By Nick Dent
About a week after Courtney Monsma was cast in one of the lead roles of blockbuster musical Wicked, her sister Emily phoned her in tears.
“She said, ‘I got in!’ and I started bawling my eyes out,” Courtney recalls. “It wasn’t until I found out she was in it too that I celebrated for myself as well.”
Courtney, 26, is playing Glinda, or the “good witch”, opposite Sheridan Adams as Elphaba, the green-skinned “wicked witch”. Emily, 28, is playing multiple roles as a member of the ensemble – and is also covering (understudying) her sister’s role.
“Just to be a part of it is amazing, but doing it together is the best,” says Emily. “I’m her biggest fan.”
“It’s not often that you get to sit at home, either unwell or on leave, and think that your sister’s living her dream,” Courtney says.
Coincidences seem to coalesce around Wicked. The Lyric Theatre, QPAC, where the musical is playing until November 24, is the venue where the sisters first saw the show, from seats up the back, as teenagers on a school excursion.
“Glinda doesn’t understand her privilege, but everything she does, she does it 100 per cent.” Courtney Monsma (right) stars in Wicked opposite Sheridan Adams.Credit: Jeff Busby
At the time they waited at the stage door for autographs from cast members Lucy Durack and Jemma Rix. Now, Courtney has played Glinda opposite Rix herself, who has made a celebrated return to Oz after nine years to provide occasional cover for Adams.
But one of the Monsmas’ former teachers is not surprised. Paul Sabey, director of the Queensland Academy of Excellence in Musical Theatre at Griffith University, says that siblings excelling at song and dance is something he has seen several times since founding the bachelor of musical theatre course 12 years ago.
“We also had Jackson and Liam Head, and now Liam is playing Fiyero in Wicked and Jackson was Gaston in Beauty and the Beast,” he says.
Sabey recalls the sisters as “beautiful people, incredibly talented, committed to their own development as well as the development of others”.
“That’s the thing that’s quite special about them: they care about other people’s success.”
Their path down the yellow brick road began when both were children growing up in Tallebudgera on the Gold Coast. Courtney recalls being eight, seeing 10-year-old Emily starring in a production of Annie, and thinking “I can do that”.
As kids, they were both cast to share a role in a community production of Gypsy before the producers realised they were related.
Wicked was always a firm favourite. Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical debuted on Broadway 20 years ago and has played ever since, seen by more than 67 million people. A long-gestating Hollywood movie version arrives at the end of the year.
Based on a novel by Gregory Maguire, the show takes place before the events in the book and film The Wizard of Oz, and explores concepts of prejudice, tyranny and disinformation. If anything, it’s more relevant than ever.
The sisters are graduates in the musical theatre degree course at Griffith University.Credit: Jeff Busby
“It’s a great show,” Sabey says. “It takes the audience on a fantastic journey, and it’s really exciting for a performer to actually have something meaty to get their teeth into.”
The Monsmas grew up dueting on Wicked’s bangers like Defying Gravity, Popular and The Wizard and I. “I would often be Elphaba, because I have the darker hair, and Emily would sing Glinda,” Courtney says.
The younger Monsma went straight from her Griffith degree into plum roles in Mamma Mia!, Aladdin, Six and Frozen (playing Anna to Jemma Rix’s Elsa).
Emily has been in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and productions of Hairspray and Grease. After more than 400 performances of Wicked in Sydney and Melbourne, she (as well as another standby, Jordan Malone) has had the chance to ride the giant bubble as Glinda several times.
The sisters cohabit while on tour, but that doesn’t always mean Emily will get much notice that she’s going on in Courtney’s place.
“Sometimes you get to the theatre and illness can hit you really quickly,” Courtney says.
“That was incredible – my first show,” Emily recalls.
“It was a sister saving-the-show kind of moment,” says Courtney. “It’s this extra layer of support that I feel within the role, which is really beautiful.”
Wicked is playing at the Lyric Theatre, QPAC, until November 24, then at the Crown Theatre, Perth, from December 15.