Year of the Queen: The Making of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - The Musical (9 page)

I arrive first and wait for the small gang of cast members who will be part of this workshop to assemble. Nick and Lena arrive and we chuckle about the hijinx of yesterday. Nick can only shake his head in bewilderment when I tell him what a natural he is in drag. But where’s Marney, the woman playing my wife? Who is this girl who beat off such fierce competition for the role?

Amelia fronts up, looking like someone who’s just arrived home to their own surprise party. She’s a young WAAPA graduate who was only cast yesterday and has had a dizzying twenty four hours. She’s flown down from Sydney today to be part of the workshop. Resembling Christina Ricci, her eyes reflect a sharp, inspired optimism, and she is blessed with a buxom cleavage that you could safely dive into from the twentieth floor. She giggles nervously as she asks if any of us know what we’re going to be doing. No one can really answer her, but we sound convincing with our best guesses.

Finally, Marney sweeps into the room beaming at all and sundry. She rushes over to me and Clare introduces us. I can tell that she’s as keen to meet me as I am to meet her. I call her ‘wife,’ and we fall into peels of laughter over nothing. This, it seems, is Marney’s way. She has a charm about her which is like the tractor beam from an alien space craft. When it shines on you, it instantly paralyses you, then it levitates you into the air and draws you, slowly, helplessly, but inescapably into her hemisphere of beaming light. We fire up the gossip and swap any information we have. Of course we’re starved, so any tit-bits are worth repeating. I show her my champagne bottle war-wound from yesterday and we giggle over how surreal it all was.

Tony arrives and the tempo goes up another notch. He and I huddle and speculate on what we’re in for, and how the script will read. He’s bursting at the seams. We’re rounded up and taken into the rehearsal room. My eyes dart around the table for a pile of scripts, but the table is bare. Simon welcomes us, and explains the absence of scripts by saying Allan Scott can’t make it in until this afternoon, so we’ll wait for him to arrive before we read it. Until then we’ll be working on music with Spud.

Spud takes over and assembles us around the piano. His brow is heavy and I can see he wants to waste no time getting stuck into this. Our task is to fit some of the production numbers around the dialogue. We begin with
Go West
. This number sees the drag Queens agreeing to travel to Alice Springs, it brings the bus on stage, it shows them packing the bus and then leaving Sydney. Spud needs to know exactly how many bars of music is needed to work the song around the dialogue and all the action that’s involved. Once that’s bedded down he can begin to arrange the orchestra parts.

It begins with Felicia’s speech, where he explains why he wants to go on the trip in the first place: “To go where no Queen has gone before, and conquer the outback in full Gautier, heels and tiara…” The song begins as underscore for his speech. In the absence of Daniel, Nick is playing Felicia in the workshop. He runs the lines a number of times as Spud plays the underscore to make sure it fits. When he’s happy we move onto the beginning of the song. We sing through to the first music break, which is where the bus appears. Simon imagines the time the bus will take to come on as the music plays out. The whole piece seems to be in his head already. Then the three Swedish backpackers, Lars, Lars, and Lars hand the keys to Felicia and there’s dialogue to fit into the music. Spud switches a few bars around and negotiates with Simon where he wants things to go. Spud scribbles madly on his manuscript.

As the session goes on I begin to become a little self conscious. Marney, Nick, Lena and Amelia are fabulous singers. I’m working hard to keep up, but they’re in another league. I begin to get a few tremors.

Spud stabs at the last lines of his arrangement with his pencil and seems satisfied. We go back to the start of the song and sing straight through it with dialogue, and with Simon waving his hands around like a crazed magician at his invisible bus, as he imagines its journey across the stage. When we reach the end, Spud and Simon are happy and the song is chalked down as done. Spud leaps onto his computer and begins committing it to history.

