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[Work in Progress]
Mozart's Sister
This project began as my graduate show for my Master of Theatre (Writing) degree at the VCA. It's a Broadway-sized musical. I suspect I will be working on it for the next decade. Here's the blurb:
What if I told you Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a sister?
In real history, Maria Anna Mozart was the toast of Europe, lauded by Kings and Queens and even a young Marie-Antoinette, who gifted Maria her embroidered cast-off dress.
But then, Maria turned a marriageable age, and her musical career was over.
Maria retreated from the limelight, settling down in the sleepy lakeside town of St Gligen, Austria, where she married and raised children. She also composed, very well according to her brother, but none of her original compositions survive.
In my musical, Maria is rescued by a drag queen, who takes her to the centre of the Universe: Vienna. There, she becomes famous in an underground gay bar, inventing pop music in the 18th Century, and developing her superhero-drag-persona: Lady Caca. Think a Rococo Lady Gaga.
I'll let you hear a little bit of one of my demo songs ‘Where There is Silence’ – this is what Maria plays to a salon audience at the age of 16 after learning about her future and starting to develop contemporary feminist leanings.
30,000 Notes [2019]
Poster
A little about the show . . .
30,000 Notes was a cross-artform theatrical experiment with surround-sound choir and string quartet, a bunch of monologues, and everything I’d ever written (and saved) across my entire life to that point (23 years), spread out on the walls of a little-known art gallery in the Tandanya/Adelaide CBD.
The show was about memory, how to capture the past, and an ode to my late Nonna.
In original music and words, I tried to capture everything she meant to me.
I came up embarrassingly short. But in collaboration with the brilliant designer Mark Oakley, we ended up making something along the way that I still think was a little bit pretty.
30,000 Notes premiered at the 2019 Adelaide Fringe. At the Adelaide Fringe Awards, it won the Adelaide Festival Centre InSpace Development Award, the Holden Street Theatres Award, and was nominated for the John Chataway Innovation Award.
It also won the Adelaide Theatre Guide Award for Best Cabaret in Adelaide, 2019 season. The show was nominated for the Adelaide Critics Circle Innovation Award.
The studio album
You can purchase 30,000 Notes as an online download or hardcopy CD (which I will mail to you), or both.
30,000 Notes
Cadence Chaos
Buying this album will allow me to buy a meal or two as I write the next one. Or just rest. Resting is important too.
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Prologue 0:530:00/0:53
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Magna Gloria 7:390:00/7:39
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A Thousand Winds 6:360:00/6:36
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0:00/9:48
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0:00/4:53
Where Nonna and Nonno Are
To make this music video, which was the finale of the show, I did the following:
- Composed & orchestrated it
- Made the parts (with a lot of help from the fantastic Patrick Baker)
- Conducted it (poorly – but I had an excellent mentor, being Carl Crossin OAM)
- It was recorded by the late, great Neville Clark of Disk-Edits. He did a brilliant surround-sound recording as we sung it in a circle in the middle of a church (thank you, Calvary, North Adelaide).
- I raided the family archives of home movies taken by my late Nonna, mostly in the 90s and early 2000s.
- I then taught myself how to use Premiere Pro and edited the footage together and kept going for two weeks until I gave myself my first migraine.
- Mark Oakley picked up the pieces, projecting it beautifully as he did, and adding a few brilliant finishing touches (he's a genius).
I then saw this thing only become successful thanks to the brilliant artists around me. So I vowed never to do so many different jobs on the same creative project again.
I struggle to keep that vow, but I am trying!
The Promotional Reel
The Gallery
The sheet music
This purchase is designed for choir conductors. The scores are available in multiple versions: for SATB choir, with or without string quartet or piano accompaniment.
If navigating all of this online is too confusing, just get in touch with me below and I'll sort you out with the right score.
Purchase this and you have the licence to perform this composition, and print unlimited copies for your ensemble.
Purchase this and you have the licence to perform this composition, and print unlimited copies for your ensemble.
Purchase this and you have the licence to perform this composition, and print unlimited copies for your ensemble.
Purchase this and you have the licence to perform this composition, and print unlimited copies for your ensemble.
Awkward Activists (2021)
Gallery
Poster
My Spiel
I collaborated with my feminist pal Millicent Sarre to make this two-person cabaret show.
It was a fun time with ukuleles and general awkward goobery.
The show, which was my last and possibly final Adelaide Fringe cabaret show, was a joyride through the intersectionality between queer rights and feminism. The word 'intersectionality' in that sentence just then might imply this show was dry, but it wasn't! I've long-admired Mim's ability to make feminism fun, with original songs about being mansplained, body shamed, and being told to be more 'polite' about your activism. So I asked if I could key into what she was doing, and this is what we made.
Awkward Activists opened at the Ukiyo, Gluttony, on the 8th of March, 2021. As it was one of my first pandemic performances, It was pretty surreal to have a live audience in front of me again (albeit with quite-well-enforced checkerboard seating).
A song from the show
Unfortunately, hardly any of the original season of Awkward Activists was filmed/recorded. But I did perform half of one of the songs from the show at a Sunday Sessions at Midsumma Festival in Naarm / Melbourne in 2021, and my boyfriend-at-the-time managed to get it on camera. So here you go! Apologies for the quality of the recording.
Scarred For Life (2017)
My Spiel
Scarred for Life was my debut cabaret show.
I filled it with original songs about the time I fell off my bicycle, ruptured my spleen, and almost bled to death. A classic musical comedy.
It premiered at the 2017 Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival, and it caused something unexpected: a tide of people were compelled to share with me their own stories of becoming ill. Many showed me their scar(s). We shared a connection that was quite special, as we reflected on our fragility and mortality – topics that we seem to be facing communally in the 2020s.
I performed the show around a bit, and it won a few awards. I then recorded an album, with all the patter that you need to be able to follow along with the story, even if you haven't seen the show.
Studio Album
Scarred For Life
Cadence Chaos
Buying this album would help me buy a few sexy new masks and matching hair ties, because you always want to have matching masks and hair ties.
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Underneath My Shirt 1:580:00/1:58
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I Stuffed Up 5:250:00/5:25
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Rushing 6:490:00/6:49
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I.C.U. 2:560:00/2:56
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0:00/3:48
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0:00/4:52
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Fine 7:470:00/7:47
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0:00/1:46
Gallery
Promotional reel
~ Another note before we continue ~
I have had, as Andy Warhol would have put it, my 15 minutes of fame:
A few years ago, I made headlines lampooning a now-former Prime Minister or two. I'm still proud of these videos, even though they were highly topical, and accordingly, now highly irrelevant.
Having said that, the issues that I was criticising haven't really gone away, even though the government has shifted the occasional carbon-neutral goalpost or amended the odd Marriage Law. So even though my anger may read as now embarrassingly misplaced by the forces of time, I think that nonetheless, there is value in reflecting on how angry I was back then.
Also, I spent, like, two weeks learning how to use what felt like half of the Adobe suite to teach myself the very basics of collage-style animation so I could make that funky little music video to Scomo, and that was such a huge and maybe not very prudent investment of time and energy, so I’ve decided it must continue to be out there in the world now.