Priscilla - Six months on the Road
Six months after opening night, the inspiringly energetic and talented cast will celebrate their 200th performance on April 4. Meanwhile, the producers are planning to celebrate a year at the Lyric Theatre in October, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the musical has confounded the Cassandras who said she'd never make it.
Now the old bus looks like the most obvious fixture on the Sydney entertainment scene - the feel-good night out we had to have. Yet in the weeks leading up to its world premiere, it seemed anything but a certainty. For one thing, Priscilla was going to be up against another major musical - Titanic - and many thought the ship (seen as classier and with a semi-operatic score) would win out over the tarty old bus with her disco soundtrack. For another, some thought Priscilla's time had come and gone: that the road movie which took three drag queens to the outback and captivated the world and Australia more than a decade ago, would not sit well in these lemon-sucking, neo-con times.
How wrong can you be? At the time I was amazed that anyone believed Titanic was a winner. And perplexed that anyone could doubt that Priscilla would be anything but a sure-fire hit. In recent years it has become apparent that if we're being asked to shell out big bucks for a night out at the theatre, Australians are warming more and more to our own stories or, at least, stories which are either universal or translate readily to the Australian experience.
So, taking the most similar big successes of recent years: Mamma Mia! was virtually our own, given the abiding passion for Abba in this country; and The Lion King was a universal feel-good fairy tale which, after Disney's enormous marketing budget did its job, felt like our own anyway. Priscilla sits squarely between these two: a familiar "our" story with tunes everyone is humming from the first bar on the one hand, and a visually dazzling spectacle with a heart-warming story on the other. Titanic had none of that going for it.
Prior to the musical, Sydney's only real contact with the Titanic story was the disastrous theme-ride-fiasco-thing with which some nong decided to open what was then the Fox Studios entertainment area. They were astonished to discover that very few families took to the idea of experiencing for themselves being aboard a sinking ship. It took about a year to go down - taking an awful lot of Fox dollars with it. Moreover, when the real thing sank in 1912, there weren't even the required Australian casualties to make us sit up and pay attention - mandatory ingredient close to a century on.
[page]There's a school of thought that say Titanic (the musical) might have worked in the wake of the Leo di Caprio blockbuster movie, but that's debatable. Just as likely people would have been all shipwrecked out and not a bit interested. Yet, timing does come into it because one of the main factors behind the Sydney production is, apparently, that producer John Diedrich's choreographer wife saw the Broadway production eight years ago and wanted to do it ever since. And if Max Bialystock had a word of advice for a would-be producer - other than "Don't put ya own money in da show," it could well be: "Don't put da hoofer in charge of da big decisions."
Timing again: rather than having run out of her times, it seems more that Priscilla has trundled steadily out of movie history into the time of her life. After years of confusion, disillusion and unease, growing fears for the planet, war, terrorisms of all kinds and deep uncertainty about the future, the typical Priscilla audience makes it plain that a lot of girls just want to have fun. Guys do too, but the number of girls' nights out that gravitate towards Priscilla, lit-up cocktail glasses waving like camp banners to the familiar anthems, is part of the phenomenon.
And deep down, lurking in the bosoms of most really nice girls is a roaring faghag just itching to get out. So the story of three drag queens setting off on the journey of a lifetime, taking with them more frocks and sequins and impossible shoes than Imelda Marcos ever dreamed of, while tottering beneath baggage laden with triumph, despair, hopes and dreams, is one with which women really relate.
In short: no wonder Priscilla is a screaming success when you add to the feel-good sensations (with a few sharp twists), the disco hits and well known story, a show whose production values are stratospheric. It must be the first time in showbiz history that a costume designer (Lizzie Gardiner) had a bigger budget for the stage version than she did for the movie - and it shows. A soaring imagination, cheeky whimsy and virtually unlimited dollars have all contributed to a spectacle unmatched even by The Lion King.
And it's also possibly the first time that a character created on-screen by a movie legend has been eclipsed and all but obliterated by the stage interpretation. Tony Sheldon's weary, dizzy, tender, tough and tawdry Bernadette is a living, breathing, bleeding human being. A three-dimensional character whose humanity is as towering as her glamour, dignity and platform shoes. By evening's end Terence Stamp's grumpy, mean-spirited old moll has deservedly faded into history. Sheldon's intelligent, witty and compassionate performance is a great achievement in musical theatre.
