Year of the Queen: The Making of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - The Musical (21 page)

Cam, the head mech boards the bus during an agonizingly protracted wait and spills what the problem is with the bus. It was never designed to work in tandem with the revolve, so the axis of the bus has been shifted to accommodate that. But now the computer isn’t sure where the bus actually is, so it keeps taking it to the wrong place on stage. The computer guys are trying to reprogram it as we speak but they can’t predict the outcome. This is bad. I hope it’s something that is solvable or we’re really screwed. I ask Cam if it can be fixed and he just shrugs and gives me an exhausted smile.

At this rate I can’t imagine how we’ll ever be ready by our first preview in six days.

It’s like Ground Hog Day. Sunday begins as Saturday ended. We wait an hour to start - until the bus is ready to behave herself. What we’re waiting for is a cue to get us into the Broken Hill Pub scene. The bus rotates as the side closes. We run it a few times, improving the timing each time. What I’m heading for is a quick change into the next scene. It’s crucial I time this accurately as it’s super quick. And I can’t rush it either, as the outfit I’m getting into is my thong dress, and the shoes I’ve been given are literally one foot tall, so there’s no way I can run back onto stage for my entrance. I’ll be lucky if I can walk it. Troy waits patiently side stage for us to finally get up to where he and another dresser will rip off my previous costume and then throw on the next. Finally we get there. I leap off the bus and fly through the quick change as fast as possible. I race back to stage as fast as my towering shoes will allow, only to find my entry point blocked by a piece of set that shouldn’t be there. My cue to enter comes and goes and since I’m not on stage everything grinds to a halt.

“I’m here”. I shout feebly. “I just can’t get on stage.” Finally the set flies into the roof and I walk on stage to an ironic round of applause.

“Did you make it?” Simon asks.

“Yep”. I say.

Then Simon sees the size of my shoes. He’s un-amused.

“Whoever’s responsible for those shoes, I want them, at the very least, cut in half. He’ll kill himself in those.” This is music to my ears.

The day rolls on, much the same way, the bus acting up at every opportunity. At one point she runs out of batteries completely. The crew was up until four a.m. this morning working her and the batteries haven’t had time to re-charge. A giant extension cord is produced from God knows where and it is slotted into some version of a mains plug. A mechanist is forced to stand on top, guiding the power lead around the outside of the bus so it doesn’t run over it as it moves. It looks like he’s up there driving it himself, like he’s got the world’s largest remote-control toy.

Patience is at breaking point. Everyone wants to put a bomb under Priscilla-the-bus and blow her into the next musical. The temperature of the chat through the mechanist’s headsets is at magma temperature and several times I see exasperated crew tearing them off, to just escape verbal haranguing. Inside those earpieces everyone is fighting to be heard, as they attempt to fix the myriad of problems which bombard them. It’s not just the bus, it’s the timing of flys, the timing of the revolve, the constant absence of pieces of set or costume. Lighting hasn’t had time to focus lights so action is in darkness and we have to stop until lighting has caught up. It’s a world of hurt and the weekend can’t come fast enough for everyone.

As actors, we have to stand around and wait until each problem is sorted out. My overwhelming preference is to be on this side of the headsets and I retreat into a Zen-like state, making a concerted effort to project patience and good will. The last thing anyone needs is a testy actor huffing at how fucked up everything is. But utter confusion reigns. No one can answer the simplest of questions, because no one can second-guess how long any single problem will take to be solved.

By the end of the day we seem to be approaching the end of act one. This lights me up like Christmas. We hit the dialogue scene before the closing number of the act and just as my belief surges that we’ll really, truly make it, Kath steps on stage and calls ‘Time’. Simon crumples. We all crumple. Couldn’t we just stay and finish? This is impossible, because we all know that it’s highly likely that we’d all still be here at five a.m. Aside from that, the crew are already heading off to get extremely drunk.

My day off seems to fly by. The kids want to know where the hell I’ve been all this time. How do you explain to a couple of kids who are used to dad being constantly at hand that he’s been at
WORK?
A strange and unfamiliar concept.

