Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall open new musical Bananaland
After scoring a hit with Muriel’s Wedding The Musical, Keir Nuttall and Kate Miller-Heidke are back with a show about their beloved home state.
No one can make a joke at their own expense quite like a Queenslander can. Think banana benders and nut farmers. Brisvegas and the Gold Coast. The white-shoe brigade. The moonlight state.
Admittedly, not all of it is funny. But the state’s propensity for self-deprecation is part of the joke in Bananaland, the new musical from true-blue Queenslanders Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall.
The show is a kind of parable about ambition and misplaced ideals, set in the world of rock music, but also cast in the long political shadow of Clive Palmer and, a generation earlier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The show’s title song is pure bubblegum pop – “Ba-na-na, Bananaland” – but with an ever-so-slightly satirical edge.
“It’s an angry political song that gets mistaken for a children’s song – it’s about Clive Palmer’s incursion into federal politics,” Nuttall says.
“It was written when Clive had all the yellow billboards everywhere – we make reference to the billboards a couple of times. By the end of the show, Bananaland is this weird utopic thing. It stops being this specific song and becomes more about the direction you’re heading in.”
Bananaland is set in a milieu the husband-and-wife songwriters know very well and are happy to have left behind. It concerns the fortunes of Ruby Semblance and Kitty Litter, her punk-rock band – sorry, “onstage conceptual art/music-oriented happening” – and the group’s unlikely second life when their undeniably catchy protest song, Bananaland, becomes a hit with children.
Both Nuttall and Miller-Heidke have done their time in pub rock and the grungier side of the music business. Nuttall in his early days was in a band called Dogmachine – the instruments included an angle grinder and a car door – and Miller-Heidke recalls her share of gigs in out-of-the-way and unappreciative places.
“There are a lot of scenes in the play that are verbatim, things that have happened to us,” she says. “The Manhattan, Launceston was one of the worst gigs of my career. And just walking into a venue and being mistaken for the merch chick: ‘You go and set up over there …’
“The late nights, the gruelling touring, the maxing-out credit cards – it’s a very familiar place for both of us.”
Like other couples, Nuttall and Miller-Heidke speak over the top of each other and finish each other’s sentences.
“Kitty Litter are unintentionally hilarious – they’re shit but they don’t know they’re shit,” Miller-Heidke says.
“They have that Spinal Tap quality,” Nuttall says. “Your music can have the best of intentions but if nobody likes it, it’s not going to change the world.”
“And how you see your art is not necessarily how other people see it,” Miller-Heidke says. “They think they’re edgy, but in fact they’re just extremely nerdy and theatrical.”
The pair are in the middle of rehearsals for Bananaland at a studio in Brisbane. A drum kit on a raised podium dominates the room. There’s a forest of pink plastic bollards and what appears to be a large inflatable penis – because what onstage conceptual art/music-oriented happening would be complete without one? (The show comes with a warning of strong language and sexual references.)
Supervising proceedings is barefoot director Simon Phillips, and on the floor are actors Max (formerly Maggie) McKenna and Georgina Hopson, who play sisters Ruby and Karen. The song they’re rehearsing is not a hard-rock headbanger or relentlessly upbeat kids’ number, but a duet for the two sisters called Grow Up and Be Kids. “You are my best friend,” they sing, while music director James Dobinson accompanies from the piano.
Miller-Heidke listens from the back of the room, scribbles Post-It notes and pipes up occasionally to give pointers on the singers’ phrasing. She wants the vocal delivery to be less like the big-note gestures of musical theatre and more like the clipped stylings of contemporary pop.
“Most of the show is this hilarious, physical comedy, and hopefully we can disarm the audience with laughter,” she says later. “But the beating heart of the story is the relationship between these sisters, and this song is the first time we see Ruby be vulnerable about her childhood. The song shows a deeper side of their relationship.”
Nuttall takes up the story of the two sisters whose parents abandoned them in childhood – they were raised by their Nana Hanrahan in a caravan in Coonabarabran – and why Ruby resists so strongly the idea they should be playing music for kids.
