Get Happy
Produced by IMAC Productions

Cast: Normie Rowe, Chelsea Gibb, Renae Berry, Shane Emmet, Daniel Wakefield, Leigh Archer, Meagan Caratti, Karl Conti, Majella O'Shea, Daniel Scott, Leigh Shorten, Adrian Wells, Luke Alleva, Olivia Ansell, Kelly Comerford, Fiona Gage, Markham Gannon, Keli Grauer, Monique Hendry, Tara Hickey, Letitia Legge, Deon Nuku, Troy Phillips, Nathan Wright, Juliette Verne, Amanda Talbot.

Music & Lyrics: Various
Book: Ian R Mackellar
Director: Ian R Mackellar

Publicist: Judith Johnson (Judith Johnson Publicity)

Australian Premiere: Star City Showroom, Sydney. Date undetermined.


The Lowdown:
Get Happy suffered from the one thing so many shows do: the same person wrote, produced and directed it. Unfortunately, it showed. What was the promise of a good storyline got washed away with too many side-stories and a cast that wasn't overly brilliant. The show was flawed from the beginning and its status of a flop is well earned.

The show pulled two huge names out as its leads: Normie Rowe and Chelsea Gibb. While both lived up to their reputation as excellent talents, they were hidden away in a storyline that didn't focus on them enough. If a tour of the country was planned, it was quickly quashed when the theatre community failed to embrace this show.


Sydney Morning Herald Review:
As wildly diverse as such artistically successful musicals as My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof and A Little Night Music are, they have crucial common elements. Most importantly they have likeable characters, and songs which advance the story and illuminate those characters, not just via the lyrics, but via the music itself.

There is, therefore, a monumental hurdle in appending existing songs to a storyline, as Ian Mackellar has opted to do in this shot at a fun and accessible musical entertainment.

Weaving in such disparate songs as Night and Day, Calendar Girl, Hernando's Hideaway and Cry Me a River ensures audience familiarity, but the disadvantage is that they always seem to be sung by the performer rather than the character. Mackellar's simple story is set against a backdrop of the razzmatazz of nightclubs in their heyday. Curiously he has opted for an American locale when comparable institutions flourished in Australia. Be that as it may, the setting obviously creates a context for big-production, show-within-a-show songs, and gives Pamela French the scope for lavish, if predictable, choreography, which becomes a key attraction.

The central character is Frank Marlow, whom we meet both in later life (played by Normie Rowe) and as a young man (Shane Emmett). Frank's father ran a nightclub where the young Frank sang, between chatting up gals. Frank, you see, was an inveterate womaniser who, like Don Giovanni, kept a book of his conquests complete with scores. Unlike the Don, however, he has no redeeming features, so we never care whether he wins or loses, learns or rots.

Rowe's older Frank creates an expectation that the action may move into his middle-aged present and explore the consequences more deeply. But this Frank just hovers on the periphery of the action with a tumbler of scotch and a batch of memories, memories of what a bastard and a fool he was, even if well sated in the trouser department. It is a role which under-uses Rowe.

The young Frank's ingenue girlfriend, Natalie (Renae Berry), doesn't care for Frank's touching up the more intriguing Dana (splendidly played by Leigh Archer), and she leaves when he sinks his lust into Ruby Red (Chelsea Gibb) at the end of Act I.

Ruby has trouble written all over her but, again, we never particularly care whether she and Frank stay an item. When she suddenly (and convincingly) sings Fever to Mac (Adrian Wells), the other man in her life, it seems a romantic non sequitur.

Gibb, who was so successful as Roxie in Chicago, plays Ruby to the hilt. Alas there is too little blade for her to work with.

Meanwhile a fragment of sub-plot plays out between Natalie and Frank's buddy Pete (Daniel Wakefield), which could have been intriguing given more time and fewer cliches. Audrey (Majella O'Shea) also manages to interest us in the space of a few lines and a genuinely relevant song (Janis Ian's At Seventeen), but is relegated to a quick second act appearance and then oblivion. Dana never makes it that far, Archer being commandeered to play Marilyn Monroe for reasons that evade me.

The set incorporates the cute device of having the "past" characters disappearing into an open book that is like a program for a bygone show. The costumes are splendid at their best, which, as for the show as a whole, is in the big production numbers.

Perhaps Get Happy! wants to be a revue because there is nothing lacking in the singing, dancing, costumes or band.

Otherwise the lack of strong characters and subtext and the flood of thinly relevant songs weigh too heavily. It's not easy being producer, writer and director.


Production Shots:
None Available


Further Information:
At the time of printing, the website of this production is still online: www.gethappy.com.au