Musical Theatre
In March of 2016 I had was honoured to be part of Canberra Philharmonic’s production of Rock of Ages – a member of the six piece house band for the show (Drums/Bass/Guitar x2/Keys x2) which did a three week season to over 3,000 patrons. RoA is a “jukebox” musical with a pretty fun and irreverent storyline winding it’s way between some 80’s rock classics. The memory of playing the finale – Journey’s “Don’t Stop Belevin’ ” with a ~30 strong cast of exceptional singers in five part harmonies gives me goosebumps to this day. The while experience an absolute joy – hard work of the best kind. I wrote a blog post towards the end of the season, published here.
Fast forward to 2022 and, encouraged by a Musical theatre master class run in a nearby town and some nudging by my singing teacher, Leah Oswin, I auditioned for a local community theatre production of Cats! I did an initial blog post about it here but now realise I never really followed it up after the show. Suffice to say it was a wonderful experience and the show received some great reviews.
In 2023 I was involved in another production – this time of The Wizard of Oz. This was quite the adventure – very different to Cats! in all sorts of ways. I was in the ensemble and the understudy for Lion (I seem to be typecast as slightly dottery old felines, but whatever ;) The show was dual cast which meant we understudies got to do a show one evening which was quite a delight. The Company received some great reviews for this show as well.
Come from Away is pretty much my favourite musical ever, having seen the professional production in Melbourne a few times during the 2018 season there. Brilliant script, great songs and a thought provoking storyline. So when the opportunity came to audition for the Holiday Actors production in Warrnambool in 2025 I had to give it a go. The dual cast approach was once again taken and I was delighted to land the part of Nick/Doug/Rabbi in the Blue Cast. Each cast had three shows on stage and the other three singing off stage in the orchestra pit. A ton of fun, if astonishingly hard work :) As a company we received a nice review of our shows and there’s a Facebook post with some nice photos too.
I talked a bit about the journey from behind the scenes to performing musical theatre on stage in a blog post published in March 2023. If you follow through to the end of the associated keynote there’s even a bit of singing :)