Year of the Queen: The Making of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - The Musical (22 page)

“Act one beginners” is called and I take a deep breath and head to side stage. “Chookas”, I call to anyone I pass on the way but my concentration is not on individuals now, more important is the mass of lines, songs, blocking, quick changes, dance routines and potential failures in front of me for the next three hours. I stand side stage, and think through my path for the first ten minutes of the show. I try to breathe in the feeling of being Tick.

Simon is side stage, more nervous than me. We catch each other’s eye and he gives me one of his boyish grins. His smile carries more than its fair share of apprehension. Kath gives him a nod and Simon steps on stage. The murmur of the huge crowd instantly turns to applause. We gather around the stage management monitor to watch, our hearts in our mouths at what he’s about to say. He gestures for them to hush and let him speak.

“Good evening”. He begins. “I’m Simon Phillips, the director of what you are about to see.” The crowd erupts into applause again. “Thanks for that”. He says. “But you mightn’t want to applaud me after what I’m about to tell you. As you’re all aware this is a brand new show. And with that comes certain challenges. We’re not entirely finished rehearsing it, but rather than cancelling the show, what you are about to see tonight is a rare glimpse into the making of a theatrical production.” The crowd cheer again. “Aren’t you lucky?” They all laugh. “So it’s not a matter of
if
the show grinds to a halt, it’s a matter of
when
, how many
times
and
how long
it will grind to a halt for.”

He begs them to bear with us and to be as encouraging as possible to the poor actors, whose miserable job it is to muck through what is bound to be a difficult night.

With that said the band strikes up the overture. I get a stab of nerves which I try to swipe away like a swooping magpie.

The curtain goes up and the show begins. The Divas fly in from the roof and the crowd hoots.
Downtown
begins and the ensemble throw themselves into it. I jog up and down on the spot behind the flitter curtain waiting for my cue. “One moment at a time,” I tell myself, “It’s a game of tennis. Play each point as it comes.” I make my first entry filled with adrenalin and I get my first glimpse of the auditorium filled with people. It’s an impressive sight. I try to put it out of my mind and focus on what I’m doing. So far so good. Nothing has gone wrong. We’re thirty seconds into the show. Before I know it the song is finished and I’m backstage doing my quick change into
Never Been To Me
. I can’t believe we haven’t stopped yet. I race to get to my entrance and I make it. I stand atop a platform adorned with footlights, and am rolled manually onto the stage for my entrance. The crowd gasp at the final picture of Tick in drag as I push through the flitter curtain. I’m tottery in my stiletto heels under my emerald dress, and when the mechanists pushing reach the end point of the platform’s track (which is beyond the end of the stage and over the orchestra pit) they stop all too abruptly. I overbalance and almost fall straight into the pit. Being afraid of heights I totally shit myself and my legs begin to shake uncontrollably. I can barely stand up. I breathe through the panic and try to focus on miming the song, wondering if the audience can sense my terror. The end of the routine can’t come quickly enough and I race backstage for my next change, cursing and breathing deep calming breaths as I go.

Miraculously, the show continues uninterrupted for about forty minutes. There is, of course, the odd clunky moment, which we
professionally
ignore, but there hasn’t been a terrible car accident yet. And then it happens. The bus stops for some reason and the three Queens are marooned on stage with nothing to do but grin sheepishly. Simon’s voice booms over the sound system. “Sorry folks, we have a problem.”

Dan retreats to the bus and Tony hovers. I walk to the edge of the stage and begin a sing-a-long of
Kum Ba Ya M’Lord
. Audiences love it when things go wrong and this is no exception. They’ve been waiting for this to happen all night and finally they’re getting a taste of the chaos Simon had promised. I have no intention of letting them down.

“Hello up there”, I say waving at the ‘gods’. “Who do we have up there? All the drag Queens and the lesbians. Hello guys.” They all laugh and wave back. “And what about down the front here in the stalls? We’ve got all the John Howard supporters.” There’s a big laugh, followed by a nasty hiss. “Oh dear! Never do political jokes, huh?”

