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Source: The Australian Newspaper, November 12th
2005
From sex to suburban angst, no subject is too
delicate for a musical, writes Susan Horsburgh
IN an exuberant show of boy power, four blokes spanning a 40-year age range
are high-kicking and pelvis-thrusting their way across a St Kilda stage, doing
the sweeping finger point Greased Lightning-style. "Book yourself in now, come
on!" they belt out in unison, celebrating the unsung joys of a regular prostate
examination.
Touted as the male comeback to surprise hit Menopause the Musical, the subtly
named Premature Ejaculation is an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to men's
sexual insecurities, from shagpile backs to age-induced impotence. Far from
prompting a premature evacuation of the playhouse, the irreverent romp turned
out to be the crowd favourite at OzMade Musicals 2005, a recent showcase of four
new Australian works in progress.
Melbourne's barn-like Theatreworks space was packed to capacity with
twentysomething thespians and middle-aged industry people, the front row filled
with the sparsely covered scalps of the night's musical writers.
New music theatre may be notoriously tough to get up on a commercial stage but
that doesn't deter the hundreds of musical-mad hopefuls willing to labour away
on an endeavour that may come to nothing.
They create their musicals with dreams of making it to Broadway or the West End,
but it's often after the show is written that the real work begins, transferring
it off the page and into production. Even Matthew Robinson, winner of last
year's $80,000 Pratt Prize for new music theatre, which attracts more than 100
entrants biennially, has yet to see his Rent-style musical, Metro Street, up in
lights.
Now into its fifth draft, the show is "a heart
piece with comic elements", says the 25-year-old Western Australian Academy of
Performing Arts graduate, who started writing it in 2002. Metro Street was given
a two-week workshop in June and a piano vocal recording is being made to help
Robinson pitch the musical to state theatre companies next year. In the
meantime, he has sent recordings to London producers and talked to an
off-Broadway theatre company in New York.
When the negotiation process takes so long and success is so uncertain, the
obvious question is: why do they do it? "Why do we go to church or go to yoga?"
Robinson replies. "We do it so that our souls are fed."
Tim Minchin agrees. "It's the same force that makes people write plays or novels
or short stories," says the 30-year-old comedian, who won the Perrier best
newcomer award at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival and wrote the music for
last month's production of Somewhere at Penrith's Q Theatre.
"Lots of people write poetry but no one ever reads poetry or gets it published.
People are compelled to create art and the market doesn't change that." Besides,
he says, "everyone thinks theirs is going to be the one".
Of course, even if a show reaches the stage, there is no guarantee of success.
Look at last year's much-vaunted new Australian musical Eureka, which cost $5
million and flopped.
New Australian work is usually perceived by producers as too big a gamble and
even some overseas imports, such as The Producers and The Full Monty, failed to
meet expectations. Perhaps only The Boy From Oz, which returns to Australia next
year with megastar Hugh Jackman in the lead role, promises to put bums on seats.
Still, despite music theatre's fluctuating fortunes, the quirky, grassroots
musicals keep being created. At the OzMade Musicals showcase, 35-year-old David
Young took up position behind the keyboard to present vignettes from The Beauty
Spot, the fizzy black comedy he has been working on for four years about a
beauty parlour and a dangerously ambitious young newsreader.
Young was musical second-in-command on Mamma Mia and roped in some of the actors
from that production to give impressive renditions of his cheery, up-beat tunes.
"Everybody's trying now to change their faces," trilled the beauticians.
"Michael Jackson almost managed to change races."
The Melbourne freelance musician made the show small, with seven actors and four
band members, so that it could easily be mounted and toured. Now, after four
drafts and two demo recordings, he's trying to have it staged professionally.
"It's a world full of no: 'No, we can't put it on.' 'No, it's not good enough.'
'No, we don't have the money,"' Young says after a warm audience reception.
"Nights like tonight really inspire you to keep going."
Like Young, Daniel Thompson is no stranger to rejection. The 31-year-old singer
and dancer, who started performing at Queensland shopping centres when he was
seven, has worked on his show City Gym the Musical for 11 years, pouring an
estimated $100,000 of his own money into it.
His last attempt to stage it, for an audience of 200 people in the second-floor
aerobics room of Sydney's City Gym, cost him $20,000 last month. Slow ticket
sales forced him to pull the plug just a week before opening. "If I'd gone all
the way," he says, "I'd have risked twice that again, so it wasn't worth it."
