How Eddie Perfect got his big Broadway break
The reviews have been harsh, but as an ‘unknown’ in NY, Eddie Perfect’s surprise storming of Broadway is a king-sized achievement.
Eddie Perfect is standing in the foyer of New York’s Broadway Theatre on a winter’s night watching the crowds shuffle towards their seats for the performance of King Kong. This should be the fun part, where he gets to see how a Broadway crowd reacts to the musical score he has penned for the stage version of the classic tale of the giant gorilla. Instead, Perfect sips on a red wine and beats himself up. “There is no sitting in there and basking in the glory of your own work,” he says. Instead, “I see all the battles I lost, the things I could have improved. This is the alchemy part where you get to see if what you wrote resonates with people, but to get to this point there are about 5.9 billion arguments and fights and things I wish I did better and things I wished I’d changed or were clearer.”
It’s clear that Perfect is, pardon the pun, a perfectionist, and this Melbourne songwriter, singer, comedian and actor is his own biggest critic. Harsh reviews of the show, and his music, haven’t helped. But as we are about to take our seats he ignores his inner demons for a moment and smiles when asked about his unlikely journey from the bayside suburb of Mentone to Broadway. “Yeah, crazy isn’t it,” he says.
Like King Kong, Perfect, at 41, finds himself as the random outsider trying to navigate a new and unexpected life in New York.
Having sprung from nowhere — according to Americans, at least — Perfect materialised in Manhattan to write the musical score for not one but two giant Broadway productions. As well as his work on King Kong, which opened in November, he has written the entire score of the musical adaptation of Beetlejuice, which opens on Broadway on April 25. It’s a big-time moment that has the Broadway crowd asking: Just who is this spiky-haired Australian?
When The Washington Post learnt that his previous best-known work was Shane Warne: The Musical, it couldn’t help but ponder how Perfect got his big break. “A musical about a former captain of the Australian national team playing something called ‘limited overs cricket’ was never a safe bet to get him noticed,” the Post wrote.
For years the dream had bubbled inside Perfect that he might one day write a musical that would work on the international stage. But for a New York agent flicking down his long resumé, there was a fundamental problem. It was all so damned Australian. Beyond Shane Warne: the Musical, there was Songs from the Middle about his childhood in Mentone, his role as Mick Holland in Network Ten’s Offspring; his star turn as Alexander Downer in the musical Keating!, his Melbourne comedy festivals, his one-man shows like “Drink Pepsi, Bitch”, his political satire about John Howard and Kevin Rudd, and appearances on TV shows from Kath & Kim to Blue Heelers.
Yes, he had won awards and yes, he had a strong following in Australia — but on Broadway it was like, Who is this guy? “Everything I wrote was so quintessentially Australian,” Perfect says. “I mean that’s where I was, that was the conversation I wanted to have, that was the audience I was writing for. But as a result I was hamstrung in terms of getting things out of the country.”
On the day we meet, Perfect looks tired as he sitson a couch in an office just off Times Square wearing torn black jeans and a grey sweatshirt. He has spent the morning scribbling down rewrites of Beetlejuice while sitting in the Ladies’ Pavilion in Central Park overlooking the lake. He says it’s the place he writes best, but it’s also close to his heart — he married Lucy Cochran there in 2009 during their first visit to the city. His sleeves are rolled up just enough to show the 40th birthday present she gave him in December 2017: a large tattoo of superb fairy-wrens on each arm. “I want to cover myself in Australian birds one day,” he says. “I especially love black cockatoos.”
It is almost 11 months since Perfect emptied the family home in Melbourne’s East Brunswick and moved with Lucy and their two daughters, Kitty, nine, and Charlotte, six, to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Even for Perfect, who thrives on being busy, doing that while also working on two Broadway shows has swallowed all of him. “I don’t know who I am outside of writing,” he laughs. “I am a musical theatre composer and a lyricist and a husband and a dad and I don’t know what else I do. I used to have hobbies.”
