Michael Ruffles (The Canberra Times) writes
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Earlier this year Melbourne theatrical director Bryce Ives established Melbourne Musicals – a new company that created quite a buzz around theatre circles for it’s first production You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. As its name suggests, the company produces only musical theatre and is keen to focus on Melbourne talent despite beginning with a Broadway show.
Ives, who has already built up impressive directing credits across Victoria at the age of 24, has begun work directing the new Australian production of Call Girl the Musical. Written by lead actor Tracy Harvey, Call Girl is a new Australian piece that will also star Neighbours’ Alan Fletcher and feature the voices of Bert Newton and Steve Vizard.
Ives says the biggest learning experience from the debut show was the need to offer a sense of familiarity to the audience, which the little-known Charlie Brown and young but talented cast lacked. While Call Girl will be all new, the familiarity factor will come from casting a well-known comedian in Harvey, an actor from prime-time television, and giving Hunters and Collectors’ Jack Howard control of the music arrangement.
“Most of the time people are coming to leave their cares and troubles at the door,” Ives says.
“You want to feel good at the end. A new show has to have a really good story, likeable characters and enough of the conventions of musical theatre for it to work. The biggest criticisms you get of new shows is `well, it was okay but there were no shows that I came out humming at the end’. That’s why Lloyd Webber is very smart, because he uses the same bits of music again and again.”
Proving once again that there is no correct formula, Ives points out Spamalot closed early in Melbourne after poor ticket sales. Based on Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie, the story and characters were familiar to fans, at least three songs stick in your head afterwards and key music is repeated.
Ives, who recently visited London and took in a few shows including the award-winning version of Spamalot, says the context is different. Where London does pantomime and audience interaction well, Australian fans prefer a spectacle.
“Spamalot just didn’t work here at all. And it wasn’t that the cast wasn’t good. It’s all about context. In London it was laugh a minute, here there were a few funny moments.”
Revivals and jukebox compositions may be popular, but Ives sees other interesting trends emerging in recent years. The movie musical has taken off, which has been attributed to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge in 2001. Since then, Chicago, The Producers, Hairspray, and Mamma Mia! have trod from the boards to the silver screen.
“It’s kind of built into the Broadway thinking these days, if something’s being revived does it have a life in the movies,” Ives says.
“Mamma Mia!’s been a really good example. It’s getting back to that really old attitude of the 1940s and ’50s when it wasn’t musical theatre stars who necessarily played the lead role. It was kind of the star of the day. Pierce Brosnan can hardly hold a note, but he kind of worked in that role [in Mamma Mia!].”
In a time when the star of the day changes with the latest reality television show, what better way of choosing an actor to play a lead character? And what better way to introduce them to a new audience, such as the younger generations? Lloyd Webber certainly thinks reality television is the way to go, casting Maria for his West End revival of The Sound of Music through a 12-week show. A follow-up series, Any Dream Will Do, included Barry Humphries as a judge selecting an actor to play Joseph for Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat.
“So that’s provided an interesting spin on a traditional musical and bringing it to a new audience, and also unearthing new talent,” Ives says.
“But at the moment if you looked at what’s on in London, it’s pretty much revivals, shows that we know and love, and jukebox musicals – songs we used to have sex to now with a loose story attached to them.
“Producing big, blockbuster, West End-style musicals on a first run is always destined for failure. New West End and new Broadway shows start small, and then they build. You’ve got people like Eddie Perfect, who is now writing Shane Warne the Musical. The way that started was kind of in the corner of Melbourne pubs and little cabaret venues. There’s more out there.”