The bus is soon fixed and we travel on. Amazingly, we make it to the end of act one with few problems. I retreat to my dressing room to re-group. Across the hall, Tony is madly fixing make-up and getting into his second act costume. I just sit for a moment and try to calm myself.

The second act is diabolical. There’s constant stoppages and props appearing at bizarre times and in bizarre places. Tony and I find ourselves once again marooned onstage during a stoppage. By this time, Tony has joined in the riffing and our chatting to the audience has become a given which they eagerly look forward to. Simon makes another announcement about a stoppage and speculates whether Tony and I have run out of stand up material yet.

“Simon’s terrified I’ll make another John Howard joke” I say. “Oh by the way, did you hear we did a publicity gig in front of our Prime Minister?”

“He wanted a photo with us.” Says Tony.

“We said,
no.”
I boast bitchily. The crowd laughs and applauds. When they fall silent again, Tony quips casually: “When
he
does something for us,
we’ll
do something for
him
.”

This brings the roof down. The audience howls with laughter. I think back to what he said in the dressing room before the show. “It’s not what I do
.” Indeed!
It was one of the most brilliant pieces of ad lib I’ve ever heard.

When we finally limp to the end of the show, we find it has taken us over four hours to do and the audience has supported us generously the entire way. We’re now totally exhausted and so are they. As I’m taking off my make-up, Sandra appears and reminds me that there’s a party in the show room for the audience which I’m invited to. “Of course, I know you’ll want to go home but I just thought I’d let you know,” she says.

As much as I desperately want to go home I feel beholden to this fabulous crowd who have been so generous to us tonight. I need to go to the party and thank them.

I enter the show room to find a party in full swing. As I push towards the stage, everyone I pass thanks me for the show and tells me how fabulous it was. I can’t believe it. It felt completely chaotic. Mitzi Macintosh hits the stage and introduces the few members of the cast who have shown up. We assemble on stage. I snatch the mic from her and thank the audience for their generosity.

“There’s no way we could have got through the show tonight without your beautiful support. Thank you.”

Again they cheer generously. There is a genuine sense of excitement amongst them that they were a part of something tonight - that they witnessed some kind of history in the making and I guess it was. Messy, fucked up, tentative, but performed with gusto and heart. The show is finally on the stage.

Chapter 17

Second and Third Previews

As I arrive at the theatre for the second preview, I reassure myself that if you’ve base jumped once, it can’t possibly be as bad the second time. Wrong. The temperature on stage as I pass heading to my dressing room is hot. The dance of the vandalized ants’ nest has returned. Something bad has happened. My heart sinks. I scan the chaos for an authoritative face and find Kath. She gives me a sympathetic smile and tells me the bus has broken down. Whatever a current converter is, it has failed and the bus won’t work. I wait for the four beautiful words: “You can go home”, but they don’t come. In their place I hear but don’t quite believe, “We’re doing the show without it”. Did “Phantom” go on without the chandelier? Did “Saigon” go on without the helicopter? Did “Hair” go on without clothes? The answer to all these question is probably ‘Yes’. And in our second public outing we’ll go on without Priscilla. We’ll be base jumping today
without
the parachute.

I tap on Tony’s door and he looks up at me from his make-up mirror in mock horror. We can do little but chuckle. Dan appears and we have a quick discussion about how to mime a bus. Quick changes have been set in the bus too. We have to reassign where we’ll be doing them. Characters appear through the roof of the bus via the elevators inside, how will we do that? The truth is there are so many points at which the bus is crucial that the only practical way to do this show is to make it up as we go along.

Garry and Simon arrive. When things go badly, Garry’s smile tends to widen, although his eyes don’t necessarily smile with it. Simon giggles nervously alongside him. They try to reassure us that everything will be alright but they’re both so tired that nothing comprehensible spills out. Right now, standing backstage before this show, to contemplate the measure of this disaster can be nothing but an enormous joke. It’s almost like it’s not happening. As dressers scramble around us trying to re-plot their change points, and stage management and props people scan the show for places where the whole thing could come unstuck, we three Queens know that the success or failure of this adventure is again resting entirely on our shoulders.