“She is fighting against being reminded of her childhood,” he says. “She’s like, ‘To do kids’ music, it’s a total waste, we are not doing our job as artists’.
“Karen is trying to remind her of their childhood before everything went wrong. She’s saying, ‘You don’t have to fight the whole world, we can do this together’.”
Miller-Heidke adds: “At the end, Karen has convinced Ruby that she will enter the world of children’s music with an open heart and give it a shot.”
The song may, for some audiences, recall a number for two female characters in Muriel’s Wedding, Nuttall and Miller-Heidke’s musical that opened in 2017.
That song, Amazing, also was a duet of defiant sisterhood for best friends Muriel and Rhonda. Key players in Team Muriel have reunited for Bananaland, with McKenna again in the lead role, songs by Nuttall and Miller-Heidke, and Phillips directing. The difference this time is that Bananaland is an entirely new story, not based on a film. And it’s the first time Nuttall has written the book or play of a musical. He has taken some tips from the writing of US playwright David Mamet and from his experience of working on Muriel’s Wedding with Phillips and creator PJ Hogan.
“I was just being completely dropped in the deep end, and I didn’t have any idea what was happening for the first month we worked on that – I just sat there in silence,” Nuttall recalls of the first few weeks of Muriel’s Wedding.
Miller-Heidke chimes in: “Every theatre-maker in the country is going to read this and hate your guts, by the way. ‘I just read a book about David Mamet …’.”
“That sounds overly simplistic,” Nuttall says. “That’s not really what happened. What it was really like was a three-year apprenticeship with PJ Hogan and Simon Phillips, and I just watched everything and absorbed so much from both of them.”
“Lucky he had me as a collaborator,” Miller-Heidke says. “Neither of us have studied how to write music theatre – but I have done a lot of it in my life, and opera. I did feel that I had an instinctive sense of how things tick in that world. But PJ and Simon are utter geniuses. I learned so many things.”
Nuttall and Miller-Heidke also provided songs for Phillips’ productions of Twelfth Night and As You Like It for Melbourne Theatre Company, and Miller-Heidke wrote the music for The Rabbits, an opera based on Shaun Tan’s graphic novel about colonisation.
One thing they have learned about musical theatre is to be prepared to rewrite material, to kill their darlings and start over with songs that aren’t working.
That’s what they’ve been doing with Muriel’s Wedding. The creative team recently took part in a six-week workshop in New York, ahead of Muriel’s first international season in Britain, likely next year.
Bananaland also continues to be bent into shape and made into an appealing show. The musical is a co-production between the Brisbane Festival and QPAC, building on a successful partnership that last year produced Boy Swallows Universe, the theatre adaptation of Trent Dalton’s novel. Produced with Queensland Theatre, it was the most successful show ever staged in the festival. The Brisbane Festival’s Louise Bezzina was keen to see an original work from Nuttall and Miller-Heidke, and Bananaland is the first musical the festival has commissioned.
Phillips says he could see the potential in Bananaland when Nuttall first showed him the script.
“He is doing writing for beginners – but significantly talented,” Phillips says. “I was immediately thrilled by the rhythm and spirit of the writing. He is very good at comic writing, and his sense of rhythm and dialogue is very appealing, very smart.”
What about the transformation of Kitty Litter into high-energy children’s group the Wikki-Wikki Wah-Wahs? Miller-Heidke says the idea came from watching the Wiggles with their son, Ernie, now 7, and thinking about that group’s origins in ’80s band the Cockroaches.
“It made us think, ‘What is going on, what are their inner lives like, is this what they set out to do, or did their alternative career get derailed somehow?’,” Miller-Heidke says.
“It’s the mythology of a rock band that then changed – that’s the plot of our show,” Nuttall says.
“A fictionalised version of their origins,” Miller-Heidke says.
“It’s like Ruby goes into the underworld,” Nuttall says. “The underworld just happens to be a career in kids’ music and the hellish landscape of morning TV.”
Bananaland is at QPAC, Brisbane, September 16-October 1.