|
|
 |
Keating! The Musical
"I'm not much of a fan of musicals really," claims Mike McLeish, who plays the title prime-minister of 'Keating!', a musical theatre rendition of the life of the man Mike reckons is the "Placido Domingo" of Australian politics.
"They tend to bore me a bit, and I reckon they're all a bit cheesy and over the top. And you know that transition from dialogue to singing always seems a bit awkward and clunky. So one of the coolest things about this show is that there is no dialogue, it's just songs - it just goes from song to song to song. The closest thing to dialogue we've got in the show is a rap battle!"
Okay, now that does sound supercool, certainly, but what could possibly make someone want to write it in the first place? McLeish says it took a lot of persistence on the part of writer and friend Casey Bennetto.
"He'd written a show for the comedy festival in 2002, which was just a bunch of songs that he'd written that sort of had a Melbourne flavour to them, and then he threw them together and put it on stage, and that went really well and had a good response. But the next time around he decided that he really wanted to write something that had a bit more of a through-line, like with an anchor and a good story to it, not just a bunch of songs thrown together willy-nilly, so he called me up one night and said 'look, I'm going to write a musical about Paul Keating', and like most other people my initial response was 'are you fucking mad?!' Cause you know, politics and musicals, it seemed the strangest of marriages...
"Anyway, he kept mentioning this idea to a people and most sort of baulked at it. But, and I can't remember who it was but there was one friend of his who he mentioned it to who just went nuts for the idea, and that was just about all the encouragement that Casey needed to sit down and get busy! And he wrote the thing so bloody quickly it was remarkable, and it turned out not-too-shabby.
"Sure enough, he went away and demoed a bunch of songs, we had a couple of rehearsals to make sure we all knew the words and the sharps, and then we just got up and did it."
Since that first run at the 2005 Melbourne international comedy festival 'Keating!' has hooked audiences and won virtually every award imaginable. But what about the most important, potentially volatile critic - the verbal-demolition-machine of an ex-PM himself?
"Actually he's seen it three times now," notes McLeish. "He came to the opening night in Sydney in November 2006, and then came along a couple of weeks later and brought his mum, which we felt was a pretty decent seal of approval. I've spoken to him a few times now, and he's been really lovely actually, it's kind of weird... But I reckon if I had a musical written about me I'd want to go a few times too!
"You know the good thing is that I'm not trying to do a sort of Max Gillies style political impersonation - I reckon if I was trying to impersonate him I may well completely freak out knowing that he's in the crowd. Instead I'm playing an appropriation of the man as musical-theatre-hero, so it was always a real buzz to have him there, and he's always been really nice and sticks around afterwards to share a glass of wine - well not share a glass of wine - we had one each."
But what about the bizarre combination here? Musical theatre is problematic enough on its own, as Mike himself admits, but add politics - Australian politics at that - and it would seem a formula for, well, something awkward. Not so, McLeish argues.
"Well, first it's totally satirical - Casey who wrote it has always maintained that it's more of a satire of music-theatre than politics - it takes the piss out of all those traditional music theatre forms, and Paul Keating is just a convenient subject, you know his career is sort of operatic in structure. The satire is sharp and biting, and Keating pretty much cops it as much as anyone else in the show, even though it's a musical and he's the hero, so it's sort of deranged in its bias towards Keating.
"Plus there's styles ranging from reggae and hip hop to country and soul, bossa nova, and mambo, so by no stretch of the imagination is it a traditional musical, and it's definitely not operatic."
He reflects: "We've got a five piece band on stage playing a whole bunch of pretty contemporary styles of music, and they play it incredibly well - they're the funkiest Greek chorus you're ever going to see!"
As such, McLeish is adamant 'Keating!' appeals to lovers of musicals and detractors alike.
"It's much more like coming to a gig than going to see a musical, even though with the production that we've got there's still all the theatrical bells and whistles to give it some good oomph! I think it's self-referential enough about musicals that people who do enjoy them would like it, but people who don't like your traditional musical I think will be very pleasantly surprised."
William McGinley
'Keating! The musical opens at Her Majesty's Theatre on Thurs 3 April
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
