Written by Mark Rogers. Sydney Opera House. 4-7 Sept, 2024.
Re:group performance collective deliver their most emotionally engaging show to date with AUTO-TUNE, part of Sydney Opera House’s far too short UnWrapped season. Their ever-playful use of technology gets taken for a new spin, and maybe it’s the focus on music, or maybe it’s the first person narrative, but this one comes with an unexpectedly strong emotional kick. Now let me ask you the question… do you believe in life after love?
You know how auto-tune corrects your singing instantly? What if there was a way to do that with your whole life? Smoothing out every little wobble and making your life pitch perfect all the time. Well, teenager Michael is just a kid in Wagga Wagga who’s in a band with his mates and has a superpower. When he makes a mistake, a portal appears and lets him jump back in time to fix it. Useful for when he plays the wrong note or embarrasses himself. But what happens if, one day, the portal disappears and he’s faced with the worst decision of his life?
AUTO-TUNE is a musical, or an opera if you will complete with surtitles. Mark Rogers plays Michael, in a show without a fourth wall. It’s part pub rock gig, part awkward school assembly, part performance art.
Liam ‘Snowy’ Halliwell plays Michael’s best mate, and Ashley Bundang is their keyboardist and mutual object of teenage affection. Set in the mid-noughties, a time of bands like Limp Bizkit, Slipknot and other magnets for male teen angst. It’s an era of music I’m far too familiar with (R.I.P. Channel [V] – the best job I ever had) and while the music is rooted in this rap/rock hybrid core, it jumps across multiple musical genres without losing its garage band energy.
The genius is how these tracks, and their accompanying lyric videos, convey the story. These are better musical-theatre songs than you find in most musicals. Each one combines character, advances plot and keeps you entertained all the way through. It’s the most DIY, indie musical I’ve seen.
Of course all the genre-bending and technology means nothing if the story isn’t there, and AUTO-TUNE gets pretty shockingly deep. Michael’s mistakes escalate to a future-destroying level and he’s forced to face up to the consequences of his actions.
There is a sly sense of humour to the entire production that smirks but never sneers, and a juvenile shit-stirring vibe that keeps you guessing. There’s something in the lo-fi rock’n’roll set up that had me on edge the whole time, unsure which direction the narrative would go in. How dark would it get? The answer is, pretty fucking dark but always intriguing. It’s like watching Donnie Darko: The Musical. A brilliant third act rug pull drew gasps from the crowd and proved that re:group aren’t just masters of multimedia tech, they know how to really engage an audience with old school theatrical tools as well.
If you’re familiar with re:group’s earlier shows like UFO, POV or Coil, you’ll understand the general vibes at play here. They excel at deconstructing genre, narrative and theatrical convention, and reassembling things in a new order. With AUTO-TUNE we have a reinvented form of musical theatre, gig-theatre. It’s brilliant. I can’t get enough of their work. Re:group are easily the most creative and exciting theatre-makers I’ve seen in years.
Cultural Binge 
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