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Shane warne the musical
Review

Shane warne the musical

May 22 2009

Shane Warne the Musical, Enmore Theatre, May 20 to June 7

The tragi-comedy of errors that is the life of Shane Warne continues, by default, with the cast of Shane Warne the Musical having to endure a storm-ravaged opening night in Sydney already knowing their show had been cancelled and the prospective three month pay packet was reduced to two weeks. Very tough.

Tough too, after a successful five month run in Melbourne that must have led to high hopes for the show. But deary me, it was hard to like. To start with, a show whose lyrics are 75% of its raison d’etre, needs crystal clear sound. When you can’t make out half of what’s going on the laughs are lost, the satire is lost, and the meaning is lost. And in the end, pretty much all is lost.

And it’s not about being a cricket fan or Warney fan or not. Ironically, the person who fares best out of the telling of Shane Warne’s story of lard-arse, larrikin, loutery is the man himself. You can’t help but sympathise with the boofy boy whose athletic prowess was achieved despite his best efforts to sabotage himself and whose despair at not making the grade – St Kilda under-19 footy player –was profound.

Then, like so many young men who find themselves in the rock’n’roll limelight as sporting stars, temptations of every kind were flung at him and, like the great cricketer he is, he caught every single one. And bugger the consequences. It’s a fascinating and unpleasant picture of the modern culture of booze and elite team sports. And anyone who thinks it’s exaggerated or “boys will be boys” needs their head read.

But back to the cavernous Enmore Theatre. In Melbourne the show played in the Athenaeum, which could almost fit inside the Enmore, and it’s obvious that a more intimate venue would have better suited the show. As it is, the rock’n’comedy vibe of the place emphasised star and co-creator Eddie Perfect’s penchant for the power ballad – among a selection of pastiche musical styles – and as they’re not particularly great pastiches, the effect is numbing. The underlying pathos and meaning are leached from the characters and it ends up shallow and enervating, despite the energy and enthusiasm on stage.

Shane warne the musical

There is also another weird thing about Eddie Perfect that Shane Warne the Musical emphasises: when he utters the spoken lines of his character, his accent is as Aussie as a meatpie. But when he bursts into song, he sounds like Billy Bob Wackdoodle who’d be more at home with a wedge of momma’s apple pah somewhere in Mississippi. The disjuncture is bizarre and silly. In effect the performance as Shane Warne is destroyed and we’re left with Eddie Perfect, who is very talented and charming but not really the point in this context.

As it is, the show consists of a gallop through Warney’s early life, a curiously disappointing abstract choreography of the Ball of the Century, then it’s on to the slide to the abyss of excess. Along the way he meets and marries Simone (Rosemarie Harris) but she gets the rough end of the pineapple in more ways than one. Not only did she have to endure her husband’s real life larks but in the show she is sent up rotten and is portrayed merely as an airhead. If feminists were doing anything these days other than writing their memoirs, there should have been some protest at least, if not a ceremonial burning of cricket boxes in the foyer.

The presence of Mike McLeish in the cast (as Michael Slater, then Daryll Cullinan) is a reminder of how good this kind of bio-musical can be. He was Paul Keating in Keating! and we all know what happened to that. So what’s the difference? Is Sydney just not into cricket – and a Melbourne cricketer at that? Surely not. Shane Warne transcends almost every boundary, geographical and spiritual. He’s actually the stuff of drama – and comedy – in his accidental hero status and the very human flaws that are writ large in his character. Is it the economic times? Yes, probably, although –unusually – I know of two mobs of gals (young mothers groups) who’ve bought tickets for the show, and they’re all on the tightest of tight budgets.

In the end I suspect the finger must be pointed at Eddie Perfect for the good and not so good things about the show. He’s clever, but probably not as clever as he thinks he is. It’s a great idea and it nearly works. Obviously, in some ways it actually does work (five months in Melbourne, hello?) but on opening night in Sydney, it did not. And neither the presence of Neil Armfield as director nor Gideon Obarzanek as choreographer could save it from itself. But I came away liking Shane and understanding him more than when I went in, and that was good.

 

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