Kala Gare stars in the MTC’s musical version of My Brilliant Career.Credit: Eugene Hyland
Miles Franklin is not big on TikTok. Search up My Brilliant Career by all means but prepare to suffer through millions of wannabe influencers spruiking their #goals and #dreams and #tipsforsuccess, and precious few references to Australia’s pioneering literary heroine.
“When I started to do research for this show, I went on TikTok because sometimes you can find people who are deep, deep fans of a thing that just know random amazing facts,” says Kala Gare, who performs the part of teenager Sybylla Melvyn in a new musical of Stella Miles Franklin’s most famous work.
“Anne Boleyn people! My god, they are so intense,” she gasps, recalling the research phase of her last stage triumph in SIX: the Musical. “So I was like, My Brilliant Career TikTok? Miles Franklin TikTok? Surely. And all that came up were thirst traps of Sam Neill!”
We agree that he was rather dashing opposite the ostensibly “plain” Judy Davis in Gillian Armstrong’s classic 1979 film version of the novel. But “come on, guys,” the singer yells in frustration, “this is not what this is about!”
The cast of the MTC’s My Brilliant Career.Credit: Eugene Hyland
My Brilliant Career is about a lot of things, not least ambition and self-belief, class, poverty, expectations of womanhood and the challenges of the artist’s calling, all intersecting in the hardscrabble Australian bush of the 1890s. But as Franklin’s preamble made clear, “This is not a romance” – a pointed rejection of the sole thing young female characters were once deemed fit for.
On the day we meet, Gare is five weeks into rehearsals at the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Southbank HQ. Artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks is coaxing her through the last few pages of the book, in which – spoiler alert – 19-year-old Sybylla declines the socially expected surrender of matrimony in favour of the blank page of her own uncertain creative journey.
The path ahead is represented not by a fountain pen or typewriter but by a centre-stage piano. Gare plays it herself, surrounded by half a dozen other musicians who are also actors in the show. With band ensconced on stage rather than hidden away in the pit, the result is as much live gig as theatre.
To writer Dean Bryant, who once again pairs with composer Mat Frank (Britney Spears: The Cabaret), the transformation of Sybylla from author to singer-songwriter is part of a contemporising conceit that felt perfectly in tune with the character as originally written.
“Obviously Sybylla ends up being a writer; all she wants to be is a writer,” Bryant says of Franklin’s protagonist – a thinly veiled alter-ego in many respects. “But all the way through the book she constantly talks about, ‘I just want to be surrounded by music and art and writing’ ... It felt like Sybylla lives in a world of music.”
The pair presented what would become one of the show’s key songs, In the Wrong Key, for an unconsummated Victorian Opera commission eight years ago. Later, developing the concept as Pratt Foundation artists in residence at Monash Uni, “we had to actually think, well, what is it that makes this story a musical?”
Kala Gare with My Brilliant Career director Anne-Louise Sarks.Credit: Eugene Hyland
The answer turned out to have autobiographical resonance for all concerned. Sybylla Melvin, uncannily like Stella Miles Franklin, grew up on a dairy farm. So did Dean Bryant. Mat Frank and third writer Sheridan Harbridge also grew up in the country. Turns out the feverishly imagined arc from backwoods nobody to singing-and-dancing success story is very much the stuff of the musical stage.
“I was that kid on a farm listening to music thinking, ‘I’m not going to be staying here; I’m better than this’, with all that arrogance that Sybylla has when the show starts,” says Bryant. “I could relate to that desire to escape, to do something creative with your life.
“These feel like very musical-isable ideas and emotions,” he adds. “Musicals need big feelings in order to generate the battery required for songs to occur.”
Another aspect of the character’s motivation, he says, was “the idea that she’s a girl out of her time. She doesn’t fit in her century. So it felt like that was a great opportunity to write Sybylla in a pop/rock vernacular, so her voice clearly was ‘other’ in that world.
“She feels like she’s creating the story herself in the book, and in the musical it feels like she’s bringing that world to life. It felt like it could sound like a Sybylla mixtape. All the songs would be the sorts of songs that a modern girl would listen to, would write in her room, pour her feelings out into.”
Kala Gare as Anne Boleyn in SIX The Musical.Credit: Getty
A hundred breakthrough pop stars of the 21st century spring to mind here: little Stefani Germanotta daring to dream off the shackles of her Catholic convent upbringing to become Lady Gaga; seven-year-old Beyonce Knowles singing Imagine at her primary school talent show in preparation to Run the World.
