Musicals: The Shocks Of The New

Bringing brand new Australian musicals to the stage is a thrilling, expensive, nail-biting ride. FRANK HATHERLEY talks to some brave theatre people who are currently taking the plunge. They are all discovering that musicals need to be re-written and re-written and then some.

Top producer John Frost had a warning for Jill Walsh and Karen Strahan as they prepared to stage their first professional, self-written musical. “If anything can go wrong,” he said, “it usually does go wrong.”

“That’s so true!” says Jill, co-writer, co-producer and co-star of Winging My Way To The Top, opening at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre in May. But you can tell from her bubbly enthusiasm that nothing will stand in the way of the bright dream she shares with Karen, her long- standing performing and writing partner: the dream of launching an all-new, all-Australian musical.

“We’ve been wanting to do this
for 20 years,” says Karen. Seasoned performers, Jill and Karen are currently half of a busy four-women cabaret act called The Marvellous Mizdemeanours, based in the ACT but touring widely, for whom they have written many songs.

Winging My Way To The Top is about feuding sisters who aim to star in their own musical. The script and songs were good enough to attract a $34,000 ArtsACT grant to launch the show professionally at the Q Theatre.

“Getting the Q on side took a lot of courage,” says Jill. “We contacted the Program Manager, Stephen Pike, and said ‘oh, we’ve written this brand new original Australian musical comedy’. ‘Oh, right,’ he said, ‘you’d better come in then.’

“So we sat in the foyer of the Q and pitched it to him – the whole show — we sang our lungs out. We finished and he said ‘It’s not a question of if it goes on, it’s a question of when!’”

With a May opening fixed and Stephen Pike himself engaged as director, producers Jill and Karen turned their attention to raising their$120,000 budget. They were determined to pay everybody involved.

“All of a sudden the business side kicks in and you have to think about where you’re going to get all this money from,” says Jill.

“We did some internet crowdfunding but didn’t raise as much as we hoped. We have a friend who was making a film, a zombie movie, and his target market was very much the internet market, a younger market, so he did well. We’re not spring chickens and we found the internet challenging.” They raised $4,000.

Then four months before opening night they lost their director for “health reasons”. “That’s what can happen,” says Karen.

There were more shocks to come. While looking for a new director, a friend in the industry suggested they approach Rodney Fisher, one of the country’s most established musicals directors. Surely he wouldn’t be interested, they said.

To their delight, Rodney Fisher inspected the material and said he’d do it. “That was a great moment,” says Karen.

The coup was announced. Jill, Karen and Rodney posed for photographs for the Canberra City News.

Rodney suggested they did some work on the script and in March the Canberra writer/producers visited their distinguished director in Sydney to discuss possible changes.

“We were going over the script and the songs,” says Karen, “creating a genius kind of a frenzy, and we said, ‘Rodney, this is fantastic what you’re doing, but you do realise that we’ve got a very short amount of time to put this on?’

“I think it dawned on him and we all looked at each other wide-eyed. Rodney’s a perfectionist. We talked about delaying the show, deferring it, but...”

They decided to part company.

Alerted, the Canberra City News headlined ‘Top director pulls out of local musical’. Rodney was quoted as saying that, though the script has “dramaturgical problems”, Karen and Jill plan “to proceed with the show in its original state”.

Recovering from this blow — and “mopping up negative publicity” — the intrepid duo appointed their third director, Gordon Nicholson, one of the cast members and an experienced director of musicals. Original director Stephen Pike would be on hand at the Q during the run-up to opening night.

And then the audience will decide if this new musical can really Wing It’s Way To The Top.

**

The writing/producing team behind the musical DreamSong, which opened at Melbourne’s Theatre Works in April, are younger than the Winging team and so have a younger approach to crowdfunding.

Hugo Chiarella (book and lyrics) and Robert Tripolino (music) took their project to Pozible.com, hoping to raise $7,500 towards their live sound budget. “It was a lot of effort, but absolutely worth it,” says Hugo. They exceeded their goal by over $2,000.

Pledges were graded, each with its own ‘reward’. For a $25 pledge you got ‘A Thank You in the program’; all the way up to a $1000 pledge for which you got ‘A Thank You in the program, five free mp3 tracks from the show, a copy of the program signed by the writers and the cast, a signed poster, a T-Shirt and a personalised song about any subject of your choice written by Hugo Chiarella and Robert Tripolino’.