One day he might look back and see a potential script in how he earned his shot at Broadway. He traces it back to a flat spot in 2014, after he’d penned some songs for the stage production of Strictly Ballroom at the request of director Baz Luhrmann. The experience had further reminded Perfect that despite his local success as a singer, comedian and actor, it was composing musical theatre that he loved most. “It’s always been what I wanted to do but I didn’t know how to do it,” he says. “Also, it was kind of depressing because there was nothing else in terms of music theatre on the horizon. So my wife was like, ‘Just get a ticket to New York and go’.”
He knew no one in New York, let alone someone who might back him. So he called everyone he could think of who might have a connection. It was his old friend and fellow composer Tim Minchin who came to the rescue. Minchin and Perfect, who both studied at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, had toured and written together in Australia when both were trying to forge their careers. Minchin, who was by then living in Los Angeles, connected Perfect with his own New York-based manager, the powerful and well-connected John Buzzetti, who had worked on Hamilton, The Book of Mormon and Frozen among many other productions.
Buzzetti listened to Perfect’s work and gave him some blunt feedback. “He said, ‘It’s very Australian’,” Perfect recalls. “‘I don’t know what the f..k cricket is or who Shane Warne is or where Mentone is but I really like the voice in your writing and I’d like to work with you.’ So I got an agent.”
But that didn’t mean Perfect had landed a job. When Minchin told Perfect that composers were being sought to write the music for Beetlejuice, the Broadway adaptation of the 1988 dark comedy fantasy movie starring Michael Keaton, Perfect asked Buzzetti if he could pitch for the job. Buzzetti tested the waters with the Beetlejuice people but replied, “Look, I asked, but they don’t know who you are; your material is very Australian. I like it but they can’t quite grasp it — they are going with heavy hitters so I think you need to let this one go.” Perfect was getting desperate, so he broke with Broadway convention and offered to write for free. “I said, ‘What if I wrote two songs on spec — wouldn’t cost them any time or money. If they hate them, fine’,” he recalls. “I was a complete nobody with my hands out begging for a shot. And miraculously, they agreed.”
From a small studio at his East Brunswick home in 2015, Perfect composed the two most important songs of his life. “I turned myself inside out,” he says. “I would sit in my studio writing all day, emailing the songs to myself and then walking around the streets of Brunswick with my headphones on. That’s the way I can be the most objective about my writing.”
For the song about the multi-personality character of Beetlejuice, Perfect wrote a high-risk piece that lurched wildly from genre to genre, dripping in comedy and dark whimsy. Eventually he held his breath and pressed the send button. Scott Brown was standing in his kitchen in Massachusetts when he first pressed play to hear Perfect’s songs. Brown, who had been writing the show since 2011, had been involved in several dead-end searches for a composer who could capture the dark comedy of his piece. “I was in my kitchen and I just remember laughing over my kitchen counter,” he tells me. “We weren’t familiar with Eddie; I don’t think anybody was at the time. But Eddie just came roaring out of the gate with a few songs that he wrote on spec and they were hilarious. He has such love for and respect for musical theatre and conventions but he is also a wonderful beautiful brat, he’s got a bit of that punk rock sensibility and he is really funny — that just made it an easy choice.”
On the basis of just three songs — Perfect thought of another one at 3am one day and included it — the Beetlejuice producers gave a virtual unknown one of the best jobs on Broadway. “I couldn’t believe it — I mean nobody knew me or the stuff I had done in Australia, they liked the song. It was such a great validation. I was walking into work along Spring Street, just opposite the Princess Theatre, when I got a call from John Buzzetti who said, ‘Guess what, you got the job.’ I was so shocked that I lay down on the footpath and I was lying there screaming, ‘No f..king way’. It was the dream. I mean, when does that ever happen?”
Some might think someone so multi-talented was destined for such a dream from an early age. They would be dead wrong, says Perfect, who claims he fell “arse-backwards” into his career.
Raised with his two sisters in Mentone in Melbourne’s south-east, Perfect’s childhood was happy but unspectacular. His parents, Tom and Judy Perfect, were high school teachers. Tom sang in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra choir; Judy was arts co-ordinator at her school. While Eddie took piano lessons from the age of five, he stopped at seven after his piano teacher realised he was playing by ear rather than reading the music. He came to love musicals at an early age, listening to Sweeney Todd and The Pirates of Penzance in his parents’ Kombi van on camping trips. Inspired by bands like Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses he chose to learn guitar, and then took that knowledge of chords back to the piano and taught himself how to play properly.