“And Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan,” Bryant adds. We are, he says, in “an amazing period” where there are women writing their own material who are “strong and unapologetic and who cover the gamut of experiences”.
“We live in an age where pop divas are not performing for the male gaze at all any more,” he says. “They are literally doing what they want to do and being adored by massive sections of the population for being authentic.”
It’s a role Kala Gare has no trouble imagining for herself. The singer-songwriter and actor graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts’ musical theatre stream barely out of her teens in 2017. She’s studied classical piano and fronts her own ensemble, the Hot 8 Piece, when she isn’t recording solo material.
“Sybylla is wrangling with trying to figure out what is inside of her, and then how to carve the path for herself,” she says. “And then when she does get to the place of, ‘I know that there’s something in me that I need to share’, then it’s, ‘I don’t know how, I don’t know what, I don’t know why — and is anyone going to listen?’
“As a creative person and a writer too, with giant dreams of my own ... I know that feeling; the writing and the vulnerability of something that you’ve created … knowing inherently that that’s something that has to come out of you, and the trust and the surrender involved ... That coming to self and backing self is so inherently human, and something I talk about a lot in my own writing.”
Gare’s latest release on Spotify, Breath I Take, might easily have come from the diaries of the young Sybylla Melvyn. “Breathe free, let it flow,” she sings, “in search of who I am, who will I be when I am truly free?”
“You’re gonna make me cry,” she responds. Hey, it’s been a long day of big musical emotions. “[Director] Anne-Louise actually just reminded me in the rehearsal room: When you have the permission to follow your dreams, or the opportunity to actually do whatever that is, that’s terrifying.”
What’s also terrifying, she wants to declare for the record, is the challenge of the “actor-muso” format that Bryant and Frank chose as the best way to stage their work. “Let me just share this,” she says. “Dancing, singing, playing an instrument and acting if you can, all at the same time … it’s so, so hard!
“There are moments in this show where people are doing an insane amount of work. You’re actually making new neural pathways because your body is working on one rhythm, and then you’re singing different rhythms, and often playing different rhythms as well.”
Bryant is unrepentant. “If Sybylla is going to lead a band, she has to be a pianist as well as an actor-singer-dancer. But more than just being able to play a keyboard, she has to be someone who’s done gigs. You can’t learn how to do that in rehearsal. You have to have that ready to go.”
The writers asked Gare to audition after seeing her play Anne Boleyn in SIX. But they’d also seen her give Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer a spectacular belting in season 10 of The Voice. “We were like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s a rock voice’,” Bryant says.
The final piece of the creative process involved another woman, appropriately enough, with award-winning writing, directing and performing experience. From her own Songs for the Fallen to turns playing Blanche Dubois, Valerie Solanas and Judy Garland, self-described “disobedient woman” Sheridan Harbridge took one key filter to Bryant’s book.
“My contribution was to look at what it is to be a feminist,” she says. “Why tell this story now? As I read [Franklin’s] book, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this is when the suffrage movement was in full swing …’ Then around the time of [Armstrong’s] film in the ’70s, there was such a strong movement to show women removing all those shackles, being kind of a warrior type.
“I think feminism now is in a different phase where we’re embracing imperfection. And I wanted to make sure that that was represented in Sybylla.”
Having not read Franklin’s novel before, Harbridge says she was “astounded at how contemporary it felt; how she captured that true spirit of being a 15-to-19 year-old girl. She’s ambitious, she’s arrogant, she’s rude, she’s loving, she’s generous … all these things that teenagers are.
“You know, sometimes musicals can smooth out their characters. I really wanted to make sure we kept all her rough edges. And to do that would be to make it feel contemporary: not to idolise her, but to make her agitating, a bit selfish ... just real.”
Again, Kala Gare gets it. “Say what I feel and demand what I’ll be,” she sings in the climactic power ballad, Somebody Like Me: a shorthand manifesto these days for every bedroom strummer-diarist preparing to tell the world their truth on TikTok without sticking on eyelashes or even necessarily changing out of their pyjamas.
“I feel that it’s a gift to be able to do that,” Gare says. “Being someone who looked up to people so much as a young person, the stuff that I can do or say to show that I’m living truthfully to myself, and that that’s not perfect … that honesty I’ve always felt was such a superpower.
“I would love this show to move people and for them to see the parts of themselves that Sybylla can show them. It ends on such a beautiful note of, ‘I’m gonna try’. That doesn’t mean, ‘I’ll win’. Just try. There’s room for everyone. I feel like that is such a freedom.”
My Brilliant Career is at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, from November 7 to December 18.