Hugo thinks the success of their crowdfunding campaign was because the musical — about a dodgy evangelical church marketing the second coming of Jesus — already had many real fans.

DreamSong had first been performed as a 2010 graduate production of the Bachelor of Music Theatre course at the Victorian College of the Arts. Then, substantially rewritten, it had been part of the 2011 Carnegie 18 New Music Theatre Series. Rewritten yet again, it played four nights in early 2012 at the Arts Theatre Melbourne.

“Thanks to this exposure there are people who love it and really want to see it have a professional season somewhere.”

How different again, I ask, is the latest version of DreamSong?

“It’s vastly different,” says Hugo, proudly, noting that the original had cast numbered over 30, “before we reduced it to something more commercially achievable.

“Last time it was set in America, but now we’ve relocated the action to Australia. We’ve streamlined the story, culled a lot of songs, several characters and a whole storyline.

“That was very painful, and at first I was very, very protective of the script. But we’re now at a stage where you realise that the narrative flow comes above everything else.

“You might have written the best song you’ve ever written, but if it’s not serving a key moment in the story then it just has to go.

“Also shocking was the realisation that, in terms of championing the work, you, the writers, have to be self- propelled, put in the hard yards.

“At the beginning we thought — hey, it’s a great show, someone is sure to pick it up, give us five million dollars and it will get done. But, no, no, you have to get it onstage yourself before anyone will pay any attention to it.

“The pressure to raise money is enormous, all the time. You’ve really got to hustle. You’ve got to be unabashed at selling yourself and your work, which is not something that comes naturally to most writers. We did the Pozible campaign and we found some great sponsors and some extra investment.”

So what happens next to DreamSong, I wonder, after the Theatre Works production?

“We’re playing as part of a festival — the Melbourne Comedy Festival — so maybe we could take it to the Edinburgh Festival at some stage. DreamSong would sit there nicely. And I would really like to get it to the New York Music Theatre Festival.”

Would that mean even more changes, I ask.

“Yep,” smiles Hugo. “It’s hard to imagine a time when I will ever consider it finished.”

**

It’s equally hard to imagine that Danny Ginges will ever finish working on his musical Atomic. It wasn’t even a musical at first. Danny wrote a sprawling play about Leo Szilard, the brilliant and largely unknown German/Jewish physicist whose discovery of the nuclear chain reaction lead to the detonation of atom bombs over Japan in 1945.

A successful Sydney advertising man, Danny was determined to get his sprawling vision on stage, a discipline he knew almost nothing about. But he was unafraid to ask and to learn.

After many rewrites, and by forging creative partnerships along the way, Atomic, by now a fully-fledged musical, played a 3-week season in Sydney last November at the out-of-town NIDA Parade Theatre.

“A lot of changes” and a 4-day workshop followed in New York, then an intense fortnight of further workshops and rewrites in Sydney. Now the powerful show is on its way to the Acorn Theatre on West 42nd Street for an off-Broadway run starting in July.

Danny’s is an amazing story of never-say-die doggedness, taking all the shocks and setbacks in his stride. I watch him at the final rehearsed reading of his enterprise before he travels to New York. He concentrates fiercely, very much the quiet outsider among a volatile, arty crowd.

“The script’s finished,” he assures me, qualifying this immediately with “well, it will probably change again when we get to America.”

What are the main changes to Atomic from last year’s NIDA showing?

“It’s a lot shorter. We’ve moved characters about, trimmed quite a few. Audiences were getting lost and we thought a narrator might be able to help them along. So we’ve expanded Oppenheimer’s role: he’s now the narrator as well. We’ve got Bobby Fox playing Oppenheimer at these workshops. He’s really good.”

And indeed he is. Bobby Fox – Hot Shoe Shuffle, Frankie Valli in The Jersey Boys, etc — gives his all to a mere 30- strong invited audience. As does Michael Falzon, quite brilliant as Szilard himself. But none of this excellent cast of eight will be playing the show in New York.

“It’s too expensive taking people over there,” says Danny. “But we’ve been signing up some very good people on the strength of the script and the songs, so that’s really encouraging.”

