Have you ever, ever felt like this? Round The Twist The Musical revives beloved Australian story
A musical version of hit children’s TV series Round the Twist will bring Australia’s favorite family from the 90s to a whole new generation.
A dirty nappy may be responsible for the creation of Australia’s next great musical.
Round the Twist – the magical and often malodorous misadventures of baby brother Bronson, older siblings Pete and Linda, and their single dad set in a lighthouse on the rugged Victorian coast – will have its world premiere staging in Brisbane next month.
Composer Paul Hodge enjoyed watching the show as a kid during the 1990s, and was attending a family gathering in late 2016 when inspiration unexpectedly struck.
“There’s this episode where Bronson saves up the stink of his feet for six months to be able to use it as a weapon to knock out the Gribble gang and to use the power to save this turtle. And every time he would use that power, he’d say: ‘Up the pong!’
“And so my mum was changing my nephew’s nappy, and she went: ‘Oh, that’s a pongy nappy’. And immediately my brain went, ‘Up the pong!’ And I thought: ‘Oh my God, Round the Twist. That’s what I should adapt as a musical’.”
Within a week of his epiphany, the determined young composer had arranged an opportunity to pitch his idea to the rights holders. Up first – a meeting in Melbourne with Jenny Buckland, the long-serving CEO of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF), which had produced the series based on the short stories of Paul Jennings.
Buckland reveals that there have been no shortage of potential suitors to adapt Round the Twist over the years, but their proposals had missed the point.
“There are all these gadgets and yuck factor (in the stories), and that’s usually what people focus on. They’re all a special part of it, but I think the real heart of Round the Twist, and very much the thing that Paul Jennings brought to it, is that concept of growing up, facing your fears, the adolescent embarrassment – that idea that we are constantly on edge that we might do something that makes us the centre of everybody’s attention at school and has them all laughing at us.”
Hodge’s early outline for the musical zeroed in on the Twist family, and how they would collectively shoulder the story and the songs. He left the meeting with Buckland’s blessing, and shortly afterwards received the green light from Jennings himself.
“I have to say, his vision has only become stronger and stronger and stronger as it’s gone on,” Buckland says.
“He’s had the input of other people, but it’s always stuck to that idea about the little kid against the world, and they’re coming to terms with the things that we’re afraid of. He does it really, really well, but there’s a lot of humour, a lot of fun, a lot of heart, all those yuck things, but the essence of it is still there.”
Jennings is one of the nation’s most prolific and successful authors – his combined works have sold more than 10 million copies. His distinctive storytelling style utilises supernatural devices and grotesque humour to reveal deeply human insights, and was shaped by an early professional experience.
At 17, fresh out of teachers’ college, Jennings was asked to look after a class of students who had special needs, and could not read. Jennings was visited by senior educators who challenged him to make a difference.
“One of them said to me: ‘If you can find a book for every kid in this class that they can read and want to read, you will have at least achieved something’.”
Jennings soon realised that focusing exclusively on the sounding out of letters and words would not achieve a breakthrough. Colourful characters and engaging plots were the sugar pill needed for the medicine to go down. Jennings applied these learnings in the classroom and quickly got results. He received further training in speech pathology, and became a lecturer with a focus on special needs and literacy at the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education (now Deakin University).
That formative workplace challenge took on a personal dimension years later when one of Jennings’s own sons was struggling to read.
“We were giving out these little things called Books for Reluctant Readers, and they were pretty boring. And I had taken one home to give to him and he was reading it aloud to me and he suddenly chucked it across the room and he yelled out: ‘Well, I’m sick of these piddly little books!’
“Because they even looked small compared to what the other kids were reading, so it was insulting really. And I thought: ‘I could write a better book than that, a better story than that’. So that was definitely a defining moment.”
The aspiring author enrolled in a creative writing course for adults, led by Carmel Bird. Buoyed by her encouragement, Jennings wrote a suite of short stories, and sent them to six local publishers. Four rejected them outright. Another said they were “too off the wall”. Penguin Books decided to give the new prospect a shot. His first book, Unreal!, was published in 1985.
Jennings’s work eventually caught the attention of the ACTF’s founding director, Patricia Edgar, who had taken one of his books to read on a flight to New Zealand, and found herself laughing uncontrollably. Edgar sought a meeting with Jennings to option the television rights, and he asked for the opportunity to write the scripts. Edgar agreed, on the proviso that he would be mentored by an experienced screenwriter and director, the late Esben Storm.
As a test, Jennings was asked to provide a draft of how the first episode would work. He needed multiple attempts before Edgar and Storm were convinced. The translation of short stories to the small screen was a sticking point – by this stage Jennings had published four popular collections, but the series needed a stable set of characters, and a narrative through-line.
Jennings hasn’t hidden that Round the Twist was written from life – one of his sons is named Bronson, and one of his daughters is named Linda.
“Pete was me as a boy, and the father was me as a man, in my own mind,” he explains.