I retreat to my dressing room to once again gather myself for the coming onslaught. I begin the process of re-programming the brain to cheerfully take whatever happens today on the chin and try to enjoy it. This is a story for the grand kids. I get made up and put on my first costume.

At ‘beginners’ Simon is again standing nervously side stage. Garry has decided to give the whole audience free tickets to another show as a sweetener. This would cost him a fortune, as it’s another full house. Simon hits the stage and tells the audience the bad news.

“Never in my life have I worked with such a Prima Donna.” He says about the bus. “She’s gone into her dressing room and she won’t come out.” He butters the audience up beautifully and by the time the overture begins, they are one hundred percent with us.

All goes reasonably smoothly up until the point where in
Go West
, Felicia gestures behind him to the flitter curtain, which rises to reveal the bus. Tick and Bernadette reel in shock that he’s bought a bus and the three Queens circle the bus in awe. Of course today, there’s nothing there. We pretend the bus has appeared and do our choreography as writ. When we arrive back to the front of the stage Felicia says: “What do you think?” I turn my next line to our advantage and say, “When do we have to get this
imaginary bus
back to the school.” The audience crack up laughing and from then on, entirely go with the notion that for the rest of the afternoon, they’ll be imagining the bus with us.

We muck through absolutely everything. If the bus has to turn, we turn. If it rotates, we rotate. One of us mocks holding an imaginary steering wheel, while the others do the scene on the bare stage pretending we’re sitting in our life sized bus. It’s shambolic, but again the audience is tolerant and supportive, and at the end of the show gives us a standing ovation for our troubles.

Bathed in sweat, we finish the show and bolt for the sanctuary of our dressing rooms. We have to repeat this marathon tonight, so in the meantime I intend to eat and sleep and avoid any kind of communication with another human being.

The night show runs the same way as the afternoon but with a larger and rowdier crowd. We’re slightly more adept at knowing what to do in the absence of a bus, and technical hitches which were slowing the show down in all of the previous previews are getting ironed out. Effectively we’re tech running the show in front of our audiences. This is great for the crew, but a huge worry for the actors. I’m becoming aware that I’m still not focusing on improving my own performance, because my mind has to be so aware of the constant stream of technical issues. Previews are traditionally shows to test how the audience is responding to jokes and scenes, and to hone how your performance scrubs up in front of an audience. This is not happening at all for me and I long for everything to be set so I can begin this process.

Sunday’s matinee has been cancelled so we can continue teching the show. We drag ourselves back into the theatre at eleven. I arrive to find that the wrong current converter was sent from Adelaide, so the bus is
still
not working. This of course means that we can’t tech anything involved with the bus. There is so much other stuff to do that no one seems to know where to start. A strange listlessness pervades the entire work force, including the usually resilient Simon. I find myself doing a lot of standing around while others drag themselves reluctantly through cues they would rather not be bothered with. Everyone wants the show to be fixed but we’re all too exhausted and have lost the will to fix it.

At the end of the day the cast, at least, head home for a day off. I guess that the crew will have another long day in here tomorrow, and will have to work through their weekend, poor sods. At least they don’t have to put a public face on the world of chaos which is spinning out of control backstage. The kind of white lie we’ve been selling our audiences for the last three shows takes an enormous toll, and I head home completely shattered. I want to sleep for a year.

Chapter 18

Hell

Final week

It’s about four a.m. on Tuesday morning. The fog of a slightly putrid dream begins to curl into my now increasingly restless sleep. In this dream, someone is taking to the inside of my throat with a knife. I fight them off, but I’m weak in my bed and my assailant is cunning. I thrash around until I’m disconnected from my sleep enough to stir, and then wake. When I finally hit consciousness I sit bolt upright in bed and clutch at my throat. It stings. The Perp’ has flown the apartment but he’s left behind his nasty infliction. I swallow hard against the pain, thinking it may ease it, but the sharp sting only serves to rouse me further.