Melbourne boasts one of the most thriving independent theatre scenes in Australia, but that's not to say that all indie productions are equally accomplished. Nor should that be the point of grassroots art; the realm of independent and fringe performance is a space to take risks, experiment and grow from failures.
This was perhaps the expectation of Melbourne-based playwright Jean Tong, when her subversive queer musical Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit premiered last year at the Poppy Seed Theatre Festival, serendipitously on the same day, November 14, that the results of the same-sex marriage survey were announced.
But far from being received as a mere fledgling effort by a novice theatre-maker, the maturity and sophistication of the show wowed critics and audiences alike. During its sold-out debut run at the Butterfly Club last year, it charmed Melbourne's theatregoers with its no-frills stagecraft and rom-com parodies, steeped in a whip-smart critique of the way queer characters are mistreated in mainstream entertainment. The scale of this success took its creator completely by surprise. "I'd expected it to connect with queer members of the audience, especially post-survey. I knew there were a lot of people who were just desperate and needed to hear this kind of story. But I didn't expect to resonate as strongly as it did," Tong admits. "I thought the reviews would be a bit like, 'This is really great… for the community. The show itself is average.' So, getting some great reviews about the actual material of the show was kind of a shock - but a nice shock."
"I knew there were a lot of people who were just desperate and needed to hear this kind of story."
Loosely based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and inspired by the "bury your gays" trope - a common plot point for queer characters in mainstream storytelling that inevitably sees them die in various tragic circumstances - Tong and her collaborators set out to tell a story that actively confronted this stereotype. "As creators, I don't think it's enough just to say, 'This is a problem.' It's like, if we actually have the skills to make a show about it, why don't we?"
One of the production's most powerful assets is its musical theatre format, which according to Tong, was something of a happy accident. "We didn't really go into the project thinking, 'Let's make a great musical.' It was more that we had a bunch of really talented people who had musical theatre backgrounds, so it happened quite organically: 'Ok, so I guess we're making a musical,'" she explains. "But it proved to be a really helpful medium. Because musicals are already so theatrical, we could make it really meta, we could have a chorus who could comment on the action, but in a way that was fun and immediately engaging. And it also made us really unique - I mean, how many well-known musicals have queer women in the leading roles?"
In addition to wrestling with the "bury your gays" conundrum, Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit also challenges another major shortcoming of the mainstream depiction of the queer community: the lack of people of colour. With just one white cast member, Tong aimed to "flip that tokenistic role that a lot of people colour are expected to play."
"The group I made the show with, This Colour Nation, had made another show about the lack of diversity in the theatre scene called, The Unbearable Whiteness Of Being. But that was a show that critiqued the lack of people of colour, so innately, it became a show about whiteness. So with Romeo, we wanted to make something that took out the question of whiteness altogether," Tong says. "Because, in all honestly, we thought, 'Fuck it. What do we want to talk about if we don't want to talk about race? That is all we get asked about. So that cross-pollinated with the 'bury your gays' idea, and when those two concepts collided, it became this really uplifting process of telling a story about queer women, who fall in love. And they actually get to live this time."
MICF presents Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit until 8 Apr at Malthouse Theatre
