By Robert Moran
The Lovers writer Laura Murphy says there have been some “naysayers”.Credit:Daniel Boud
It’s probably not the sort of thing you’d usually see at Bell Shakespeare’s workspace at Pier 2/3 at the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct. During a rehearsal of The Lovers, the company’s new original musical based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, floppy-haired Lysander (Jerrod Smith) and Demetrius (Blake Appelqvist) make their moves on Helena (Natalie Abbott) and Hermia (Brittanie Shipway) with Y2K-era R&B dramatics, like they’re the lost members of NSync. “Shakespeare meets Girls5Eva,” I jot down in my notebook, with a barely contained giggle.
Another number, a sort of ’80s power ballad featuring fairy king Oberon, played by The Voice’s season five finalist Stellar Perry (sporting neck tattoos and a NOFX t-shirt), laments the state of modern romance with its eggplant emojis and “DTF” courtships, while Puck (Monique Salle) spits biting asides like an eshay rapper. Even for those familiar with Shakespeare’s 16th-century comedy, the scores of us who had it shoved down our throats in high school English, this seems, uh, different.
The musical is the brainchild of writer-composer Laura Murphy. Murphy, who previously penned the music and lyrics to The Dismissal, a musical based on Gough Whitlam’s removal from office in 1975, has been thinking about the project since she was in school uniform at Mount St Benedict College in Pennant Hills, when – somehow, miraculously – Shakespeare’s words suddenly made sense.
“I remember how empowered I felt when it clicked, when I got it – this thing, this Shakespeare guy who’s for smart, cultured people, and whose language intimidated me so much I thought I’ll never grasp this – and then you just feel like, maybe I’m not an absolute fool after all, which is such a beautiful thing for a kid,” Murphy says of her earliest experience with Midsummer’s (she played Flute in a ninth-grade school production).
The Voice finalist Stellar Perry plays Oberton in The Lovers.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
“I kind of thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could write a show that offered that same empowerment to others, that demystifies this language and makes Shakespeare accessible so you can understand it’s all just humans and feelings and situations? Pop music was the perfect vehicle to do that because it feels good, it’s familiar, and it’s literally designed to not need words to evoke emotion. You may not understand what the frickin’ sentence means, but the music is telling you how to feel through it.”
Murphy had originally conceived of the project as a jukebox musical, angling in Taylor Swift tracks to highlight character motivations. But she realised the story was being sacrificed to fit the confines of lyrics she couldn’t change. “So I was like, ‘You know what would be easier? I’ll just write original lyrics,’” she deadpans. “Twelve years later, I finished my first draft.”
If the more-than-a-decade commitment doesn’t make it obvious, The Lovers is a passion project for Murphy, one she’s pondered obsessively. In conversation, she breaks down the play’s 400-year-old protagonists to their most relatable (“Hermia is that girl who when she gets a boyfriend is like, ‘I have no family or friends, it’s just my boyfriend now’” ; “Demetrius is your classic commitment-phobe”) and finds prescient parallels in current pop iconography: “Helena is totally an Adele, Hermia is Ariana Grande,” she explains. It’s a fun game. Puck is Lil Nas X, I offer.
“Yes, I love that!” Murphy exclaims. “In the show, it’s not so explicit, but it’s just this mosaic of musical influences from the past 30 years, coming together to tell this story.”
It’s a big risk. A huge risk. I may end up with egg on my face.
That Bell Shakespeare has taken on the project – a theatre company that, despite the occasional thematic update, treats its Shakespeare with highbrow reverence (“And that ain’t me. My brows are low,” laughs Murphy) – has boggled some minds. It’s an off-kilter departure, but the demands of a post-COVID landscape will do that to arts companies.
“All the programming we’re doing at the moment is blockbuster-y,” says Bell Shakespeare’s artistic director Peter Evans. “We need to get audiences back and give them the confidence to come back out – so it’s perfect timing for something like this.”
Evans says the company had long been in the market for a musical – a big, commercial gambit that could bring in younger audiences. “What we were looking for was a Kiss Me, Kate,” he says of Cole Porter’s musical take on The Taming of the Shrew. “You know, like what that was in the ’50s. Of course, it’s dated terribly, but at the time: Bob Fosse, contemporary, fantastic. We would talk about that a lot. But to do it is very hard.”
Even Murphy was shocked when, in mid-2020, Bell Shakespeare showed interest in The Lovers after viewing a Vimeo of the musical’s opening act. Evans recalls exactly what convinced him: a scene where Hermia sings Perfect Little Princess, a song to her father, who has brought her before the court and told her she needs to ditch Demetrius and marry Lysander, or else be imprisoned or killed.
“Suddenly, Laura stops the play at that point and Hermia gets to sing a song which explains to her father that ‘I’m not a little girl anymore’ and I can make my own choices,” says Evans. “Dramaturgically, that’s great. But it’s also an amazing song. And it was at that point – we were in lockdown – that I texted the senior management group and I was like, ‘This is it.’ We just knew.”
The cast practise their moves ahead of the opening of The Lovers.Credit:Daniel Boud
Evans is aware it’s “a big swing” for the company, an indelicate commercial departure from Bell Shakespeare’s traditional work. “It’s a big risk. A huge risk. I may end up with egg on my face,” he says. “But it’s never occurred to me, from that moment, that it wouldn’t work. And from my point of view, no one else can do this. We have to do it. It makes no sense if somebody else does it.”
