Eddie Perfect pays tribute to Shane Warne and Barry Humphries
As he prepares to give a songwriting masterclass, Eddie Perfect reveals some secrets behind Shane Warne: The Musical and Beetlejuice.
Eddie Perfect had just finished the second preview of his show, Shane Warne: The Musical, in 2008 when he was summoned to meet Warne himself. Perfect, by no means a cricket tragic, had written the book, lyrics and music for the show, and also appeared as Warne in cricket whites and bleached hair. It was a hilarious send-up of the spin bowler, his celebrity and relationship dramas – one of the songs was called What an SMS I’m In – but how would the great man take it?
“I was summoned to meet him in an Italian restaurant over the road,” Perfect recalls of their encounter near Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre. “He was in a booth with his manager, James Erskine. I had bleach-blond hair, I was dipped in fake tan – it was a bizarre experience. But thankfully he really loved the show.
“A lot of the preconceptions (of the show) were that it was going to be a piss-take, with me in my undies, being mean to Shane Warne, making him the fodder of punchlines. To be honest, I wasn’t interested in spending my energy tearing somebody down. I think you have to write from a place of love.”
Shane Warne: The Musical says several things about Perfect’s approach to writing music for the stage. First, that place of love. He can’t write songs in the abstract. There needs to be a motivating idea or subject. Second, music and lyrics can work together, or can be more exciting if they rub against each other in clever juxtaposition. And third, says the Broadway songwriter who never formally studied songwriting, you have to give yourself permission. Permission to try, and permission to fail.
Perfect will lead a masterclass in songwriting for the stage in a special session at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival this weekend. In The Blank Page, Perfect and theatre-makers Dean Bryant, Mathew Frank, Gillian Cosgriff and Michelle Brasier will explore their creative process, from the inkling of an idea to fully formed song.
Perfect, 45, has had a multifaceted career, from writing music and lyrics for the Broadway adaptation of Beetlejuice – the show is now on a North American tour – to appearing in stage musicals such as 9 to 5, having runs on TV with Play School and Offspring, and writing the Matesong for Kylie Minogue to sing in a Tourism Australia commercial.
He’d started off studying visual art, but found painting and drawing wasn’t the way for him to express himself. Later, at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, he started to find his voice.
“I studied musical theatre as a performer, and I was writing music for the stage, but I never studied songwriting, never really studied the piano or music theory,” he says. “I felt like a fraud. It took me 10 years just to give myself permission to be a writer. People say, ‘I’m not a writer, I’m not a composer’. I break out the rubber stamp: ‘Just f..ken do it’.”
To write a song, he needs a motivating idea: a drama, a situation or a character that will push him towards rhyme and melody. A book musical – one that has a script or scenario already worked out – gives him the cues he needs. But he bucks against the received wisdom that a character should only break into song when their emotions can’t be expressed in spoken dialogue alone.
“I see it differently,” he says. “You’ve got the words, they will create a certain imagery, and tell you how this character expresses themselves – whether they lean into emotion, or whether they try desperately to suppress it, whether they are funny, whether they are angry.
“The text is a huge part of it. But then you have the music, which is like an emotional shadow that follows everything. You either have the music play completely in sync with the lyric, or the music can play against the lyric. You can have a bright Latin big band with horrendous lyrics – I think you can get away with a lot more in a song that way, when you have these two things play off each other.”
Perfect had a hit at home with Shane Warne: The Musical but was unknown in the US when he sent songs, on spec, to the producers of Beetlejuice. He was the last to join the creative team working on the Broadway adaptation of the 1988 Tim Burton movie, and then followed another five years of writing and creative development. He says it was a hugely stimulating experience to work with writers Scott Brown and Anthony King and director Alex Timbers after he had been used to writing music in isolation.
“You realise that, as a writer, your capacity to lie to yourself is almost infinite,” he says. “But when you work with other people, everything gets interrogated.”
Beetlejuice had its premiere in Washington, DC in November 2018 and the critic for The Washington Post wasn’t impressed, finding it “overcaffeinated, overstuffed and virtually charmless”. Perfect and his collaborators were gutted, but pulled themselves together and substantially reworked the show for its Broadway premiere just six months later.
“Between DC and New York, we just refused to die, and rewrote the show for Broadway,” he says. “It’s the creative experience that I’m most proud of in my life.”
The Cabaret Festival gets under way on Friday with the popular Variety Gala, featuring former festival directors Kate Ceberano, David Campbell, Ali McGregor, Julia Zemiro and Perfect.
One of the directors missing from the line-up is Barry Humphries, who programmed the 2015 festival. He was another in the audience who saw Perfect’s turn as Shane Warne.
“I remember when Barry Humphries came in, at the Athenaeum,” he says. “He just walked into my dressing room. I’m such a gi-normous Barry Humphries fan – it was like getting a blessing from the pope.
“He loved the show, but he also got what I was trying to say with the show. He was incredibly generous and supportive.”
The Blank Page with Eddie Perfect is in the Banquet Room, Adelaide Festival Centre, June 11. The Adelaide Cabaret Festival continues to June 24.