“The real heart of Round the Twist, and very much the thing that Paul Jennings brought to it, is that concept of growing up, facing your fears, the adolescent embarrassment.”
For several years, Jennings lived with his four children at a windswept spot overlooking Warrnambool Bay. It was a wild place alive with spirits and stories, and the family occupied a rickety house that been transported from a farm 100km away.
By the time writing for the first season began, the family had moved to nearby Warrnambool, where Jennings still lives. But those seaside experiences etched a lasting impression on the author, who was keen for Round the Twist to be set in Port Campbell on the Great Ocean Road, in a fictional lighthouse in lieu of the farmhouse.
Jennings received a quick lesson on the realities of television production – an existing building within two hours’ drive of Melbourne was required so that the cast and crew could commute each day. The Split Point Lighthouse in Aireys Inlet got the nod, and was transformed into Port Niranda for the show.
Buckland shares that diehard fans from around the world have travelled to the lighthouse over the years, with some dismayed to find that the infamous outhouse, haunted by a skeleton in the very first episode, does not actually exist. (The local council was considering recreating the iconic dunny as a tourist attraction, before Covid-19 hit).
Hodge, who has written the book, music, and lyrics for the musical, is pleased to be telling a beloved Australian story, using our own idiom.
“The good thing about the relief to be writing in an Australian accent is rhymes … we don’t pronounce our ‘r’, which changes the rhymes.
“In America, ‘before’ and ‘law’ don’t rhyme, but before and law rhyme in Australian. And so it opens up other rhyme possibilities that don’t exist in an American accent.”
Buckland began her career at the ACTF as a young lawyer negotiating the foreign rights sales for Round the Twist, and recalls a memorable experience pitching the show to an executive from the United States.
“There’s a scene in one of the episodes where Mr Gribble is upsetting Mr Twist, and the Gribble kids say: ‘Sorry, Mr Twist is going to chuck a wobbly’, and this guy in America’s going: ‘What do they mean he’s going to chuck a wobbly? Is he going to barf or something?’ So, they thought he was going to be sick, but he was going to lose his temper.”
The ACTF was kept busy for many years co-ordinating the contracts for Round the Twist to air in 157 different territories. The show won numerous awards, and in 1998 an expert panel selected it for a two-hour “dream block” of children’s television alongside beloved series including The Simpsons, and Rugrats. One of Buckland’s favourite pieces of fan mail was received by a nine-year-old boy from Ireland, who had enjoyed the first season. His letter to the ACTF read: “If Paul Jennings is not writing a second series of Round The Twist, then lock him up and make him.”
Despite its long tail of success, the show was not an immediate hit – at least in Australia. (The BBC aired Season 1 first, in April 1990, and Channel 7 followed in August of that same year. It wasn’t until 1993, when the ABC started broadcasting Season 2, that the series really took off at home).
Hodge has drawn on the first two seasons only to power the musical (there were four in total). The composer keeps mum about which plot lines and fantastical creatures have made the cut. He does reveal that the earworm theme song composed by Andrew Duffield is part of the score, however.
Director Simon Phillips, who has developed a reputation for adapting classic Australian stories for the stage, thinks Round the Twist will charm a multi-generational audience here and abroad. (Queensland Theatre and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre are producing the musical, which received seed funding from the Australian government as part of an initiative to bolster local creative industries in the wake of Covid-19).
Phillips admits that he had not watched Round the Twist, nor read the short stories, prior to being engaged to direct the musical. He quickly immersed himself in the TV series to help Hodge untangle and connect the various plot points scattered throughout the 26 episodes that were within scope. To make the story work on stage, Hodge has soldered various odds and ends together, and also invented entirely new plot devices.
“He is attempting on one hand to be very faithful to the original material, and on the other hand can’t be, because he has to make two hours of theatre as opposed to 20 hours of television,” Phillips says.
Working closely with designers Renee Mulder (set and costumes) and Craig Wilkinson (audiovisual), Phillips has sought a balance between old school theatrical magic, and digital wizardry. It is an entirely different landscape from Phillips’ previous projects, which include the successful musical versions of Muriel’s Wedding, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Ladies in Black.
“We knew that it was kooky. We knew that it’s a world full of supernatural elements, and to pretend that we could make those entirely believable would be hubris to a foolhardy extent. So we needed to find a language that we felt could deliver that world.”
Buckland will be in Brisbane for opening night, but Jennings will remain in Warrnambool.
At 81, health issues have stopped the author from travelling long distances, although Hodge has been in regular contact throughout the development process, and recently visited the writer at home.
Jennings has a simple wish for the musical.
“What I’m hoping is that all the joy that it had brought to kids and their parents back then, happens again for a new generation. And I always thought, if you make children happy and they laugh or have a nice time, that’s a hell of a nice thing to do.”
Round The Twist The Musical will appear at the Playhouse Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre from November 12 to December 8.
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