If tonally distant, it’s not completely removed from Bell Shakespeare’s core mission since its inception in 1990: finding a contemporary context for Shakespeare’s work and saving it from the sort of elitist bent that’s transformed it from popular entertainment to intimidating fare over 400 years.
If you don’t want women playing Hamlet, if you don’t want new voices rewriting it, it’s going to die out real soon.
“It’s always been that, it has,” Evans says. “I don’t know if John [Bell] ever articulated it like this but I certainly articulate it, and that is that one of the constant barriers to Shakespeare is people think they’ll feel stupid. That’s a barrier, we know it. Either they’ve had a bad experience at school or it was something where Shakespeare was used punitively.
“Of course, John’s focus and my focus has always been, ‘No, this can actually add pleasure to your life and you don’t need to be intimidated!’ We’re not doing [The Lovers] for this reason at all, but a by-product of it is that you cannot help but be swept up in the Shakespeare within it. As a piece of art it is very accessible, yes – but it’s still Shakespeare. It’s Shakespeare, song, Shakespeare, song, and the songs are contemporary and the lyrics are brilliant, but there’s a deep love of Shakespeare and the play there.”
Director Shaun Rennie, a longtime friend and collaborator of Murphy’s, who was in the room during the one-act showcase that so convinced Evans, is also a believer. “Within the first three minutes, I was like, ‘This show is a hit’,” he says. “It’s so infectious. It’s so smart. It’s so funny. It’s so Laura.
“It’s been a passion project for me too, only because as a musical theatre director in this country, it’s incredibly rare – like, almost unheard of – to create a new, commercial musical from scratch. It just never happens because they’re incredibly expensive and risky and to get them right is a lot of time and money. So this is such a rare opportunity.“
Perry with writer-composer Laura Murphy.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
Murphy is still overwhelmed by Bell Shakespeare’s interest in The Lovers.
“I never would have thought Bell Shakespeare would have been down for this. I was like, this is sacrilege,” she jokes. “But they were excited about it for that very same reason. They are ambitious for their company to have a shake-up, a ‘Shakespeare-up’, as much as what this show does conceptually.”
For all the support, Murphy says she has come across some resistance.
“There have been naysayers – you know, Bell supporters that I’ve met along the way. One of them said, ‘Oh, I don’t like this, changing Shakespeare. I don’t like this, getting women to play Hamlet. I don’t like this…’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m interested for you to see the show because, firstly, it comes from love, but also this is how his work lives on. We need to evolve with the times, we need to allow new voices to take on these stories and move into the future. Because if you don’t want women playing Hamlet, if you don’t want new voices rewriting it, it’s going to die out real soon.’”
Of course, the cultural exchange works both ways. As much as the project aims to bring a helping hand to Shakespeare to the masses, there’s also something delightfully subversive in getting such rusted-on Shakespeare-ists to experience the primal bliss of pop music, an art form long derided as vacuous and disposable. I mean, if Hamilton could get old folks into hip-hop, anything’s possible.
Writer Laura Murphy during rehearsals for the Lovers.Credit:Daniel Boud
“I started writing the show because I wanted to demystify Shakespeare for kids and engage kids with Shakespeare to feel that empowerment I felt when I was 15 and I felt like I got this really smart thing,” says Murphy. “But as it evolved, I realised that perhaps it can actually bridge that gap between older generations and younger generations too, and demystify young people for older generations, like ‘What is DTF?’ – because, really, this is for everyone.”
Evans has supreme confidence in The Lovers. In previous interviews, he’s said he sees the musical playing over and over and potentially going international. If The Lovers is a hit, does he see this as another possible avenue for Bell Shakespeare in the future?
“I mean, you’d be crazy not to,” Evans says. “However, the weird thing is this has confirmed what I already knew, which is that it’s really hard. Laura has been on it for over 10 years and you can feel the depth of work in it. It’s very sophisticated. People have come and watched the rehearsals and gone, ‘Wow, what would you do next?’ The thing is, it’s very particular; she’s taken the right bit from the right play to explore. It’s not like we could go, ‘Oh, Laura and Shaun, you can now take this play and this play and this play.’ We will be inspired by this, but also, unless it’s great, we wouldn’t do it. I mean, it’s really expensive! It’s a big risk.
“And that’s why it’s just here, a limited season, in Sydney. We haven’t partnered with anyone yet, we’ve invested all the money, it’s all us. It’s just, ‘Make this work right now and then we’ll see.’”
After over a decade with it marinating in her mind, success for Murphy lies in the immutable fact it’s getting done. “I just want somebody to see it,” she says. “It feels like we’re sitting on a secret, one we want to share with people, and I just can’t wait. Even if it’s just one show. Like, if we cancel after the first preview, I probably wouldn’t be that devastated because it’s out there now.”
As we chat in Bell Shakespeare’s library, a big bronze bust of the Bard peeks from over Murphy’s shoulder. What does she think he’d make of her adaptation, the pop songs, the eggplant emojis?
“To sleep at night, I actually like to think that he would love this,” Murphy laughs. “Here’s this young ratbag woman, taking credit for his work, in a real nice subversion of men usually taking credit for women’s work. I reckon he would love that. And I reckon he would love the fact that our cast is almost exclusively queer, gender-diverse, and culturally and racially diverse, and there’s Stellar, this tatted, green-haired fairy singing on stage. I feel he’d love this. Like, ‘Yes, kids. Go for it.’”
The Lovers plays at the Sydney Opera House from October 23 to November 20.
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