Author names Keating, The Sentimental Bloke and Priscilla as most successful Australian musicals

The Australian Musical by Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston traces the origins of the homegrown show.

David Harris, Tony Sheldon and Euan Doidge during dress rehearsals for Priscilla Queen Of The Desert The Musical. Picture: Sam Tabone

The origin of the homegrown Australian musical was not in one of the music halls of colonial Sydney or Melbourne, or the work of impresario JC Williamson, or an impromptu entertainment born in a shearers shed or Anzac troopship. The first Australian musical had its premiere in 1920 at the Prince of Wales Theatre (now Her Majesty’s) in Adelaide, and had a mysterious three-letter title, FFF.

It was the story of Fitzwilliam “Fitz” Ferguson, a budding playwright, and his typist sweetheart Flo. The show’s title was part marketing ploy, part plot device, driving the action to the final number, The Riddle of FFF.

This nugget of Aussie show business lore is contained in a lovingly compiled new volume, The Australian Musical by Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston. Well before the age of current musical-theatre talents such as Kate Miller-Heidke, Tim Minchin and Eddie Perfect, Australia had a busy, if not always successful, musical industry.

READ MORE Eddie Perfect’s Broadway break | PJ Hogan’s diary of Muriel’s Wedding | Tim Minchin and the making of Matilda

Pinne and Johnston’s two-part book comprises a history of the musical’s development in this country, followed by an A-Z of show titles with descriptions of the musicals, their creative teams and performances. It lists 324 shows, but Johnston says he and Pinne have identified double that number.

What, exactly, defines an Australian musical is not so easy to answer. Pinne’s and Johnston’s book certainly includes shows written by Australian writers, on Australian subjects, and produced on Australian soil, such Reg Livermore’s Ned Kelly (1977), Seven Little Australians (1988), Nick Enright’s Peter Allen musical The Boy From Oz (1998) and Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (2014) among many others.

But it also includes Minchin’s Matilda, produced in Britain by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Chu Chin Chow, the 1916 show produced and written by Geelong-born Oscar Ashe. It opened on the West End and ran for an astonishing 2238 performances, making it the world’s longest running show of the day.

The ability to produce a hit show can seem to be the product of some alchemical process, but Johnston breaks it down to several components. Successful Australian musicals, he says, typically are energised by a knockabout larrikin spirit, coupled with urbanity and wit. It’s a clever concoction that political strategists would kill for, could it ever be bottled.

“When you look at the successes and failures, the things that work in Australia are shows that tap a subversive humour, the larrikin spirit, the underdog who triumphs in some way,” Johnston says. “These to me are the quintessential Australian qualities that we find in our most successful musicals.”

Something of that character was captured in The Sentimental Bloke, the original musical by Albert Arlen and Nancy Brown, based on CJ Dennis’s verse. Johnston ranks it as the most successful original musical of the 20th century, breaking all box-office records. It opened at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 1961 and played for 154 performances, before touring to Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and New Zealand, followed by a regional tour.

Another popular and box-office hit is Casey Bennetto’s Keating. Again, it has the requisite larrikinism and wit, embodied in Mike McLeish’s portrayal of the Bankstown kid who rises to the highest office in the land. It opened at the Trades Hall in Melbourne in 2005 as kind of political cabaret. Later, it was picked up by director Neil Armfield and developed into a two-act show.

Johnston says that, while it is difficult accurately to calculate a musical’s earnings, in his estimation Keating comes out ahead as the highest earning musical with an original score to have been produced this century. That makes it more successful, financially speaking, than near contenders such as Muriel’s Wedding and Ladies in Black. “All my research leads to Keating as the most successful musical of this century to date, whether by gross or net profits,” he says.

It may be that the subject resonated with audiences, but Johnston puts the success of Keating down to the quality of the writing. The show does not have exposition or dialogue: all aspects of the story and characters are revealed in the clever songs, such as I Remember Kirribilli (“And I remember Kirribilli / The promise that he did not keep”) and Heavens, Mr Evans (“My heart’s in peril, Cheryl”).

“It’s the quality of the writing, a literary quality that comes through in a very Australian way,” Johnston says. “One thing I have learned as a writer is brevity. When you read the books (scripts) of Australian musicals from the past, and sometimes in the present, they have far too many words, but the best musicals don’t have that. They have the brevity that is a characteristic of (lyricist Oscar) Hammerstein’s writing.”

Far bigger gross earnings have been made from jukebox musicals, or pastiches built on existing songs. Some have been spectacularly successful. Priscilla Queen of the Desert, with its drag queens and disco soundtrack, has grossed more than $1bn, Johnston says, since its first appearance in 2006. Productions have been staged on the West End, Broadway and every continent except Antarctica. The next most successful musical of this kind is The Boy From Oz, written by Enright with Peter Allen’s exuberant songs.

Johnston identifies problems shared by musical flops. Massive budgets are no guarantee of success, although money spent at the right stage of development can help. A musical should be adequately workshopped before public performances, he says, and then rigorously appraised against an audience’s response.

“Very often we go about things the wrong way, throwing money at things that people don’t want to listen to, lyrics that don’t have sufficient polish,” he says. “That’s why the American system is the one that we should be following. You have to ruthlessly critique the quality of the work in front of an audience, until you know that you have an audience for the work that you’ve written. In the end, this is a ruthlessly commercial business.”

Musicals also can suffer from design by committee when, instead, they need a strong authorial voice. Manning Clark’s History of Australia, freighted with patriotic expectations, was funded by multiple government partners, private investors and sponsor Qantas, but closed after 37 performances and was, at the time, the greatest box-office failure in the history of the Australian musical. Directed by John Bell, it had three composers, three writers and additional material from other sources including Clark’s six-volume History.

“A group of people got together and wrote the musical, really like a collective,” Johnston says. “The last thing you need is a series of people constantly rewriting each other’s work. You need someone with the creative vision, and we have people like that in Australia.”

Johnston’s book springs from a lifetime immersed in musical theatre. The first musical he saw, in the 1960s, was The Sound of Music with June Bronhill as Maria von Trapp. It led him and his sisters to put on their own mini version of the Rodgers and Hammer­stein favourite for friends and family.

When, a few years later, he saw Pinne’s musical Caroline, about migrant welfare pioneer Caroline Chisholm, he started keeping clippings about Australian musicals. These now amount to 25 volumes of scrapbooks. He says he wrote The Australian Musical with Pinne because there was no such resource available for anyone who wanted to research our musical theatre history.

“For many years it bothered me,” he says. “I was interested in writing music and lyrics for myself, and now I’ve written three of my own musicals. But there was nowhere you could go that helped anyone do that because you couldn’t find out what people had done in the past: what had succeeded and what hadn’t succeeded. I thought this is a way that I can contribute, by writing the history.”

It brings us back to the musical that started it all. What the fortissimo was FFF about?

Although Johnston and historian Frank van Straten have identified it as the first professionally produced all-Australian book musical, FFF failed after a disastrous tour and ended in tragedy for writer and investor Jack De Garis, of the Sunraysed dried-fruit company in Mildura. With debts from FFF and other ventures amounting to £400,000, he took his own life in 1926. He never revealed the secret of FFF and what it meant.

The Australian Musical by Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston (Allen & Unwin, $79.99).