Black Ties (ILBIJERRI Theatre Company and Te Rēhia Theatre)

Entertaining cross-cultural romantic comedy-musical with the young lovers coming from cultures on opposite sides of the Tasman Sea, a Maori woman and an Aboriginal man, and the clashes coming when their families meet. Uncle Jack Charles, wedding style seating (at the Arts Centre's Pavilion), some audience participation amidst the controlled chaos of the second half.

(w/ R and Hayley)

The King

Handsomely put together and I do like Timothée Chalamet but it didn't really have anything particular to say - about power, royalty, family, war, Shakespeare or otherwise.

Weyes Blood @ Melbourne Recital Centre, Wednesday 26 February

This was good. I missed the layers of orchestration - and production - which dress up the songs on record, but Natalie Mering proved to be a strong singer, with the ability to open her throat more on the big moments and convey the shifts and dynamics in her undulating, long-lined songs.

She got through most of Titanic Rising and Front Row Seat to Earth, along with a (live debut) version of "Forever Young" and one older one. It didn't shed any particular new light on the songs for me - though I liked the way she used "Movies" as an epic main set closer - but I enjoyed it.

(w/ R)

Marriage Story

Great like everyone says it is and felt very real including in the aspects which were deliberately verging-on-satirical (the depiction of divorce lawyering and the family law system) and the scenes that were directed in ways that highlighted its own fictional - theatrical? dare I say it Brechtian? - nature. Characterisation and performance of both main adults an obvious highlight, but so too the supporting cast.

The New Pornographers @ Melbourne Recital Centre, Friday 21 February

Enjoyable if not in any way revelatory. The songs from their latest album - which I haven't listened to - were front-loaded and after the first half hour or so it was one 'greatest hit' after another. I had memories of them doing many of these in one or both of the previous shows of theirs I've been to (2006 and 2010), and I was happy that all of my biggest main-album favourites got a run: "Testament to Youth in Verse", "Champions of Red Wine", "The Bleeding Heart Show". Not sure whether there was something going on with Newman's voice, or if it was something to do with the sound, which led to him being even more in the shadow of Case's than was possibly always inevitable.

(w/ R)

Josephine Rowe - Here Until August

I already knew that Josephine Rowe writes sentences like a dream; for evidence I needn't go further than the first paragraph of the first story in this collection, "Glisk", which also happens to be the story of hers which prompted me to pick up Here Until August in the first place (because it's extremely good):

We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take.

What I now know is that her craft also extends to putting stories together, with all ten of those collected here satisfying not just on the level of language, but also in how narrative and action fold into theme, concern and mood - structurally as well as in terms of story-ness.

Most - maybe all - of the stories are structured around absences and losses, and frequently there's a sense of characters in that state of both drifting and stasis; given that Rowe is a writer who was born in the early 80s and grew up in Australia (although her settings range broader), it's not surprising that there are little grace notes of cultural reference points sprinkled throughout, a passing reference to Kieslowski here, another to Blacklisted and The Greatest there.

Strikingly, though, the situations and characterisations are also strong - especially the driftless couple of "Real Life", becalmed in Montreal amidst multiple deaths, the newlyweds arguing about which of them will bear their hypothetical child in "Anything Remarkable" (also, the sneakily ambiguous, ambivalent way that one begins: "Certain days: it is easy to imagine this small, once-prosperous river town (barely distinct from many other small, once-prosperous river towns) as if you are only passing through it, shunpiking the thruways in favour of the scenic rural two-lanes on a road trip in your better, your best life."), and the taxi driver and her passenger in "The Once-Drowned Man".

For me, Rowe's commitment to the shapes and elements of her stories - and her great ability to interleave them - is one of the things that makes them stand out. There were perhaps two or three points, across the ten stories, where I felt a particular gesture or moment was too 'story-ish', but even they land with a certain panache, and they're exceptions amidst what's a fairly marvellous set, which I got a lot out of and some of which I suspect I'll return to.

"Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel" & "Valhalla" (TarraWarra Museum of Art)

Klippel - I didn't engage deeply, but I most liked some of the drawings and collages, and the small steel and wire sculptures, rather than the more obviously monumental larger assemblages.

"Valhalla" was keen, like most of Callum Morton's art. On the outside, it's a three-quarter scale replica of his childhood house in ruins; on the inside, it's an unsettling generically modern lobby area - also three-quarter scale - with three closed lifts and associated lights which flicker on and off and sounds which include mysterious thuds, menacing laughter and a scream or two.

(w/ R and L)

"Collecting Comme" & "Lucy McRae: Body Architect" (NGV)

The Comme des Garcons dresses and other garments on display were fun to look at, with some surprisingly imaginable as actual street wear.

There was a bit to like about Lucy McRae but my favourites were the videos she did on commission for Miss Chu and Aesop, which both - like all her work in this exhibition - explore how technology may shape the human body and experience in the future (in the case of the one for Miss Chu, involving cloning one's own body and then eating the result) in a way that's not unchallenging while at the same time aesthetically pleasant.

(involving trips to both the NGV International and NGV Australia, with R but in each gallery viewing different things)

Your Name

By coincidence, I was in Japan when this film came out - late 2016 - and I remember seeing its poster absolutely everywhere. Later (quite a bit later) I learned what a huge hit it had been: highest grossing film in Japan that year and fourth highest of all time, and highest grossing Japanese film worldwide of all time. And now that I've seen it, I understand why - it's a wistful, romantic, gorgeously animated movie whose premise satisfyingly accounts for the common (especially among the young) feeling of being in search of something that can't be named, and whose ending I wasn't sure it was going to reach, causing it to land all the more effectively.

The Good Place season 4

If this culminating season doesn't have the same zip - energy, inventiveness and barrelling momentum - as its predecessors, it comes close to making up for it with its dedication to shedding new light on what it means to be good, and to lead a good life, and continuing to excavate from the soil of its fantastic (ie un-real) premise. And, as always when you get this far into a tv show, there's plenty of built-up goodwill to draw on, for the characters and for the show itself. It ends well.

(1 & 2; 3)