I sleep like the dead and soon find myself back at the theatre for more of the same. Simon has the day in Melbourne for MTC business today, so I spend the morning with Troy rehearsing quick changes. Nearly all of my many costume changes have to go at light speed. To be sure I’m back on time they need to be rehearsed like a dance number. First we lay out what I have to go
into
, then we prepare what I’ll be coming
out of
. We step through it slowly, making sure we have the procedure correct. Then we go through it at speed. We click a stop watch and go for it. I race in from stage and throw off my gear. Troy holds out pieces of costumes for me and I get into them. The shirts have been dressed with Velcro so there’s no buttons to negotiate and the shoes have elastic laces so I just pull them on. Once I’ve finished I race back to stage.

“Twenty seconds”, he says victoriously. We’ve done it. This change will work. We go through all the fast changes this way, sorting whether we need extra help. The “Gumby” change will require three dressers, all going like the clappers. I strip, and then Troy puts on my pants and shoes as another puts on my make-up mask and my enormous head piece, as another helps me put on lipstick. As we bash through it I feel like the latest model Commodore as it travels along the production line. Panels on, windscreen fitted, roof lowered and I’m away. Troy looks at the stop watch. We made it.

Today we are supposed to shoot the T.V. ad and have the program shots taken, but again the stage has been given over to the long suffering crew, so they can keep attending to problems and catching up with their enormous work load.

They have only until the evening however, at which time we continue the tech run. We finally make it through to the end of the act. It feels like an amazing victory. It only took seven days. Now we have three days to finish the second act before our first preview on Friday night. I already know this is completely impossible.

It’s Wednesday morning and I’m in early for a publicity call. Strangely, it’s beginning to feel run of the mill to be getting into drag make-up. I no longer find the need to grab a camera and snap the strange creature in the mirror. We head to the stage and the reaction of the photographer to our ‘get-up’ as we arrive reminds me of how awesome this show must look when you’re not in here, day in day out. I make a mental note to ‘keep it fresh’ and not tire of what is so impressive about this show.

After lunch we pick up the tech rehearsal again at the top of act two. This scene runs into the Les Girls number. It requires a quick change for the male ensemble to get into their extraordinary costumes and head-pieces, as well as a huge set change where an enormous staircase appears out of nowhere. We try it once and of course no one makes it. It’s a disaster. The cast are gobsmacked at how heavy the head pieces are and how dangerous the walk down the stair case is for them.

We have to go again but it all takes time to re-set - about an hour. The second time it almost works and that’s enough for Simon. We push on into
Shake Your Groove Thing
, finding we have no costumes or shoes for the number, only incredibly heavy head pieces. It beggars belief that if the wardrobe department knew we had to wear these things on our heads AND dance in them, why would they make them so heavy? We suck it up and continue with the number, but I see Dan boiling beneath the surface. We’ve only got two days until preview. Will we
have
our costumes by then?

Tony has fared the worst. He has almost no costumes. Most have been thrown out or modified, and the wardrobe department has been working furiously to try and get their replacements ready. Subsequently, Tony and his dresser are at a loss over which costumes he should be wearing when and they still haven’t rehearsed any quick changes. In one scene he misses his entry altogether, and Dan and I wait for him to appear on stage so we can begin the scene. When he finally makes it, he limps onto stage a defeated man, his dresser nursing a bruised eye where Tony has unwittingly kneed him during the panic of the quick change.

We move on again but things are still not completely teched in the scene. It’s a terrible worry as I can’t imagine
when
we’re actually going to get time to smooth all this stuff out.

The lighting is magnificent though. Not since Alice Cooper, Festival Hall, 1975, have I seen so many lights hung in one place. When the lights are about to change colour, the gels must roll into their new position first. Because there’s so many of them all rolling at once, they sound like a huge flock of birds all breaking into flight simultaneously. These are the kind of things one contemplates as one waits hour after hour for something to happen.

As the day approaches its end and I’m feeling like we’re getting through a lot of stuff, Cam approaches me clutching his tech sheets.

“Know how many pages are on my tech sheet?” he says. “Ten, for the entire show. Know how many we’ve done?”

I dread to ask.

