Merrigong Theatre Company presented the Spiegeltent performances, with events happening every night over the course of 3 weeks from the 7th to the 25th of June. These performances included London Calling, Woody – The Ukulele Kids Show and Roxee Horror’s Movie Maniacs.
I had the pleasure of interviewing some of the performers as well as attending some performances.
Woody from Woody – The Ukulele Kids Show
SERENA: Could you give me a little overview of your show and what you’re doing?
WOODY: Yeah. So, this one is – it’s called The Ukulele Kids Show and we’ve been touring around Australia for a number of years, I guess. I mean, we were sort of in the midst of a big tour when the pandemic hit – sort of been a bit sporadic. But we’ve been to a lot of states and territories over the last four years or so. And so, the premise of the show is that everyone in the audience gets to play along with the show. So, we have a hundred ukuleles that we hand out to kids in the audience.
SERENA: How does the show work with 100 ukuleles?
WOODY: It can be chaotic (laughs). But no – I guess I have a teaching method. So I put like little stickers on the fretboard of the ukulele so then I can hand them out or — obviously we have to tune them up first and then we hand them out and the kids sort of put them in the sleeping position or give them a little rest face-down so they’re not playing them and then there’s times when we get everyone to pick them up and sort of teach them sequentially how to play it. So obviously very simple at the start, like this is how to strum and this is what to do. And then by the end, they’re sort of playing three kinds of chords and they’re playing along with the show.
SERENA: How did you come up with having the audience play with you?
WOODY: Well, I’m a school teacher by trade and also a children’s musician, so I guess I like the idea of interaction. I’ve also taught music, so it was kind of like bringing it together. well what would happen if I – ‘Cause I’ve had other touring shows, you know. I do concerts and album launches and all that kind of stuff and there’s often an audience when you’re on stage and the audience is passively watching, sometimes engaging, but really I was like ‘how do I take that to the next level?’ The premise is that everyone can be a musician and music can be accessible by all kids and, yeah, it can be fun and engaging. It doesn’t have to be serious and so we took those ideas where we had a development process where we tried — we had 40 ukuleles where we had a kind of hybrid show concert model and that really worked well and we sort of developed it and got a director in. In the end was, yeah, I think we could handle a hundred ukuleles with all the kids and sometimes their parents. We could probably get an audience of about 150. And for a lot of kids, it’s the first time that they’ve held an instrument and played it, so we get a lot of eyes wide and jaw dropping moments which is lovely.
SERENA: Do you plan on having more ukuleles over time?
WOODY: I feel like – yeah For the three-person show we could probably go to 120, but 100 is a lot to tune up and to handle. I mean I’ve got an aspiration of getting the world record. Getting kids from all schools in a capital city maybe to come together and go for the world record at some big festival or something, but I think we need to top 8000 for that so that’s a bigger project.
SERENA: Can you tell us a bit about your backstory? Did you have a family band with your kids or something similar?
WOODY: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so my kids are a bit older now but when they were young — well I grew up in a musical family and we used to tour so I kind of had that, I really wanted to pass on to my kids. When they were young, they were helping to write and record songs with me for my first kids album, so literally singing away on the album. They played stringed instruments and sang and acted in our show and we toured a version of that with the Woody’s Family Band, that sort of thing. For probably five years we did lots of festivals up in Queensland and down to Tasmania. They very much grew up with music and they can all play now, which is amazing, and my youngest daughter is taking it a bit more seriously as she just recorded her debut album and that kind of thing. So yeah, nice to see it getting passed on.
SERENA: How does the story play into your show? And how did the puppets, Jasmina and Hercules, come about?