Perfect graduated as dux of St Bede’s College in Mentone but was not sure what he wanted to do. He tried visual arts at RMIT then classical singing at the University of Melbourne before getting into the small musical theatre course at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth. “That was my big life change,” he says. “That’s when I discovered writing for the theatre and I was like, ‘This is the art that I’ve been missing’.”
In 2007, at the age of 29, Perfect knew he wanted to write a major stage musical. But what about? “I was on tour with Max Gillies doing a show called The Big Con,” he recalls. “Every city I went to there was a new newspaper clipping about Shane Warne — either he was selling Advanced Hair or he had lost or won the Ashes or he was divorced from his wife — and I said to my manager jokingly, ‘Someone should write a musical about this guy’. I like polarising characters and to me he represented everything that we are proud of and ashamed of as Australians.”
Perfect read every book there was to read about Warne and penned the musical. To his delight and surprise, it was a hit with both critics and audiences, even if it didn’t ultimately make him any money. Even Warne liked it, sneaking quietly into the show after a few beers to calm his nerves about how he might be portrayed.
Those days now feel like a distant memory for Perfect, who has been consumed for the past three years writing the entire score of 20 songs for Beetlejuice and seven of the nine tunes for King Kong. For several months last year, both productions were rehearsing at the same time on different floors of the same building on 42nd St, forcing Perfect to race between the two floors all day, juggling two very different musical scores.
Unlike Beetlejuice, King Kong came to him. In late 2016, when he had started writing Beetlejuice, he received a call from Australian theatre company Global Creatures, which had produced Strictly Ballroom The Musical, to ask if he could write some songs for the planned Broadway adaptation of King Kong. The show was a heavily reworked version of the original Australian production that debuted in Melbourne in 2013. Its leading man was the unforgettable 6m-tall, 900kg animatronic ape, which is controlled by 14 puppeteers and lopes across the stage with sad eyes and a fearsome roar. Perfect was not involved with the Melbourne production but loved it so much that he gave a public rebuke at the time to critics who panned it. “I was pretty vocal about liking it,” he recalls. “Often you can be punished for ambition rather than celebrated for it. I had literally never seen anything like that puppetry, and I thought that would be a real shame for people not to see this because they felt the reviews weren’t great.”
King Kong opened in November to lukewarm reviews, with the LA Times describing it as “one of the most ludicrous Broadway musicals in recent memory” and Variety saying Perfect’s songs were blandly generic and forgettable. But audience numbers are reasonably strong. Broadway.com says King Kong is the 14th most popular Broadway show out of 27. (Beetlejuice, which had a preview in Washington DC late last year before being reworked extensively for its coming Broadway debut, also received lukewarm reviews, although the show has since been heavily revamped.)
Perfect believes there is often a disconnect between the types of shows critics like and those that people want to see. “People are different to the critical class, and at the end of the day our job is to make a piece of theatre the audience loves. A good review for a bad show is not going to save a bad show, and you just hope that bad reviews for a good show are not going to kill it.”
After fighting for so long to get his “shot” at Broadway, Perfect knows there is still a journey ahead. “I’ve been fortunate to work across a really interesting range of projects in my life,” he says, “and even though I feel none of them have been particularly successful, commercially or even critically, I’m still here.”
He and Lucy have committed to New York for a year to see through the start of Beetlejuice. But he still can’t imagine it as his permanent home. “I love Australia and I identify heavily as being an Australian and I especially identify as being a Melburnian,” he says. “I could happily take a project here and run away to Melbourne to write it.”
Yet he knows New York is the heart of musical theatre and if he makes it here it’ll be hard to leave. “Music theatre was born and created and developed on this street, out the door from where we are standing, and nobody does it like New York. It’s weird because Broadway always felt like a prize. But then when you think about it for even two seconds you realise it’s not a prize, it’s just an open door. And it’s yours to completely nail or to destroy.”
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