Simon approaches me and says that we couldn’t get the rights to
Lullaby
, the Billy Joel song which seemed to go so well at the first workshop. Instead we’ll be using
Say A Little Prayer
. I get a few more tremors. This is a really tough song to sing. Didn’t Aretha Franklin sing it? Just as I’m stewing about how it’s going to sound, particularly in front of these incredible voices, Spud thrusts some music at me and suggests we have a sing through it. Now I’m nervous. I’m still a way off getting my voice back in shape and my confidence is really low. Spud tries a key and I ask for it to come down. He relents, but not as far as I’d like. We sing through it with the girls joining in the second verse. I feel myself blushing. I want to stop and say, “Look, I
will
get this together you know. It won’t sound like this in two months time.”

I head to lunch feeling a little down-hearted. I can’t tell if it’s just me, feeling like the pressure is on again after all this time in the music theatre wilderness, or if I’m instinctively picking up an element of resentment from Spud. I’m desperate not to be a paranoid actor, but I can’t shake this feeling. My mood is flat and the excitement I felt coming in this morning has guttered.

Finally the afternoon arrives and we get to read through the script. Everyone’s salivating. Allan Scott has arrived and placed himself like chief magistrate at the head of the table. There’s no sign of Stephan, but he’s sent Phil Scott in his place to be a kind of joke doctor and script editor. He presents like a character in a Woody Allen film, eyes alert, darting around the group, watching for secret code. He fires off jokes at a hundred rounds a minute and still comes off with an enormous sense of credibility. I know his face from a thousand unplaceable performances.

The read begins. Now I’m on solid ground. Tick feels effortless as the pages turn. There’s been some obvious changes since the workshop, mostly driving the script into coarser terrain. I can’t believe how crude some of it has become. Lena laughs hysterically the ruder it gets, gasping for air and chanting, “I can’t fucking
believe
it.” But the script feels clunky. It’s lost a lot of the gold that we’d found last time, and some of the really touching scenes have gone completely.

As we finish I can see Tony is disappointed. He looks across at me and privately shakes his head with disapproval. Simon remains neutral, waiting for comments, and it doesn’t take long for the flood-gates to open. Tony and I begin with our list of disappointments. Alan shares our opinion that it’s clunky and too crude. Tony wants a scene put back where Bernadette fights with Adam for calling him Ralph in front of Bob, and I voice my concern that Tick has had all his jokes taken off him.

Alan and Phil vow to look at the script overnight, and we’re released for the day. I leave feeling completely different about the whole process from last time. Then, we had so much pressure on us to get the piece up and running. We had a deadline and a looming performance. This time, although we’ll read the piece for the producers on Saturday, it’s about connecting the dots and smoothing the way for rehearsals. I’m also now cast in the role so there’s no sense of ‘What if?’ about it. It’s more an intellectual process than a theatrical one. Besides, now we have the luxury of having two writers in the room with us to race away and work on any alterations we need. It’s a little like shifting the furniture around the new lounge room and seeing what looks nice beside the china cabinet.

Thursday is much of the same. More testing music with dialogue, reading re-written scenes and
lots
of talk. The creases in Spud’s brow deepen as the day goes on, and the reality of just how much work he faces hits him. Personnel come and go according to their availability. Marney is performing in a play at the Arts Centre, and has to keep trotting off for technical rehearsals. Simon has his own MTC commitments too. His assistant tells me she has his every minute of every day planned and accounted for until two thousand and ten.

Friday, and Ross Coleman arrives with a bunch of dancers, some of whom have been cast in the show, others have been hired for the morning. We’re going to test
Downtown
as the potential opener to the show. Spud has an arrangement ready and Ross will stage it.

We gather around the piano and Spud teaches the parts. I tentatively join in, but I can see I’m not going to be singing this one. Spud’s arrangement already sounds like an opening number to a musical. Gone is the aspirational sentiment in the song, replaced with a kind of dirty R&B shuffle. It rocks along and it’s easy to get swept up in the power of it. The voices are strong and stabbing. I look across to Ross and see his brain whirling with ideas. Once the arrangement is learned, Ross launches himself at the routine.

As I suspected, I sit out of it to start with, as the routine begins to paint a picture of Sydney streets at night. It’s a harsh and alienating world which Tick will eventually enter into. I watch in amazement as the choreography materializes from thin air. All kinds of scenarios spring out of the dance; robberies, lovers, junkies, mad people, all swirling around the stage as Amelia belts out the first verse. Voices join her as the song builds.