Michael Caton also stamps his own personality on "the Bill Hunter role" - the tough old truckie who falls for the tough old trany; and their relationship is a delight. The rest of the cast - with Jeremy Stanford and Daniel Scott as Mitzi and Felicia, and Genevieve Lemon making a unique contribution, among other cameos, as an outback battle-axe and a dancing koala in fishnets and corsets. Then there's the bus.
Things you might not know about Priscilla and can now thrill your friends with ...
* The show has a cast of 27 adults.
* Four boys share the role of Benjamin - Mitzi's young son and the reason for the trek to Alice Springs. Their performances are rotated each week.
* There are just eight musicians in the band as well as computer generated music tracks.
* Looking after the production are 21 permanent crew: stage management, mechanics, flys, automation, lighting, sound, props, wardrobe, wigs and make up.
* Another 32 casual crew join in, including 11 dressers and six wig dressers.
* There are eight performances and two rehearsals each week.
* There are 23 tonnes of scenery and lighting equipment hanging in the grid above the stage.
* Priscilla the bus weighs almost six tonnes, has three internal lifts, is covered in 840 LED lamps and is operated from inside the rear compartment to instructions relayed from the automation desk.
* There are 114 automated bus cues, 26 revolve cues, 28 auto-flying cues, and 68 fly cues in the show.
* The 30 radio microphones on the show use 60 AA batteries per performance; that's 480 per week, 1920 per month and 23,040 per year.
* In total the stage manager calls 578 cues - one every 15 seconds for 137 minutes.
* Sydney Harbour Bridge is recreated through 200 metres of neon.
* 400 pingpong balls are shot out of cannons each performance.
* Hidden in the set is a chicken coop, complete with a small flock of chickens. It's one of Brian Thomson's little jokes. Can you spot it?
* More than 300 costumes are in use and being cared for by the wardrobe department during each performance.
*More than 150 pairs of bespoke shoes are worn by the cast during each performance.
* Principal casts members and their dressers have become adept quick-change teams. Eat your heart out Mark Webber.
* Some 200 hats and head-dresses are worn by the cast throughout each performance. One is decorated with 25 yellow rubber ducks, another with 75 butterflies, another - a bowl of fruit and a fourth - an aquarium complete with fish.
* More than 100 wigs are worn by the cast throughout each performance.
* The casino-workers' uniform shirts are a Ken Done original fabric design called "Tropical".
* Each week, 80 loads of washing use eight litres of washing liquid, require 24 hours of ironing and 10 cans of spray starch.
* Two wardrobe workers sort and check costumes almost all day, six days per week.
* 8 60 lipsticks, in five different shades, are used each month.
* The company sucked 3000 Chupa Chups in the two weeks before opening night in October 2006. Chupa Chups are hell on your teeth but better for your nerves than anti-anxiety medication.
Nick Schlieper lighting and Brian Thomson's design are at once extravagant and simple. As Priscilla travels from a authentically towering Sydney Harbour Bridge to the red expanses of the outback and King's Canyon; with diversions for Felicia's silvertailed, bus-top aria, the campfire corroboree and the variously funny or terrifying Woop Woop pitstops, the movie is evoked and also set aside. Partly this comes from Simon Phillips' fizzy, fast and furious direction and partly it lies in Ross Coleman's choreography which pays homage to drag, to Broadway, to barn dances, to disco and finally, to the reality of the show itself. And it's tied together by a band whose arrangements and direction, by Stephen Murphy with sound design by Michael Waters, are as tight as a drum and have the audience electrified from go to whoa.
A lot of money has been spent on Priscilla and it is joyously obvious and worth every cent. When a capacity audience walks out of a theatre with faces aching from a couple of hours of big smiles and laughter, you know something is right. There is talk of a London production and a TV documentary; a cast album is also in the air. None of these sound like pipe dreams because Priscilla is so fabulously silly, such a blithe spirit - caring not a jot for the disapproving - that her 200th performance on April 4 now looms as logically as it looked impossible on opening night.
In these particular sad, scary and po-faced times, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is the musical we had to have.
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the musical, Lyric Theatre, Star City; ph: 1300 367 794; group bookings of 16 or more: ph: (02) 8512 9020 or www.ticketmaster.com.au
