Wesley Enoch wrote "The Sunshine Club" in 1999, after his collaboration with Deborah Mailman on "7 Stages of Grieving", and it played seasons at the Queensland Theatre Company and the Sydney Theatre Company, before, as a lot of Australian musicals do, disappearing back into the memory hole. 25 years later, it's back touring the regions, following a recent Queensland Theatre Company revival, to reconsider its status as a work as part of the national canon.
For me, for whatever reason, this only sporadically realises its potential - the idea at the centre is not a bad one - looking at an Indigenous soldier, returning after World War 2 into a country that doesn't quite accept him, creating a place where he and his friends can gather, dance, listen to music and enjoy themselves in a church hall, and the threats that come when it becomes apparent those around them will never entirely see him as an equal. And certainly, it's a topic that's made for music - the sounds and the styles of the post-war years being a key part of the presentation. But John Rodgers' music rarely stretches beyond serviceable pastiche of the era, and the lyrics feel very much like a first draft - never really carrying an idea longer than the title until the penultimate number in the show. The show feels very much like it could have been a forgotten piece written in the 40s - which is nice in terms of matching style to subject, but not so much in that every beat is familiar and wanders into the territory of the cliche. There's some liveliness in some of the performances - Roxanne McDonald in particular brings life to the supportive aunty, Tehya Makini gives sister Pearl resentful energy and a sense of joy as she finds her own space, only to have her hopes cruelly dashed - but there's a lot of performances that feel more generic music-theatre acting, broad smiles and emphatic gesturing, than anything more real. There are devices that had to have felt old-fashioned in 1999 (in particular, the guy whose enthusiastic pursuit of the girl he loves looks, from 2024, a whole lot like stalking as he refuses to take emphatic "No"s for an answer) that haven't really been reconsidered for the revival,
The set is quite a substantial one for a touring show, and the live 5 piece band are a tight unit. And the intentions of the show are honourable - exploring a moment when reconciliation could and should have been possible and enjoying it for as long as possible rather than recreating Indigenous trauma for a largely white audience. But it also means we end up with a show that, for much of its length, is awfully mild fare. The ending when it comes asks the right questions - "If not now then when" - and post-another-false-start in the history of our false starts in the process of reconciliation with the loss of the proposed voice to parliament, it hits home. But the path leading to that point doesn't cut nearly as deep - and the same ruthless eye that directed the last 10 minutes needed to work on the two hours and twenty minutes that lead up to that, to make the preparations charming and beguiling rather than just pleasant and nice.
I don't mean to berate this show too much - in many ways it's very well put together - but the threat of making "don't frighten the horses" theatre is sometimes you instead fail to enliven them - and for too much of its running time, this didn't really enliven me.
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