Although Thompson was paying actors who had performed in big commercial shows
such as Grease and Saturday Night Fever, he suspects that the gym venue worked
against him. "The mainstream media thought it was a gay musical, and when the
gay media approached me and I said it didn't have gay content, they backed off,"
he says.
It will take him six months working on a cruise ship to recoup the loss and
another six months to save enough to go overseas to pitch the show in London,
New York and Las Vegas. His mates have told him to give up, but Thompson refuses
to let go.
"For me it's gone too far because I don't have a mortgage or a car or things
that most people have; I don't even have a girlfriend," he says. "I've been
putting my money into this show. So it's very hard for me to walk away, because
if it does go on, people will love it."
The good news is that high schools have been buying the rights to City Gym on
Thompson's website, paying him about $1000 per production. There have been three
this year and another four are planned for next year.
The 90-minute musical features 22 original songs and a cast of gym-going
stereotypes, including the nice skinny nerd and the muscle-bound meathead.
For Thompson, it's the escapism of music theatre that has always appealed.
"Musicals take you into fantasy because people don't normally break into song
with a full musical back-up," he says.
Peter Fleming, who has written the new musical comedy Frank Christie, Frank
Clarke with composer Allan McFadden, argues that audiences have always craved a
theatrical form that goes beyond the naturalism of film and television. Musicals
are "our modern form of lyrical expression", he says.
Even before Frank Christie was shown at OzMade Musicals, a producer had bought
an option on the rollicking, raunchy tale of an 1860s Australian bushranger
turned American media mogul.
Fleming keeps coming back to musicals, he says, for "the thrill of having an
audience laughing their heads off". McFadden is attracted to the problem-solving
aspect of composing: "How do I take the moment that he's got me at [in the
script] and make it interesting or fun, catchy and engaging?"
The Sydney-based pair agree it's a fickle industry but McFadden, 55, has learned
to detach himself from the business side of the job. "I just don't care any
more," he says. "Now I would rather go home and write musical No.4 than worry
about getting No.1 on."
Working on a commissioned musical is obviously the safer option, but budding
writers don't usually have that luxury. After 25 years in the business,
Lismore-based writer and director Janis Balodis tends to peddle his ideas and
hook a supporter first.
Last year the Queensland Music Festival commissioned Balodis and Shenton Gregory
to write Charters Towers: The Musical, an outdoor spectacular staged in July on
one of the main streets in Charters Towers, attracting 10,000 of the 12,000
locals. After sifting through newspaper clippings spanning a century from the
goldmining town affectionately known as Charlie's Trousers, Balodis conjured up
a feel-good romance between Annie Bags, a local bag lady from the early 20th
century, and a yowie. The show had a core of professional actors but the rest of
the cast consisted of 200 locals.
Balodis says it's no secret why audiences love watching musicals and writers
love creating them: "Bernard Shaw said that if it's too silly to be said, it
must be sung. You can sing things that you'd never dare to say."
As with Charters Towers, Q Theatre's production of Somewhere was a parochial
celebration of a place, in this case Penrith, home of western Sydney pokie haven
Panthers World of Entertainment.
Minchin, who wrote the songs, says creating smaller, grassroots shows is the way
forward rather than getting obsessed about the Great Australian Musical. "It's
like we're looking for our Les Mis, but we're not a country that was born of one
conflict; we're too new and too diverse," he says.
"I want to write musicals the way Tarantino writes movies: dark and comic. I
don't think there's any point in wrapping up the country in a song and dance."
Minchin argues that musicals have to be properly developed and if that means
investing 5000 hours of work, only to stage it in the backroom of a city pub,
then so be it.
"You've got to do your best for 40 seats," he says. "If you want 5000 people
immediately, you do shows with pop songs from a bygone era and every punter will
see it because they want karaoke.
"Musicals will come around as a generation comes through who refuse to write
Oklahoma or Les Mis," he says. "They'll write about a coalminer who likes
cross-dressing and has a girlfriend who was abused by her father. Because we
need to shake off Broadway. We need to redefine [musicals]."
Back on the St Kilda stage, the boys of Premature Ejaculation are trying to do
just that, with retired plumber Terry, 63, singing an ode to Viagra.
After the show, the musical's first-time writer, Robert Dalle Molle, 37, is
still on a high from the rapturous applause.
"That was just after four days of rehearsals," says Dalle Molle, a long-time
dancer, heartened that producers were in the audience. "Imagine after four
weeks."
Unable to resist the pun, he adds: "I hope it's not too long before Premature
Ejaculation is coming to a theatre near you."
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