Natalie Abbott as Muriel Heslop and Stefanie Jones as Rhonda Epinstall in the 2019 production of Muriel’s Wedding The Musical. Photo credit: Jeff Busby.
Transforming beloved films into musical theatre productions is an established but risky trend. For every triumphant Billy Elliot there’s a leaden King Kong, but producers – including Australian company Global Creatures – persist. Get the formula right and the millions will flow.
Adapted by PJ Hogan from his original screenplay, and featuring new songs by Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall, something has gone missing in the translation of Muriel’s Wedding from screen to stage. Instead of treading a fine line between tragedy and comedy, the musical turns up the brightness up to 11, diminishing the subtle gradients of melancholy and satire which made the original film so successful in the process.
Choosing to end with a celebration of female friendship rather than a Hollywood-style wedding meant that Hogan’s 1994 film was praised as a feminist masterpiece. The writer has walked away from that ending here, giving us instead a romantic conclusion more fitting of Broadway – whose theatres this production is clearly aiming for.
Technically, Muriel’s Wedding The Musical is excellent. Performances are strong, especially Natalie Abbott as the titular Muriel Heslop and Stefanie Jones as her fiercely independent best friend Rhonda Epinstall, and the pair share a beautiful chemistry. Simon Phillips directs with precision, focus and flair. Gabriela Tylesova’s sets and costumes are kitsch, but perfectly suited to the production – though her decision to surround the stage with larger-than-life mobile phones and tablets really only comes into its own after interval. Similarly, the production’s lighting design, choreography, even scene changes – which employ a series of sliding screens to echo the wide shots and close-ups of the musical’s filmic origins – are all strikingly effective.
What lets the musical down is its tone – it lacks emotional depth, with only a handful of scenes wielding any real dramatic heft – and its original songs are serviceable but forgettable, and do little to advance the plot or reveal the inner lives of the production’s many characters.
The contrast between Miller-Heidke and Nuttall’s bland compositions and the ABBA songs which pepper the score is especially stark, though the decision to have actors playing the members of ABBA onstage is an inspired one. The scene in which sad Betty Heslop (Pippa Grandison) sings a slow ‘SOS’ with Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid (Maxwell Simon, Evan Lever, Jaime Hadwen and Laura Bunting respectively) is one of the production’s few genuinely moving moments. The Heslop children’s ‘My Mother (Eulogy)’ is another fine scene, but comes too late in the piece to outweigh the underwhelming book and new compositions.
Hogan’s attempts to update the story to the modern era by making Muriel Insta-famous also detracts, diluting the drama of Muriel’s obsessive need to prove herself by getting married. Consequently, the social media elements often feel awkwardly wedged into the story, only really coming into their own late in the piece as Muriel finds herself in a marriage of convenience with closeted gay swimmer Alexander Shkuratov (Stephen Madsen), by which stage they’re too late to feel more than a contrivance. A running joke about Shkuratov’s surname apparently being too hard to pronounce also highlights a particularly insidious form of casual Australian racism, and feels more laughing with than at such sentiments, to the show’s detriment.
As a production, Muriel’s Wedding is visually spectacular – opening number ‘Sunshine State of Mind’ looks great in terms of set, costume, choreography and staging, while the song ‘Sydney’ (complete with Harbour Bridge and drag queens) is a visual celebration of almost every Sin City cliché you can imagine – but as a whole it feels as hollow as Betty Heslop’s marriage to the blustering Bill (David James).
It’s the best Global Creatures musical to date, but given that the company’s previous musical outings were the shallow spectacle of King Kong (heavily rewritten for its eventual Broadway premiere) and the flabby Strictly Ballroom, that’s not saying a lot. One can only hope that their upcoming Moulin Rouge! The Musical will be a little more finessed and compelling.
3 stars ★★★
Muriel’s Wedding the Musical
Global Creatures in association with Sydney Theatre Company
Book by PJ Hogan
Music & Lyrics by Kate Miller-Heidke & Keir Nuttall
With songs by Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus & Stig Anderson originally written for ABBA
Directed by Simon Phillips
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne
Until 16 June 2019
murielsweddingthemusical.com
Also playing:
Sydney Lyric Theatre from 28 June
Lyric Theatre, QPAC from September
