Few cinemagoers have turned up for Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut, The Deb, which opened with the kind of dismal box office return a local lemonade stand might rival. Which is a shame: it’s a fun, frothy, sassy musical – hardly a masterpiece, but an enjoyable adaptation of the stage production of the same name. It abides by the crucial musical dictum – open strongly – with the rambunctious teen anthem Fuck My Life, before settling into the story of a woke city slicker (Taylah Simpkins) who is sent to the small country town where her cousin (Charlotte MacInnes) lives. But the film has already dropped from 15th spot to 20th on the Australian box office charts, taking just $237 a screen in its second week.
It’s possible that The Deb will experience a second life on streaming, though this seems unlikely, especially given the doomed aura hanging over it, the production being plagued by legal dramas. It’ll hardly inspire more confidence in the Australian movie musical, though neither did the box office returns of the previous one – the partly Australia-funded Robbie Williams biopic Better Man, which was fabulous but tanked at the box office anyway. Or the one before that – 2016’s Emo: The Musical, though that film was always going to have niche appeal.
The Australian movie musical has existed for almost a century, starting with 1932’s His Royal Highness, a dopey, revue-like crowd-pleaser about a man (George Wallace) who dreams that he becomes the king of Betonia. But we are still yet to receive a truly great Australian movie musical. And before you say The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: yes, that is a great film but it isn’t a musical; the characters perform musical numbers but they don’t express themselves through song as part of their lived reality.
This country nevertheless has an eclectic history in toe-tapping, tune-heavy films. The most financially successful is George Miller’s rambunctious animated movie Happy Feet, which was clearly designed for international viewers and doesn’t feel particularly Australian. Ditto for the second most successful: Moulin Rouge!, a characteristically gaudy splatter of spectacle from Baz Luhrmann.
Front of the pack, quality-wise, is Gillian Armstrong’s much more bloody ’Strayan Starstruck – a neon-drenched 80s classic (the colours, the clothes, the hair!) about a teenage girl (Joey Kennedy) who is desperate to make it as a singer. It has a fabulously plucky spirit and some banging tracks, my favourite being Body and Soul, performed with Kennedy rocking out on a bar in a pub, the entire clientele dancing along. It’s a moment of pure movie magic, matched in Aussie pub-dancing spectacle only by Rod Taylor’s tap routine in Welcome to Woop Woop.
Another notable production is Rachel Perkins’ One Night the Moon, which features music co-written and co-performed by Paul Kelly, who plays a racist farmer who refuses help from an Aboriginal tracker (Kelton Pell) when his young daughter goes missing. There are some exquisite moments: for instance the song This Land Is Mine, which begins with Kelly’s character singing the titular line, before Pell joins in with a very different opening lyric, “This land is me.” This small linguistic shift reveals a profound divergence in how Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians approach notions of land and ownership.
At 54 minutes long, however, One Night the Moon is not really a movie. Another example of an Australian musical with pedigree talent and a runtime just shy of feature length is 1965’s Funny Things Happen Down Under, starring a 17-year-old Olivia Newton-John in her first film role. Nobody in the right mind, however, would suggest this film comes anywhere close to greatness. It plays like a low-rent Disney tax write-off, replete with Newton-John singing lyrics hammier than, well, a Christmas ham. Take this effort: “There’s a time and a place / We come face to face / At Christmas Time, Down Under!”
Perkins also directed the spritzy crowd-pleaser Bran Nue Dae, which is peppered with uplifting numbers (including Nothing I Would Rather Be) and has a bright, sunlit aesthetic. As does the Australia-produced The Pirate Movie, loosed based on The Pirates of Penzance, which didn’t do much at the box office and has an ignominious reputation (winning a bunch of gongs at the 1983 Golden Raspberry awards) but managed to find a second life on VHS.
Time will tell whether The Deb is able to pull off something similar and become a hit on ancillary platforms. But even if it does, the search for the great Australian movie musical continues …
