Ghost Quartet

Antipodes Theatre Company’s production of Dave Molloy’s song cycle Ghost Quartet has arrived at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre, following two Melbourne/Naarm seasons (in 2019 and 2021).

While we mostly think of musicals as having a straightforward narrative, non-linear song cycles have become a familiar sub-genre. Sydney musical theatre fans will know 35mm: A Musical Exhibition, inspired by the photographs of Matthew Murphy, William Finn’s Elegies: A Song Cycle, dedicated to the composer’s lost friends, or Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World.

First performed in 2014, Molloy’s eclectic song cycle played two successful Off-Broadway seasons, touring other US centres, and was seen as far afield as Canada, Edinburgh and Off-West End. It followed close on the heels Off-Broadway premiere of the composer / writer / lyricist / performer’s better-known Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (seen in Sydney last year), preceding that show’s 2016 Broadway transfer.

Ghost Quartet demands a multi-talented cast of four singer/actor/musicians, adept at playing multiple instruments. The current cast, featuring Cameron Bajraktarevic-Hayward, David Butler (also musical director), Hany Lee and Willow Sizer admirably fill that bill. In addition to versatile solo voices, each performer’s versatility across a range of instruments effectively creates the show’s diverse accompaniments, while their ensemble harmonies are a delight.

Taking its form from the classic double vinyl concept albums (divided into four ‘sides’, and tracks numbered) I spent my youth absorbing in the 1970s and 1980s, I was intrigued as Ghost Quartet unfolded as to how it would draw on and reflect the thematic connection and weaving together of songs on those seminal albums.

With the re-discovery of vinyl, it’s no real surprise that contemporary artists would explore the medium’s full potential of its forms as a means of creative  expression.

Ghost Quartet is described in the media release as a ‘musical odyssey about love, death and whisky’, going on to explain that ‘four friends conjure spirits (both spectral and alcoholic) as they unravel four interwoven narratives spanning seven centuries: a warped fairy tale about two sisters and a treehouse astronomer; a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher; a purgatorial intermezzo about Scheherazade and the ghost of Thelonious Monk; and a contemporary fable about a subway murder … about the stories we choose to pass on, the versions of ourselves we choose to inhabit, and the healing power of music.’

This Sydney performance is textured with lively wit, drama, pathos and some fun, active audience engagement. The various songs / stories are vividly and engagingly communicated.

Beginning the evening in individual corners of the stage, the performers are surrounded by the various instruments they will move between. It’s a stage covered with overlapping rugs, a seemingly random array of the various props and items which will become integral to the various song stories spread across the space.

That pretty much sums up the setting, with the Hayes’ backstage adapted as seating, two banks of audience facing each other across the performance space.

Dave Molloy’s songs are vivid and varied, while the singer-storytellers engage us with their blend of communicative acting and vocal versatility. Only during ‘side 3’ did I become a little lost, when the production choices for an extended, complex, intense passage lost me. To say more would be a spoiler, especially as other audience members I spoke to clearly related to this choice. Perhaps I just wasn’t ready for the sudden sensory switch to a new storytelling mode.

Side 4 returned to more conventional storytelling, with surprise ending that I loved, but again wouldn’t want to spoil.

Director Brandon Pape’s production flows smoothly and freely, capturing the believable feel of a group of friends getting together, joking around and sharing as they make music.

Neil Litchfield

Photographer: Angel Legas / 3 Fates Media