Your project has been a long, long time coming together, I say.

“In the beginning it was just me in
a room,” says Danny. “Then I had a reading with some actors and they said ‘you have to find a composer’. So I asked everybody I knew in the music business and eventually I was introduced to Philip Foxman, an Australian who’s worked in New York for 20 years, and eventually Phillip said ‘would you mind if I sent the script to a director friend?’ That was Damien Gray. And he said ‘yeah, it’s got potential’.”

Gray proved the perfect choice. His CV includes shows for Disney Theme Parks, a Las Vegas ‘musical spectacular’ and a ‘multimedia rock and roll stunt show’.

“Damien doesn’t do things by halves,” says Danny. “He either does things properly or not at all. It’s been like one scary process after another.

“I come from the world of Advertising. Before this, a long piece of work for me was 60 seconds. You can’t survive in Advertising without being ready to ‘kill your babies’, as they say. You’ve got to be open to changing anything, changing everything.

“And that’s hard. You get very attached to things — songs, scenes, moments — and then Damien says ‘it’s really good but it’s not working’, and you have to say ‘okay, lose it’. It’s not easy but you’re got to do it.”

How does Danny like working in the New York theatre world?

“It’s a breath of fresh air to me, really. Sydney’s not geared to developing new work, you know. It’s geared to bringing over work that’s already written. When we began putting on Atomic in Sydney there was so much inertia it was painful.

“Damien wanted to talk to choreographers, magicians, all sorts of creative people, but Sydney would say ‘oh, you can’t do that’ and ‘oh, you don’t have the money for that’. And I would say ‘look, we just want to talk, it doesn’t cost money to talk’.

“In New York everybody gets excited about the potential of something new. In Sydney they are interested only if it’s made money somewhere else.”

“But the actors are great here in Sydney,” Danny adds. “As far as actors are concerned, there’s no difference to New York. It’s on the admin side, the production side of things that...”

His voice trails off in exasperation.

Postscript

This article was originally published in the May / June edition of Stage Whispers. With the premiere season of Winging My Way To The Top completed, and Atomic on its way to New York for an Off Broadway production, Frank caught up with the various creators for an update.

Winging My Way To The Top

Karen Strahan and Jill Walsh tell us:

“We performed 10 shows over the two weeks. Reviews were mixed but audience reaction and feedback was very positive. The comedy worked and we achieved our aim of appealing not only to regular theatregoers but also to those who had never stepped foot in a theatre. One surprise was the positive reaction we got from younger theatregoers, aged 18 to 25. Our target market had been the baby boomers.

“We plan to make some minor changes to the book based on the feedback and will be dramaturging with a theatre professional in the next month. We then hope to tour the show to regional areas, Sydney, and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.”

**

DreamSong

Hugo Chiarella told us:

“We got some wonderfully positive reviews, but there were a couple that were unflinchingly negative as well. It can be tricky to take much of any value from such a broad range of response other than the fact that it is definitely a show that is not for everyone. Although I am firmly of the belief that nothing good ever is. The most valuable feedback I got was listening to the collective audience response to it in real time night after night. It became so apparent what was working, what wasn't, where people were engaged, where they were surprised and where they were distracted.
Robert and I have plans to rework a couple of sections of the show in light of what we have learned and then we are very keen get the show on its feet again in the not too distant future. There are no concrete plans as of yet, but we will definitely be looking to Sydney and overseas for possible avenues to mount the show again.”

**

Atomic

The 8-week Off-Broadway run of Atomic at the Acorn Theatre begins on June 26, with the official opening set for Sunday, July 13.

Danny Gringes told us (23 May): “Yes, we're still writing. I don't think that will stop till opening night. The new team of actors is quite vocal about what works and what doesn't, probably more than the Sydney cast. But it's tweaking, not structural. The buzz around the show is exciting. The marketing hasn't started yet but we are selling tickets. One of the senior critics at the New York Times will be coming to the opening, which doesn't often happen for off-Broadway.”

Images: Top image is a production shot from Atomic; promotional images from Winging My Way To The Top; production images from DreamSong, photographer Jeff Busby, and production images from the Australian production of Atomic, by GXM Photography.