Beaudy the Musical @ Parade Theatre

Reviews, By petercross, 9th July, 2010

There are so few new Australian musicals – Sideshow Alley, Keating, Warne the Musical – that when I’m offered the chance to see another one I actually get excited.

There is so much to admire and like in modern theatre; innovative productions that challenge you and make you think, shows that transport you, however briefly, away from the grit and grime of everyday life, musicals that can make you spirits soar; Beaudy the Musical is not such a production.

Beaudy the Musical is a reworking of Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, set in Australia with a cast of sixteen and, if I counted correctly, a twelve piece band.

Howard (Stephen Fischer-King) gives up his new-born child, Laura (Belinda Morris), to his childless best friend Andrew (Scott Radburn) and his wife Stephanie (Anita Hartman) to raise. Patrice (Lizzie Taylor) an evil rejected lover of Howard’s calls down a curse on the child and the community vowing that the child will never see her 19th birthday. The township prospers and flourishes as Laura grows. Just before her 19th birthday she escapes to the Gold Coast for schoolies, meets and falls in love with art dealer, ‘Prints’ Tom (James Jack), and at a nightclub is slipped multiple pills by Patrice’s boy toy lover, Shane (Matt Greenlaw) and falls into a deep sleep. As she slumbers for two years the town declines and not until she is kissed by ‘Prints’ Tom after the fire, yes there is a fire, and revived will the town come out of its own economic slumber.

Exhausted? Well just wait there is more – twenty songs over three hours, numerous set changes and lots and lots and lots of unnecessary, unwanted exposition.

Clunky dialogue, pedestrian choreography, cheap costumes and some truly awful wigs – on the men – keep this terminal production limping along until the final curtain.

To highlight anyone performer as being responsible for this mishmash of dross would be unfair, even though I am tempted. Lizzie Taylor and James Jack do manage to give decent performances but even they sink at times given the material they have to work with. The all dancing all singing ensemble do well with what little choreography and truly cheap costumes they are given.

Long delays between scene changes; stage hands sneaking on then off during the action or waiting like grim reapers on the edge of the stage ready to pounce on wayward pieces of set dressing. Things fly in, sort of, well halfway in, then fly up then back down; microphones not turned on when the actors are on stage and not off when the actors leave the stage. Lights that go off during the scene and then on again when there is no one, except the stage hands, to light.

Just who is this show aimed at, who is the audience, is it children’s panto or is it for adults? The drug and Wicca references, of which there are so many, will go right over the heads of the “tweenies.” At three hours it’s at least an hour and half too long and it isn’t black enough or funny enough for adults.

If Basil Fawlty was putting on a show this would be it.

Writer, composer, lyricist, producer and sound design/operator Michael Orland has been working on this musical for the last twenty-eight years and has taken the brave step of investing a large amount of his own money into staging this event. It gives me no pleasure what so ever to say he would have been better to .buy a convenience store; at least there, he would get a return.

Beaudy the Musical runs from July 8 until July 24, 2010 at the Parade Theatre, NIDA.