by Priscilla

Oct.27, 2009, under Producer's Blog

Question

What problems presented themselves when transferring from screen to stage? Did you always plan on having a bus on stage?

Garry McQuinn

Priscilla herself was (and is!) the obvious problem. We spent a long time (maybe a couple of years) trying to work out how not to have a bus on stage … not because we didn’t want Priscilla, but because she was always going to take up so much stage space. There are practical issues (the bus has to fit four dancing actors in it) and the aesthetic issues - she has to look like a bus, not a minibus. An even bigger problem was offstage storage - how would Priscilla disappear for the scenes she did not appear in? We didn’t know how to fit the bus on stage or off stage, but we knew our audiences would expect the title character to make an appearance.

Eventually the problem was solved by our brilliant designer, Brian Thomson (who by the way designed the original London production of Jesus Christ Superstar in the same theatre in 1972!). Simon Phillips (director) was working on an opera in Hamburg and the design deadlines were looming, so Brian and I met up with him and spent a week (in a small apartment in a snowstorm!) working through the show. Brian came up with the idea for a ring revolve - to give the impression of bus movement / passing scenery - and everything followed from that. If the external diameter of the revolve matched the proscenium width, the width of the revolve was one metre (to fit cast members without colliding with any of the scenery) and the bus had to fit within the revolve (same reason, to leave room for cast and road signs) … then the maximum bus length was two metres less than the proscenium opening. The stage crew reading this will make sense of that!

The Divas and Priscilla herself (Australian Production)

The bus in London is a little smaller than the Australian bus but we’re happy with it - although we wouldn’t want her to be any smaller! This will cause us problems in the future … there are quite a few theatres we don’t fit into. Most shows can reduce the size of scenery elements in some clever way, we can’t shorten Priscilla without her becoming impractical and looking a bit silly. The bus was the most obvious practical problem. The major conceptual problem we faced was in presenting the great Australian outback. Clearly it’s not possible to realistically present the wide open spaces on stage, particularly when it’s often full of bus! Brian’s solution was to focus on the colour palette, the desert oranges, and the red and pink hues that characterise the outback areas visited by our travelling trio.

Essentially the scenery provides a background to the action that happens on stage, it’s not the film and no-one in the audience expects the settings to be literally presented - we suspend our disbelief for a couple of hours in the theatre. The remaining scenes (Woop Woop, Coober Pedy, Alice Casino, Ayers Rock) are evoked using fairly standard flying elements - flats without much dimension (thickness). The clearance above the stage is very tight - we’re jammed in so tightly that a door opening at the back of the stalls can result in a breeze that causes the scenery elements to catch on each other. Unfortunately (or fortunately) our divas spend some time in the fly tower, they’re certainly not two dimensional and we have to be very careful not to catch anything as they fly in!

As an example of our need to continually address staging problems … when we moved into the relatively small Palace Theatre, we faced a major problem in fitting everything in, at one stage we just couldn’t find backstage space for the poker machines and were seriously thinking of storing them in the street. We’re already anticipating similar problems in New York.

Back to the initial planning … the bus dilemma took most of our time

Cupcakes (Australian Cast photo)

throughout the pre-production and planning period (a couple of years!).
We’d approached the costume designers for the film (Tim Chappell and Lizzy Gardiner), primarily because they clearly had a head start with the drag costumes, we liked a lot of the film costumes (thong dress, gumbies, Uluru feathers) and we thought the design challenge was party solved. We were wrong to make such conservative judgements. When Tim ‘n Lizzy joined the design team they bought enthusiasm, an open mind, lateral thinking, little sense of budget reality and …. a remarkable and fantastical imagination that delivered us singing paint brushes, dancing cupcakes and performing Australian plants and animals!

More importantly, Lizzie ‘n Tim defined for us the Priscilla on stage aesthetic, the ‘look’ of the show - and solved a ‘film to stage’ problem that we didn’t really know that we faced. The had little musical theatre experience but a ton of imagination; they reminded us of the importance of the magic of theatre and opened our minds to a non-literal interpretation of the show. Whether in front of Brian’s backdrops or inside the bus, the Priscilla costumes are very important to our success.

I suppose the other ’screen to stage’ challenge was that posed by the music. Although the movie has a strong soundtrack, the nature of a musical brings very different imperatives. The songs must support the storytelling and should reveal things about the characters and their relationships with each other. Song selection was a long and sometimes frustrating process. A number of the artists and publishing companies (including Abba because of Mamma Mia) turned us down, and it took quite a long time to agree on a songlist that was both appropriate, and available (and affordable, since publishing companies are not known for their generosity!).

I sometimes thought this endless process would never end, and wondered if we should abandon the ‘jukebox’ paradigm for a fully commissioned score. However there is an absolute integrity about our reliance on familiar songs … these are the songs that our drag queens would perform, written and sung by the artists that are their models … and the songs that provide the score to their lives.

Song selection was a collaboration, between authors Stephan and Allan, director Simon, associate director Dean Bryant, Spud Murphy our Musical Coordinator and even some of the cast - all of them provided us with suggestions. Spud took the final song list and arranged them for a large musical theatre cast and relatively small orchestra.

There were many more challenges in translating Priscilla the movie to Priscilla the Musical. It took nearly five years, and I don’t think we’re yet finished - there’ll be more changes made for the North American production (which now it seems is ‘unofficially’ announced, and can be found on the web!). I could write the book … maybe this is Chapter One!