WOODY: I liked the idea of having a theatrical experience for kids so it’s not just me in a band with my songs but it’s really engaging and narrative driven as well. I did some crowdfunding quite a few years back and got a couple puppets made – cause puppets can be expensive and I worked with a couple of puppeteers. Yeah, there are two puppets in this show and yeah Jasmina in particular. We decided we’d set it – the show – in a school where it’s like this scene where we’re getting ready for like an end of year big school concert where all the parents are coming and that kind of stuff and the little puppet in it, Jasmina, is kind of a shy girl but she wants to sing her own song in the concert. And so, as well as like a workshop throughout the show where everyone has learnt to play the ukulele and getting ready for the concert, it’s this parallel story of Jasmina, the little puppet, who I kind of help her in the show to write her own song when she gets more confident and then, you know, she has doubts in the end but then she gets up in the finale in the school concert where everyone’s there and she sings her song with me and the band on stage and she has this ‘wow’ moment. I guess the story behind it is to show kids how you might write a song. And yeah, the creative process involved in writing a song, coming up with the tune and the melody and then having the courage to follow through and sing your song to an audience, so yeah, a few different messages embedded within the show.
SERENA: Do you find that shyer kids are encouraged by Jasmina?
WOODY: Look, I think so yeah, I don’t really like to have a sort of contrived narrative or really overt messaging where it’s like ‘don’t stick your finger in the toaster’ or something like that. I guess my background with teaching is to sort of have it where you might sort of more model behaviours and stuff with children. Yeah, this is kind of like them getting the message [which] isn’t overt but it’s sort of under the surface, so they have this creative story of this girl going through it. There’s a bit of a journey and there’s a character arc or she goes through a sort of transition and rises above her challenges at the end so they can see it play out in front of them rather than getting told about it. So, I hope that some shy kids who — they’re the ones that are in touch with their emotions and their inner world a bit more and are often the creative ones so hopefully, you know, we’ve touched a few shy kids in our time and realised that maybe they can write music and that music is accessible.
SERENA: Which parts have been your highlights over the years of performing?
WOODY: It’s probably the milestone moments, like the first time we did our show with the kids. I mean, we got a director in and there were five people in that cast, six actually, my three kids, myself, a puppeteer and a musician, and we did a ten-season debut in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne back in 2015 – so yeah, that was a highlight. Then getting to do some big festivals like the folk festivals are great, we’d be going up to Woodford Folk Festival – definitely a highlight – and then some of the bigger festivals like the Moomba festival and the St Kilda Festival in Melbourne and the first tour of WA. Then, probably, recently I was due to go to some Aboriginal, remote communities in the midst of the pandemic but it all got scuttled so I finally got to do that just this year – just in February 2023 and I went to eight remote aboriginal schools in the central desert which was just south of Alice Springs. So yeah, a few highlights there.
SERENA: If you could give advice to anyone who’s just started playing or is unsure, what would your advice be to them?
WOODY: Have fun with music. Ultimately, it’s not there to be a chore, it’s there to be enjoyed whether it’s listening or playing, so if you want to start playing music you don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to be a virtuoso and put pressure on yourself, you can just enjoy it. So, I sometimes tell parents to have a ukulele or guitar just sitting on the couch so it’s kind of like it’s like a cushion– it sits there on the couch and then you have to pick it up every time you want to sit down and that maybe encourages you to just have a little strum every day and they have a little strum every day and just like spend five minutes. Then by the end of the year, you’re playing, you know half a dozen songs and you know you can obviously look on YouTube and learn anything. So yeah, just bring it into your day, just coincidentally, by having the guitar sitting on the couch.
Paul Dabek from London Calling
SERENA: Can you just start by telling me a bit about your background? How you started, any setbacks, the whole thing.
PAUL: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ve been in show business for 21 years now. I started off as just, you know, an attention-seeking kid like a lot of performers and I found magic at a very young age and started performing all around my local area. By the time I was 16, I was working quite extensively on my days off from school and so it was a pretty no-brainer to run away and join the circus of, you know, entertainment. I started touring around the world, working for lots of different companies and eventually I landed a gig with The Illusionists which is a big, Broadway-touring magic show and I started travelling all over the world and all over America. That’s how I ended up based in Las Vegas, which is where I live now, working for Cirque du Soleil and The Illusionists. It’s kind of how I came to put together London Calling, which is a love letter to my home.