“Six.” he says. “That means there’s four to go, and two days to do it”.

He saunters off shaking his head to the heavens and smiling a mad, defeated smile.

We continue to work those four pages on Thursday. We all know the drill very well now. Everything is such a mess that it’s pointless to get upset. Everyone is stretched. Everyone is exhausted, and everyone is working their guts out. I feel like Kurtz at the end of the river in
Heart of Darkness
. I now accept that our first preview will be a terrible disaster and am preparing myself for that. That things are going to go wrong is a given. “The horror. The horror”. All I can do now is put all my twenty-five years of experience in the theatre to work and come up with something on Friday night which vaguely resembles a performance. There have been worse dilemmas in the trenches for God’s sake.
We’re
only going on stage.

By the end of the day we’ve only made it to the performance at Alice Springs Casino, about three quarters of the way through the show. None of the smoothing out which needed to be done has been done and the memory of act one is nothing but a distant glimmer on the horizon. We only have the day tomorrow to finish teching the show before the preview that night.

When we finish the day, an exhausted Simon gathers us and tells us he’s a deer in the head lights. He’s run out of options and must send us on stage tomorrow night whether he likes it or not, even though the show is not yet ready. He says tomorrow night is a must do commitment. We’ll be honest with the house and say that we’re not ready. We’ll implore them to bear with us.

Garry joins him and tells us we’re cancelling the Sunday afternoon and Wednesday matinee shows so that we can continue getting the show right. All these cancelled shows means that they’re taking an enormous financial hit as well as the potential fall out in the media that
Priscilla, The Musical
is going straight to hell. Talk has already started. He implores us to keep a lid on what we say ‘out there’ about what’s happening.

“It’s crucial that we don’t look like we’re panicking.” He says. “The media will pounce on us like a pack of dogs and kill us. Just say our tech rehearsals are taking longer than we anticipated, which is kinda the truth.” He smiles an exhausted but cheeky smile. Somehow, these two have managed to keep their sense of humour through all this.

We break for the night knowing that the weekend now entails three shows and more teching on Sunday.

Finally Friday arrives. A focus comes over us all which has previously escaped us. We know each time we move on with the tech it gets us closer to the end and gives us a little more that we can show to the audience.

We at least get to a stage in the show where we no longer need the bus. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief about that but we don’t actually get to the end. This is bad, as the end of the show involves sending Tony, Dan and me up on a scissor lift, to stand on top of the bus to sing
We Belong
. We’ll just have to wing this tonight under work lights. Being afraid of heights, I’m not relishing this at all.

We go to the meal break with our heads swimming with thousands of tiny pieces of information which, grouped together, will become
Priscilla, the Musical
. I’m sure there are hundreds of things I’ve forgotten and I know beyond anything that tonight I’m going to need to be sharp as a tack.

Chapter 16

First Preview

Picture one of those dreams where you’re about to go on stage to sing with the Rolling Stones but you can’t remember any of the lyrics and you don’t have any pants on. Finally, after a lifetime of having these kinds of dreams, one is actually occurring. Surprisingly, I’m not that nervous. I’m so convinced that the performance we’re about to give will be an unmitigated disaster that I’ve given myself over to the experience before it’s even happened. I will forge a path of good humour through the constant stream of adversity and through all the madness. I have reorganized my brain into damage control mode. At the five-minute-call I tap at Tony’s dressing room door and quietly ask how he feels about riffing with the audience if things go wrong.

“Oh, no,” he shoots back. “No, that’s not what I do. I’m not comfortable with that at all.”

“Okay.” I say. “Then I won’t pull you into it unless you
want
to join in but if things fall apart I’m going to reach out to them.”

We embrace each other as if we’re about to go into battle, which in this case is not such an extreme analogy. I tap at Dan’s door. He looks up at me and gives me an anxious giggle, like he’s just set eyes on the decrepit rope bridge on which he’s been commanded at gun-point to cross the plunging ravine. We hug. There’s little to say. Through the Tannoy we can hear the audience filling the auditorium. It’s a sold out performance, almost two thousand expectant punters, most of them gay, eagerly anticipating the first ever performance of this show.