Mid-century Australia: A time when men were gruff, women could work (but only until they had children, and forget about going to university), and post-war European immigrants and refugees were finding new homes, and new ways of life, in the antipodes.
This is the essential DNA of Ladies in Black, a new musical by Carolyn Burns and Tim Finn. A study of the women working in Ladies’ Cocktail Gowns at the fictional Goode’s department store, it’s a staunchly Australian musical with Aussie accents, a few ‘strewths’ and punchlines about escaping your troubles in Wagga.
This is a musical that means well; it’s often charming in its low-stakes personal drama, it is never challenging, and there are plenty of cheap and easy laughs (a man singing about his despair is punctuated by the flush of a urinal; women stir their tea percussively as they call their husbands bawdily). Older women are given as much respect as the younger ones on stage and that age diversity is a nice thing to see.
For me the music sounded pleasant and though there’s no real unifying sound of the show, save for a recurring Disney-sweet refrain that frames a character Lisa as our ingenue, the orchestra brings real energy to the modest vignette-style approach of storytelling, allowing each chapter its own individual moment. But the lyrics are often inane and simplistic, more cliche rhyming couplets than specific and sincere expression of plot and character, so it’s hard to truly engage with the emotions behind even the ballads.
The show dips a toe lightly into the realm of sexism and xenophobia, along with old-fashioned social mores: The main character, Fay, is afraid to tell the man she loves about her past, and her friend Myra (Kathryn McIntyre) thinks her new Hungarian boyfriend is dangerous because he’s European; Lisa’s father (Greg Stone) thinks it’s absurd that women want to study and should be happy with the vote — that, he thinks, is progress enough. But of course, this is white Australia; Indigenous populations are nowhere to be seen, and the continentals are frequently, largely comic relief.
The spirit of the show is good: It’s bright, it cares about its women, it means well. But it needs more to be truly great: Refined, exploratory lyrics, more playful staging (the second act opener, and the set-up of the women ready to face the crowds at the Christmas sales, are rare theatrical high points), and, more importantly, the show needs to trust its own emotional weight. It’s a light show, but it’s full of evolving feeling: It doesn’t need to be nothing but fluff.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Cassie Tongue is a Sydney-based theatre critic and arts writer, and deputy editor of industry website AussieTheatre.com
