here. Back in her childhood bedroom, Sarah idly switches on The Sims to distract herself – restarting a saved game from her teenage years. The last Much Ado I caught (at Bell Shakespeare in 2019) was a one-star travesty of Shakespeare’s lively romcom, and the kind of thing that might put people off Shakespeare for life. In their performances of five of Rameau’s “Concerts”, Accademia Arcadia communicated elements of the grace and good humour of the composer, finishing with a rousing, rustic Tambourin. Mendelssohn’s String Octet brought the evening to an ebullient close; the spirited playing radiating the joy and optimism of a new artistic collaboration. In a program that also included works by Clementi and Mendelssohn, Tsang dazzled the audience with the sensuous impressionism of Miriam Hyde’s Brownhill Creek in Spring and the stormy passion of Rachmaninov’s Etude Tableau Op. The crowd screams the iconic line “F--- what they did to Britney, to Lady Di and Whitney”, before the musician splits the room in half for a call-and-response segment that explodes into sweaty euphoria. At her first-ever Melbourne show, Rina Sawayama is performing Send My Love to John, an emotional acoustic number penned from the perspective of a parent apologising to her queer son.