Eddie Perfect’s redemption on Broadway
Melbourne maestro Eddie Perfect survived the highs and lows of having two shows on Broadway. Now he’s back in Melbourne with a show of songs and stories about his New York run.
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Eddie Perfect knew the exact moment King Kong was in trouble. It was the gorilla in the room.
“You cannot rehearse with a 20ft animatronic gorilla,” Perfect says.
“It only exists in a theatre, and it only exists with 12 people moving it. So you kind of have to guess.
“We made a show, threw all our ideas into the pot, and it wasn’t until preview one, that we were like, ‘This giant gorilla is having a massive effect on our human scale story!’ With the gorilla on stage, that human scale just vanished.
“At its heart, it was meant to be a piece about the arrogance of humans who think they can make commerce out of the natural world, to take something wild, dangerous and unique and exploit it. But it’s hard to tell that story and have a giant gorilla marauding around the city.
“We confused the shit out of people,” Perfect says, laughing. “I was confused.”
Of course, Perfect, the multi-tasking singer-songwriter, actor and writer from Melbourne, had an ace up his sleeve: another Broadway musical, Beetlejuice, playing two blocks away.
Perfect wrote music and lyrics for King Kong and Beetlejuice musicals.
Indeed, with that feat alone, Perfect etched his name into the history books as the first Australian to have two shows playing on Broadway simultaneously.
But the town’s notoriously savage theatre critics went ape with their own etchings about King Kong. The New York Times sent two reviewers, who gleefully filed their critique as post-show conversation, and tore the musical to shreds.
“The review was essentially the two of them in a bar, reconciling their differences by f---ing hating on King Kong. It was so mean-spirited. It felt like bullying. It hurts a lot more when it’s like people are kicking the carcass,” Perfect says.
“I think there was a bit of, Who the f--- do these people, who aren’t from New York, think they are? That parochial, protective attitude does exist on Broadway. It’s usually about the British, but it’s been extended to Australians as well.”
Perfect adds: “My biggest worry with Kong was creative. ‘Did I make the piece I meant to make?’ I didn’t feel that with Kong. I felt like I was drowning.
“That’s not pointing the finger of blame at anyone. It was just so big, so heavy, and such a giant machine; you kept turning up not knowing how to affect it, or what to do.
“I was in the deep end, buried by it. But I also knew I had the chance to redeem myself with Beetlejuice.”
Perfect was halfway into a four-year project developing Beetlejuice, when he got the call to write songs for King Kong. The latter needed to be workshopped and written in 18 months. “That didn’t seem like a lot of time to me,” Perfect says.
King Kong, written by Jack Thorne, who also penned Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, opened in New York in October, 2018, and closed in August, 2019.
Perfect, wife Lucy, and their two children, moved from their home in Brunswick to New York’s upper west side in 2018.
Their apartment, on 76th St, was a stone’s throw away from the spot where Eddie and Lucy married in Central Park in 2011.
“We liked the neighbourhood because it looked like Sesame St,” Perfect says. “We were like, ‘What could go wrong here?’”
However, just like Sesame St, there was a resident grouch.
“We spent two years dealing with our neighbour below, who was an older woman in her 80s. She just despised us,” Perfect says. “It started off on the worst foot because my kids were jumping up and down in the apartment. They’ve never lived in an apartment before.
“She just opened the door, walked in, and started yelling at our kids. Our kids were terrified. She would leave notes, bang the roof with a broom, and yell at us. Her name was Karen. She was — and is — a Karen.”
Still, Perfect and family soaked up the joys of their New York block: good public schools, liberal neighbours, multicultural vibes, community feels and excellent bagels.
“The first year we were broke, so it was a little tumultuous,” Perfect says. “You don’t get paid until your show gets on stage, and all our money went on rent.
“We had enough for all the essentials, but we didn’t have enough in the kitty for extra things, like entertainment, or having dinners out with friends. Everything is expensive in New York. “We weren’t hungry and we had a roof out of our head,” Perfect stresses.
“But it was a little tricky when friends would invite Lucy and I out for dinner. Some of our friends were earning a lot of money and had no kids.
“Everyone knows what it’s like to front up and do a mental mathematical assessment of what’s going on at the table, and realise when the bill splitting comes, it’s going to hurt.
Beetlejuice, based on the ghostly 1988 film, and King Kong, inspired by a 1933 movie, held rehearsals in the same midtown Manhattan building.