Finally, Tick enters through the chaos and walks towards the club where he’ll perform
Never Been To Me
. A dressing table mirror will come on with the revolve and I’ll get ready to go on stage to do my routine.

The whole number takes till lunchtime to choreograph, and it’s a winner. The arrangement sounds fantastic and the choreography is inspired. There’s a palpable sense that this will work a treat. We perform it one more time and it’s videoed for future reference. We finish and the cast instantly applauds Ross who cowers from the adulation. He immediately talks it down, saying, “No, no. I know what I’m going to do with it now.”

The afternoon takes us back to the script and the songs. Phil and Alan arrive with new pages to try out, like excited kids with new toys to show off. We pounce on the pages and read through them. They’re on the edge of their seats as we discover whether they’ll work or not. Some of it obviously looked better on the computer and is rejected, other bits are hilarious and work a treat. Once there’s a verdict, they scuttle back into the writing room and hit the next scene.

We’re working towards a complete read-through on Saturday afternoon. It’s a stretch, as songs are coming in and out, script is going back and forth, and actors are coming and going. We’re trying to bed down which number we’ll do for the penultimate drag performance. In the film it’s
Finally
, but Simon wants to save this for the end of the show ‘mega-mix’. We talk about a revamped disco version of
I’ve Never Been To Me
, and try it out. It’s not great, but it could work. I suggest a drag dramatization of the Shelley Winters death scene from
The Poseidon Adventure
set to a disco version of
The Morning After
. Tick already mentions it in the show as something he does back in Sydney, why not stage it? We try the song in a disco beat and there’s potential there.

Spud looks weighed down by the massive work load. All the thousands of scraps of paper, ideas, key changes and crazy requests by Simon, seem to act like a myriad of tiny Lilliputian ropes slowly dragging at him like Gulliver. He keeps sighing heavily and going back to the computer to bang together new sheet music, and change keys and arrangements. Just as he’s finished one, he has to change it again. There’s the faint boiling beneath the surface at times, like a dormant geyser ready to blow. I don’t want to be in the same suburb if he happens to go off.

The whirlwind continues until Saturday afternoon, when Garry arrives to listen to the read through. We’ve got as close to the final script as we can. We also have underscore and most of the songs arranged. As Spud shuffles his mass of scribbled arrangements into a semblance of order, Simon instructs him to have
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
ready, as well as
Do You Know The Way To San Jose
, for a particular moment in the second act, as he wants to call it ‘in the moment’. A tiny puff of steam escapes the geyser and I fear the worst, but after taking a moment, Spud rolls his eyes and relents.

We all gather around the piano for the read. It’s so much more casual than the first workshop. We sit in a circle, scripts in hand with none of the nerves associated with giving a performance. Everyone’s excited and jokes are firing off all around me like cluster bombs. Garry is clearly loving his role of papa bear in all this, presiding over his club, while Simon laughs animatedly with Phil’s relentless gag festival. Even Spud, who peers out darkly from beneath his beaten brow has a glint in his eye.

Before the whole afternoon is reduced to a total rabble, Simon calls us to order and we begin the read. What strikes me immediately is how funny it is. The best of Stephan’s gags have been kept, and Phil and Alan have written more. The three lead characters seem warm and their stories are compelling. The songs work in beautifully with the dialogue and even though they haven’t been specifically written for the show, seem to help drive the story along. The underscore gives the scenes a real sense of depth and emotion.
Both Sides Now
has been flagged for one spot in the show and I neither know nor particularly like it. When we get there I want to run and hide. Tony is as tentative with it as I am, and we leave it to Nick to hold the fort. Simon seems wedded to it, but I secretly hope it never makes it to rehearsals in a few months time. With the odd exception, the read is a success. Garry looks happy as we turn over the last page and look up from the scripts. The whole room seems to have enjoyed going on the journey. The mood is buoyant, and we all feel like this version of the script could take us to opening night and beyond. The gag fest sparks into life again as everyone gathers themselves up and begins to disband for the weekend. After spending such an intense week together, we all feel very chummy and a little bewildered that we won’t see each other now until rehearsals start.