SERENA: Was there anything that initially inspired you or someone – a specific role model in your life that you looked up to?
PAUL: Well, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with comedians and comic actors and movies. I was a huge Robin Williams fan growing up and I think that formed a lot of my comedy choices moving forward.
SERENA: What have your achievements been so far?
PAUL: Well, I think making a living in the entertainment industry. Paying the bills and supporting yourself is quite an achievement, especially in the kind of climate we’ve been in for the last few years. But I guess the main ones would be when I was 17, I was named Young Magician of the Year by the Magic Circle, which is kind of the governing body of magic back in the UK, and that kind of lead to a springboard for me doing fringe festivals and international festivals, things like that and then I went on to win several awards in magic. I guess, really, becoming a cast member of The Illusionists, which is the most successful touring magic show in modern history; performing on the West End, Broadway and now Las Vegas, which are the three main kind of theatre meccas and more recently becoming a cast member and an opening creative cast for Mad Apple which is Cirque du Soleil’s latest production. It’s kind of a dream come true because obviously growing up it was big to see Cirque du Soleil performances and I always thought it was amazing, so to become part of that company and to become a creator of a role for that company is pretty cool.
SERENA: Do you have any achievements that you would like to see yourself accomplishing in the next few years?
PAUL: Well, you know, London calling was my first award winning. I created shows before I created it and had awards from fringe festivals, so London Calling kind of brings it full circle for me because I started off doing the fringe festivals as a solo performer and producing myself and this was like my big step into producing a much bigger show with a bigger cast. We went on to Adelaide fringe just to debut it to sort of feel it out and do some workshops and from being a brand-new show we ended up going up against over 1000 other shows at Adelaide and being picked as best of the entire festival. So, for me, the next step would be to take that show and tour it like I have with my solo show. So, what I’d love to do is see London Calling playing Broadway and at the West End, maybe Vegas, but I’d certainly love to see it touring some of the big theatres here in Australia. So, they’re absolutely over the moon that the Spiegeltent season in Wollongong with Merrigong Theatre Company [they’ve] put their money where their mouth is, brought us over, you know. We’re an international cast, we’ve got members from all over the world, we’ve got all of them flying in for this season so, yeah, I’d love to see our shows maybe at the Sydney Opera House or playing in QPAC or some of those other Australian theatres would be awesome too.
SERENA: Speaking of your group and your performance, in the description of the show it emphasises that you have stars from Cirque du Soleil, The Illusionist and The Clique. How did you assemble the group?
PAUL: Basically what I did was I assembled artists and performers and colleagues that I’ve performed with over the last 20 years – performers that I have enjoyed working with both on stage and off stage. It’s pretty easy for me, it’s almost like I’ve spent the last 20 years researching this project and I just didn’t realise. We have a fantastic juggler from Germany, Antje, who I worked with 15 years ago and haven’t worked with since, but I’ve always remembered her act and when I started putting the show together you know I was very lucky. I’ve had the last 20 years to find the best of the best and bring them together. Luckily, they said yes, so we’ve got a really world class cast.
SERENA: Can you tell me a bit about the performance as a whole?
PAUL: So, it’s a love letter to London. I lived in London, performed on the West End in London, spent time street-performing in London in my early years. Modern London’s an amazing vibrant melting pot and it’s [the show] a celebration of that through varieties. So, it’s a world class variety show celebrating some of the iconography in London from the amazing soundtrack of all the great ‘60s rock’n’roll and different British London-based bands and musicians that you’ve heard of and some that you haven’t. We’ve got the iconography of London’s landmarks, the characters that live within it. So, first and foremost, it’s a world class show that’s going to blow your socks off. Secondly, unlike some variety shows that are out there this show is genuinely for the entire family. It’s a show that you can come to with your kids or it’s a show that you can come to on a date and you both have a great time. It’s not targeted towards children and it’s not targeted towards adults: it’s genuinely an all-ages variety show. And yeah, we celebrate so many of the cool famous landmark icons of London. It’s a really great show. We have juggling, we have acrobatics, we have magic, we have comedy. It’s fun for the whole family.
