Groundhog Day the Musical opens at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre
Songwriter Tim Minchin, writer Danny Rubin and director Matthew Warchus explain how they have brought a favourite movie to the musical stage.
When the clock radio clicks over to 6am on February 2 in Punxsutawney, the day begins again for grouchy TV weatherman Phil Connors. That’s the premise of 1993 rom-com Groundhog Day, whose title has become a byword for monotonous repetition – signalled in the movie by the endless replaying of I Got You Babe on the clock radio.
In remaking Groundhog Day for the musical theatre stage, composer and lyricist Tim Minchin was adamant he wouldn’t be using, sampling or otherwise referring to the Sonny and Cher hit. “I am passionate about not dragging other people’s music into a score – I think it’s a complete curse,” he says. “If you inherit a story that has a song attached to it, you’re screwed, really.”
For Minchin, the great thing about making Groundhog Day The Musical – it had its world premiere in London in 2016, followed by Broadway, and opens in Melbourne next week – was being given permission to write original material and to try new ideas.
Instead of recycling Sonny and Cher, he wrote a theme song for Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog whose powers of prognostication can predict whether spring is coming, or if there’ll be another six weeks of winter. The show begins with an extended and relentlessly upbeat musical sequence called Day One.
“The song comes on the radio – ‘Who is that, who is that, emerging from his burrow?’ – and Phil is getting out of his duvet like a little marsupial,” Minchin says. “It does a bunch of stuff that a Sonny and Cher song was never going to have the capacity to do – it gets to have thematic weight, it sets up a musical idea which is repeated later, it gets to be a tonal representation of the town. Musicals are really exciting when you dig into it, because you are doing three things at once.”
Danny Rubin, writer of the original Groundhog Day and the book of its musical theatre reinvention, chimes in.
“This was going to be a different retelling, a different storyteller, a different medium, telling the same story,” he says of the musical. “I never thought I Got You Babe was necessary to connect it to the story.”
“It is nowhere near as annoying as the song I subsequently wrote to be the wake-up song,” Minchin says. “You hear this bloody song over and over again on that day. It’s doing to the audience what is being done to Phil. The first 25 minutes of the musical is about giving the audience a visceral sense of being trapped in a sort of horrendous small-town musical.”
“I remember when you wrote it,” Rubin says. “I thought, ‘that works perfectly’.”
Minchin, Rubin and director Matthew Warchus are speaking on a video call ahead of the Australian premiere of Groundhog Day at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre. They are calling across time zones: early morning for Minchin in Melbourne, the previous evening for Warchus in London, and the previous day for Rubin in New Mexico. The mind-bending time difference is a good approximation for the time-loop scenario that is the basis for Groundhog Day.
Rubin wrote the original story for Groundhog Day – the film featuring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell continues to be a favourite – and he owns certain adaptation rights, including for a musical. He had toyed with the idea of a musical Groundhog Day years before Minchin and Warchus became involved.
“I knew I had the rights, among other things, to make a musical out of it,” Rubin says. “My first thought was, ‘I would love to do that’. I held on to it and played with it for many years. I had many inquiries over the years from other people who thought it might be a good idea – one of those was Stephen Sondheim. When I heard that he thought it was a good idea, I knew I wasn’t crazy.”
Warchus had previously worked with Minchin on their musical, Matilda, based on Roald Dahl’s novel about a free-spirited schoolgirl. With Groundhog Day, he saw potential for a musical in the story about the pain of existence and the possibility of redemption, all wrapped up with comedy and music.
“(The story) is enormously entertaining, and it’s about the biggest possible things – you have to love life, and you have to accept death,” he says. “We watch somebody struggle with that, and eventually find a way through. That’s what appeals to me: meaty substance, deep philosophical, political stuff that can contain frustration and anger and pain and struggle – and have redemption and uplift as well.”
Warchus is the artistic director at London theatre The Old Vic, whose recent productions there have included A Christmas Carol. His version of the Charles Dickens classic, adapted by Jack Thorne, has been staged in Melbourne featuring David Wenham as Ebenezer Scrooge. Is there a similarity between Scrooge and Groundhog Day’s grouch, Phil Connors?
“For sure – it’s pretty much the same show,” Warchus says. “Both characters are people who cut themselves off from life, for a reason that we would assume is ego or nastiness, but it’s something psychologically to do with fear of life. They are in a supernatural story, whereby they are forced to unclench their fist and reach out and get into the swim of life, and value other people, not just themselves.”
He describes the story of Groundhog Day as a parable, similar in theme to A Christmas Carol and Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
“Groundhog Day turned up as a mainstream, popular piece of entertainment, but it was a trojan horse from the very beginning, that was carrying inside it all of this great stuff,” he says. “People will be surprised, I think, at the potential this story has, what it has inside it, that has been unlocked by Tim’s writing. That is the great thing that songs can do – they can bring subtext up to the surface and make it explicit, just like a close-up does in a movie.”
The show when it opened in London in 2016 was a hit with critics and audiences but was not a commercial success when it transferred to Broadway the next year. After a trouble-prone preview season it closed after six months and a planned US tour was cancelled. The creative team explains that despite the show having positive reviews in New York – “The most critically acclaimed show that year,” Minchin says – it came up against competition from other popular shows and was unable to attract ticket-buyers in the numbers required.
A constant in the show since the beginning has been its leading man, Andy Karl, as Phil. He created the role in the original London season, took it to Broadway, returned for a London season last year, and is preparing to open in Melbourne.
“He is just so amazingly talented, he is fun to watch, he is a great actor, he can dance, he’s a great singer,” Rubin says. “It’s such a huge character role – a dark, cynical person (who becomes) a believably transformed man who loves his life and where he is with it. And he pulls it off.”
“Andy is extraordinary,” Minchin says.
“Bill Murray loved him,” Warchus says. “One of the things people might be thinking is, ‘I can’t get Bill Murray out of my head’. Well, within about 21 seconds of the show, that’s gone, and you are on the ride with Andy. It’s partly to do with the writing and production, but it’s a lot to do with Andy’s expertise and lovability in the role.”
Appearing with Karl is Australian actor Elise McCann as Rita, a TV producer and Phil’s love interest in the show. But who or what is the groundhog in Groundhog Day? As Minchin’s lyrics have it: “Is it a squirrel, is it a beaver? It’s kind of both but not quite either.”
“It’s a real groundhog, by the way,” Minchin says, pulling a leg. “It’s why the show is quite expensive to run. You have to breed all these groundhogs.”
“You need four groundhogs per show,” says Rubin.
“There is a man in a groundhog costume, crucially, which is not something that’s in the film,” Warchus says. “The groundhog is called Punxsutawney Phil, and the main character is Phil. And not only that, there are several human Phils in the production as well – because of all of the sleight of hand and the magic.”
Warchus adds that audiences may be surprised at how successfully Groundhog Day has been reworked for the musical stage.
“This is a work of art,” he says. “Sorry, guys, you must be cringing, but it’s where art meets entertainment. It’s very special, and I think our love for it has just intensified over the years we have worked on it, and hasn’t dimmed at all.”
Minchin says he is proud to be bringing his musical to Melbourne after the success of Matilda, his earlier show with Warchus.
“I get a lot of inquiries about musicals, and I nearly always feel like ‘yeah, nah’,” Minchin says. “The idea (for Groundhog Day) coming from Matthew meant that I was very inclined to say yes.
“It’s a redemptive story about how to be a good person. That feels good. And it felt like a difficult thing to do, and that felt good. I am much more attracted to writing a musical about something that’s almost impossible – musically and philosophically.”
Groundhog Day The Musical is at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne from January 24.