Musical Theatre

As part of a longer interview Kate Miller-Heidke talks musical theatre, Muriel's Wedding and Bananaland:

“I think I was a very eccentric child, a bit socially backward, a sort of mixture of painfully awkward and introverted and also a terrible show-off who loved to sing. I didn’t know where I fit in for a long time, and then I discovered amateur musical theatre. I found my people. When I met the theatre kids I realised, ‘Oh, I’m not such a freak after all’.” She took violin and piano lessons and joined the children’s chorus of professional productions of Brisbane shows like Oliver.

But the highlight [of her career] so far has been the success of Muriel’s Wedding the musical. “It’s such a buzz to get to sit in the audience after a few champagnes and getting to watch what we’ve done without any pressure of performing myself. The opening night of Muriel’s Wedding at that point was the biggest thrill I’d ever experienced. Partly because it wasn’t me on stage.” Yes, she still gets nervous every performance, despite decades of experience. She’d be worried if she wasn’t she says.

This year promises to be a busy one for her and Nuttall. They plan to go to the UK where Muriel’s Wedding, which won five Helpmann Awards, including Best Original Score, is slated to open on the West End after a regional tour in Britain.

BANANALAND, the project that’s brought them to the Sydney Festival, was a project they began during COVID lockdown, with Nuttall writing the script and Miller-Heidke writing the music particularly with the voice of Max McKenna in mind. McKenna, then known as Maggie, starred in Muriel’s Wedding and has what Miller-Heidke describes as one of her “favourite voices on the planet.” It is directed by Simon Phillips, who also directed Muriel’s Wedding on stage.

BANANALAND follows the story of angry punk rockers Kitty Litter and their unexpected rise to fame when one of the band’s protest anthems becomes a hit with the unlikeliest of listenerships – kids. A narrative similar to that of the Wiggles, some of whom started in the band the Cockroaches.

“The main protagonist, Ruby Semblances, is in a band who are on a mission to save the world. She’s got a bit too much Rock Eisteddfod in her background. And she takes it very seriously. She almost has a messiah complex. She’s a magnetic presence and the rest of the band take their lead from her, and they have very strong messages which are quite didactic.

“We began it so long ago it started off with Joh Bjelke-Petersen in mind. Now it’s about Clive Palmer’s incursion into federal politics,” says Miller-Heidke, who, like Nuttall, is a Queenslander who grew up with Bjelke-Petersen and Palmer often discussed.

“The kids mistake the political anthem for a song about a magical land where everybody gets a free banana and it starts climbing the charts to become a hit with the very young set,” she says.

Things go bad, there’s hints of violence, a giant inflatable penis, and Miller-Heidke warns the show really is not intended for children. “Keir created the story, the characters and the whole script, and it’s very, very rare to get an original show put up like this. It costs millions of dollars. It’s very risky. Musicals usually take about 10 years to develop, and we’re just so lucky that Brisbane, now Sydney Festival got on board to support it.

“Because it’s a comedy it lives or dies by the laughs and by the time we got to opening night in Brisbane I was like, is this even funny? I don’t know any more. And then when the audience started to laugh, and then when that laughter kept building and building and there was this sort of runaway train of laughter I was like, ‘Oh, thanks’. That sort of exhilaration is really cool.”