When Beetlejuice did a tryout run in Washington DC in October, 2018, with King Kong opening on Broadway at the same time, Perfect commuted between the two cities, in a bid to oversee work on both musicals.
“I was ignorant,” Perfect says. “I started two projects, two years apart, with no idea they’d be in rehearsal at the same time, and opening at the same time. But I don’t make the scheduling decisions.”
Beetlejuce, Perfect says, benefited from the luxury of time and like-minds.
“Beetlejuice was four years of development, plus an out of town trial, then we rewrote it and brought it into Broadway,” he says. “It’s the longest time I’ve ever spent writing one thing, but I saw what time does to a piece. It really enhances everything. You might end up solving a problem in the fourth year that you should have seen on the first day of school.
“With Beetlejuice, I knew my collaborators’ minds, and I trusted them. We had all the fights, arguments and dead ends we needed to have. We looked each other in the eye and held hands before we made any decisions about we would do next. We failed and we recovered.
“That is why the process on Broadway is so long and convoluted,” Perfect says. “You need to test your show from every angle.”
Beetlejuice opened on Broadway in April 2019, and closed after COVID-19 shut down all theatres in March last year. It garnered mostly positive reviews, and eight Tony Awards nominations, including best musical, and a best original score nod for Perfect.
“I didn’t want to leave my Broadway experience without feeling, on Beetlejuice, I had left everything on the table,” Perfect says. “I didn’t want to have any regrets.”
Perfect and his family moved back to Melbourne last March. The reason was partly due to New York being locked down, and mostly wanting their Brunswick lifestyle back.
“My eldest daughter is 10, and all her 10-year-old friends are like tiny 40-year-olds to me; all on their iPhones and TikTok. They all know what’s going on, and it’s very adult.
“In New York, she would go on these dates with her friends to a fancy Asian fusion restaurant. We were like, ‘We’ll give you ten bucks and you can have — what would have been when I was a kid in Australia — a lunch order.
“But for them, it’s getting prawn and chive dumplings at a fusion restaurant on the upper west side with friends,” Perfect says, laughing.
More so, Perfect said he was worried about the homework load foisted on his kids.
“There’s a ‘work harder than the next person and you’ll get ahead’ mentality in New York, which is fine. But we didn’t want that,” he says.
“I wanted my kids to have freedom and space to play and room to grow. We wanted a dog, we wanted our back yard back. I wanted to cook in my kitchen and write on a park bench. We just missed home.”
Perfect will reopen the New York diary, warts and all, in Introspective, a show of songs and stories about his Broadway run, on the Malthouse Outdoor Stage, from February 16 to 21.
“I’m not doing a chronological catalogue of what went on,” Perfect says. “It’s snippets; the process of finding an apartment, living in a neighbourhood in NY, creating two shows at once, how some experiences went great, how some went terribly, and how to recover.”
He adds: I had the best kind of anonymity in New York. I would stand at the back at the Winter Garden Theatre, watch Beetlejuice, then after the show, go out the stage door, where there would be hundreds of screaming fans holding (theatre magazine and program) Playbills in their hands, waiting to get autographs.
“There would be literally no recognition, nothing. I loved it,” Perfect says. “It was that sense you could make something people loved, but I didn’t have to be the face of it.”
Perfect says he wants to “bring the experience and knowledge of making Broadway shows to Australia,” adding: “I want to be here, and write everything from here, and put it wherever it needs to go after that. I want to bring creatives out here, and mix them with our creatives. We’ll take our shows to New York, but develop them here.”
Perfect said working on Broadway is not so different to crafting a show in Melbourne.
“The most important thing I learned was, don’t be precious, and be a good person to work with. You only get one hill to die on, so you can’t dig your heels in all the time. If you’re a bad collaborator, no one wants to work with you.”
Perfect takes a moment to consider his next thought, then runs with it. “This is going to sound corny as f---, but making Broadway shows is all about love.
“I had this very acute experience of working with people, under pressure, whom I trusted and respected. When you find those people, you just love them to death.”
For now, Eddie Perfect is home, and no doubt already sitting on a park bench devising his next move.
“I got used to working on a park bench in New York because the apartment was so small. I’d walk into Central Park and write there,” Perfect says. “I’m a bit more on my game when I’m not constantly making cups of coffee, or just staring idly into the fridge. I’m more focused just sitting in a park watching the world go by.”
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