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“Damn these big belly bastards with their big fat necks,” chants actor Ethan Jones as Ned Kelly. He’s paraphrasing Kelly’s manifesto, known as the Jerilderie Letter, written in 1879: “a parcel of big ugly, fat necked, wombat headed, big bellied, magpie legged, narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords which is better known as officers of justice or Victorian police who some calls honest gentlemen.”
“You are not toy soldiers,” says Robert Grubb as police officer Superintendent Hare. “You are avenging angels.” He leads his officers in a brooding song. “Keep the people on their knees,” they sing.
At Victorian Opera’s rehearsal space on Victoria Street, rehearsals are resuming for Ned Kelly, a musical written by Reg Livermore and Patrick Flynn, which opened this year in Ballarat to strong reviews.
With its Australian vernacular and unvarnished depiction of early colonial life, it’s a far cry from most of the big-ticket musicals in Melbourne, many of which are based on feel-good American films. The story of Ned Kelly is familiar, but the musical isn’t – though it has a long history.
Nearly five decades ago, Livermore’s Ned Kelly premiered on stage in Adelaide. It was an ambitious, big-budget rock opera, as was the mode of the time – Livermore was coming off the back of roles in Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. The reviews were savage, and the ticket sales didn’t stack up to the budget. The show was closed after just three months.
“The cast were so young and enthusiastic and I was so devastated,” says Livermore today. “I wore it as a guilty token for most of my life. And as I get older, it’s kept coming back to me.”
Decades after that first sting, Livermore contacted Stuart Maunder, the artistic director of Victorian Opera – would he be up for a revival of this obscure bit of theatre history?
“I thought, look, this is my last chance,” says Livermore. “Nobody else would be interested.”
Maunder wrote back the next day saying he thought it was a great idea. Livermore and Maunder have worked together numerous times over the years, and Maunder has loved Livermore’s work since he was a seven-year-old watching him on stage as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Maunder remembers seeing Ned Kelly in 1978. He recalls thinking there were things he would change, but it wasn’t the disaster the reviews suggested.
“It had huge energy,” he says now. “I remember being astounded at the theatrics of it. In 1978, nobody had seen anything like that.”
When Maunder and conductor Simon Holt began research, they found that there was no complete score, and much had to be reconstructed from disparate notes and recordings. They made some trims and changes along the way.
“It’s a very different show,” says Maunder. “We’ve edited the original material, and slightly de-rocked it. It’s got more of that Evita-y, Les Mis-y feel now. But it’s the same music, the same larrikin feel.”
Livermore embraces the discrepancies in the Kelly myth, but doesn’t sugarcoat Kelly’s life. He was a thief and a killer, driven by desperation and injustice.
“I’m on his side,” says Livermore. “People like the Kellys were living in really difficult circumstances. Life was shit. And, of course the police had to do a job. But they were a vengeful lot.”
Ned Kelly opens at a time when Australian musical theatre is in the news, for all the wrong reasons.
In a rehearsal break, leading man Jones vents about the early closure of Waitress, in which he had a part. “Some American says you’ve got to get this stupid haircut because they own you for 12 months,” he says. “And then they end it three weeks later. Dogs.”
It’s tongue in cheek, but there’s real frustration there. It’s one of a spate of cancellations that have hit the theatre scene in Australia recently. Waitress had its Melbourne run cut short, with a planned move to Sydney dropped. Jones was also in Back to the Future, which closed early in Sydney this year. Beetlejuice, starring Jones’ partner, Erin Claire, also ended early.
It seems like the tension between the cost-of-living crisis, spiralling production costs, and the demands of a big-budget musical have finally come to a head.
“A ticket to a show like that is like a luxury item now,” says Jones. “The products are good, but how do we convince people to come to the theatre? And maybe one answer is domestic stories.”
Ned Kelly is familiar subject matter, but it’s ours.
“We have all the talent here, and we can do exceptional work here without relying on overseas buy-ins,” says Jones.
“We don’t shout out about Australia enough,” says Livermore. “We know that. And this has a very Australian feel. It makes me tear up, if you like, because of this sense of us. It’s not just the story, it’s the way we’ve captured it.”
Reg Livermore’s Ned Kelly: The Musical is at the Union Theatre, University of Melbourne from 24–25 July.
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