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How do you write music that can live up to ABBA?
That was the challenge for long-time collaborators and music power couple Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall, when they started work on the musical adaptation of the classic 90s Aussie film Muriel's Wedding.
Writing a musical was new territory for the duo. While the classically trained singer-turned-popstar Miller-Heidke had composed an opera before, this was something else.
Miller-Heidke and Nuttall were brought onto the production around two years ago, when the original film's writer and director PJ Hogan was still working on an early draft.
"To be honest as soon as we heard about Muriel's Wedding the Musical, we were desperate to do it," Miller-Heidke says.
They were drawn to the colourful characters and the quintessentially Australian story of Muriel Heslop — a fame and ABBA-obsessed oddity, desperate to escape her small town and her suffocating family.
Mamamia, how to live up to ABBA?
The pair describes the thought of writing music on par with the hits of ABBA as "terrifying". But in the end, facing such a daunting task was actually a blessing.
"I think sometimes with art, having to overcome a challenge actually sort of explodes the whole thing and it [the work] transcends," Miller-Heidke says.
They wanted to compose music that would not sound boring in comparison to the ecstatic catchiness of ABBA's hits.
So instead of trying to emulate the Swedes, they decided to deliberately contrast them.
ABBA serves as the soundtrack to Muriel's fantasy world, while Miller-Heidke and Nuttall's poppy, original songs are the score for the real world.
Dreams and darkness
Muriel might not seem like the archetypal musical protagonist at first glance. She's far from a plucky orphan or rebellious nun. But Nuttall disagrees — dreamers are the bread and butter of musicals.
"Muriel, despite her talent for absolutely nothing, is actually a real dreamer … It's just that it's a kind of bizarre dream," he says.
The song-writing duo was also drawn to the darkness of Muriel's story.
While it's easy to remember the funnier and more quotable parts of the original movie, there are sad scenes too — like Muriel's mother's sore feet finally getting some comfort, in a pair of stolen sandals.
Act Two of the musical includes a suicide and funeral scene, but Miller-Heidke says this darkness gives the show its potency.
And darkness isn't actually foreign to musicals — most of the characters of the West End and Broadway mega-hit Les Miserables (spoiler alert!) end up dead.
Muriel in 2017
Miller-Heidke and Nuttall worked closely with director Simon Phillips, who had been talking to Hogan for over a decade about bringing Muriel's wedding to the stage.
One of the key decisions of the Sydney Theatre Company and Global Creatures production was to bring Muriel into 2017.
"PJ was very insistent that the story was … more relevant than ever in the social media age," Miller-Heidke says.
"So Muriel doesn't just want to get married, she also wants to become famous, she wants to become an Instagram star."
Miller-Heidke says the production went through an intense series of workshops with "lots of fire, lots of heated discussions".
Songs were drafted and redrafted as the duo became more familiar with the musical format. But the final product retains their signature creativity, for example where they've used the sounds and exclamations that come along with "the slow monotonous rhythm of cricket" to create a musical signature for Heslop family.
In other places they've been able to lean into their pop music grounding.
Miller-Heidke describes one their songs, Sydney, as "a slice of pop heaven you just wanted to crawl inside".
The controversial ending
While the new music has been critically acclaimed, some reviewers have criticised the musical's new ending.
Unlike the film, which sees Muriel run off to Sydney with her best friend Rhonda, the musical sees her with a boyfriend too.
Nuttall and Miller-Heidke don't see this as a compromise on the original's feminist bona fides.
"Bryce [the boyfriend] is very much a postscript. It's like it's a footnote," Miller-Heidke says.
But it's a footnote she's fond of, because "the movie never wrapped that story line up neatly, it was always sort of left out in the ether … [the musical] is neater."
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, film-movies, opera-and-musical-theatre, sydney-2000