Designing a musical, not like a musical.

It is a rare occasion that the State Theatre Company stages a musical. Having the opportunity to bring a new piece to the stage is always a journey of discovery, with its own unexpected challenges and joys. The artists bought together for Metro Street come from very diverse performance backgrounds combining their great range of skills and experiences to make Metro Street a thrilling new piece.  Creating the Metro Street design has been an exciting part of this collaborative process.  It is hard not to feel a little thrill of joy when hearing a piano played in the State Theatre Company rehearsal room.

Metro Street covers many locations; apartments, streets, cafes, interiors and exteriors, all flowing together in a seamless dramatic structure.  A space was needed that could incorporate all this as well as evoke a sense of the generic Australian city experience and the feeling of cold isolation the urban environment can bring.  It is a shell in which Chris’s memories can be played out, it is slightly faded and disjointed and in some parts crumbling away.

The inspiration came from familiar city places; old theatres, picture houses, community halls and cafes, spaces where stories are told where people come and go. These urban spaces provide a backdrop for every day life in every big city.

This is a musical about familiar people with everyday problems, played out in ordinary places. It is not the bright glamorous showpiece one might expect from the musical genre but an urban drama of the most intimate kind, made all the more vivid in musical form.

Victoria Lamb