Purple Reign

Well done on The Inheritance, guys. I saw it in Melbourne during the Comedy Festival before you took the show to the Edinburgh Festival. How did you get on over there?

Randy: We had a little bit of trouble with ticket sales. We were in a makeshift bivouac-style tent right up at the top of [Edinburgh hill] Arthur's Seat. We did have some wind issues but that was mostly from the haggis.

Sammy J: Some said it was a risky move going from a 300-seat theatre last year to a five-seat tent but we thought we'd keep it real. We're musical comedy trailblazers.

Are you telling me you couldn't even sell out a five-seat venue?

Sammy J: Oh, hey now – when we say 'five seats', it was a plank of wood. It was a bench. Which leaves it open as to how many people constitutes a sell-out show. It could have been three morbidly obese people came along one night and filled up the bench. But that never happened. There was a lot of room on the bench.

Randy: It was mostly pale, gothic, skinny people. We had the right idea, wrong location. Where we made the mistake was that no morbidly obese people can actually climb Arthur's Seat. Now, if we'd put the show in the chip shop in Leith and renamed the show Free Deep-Fried Mars Bars… But I think we did get the 'sold out' sign up once.

Sammy J: That was for the German tourists. They thought it was a rest stop! We abandoned the show and started serving them cups of tea.

How do you guys write together? Does one of you shoulder the burden of the music more, and one of you the rest of the script?

Randy: Baz, we're gonna come clean with you. We don't write our own material.

Sammy J: There is a little boy who charges very reasonable rates, called Gustav. We found him on Gumtree. Go on Gumtree and search for 'musical comedy scriptwriters', there's a whole lot…

Randy: But Gustav looked to be the best of the bunch. He'd be what, 16 now?

Sammy J: Yes, but when we started working on The Forest Of Dreams, he was just eight. We got him in to punch up the script a bit.

Randy: We had to punch him up a bit to get that to happen. But I think he's a happy camper.

The Inheritance is your fourth show together – you did The Forest Of Dreams, Ricketts Lane and I believe you did a show called Bin Night that didn't tour to Brisbane. Why's that?

Sammy J: We asked the set designer to build us a fence because the show was set outside our house on bin night, and being a practical man, he just used a fence that a neighbour was throwing out.

Randy: It looked amazing…

Sammy J: But it weighed as much as a normal fence because by definition it was a normal fence.

Randy: We got a quote to freight our set up to Brisbane and it came in at just under a quarter of a million dollars. So we decided to hold off and sell that show on DVD after our show, because a DVD weighs very little.

WHAT: Sammy J and Randy in The Inheritance

WHERE & WHEN: Friday 2 November and Saturday 3, Brisbane Powerhouse