SERENA: What about the performance makes you feel passionate about what you do?
PAUL: Oh, I mean, you know, we live in a world where the answers to most things are a few clicks away or people are permanently connected to the entire world, but being able to experience something that’s mysterious or unexplainable or just transcends anything you see on the internet. This is a time where we need light entertainment more than anything as we were stuck in our houses and watching screens for such a long time so, to watch people come in, put their phone down and just be captivated for an hour, 75-80 minutes and just be amazed and be wowed is great. You see people’s faces and when I’m not on stage and some of my co-performers are on stage standing behind the curtain and just hearing the ‘oohs’ and the ‘ahhs’ and the sharp intakes of breath is incredible. There’s nothing better. Pure human connection and real escapism.
SERENA: What has been your highlight when performing and is there anything you don’t particularly enjoy?
PAUL: Well, the hardest part about being performers — it’s the double-edged sword. It’s travel, you know. We get to travel and be all over the world and that’s amazing, but that also takes you away from your nearest and dearest and the people you love and your family. So, you know, being on tour is both the best and the worst. So, probably missing birthdays and weddings, deaths and births, that happens all the time and that’s one of the harder parts. But you get a new family, which is your cast and crew and the people you’re working with. And I’d say, for me a highlight has to be opening on Broadway. That was the last show I did just before the pandemic ended. Six weeks on Broadway with The Illusionists hosting and performing in that show was probably, I would say, the highlight of my career. And then, obviously performing and starring in a world premiere of Cirque du Soleil in Vegas comes up there pretty good too.
SERENA: Those are pretty big things to do. Do you ever get nervous before performing?
PAUL: I don’t get nervous, I get excited. There’s always a nervous energy, you know – a new crowd or a new show is always going to be a little bit more but I think that if you can take those – nerves are just, you know, unprocessed excitement really. Getting out there and doing it, it’s rare that I get super – I don’t get stage fright anymore but certainly we always get nervous on opening night. ‘Will they like it?’ But those nerves are normally pretty quick to disappear once the show starts.
SERENA: Do you have any advice for anyone who’s just starting out?
PAUL: Just experience, you know. I think about getting anything or doing anything, from pilot, a surgeon or a doctor or veterinarian, whatever it is. You can read and study as much as you like, that’s really important, but practice in the job is the best way to learn. Just starting out and just getting those – clocking up those stage hours, whatever it is, buying yourself somewhere to go and perform or whether it be a charity event or someone’s birthday party. Just get out there and do as many shows as you can and the more shows you do the better you get. Practice makes perfect, so finding somewhere you can go and perform and, you know, also finding somewhere to fail. You learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. So, you have to find somewhere, whether it’s an open mic night or, say, a charity event or somebodies’ backyard, it doesn’t really matter where it is. Just every opportunity you can get to get up in front of an audience and before you know it you’ll turn around and go ‘oh my goodness I did 100 shows or 1000 shows or 10 000 shows’ and before you know it, you’ll look like it comes effortlessly.
Roxee Horror from Roxee Horror’s Movie Maniacs
Roxee Horror is a local drag queen in the Illawarra region, presenting their show Roxee Horror’s Movie Maniacs. The performance includes iconic scenes from famous movies– with a twist: costumes and drag for a full makeover. The hour-long show consists of four queens each playing four characters such as Romy and Michelle from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. Matched up with lines from movies and adding a touch of drag to their costumes, these queens poured their hearts out to their characters.
It all started with Roxee Horror’s movie obsession – they call themselves a “movie buff.” Roxee thought about how they could “drag these movies up” and came up with their ‘very different’, glamorous Movie Maniacs show. They integrated comedy, drama and horror into their sing-along and dancing show as the queens fought for the Academy Award.
Roxee Horror hosted and introduced the Movie Maniacs and returned to Spiegeltent for a second year in a row, something they thought would never happen “in my wildest dreams.”