The creators of a new musical based on Miles Franklin's debut novel My Brilliant Career have all felt like a Sybylla sometimes.
The book's heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, is a headstrong teenager living in rural Australia in the 1890s, who desperately wants to pursue an artistic life — and defies social conventions, like marriage and familial duty, to do so.
As the musical's writer, Sheridan Harbridge, told ABC Radio National's The Stage Show, Sybylla is a "ratbag" and a "troublemaker".
Harbridge and her co-writers, Dean Bryant and Mathew Frank, all grew up in regional Australia, where they wanted to make art but didn't know where to begin.
"We all found really unusual ways to channel the creativity we grew up with," Bryant says. "And that's Sybylla's story as well.
"How do you [make art] when you don't even know how to define what it is you want to do, but you just have this thing within you?"
This dilemma is the crux of My Brilliant Career, which has been turned into a movie, a play and even a ballet.
Now, the musical version has debuted at Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC), where it earned a slew of five-star reviews.
"To me, the show feels as much a love letter to artists as it is to Sybylla's story," Frank says.
"It celebrates everyone willing to take a chance to be different and to follow their heart and to do what feels right for them."
The journey to the stage
Bryant and Frank know exactly what that feels like. Bryant's parents discouraged him from dropping out of law to go to drama school after he was accepted into the prestigious Western Australian Academy of the Arts (WAAPA). That's where the couple met, and where Bryant first suggested he write lyrics for some of Frank's songs.
While they were still studying, they wrote their first musical, Prodigal, which won a Green Room Award and travelled to New York for an off-Broadway run in 2002.
"That set up an expectation [of success] that was not fulfilled for a long time," Bryant says. "The terrain [in Australia] was so hostile. There had been Australian musicals sporadically, a celebrated one maybe once every decade, and a lot of people trying, but there was just so much eye-rolling about it.
"Those obstacles force you to refine your voice, and to go, 'Well, what do we want to do, seeing as no-one wants to hear it anyway?'"
Bryant and Frank refined their musical skills with Once We Lived Here, Virgins: A Musical Threesome, The Silver Donkey and the music for TV series Mr and Mrs Murder (starring Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart), and also collaborated on cabaret shows with Christie Whelan Browne (ABC TV's Mad as Hell).
Bryant and Frank are always looking for stories to adapt into a musical, and it occurred to them My Brilliant Career might be the perfect fit. About a decade ago, they sat down to watch the movie, directed by Gillian Armstrong (Little Women), to figure out if they were onto something.
"The movie is just in our cultural consciousness," Bryant says. "So many of the images from the movie are just what you think of when you scan through your head the ways we see ourselves in Australia."
They wrote the first song, 'In the Wrong Key', back in 2016.
Three years later, they began working intensely on My Brilliant Career as artists in residence at Melbourne's Monash University. They had nine months to write and workshop the musical, and the program culminated in a production starring theatre students and professionals.
"We got to the end of that and it was a very lovely, moving musical," Bryant says.
But it was missing something. When the COVID-19 lockdown forced Bryant and Frank to slow down, they realised exactly what it needed: more fun. And the person to inject that into the musical was Harbridge.
"I wanted a lot more jokes and a lot more bratty-teenage-girl energy and a lot more proper feminist thought in it," Bryant says.
With Harbridge now on board, the musical shifted in form. It would no longer be a traditional musical, with a separate band and cast. Instead, Sybylla (played by singer-songwriter Kala Gare) would be the piano-playing frontwoman of a rock band, with the rest of the cast — led by musical director Victoria Falconer — playing the rest of the instruments, including guitar, drums and keyboards.
"[Sybylla has] essentially conjured a band and a gig up to bring to life her story," Bryant says.
Director of My Brilliant Career, and artistic director of MTC, Anne-Louise Sarks recalls the "spunk" and "playfulness" of the workshops for the rejigged show.
"It felt very fresh and fun, but with the political heart that I want all my work to have," she says.
Eighteen months ago, Sarks and MTC invested in more development for the show and programmed it to close this year's season.
"The show always moved people," Bryant says. "But I am agog at how much it has changed and grown and matured and become its own unique thing, just by the sheer gift of having that much workshop time with incredible minds in the room.
"It couldn't have become what it's become without that amount of investment."
Reflecting contemporary feminism
Written while Franklin was a teenager, My Brilliant Career was published in 1901 as women battled for the right to vote. The new federal government established voting rights for white women in 1902, after South Australia in 1895, and Western Australia in 1899.
In 1979 the play was turned into a movie, starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill. It premiered during feminism's second wave, two years before marital rape was criminalised, first in New South Wales and then across the rest of the country.
The movie landed almost 20 years after the contraceptive pill first came to Australia and nine years after the publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, as feminists fought sexual harassment and workplace discrimination.
"[The movie placed] Sybylla in this role of the Amazonian hero. She was perfect. She was strong. It was watching a woman push against all the boundaries in front of her," Harbridge says.
But now we're in either the third or fourth wave of feminism (that's debatable), and a new version of My Brilliant Career must resonate for women living in 2024.
"This sort of third-, fourth-wave feminism is about the imperfect heroine; she can be messy," Harbridge says.
"It was great to go back into the book and pluck out all the things where she is a contradictory, annoying little piece of work, as all 15-year-olds are.
"She didn't have to know exactly what she wanted to be. She could keep changing what she wanted and what she needed and how she got it."
These styles of messy women are everywhere in popular culture right now, from Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, to sad girl novels including the work of Sally Rooney, to the music of Charli xcx and Chappell Roan.
The show also speaks to contemporary Australia and modern feminism, through Sybylla singing directly to the audience from the stage.
"It creates permission for Sybylla's character and voice to be more contemporary at moments," she says. "It allows her to be much more of a sort of hot-mess Sybylla Melvyn than Miles Franklin ever would have imagined.
"It is absolutely for 2024, but still honours that original work."
A wave of Australian musical theatre
Harbridge was also excited by the idea that the musical form might introduce a new audience to My Brilliant Career.
"Musicals are having a moment as the way younger people access theatre and story," she says, pointing to musicals like SIX, which gives a voice to the six wives of Henry VIII.
"A lot of actual theatre isn't for young people … We wrote with those people in mind, seeing their own journey on stage."
And My Brilliant Career is part of a wave of new Australian musicals centred on the experiences of young women, and often written by women, including Zombie! by Laura Murphy, Muriel's Wedding by Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttal, Fangirls by Yve Blake, The Deb by Hannah Reilly, and Converted! by Vic Zerbst.
"It used to be big, commercial musicals or nothing," Harbridge says.
"My Brilliant Career sits nicely in that place of delivering the joy of a full-scale musical, but really the emphasis being about story and art and talking to the nation."
Sarks admits putting on a new Australian musical is a "slightly mad thing to do".
"New musicals are epic," she says. "It's a pretty mighty task to take this on, but it's so rewarding to be able to tell our stories and to really make them resonate for audiences. And I guess I'm also just a sucker for a really big challenge.
"I'm really passionate about Australian stories on our stages, and stories that examine who we are and where we've come from and who we want to be … This felt like a beautiful way to do that."
My Brilliant Career is at Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, until December 21.
