‘Camp, colourful and competitive’: TV game shows get the musical treatment in PRIMETIME
Singer, composer and musical theatre diehard Millicent Sarre taps into her love of retro game shows with her own new musical PRIMETIME, set for its first work-in-progress showing at Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
PRIMETIME centres on a scandal at a fictional TV game show Race Against the Clock — what inspired you to take on this genre? Are you a big watcher of game shows and have you ever auditioned?
I love game shows! As a kid I religiously watched Deal or No Deal and Wheel of Fortune after school. Joseph Simons, my co-writer, is an even bigger game show fan; he has watched every single episode of The Price is Right.
When Joe and I were in the brainstorming phase, I distinctly remember him turning to me and dramatically proposing “what about a game show?”. We did a bit of digging and were floored that a musical set on a game show didn’t exist in the musical theatre canon. Game shows are camp, colourful, and competitive; in the Venn diagram between game shows and musical theatre, there’s a LOT of shared real estate. The game show setting has proven a rich backdrop against which to set our story.
The musical is technically a period piece — a throwback all the way to 2005. Why did you choose the mid-aughties and how does that era shape the experience?
From a purely practical standpoint, we needed to choose an era in which game shows were culturally relevant; with our modern-day streaming habits, they certainly don’t garner the same buzz and celebrity now as they did 20 years ago. We also wanted to flash back to episodes throughout Race Against the Clock’s 40-year history, and the delicious aesthetics of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s really appealed to us from a design perspective. These were also exciting and momentous decades for the feminist movement, significant for a musical that centres on the experiences of women. The prospect of writing five female characters of different ages, who had experienced the changes of these eras to varying degrees, allowed for robust feminist discourse to be woven into the fabric of the musical.
"The number of Spice Girls references I’ve hidden in the lyrics increases daily."
From a personal standpoint, Joe and I were both kids in the early 2000s. It’s an era we vividly remember living through, and an era we can feel nostalgic for. There’s something really wholesome about referencing the music and pop culture of our childhood; the number of Spice Girls references I’ve hidden in the lyrics increases daily. From a commercial perspective, the rising popularity of Y2K fashion and aesthetics suggests that the noughties are the next frontier of nostalgia that we are approaching culturally. By the time that PRIMETIME is a fully realised and staged musical, we imagine that we’ll culturally have the same fondness for this time period that we currently have for the 70s, 80s, and even 90s.
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When did you and Joseph start working together, and how did the show come together?
Joe and I met at the Elder Conservatorium; he was my lecturer when I was studying musical theatre. In the first dance class I ever took from him he was wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Human Rights’ which was a glowing first impression in my eyes! We had a great student-teacher relationship, and it was very apparent that we’d become friends once I graduated. We had a coffee together in early 2024, and it came up in conversation that both of us wanted to write a musical.
I was an experienced songwriter but didn’t know the first thing about writing dialogue, and Joe was an established playwright who didn’t write music: entirely complementary skill sets for a music theatre writing duo. We decided there and then to write together and have been working on PRIMETIME ever since. We both still pinch ourselves to have stumbled upon such an easy, equitable, and creatively fruitful partnership, and it’s been so exciting to undergo this process together.
How did studying music theatre at the Conservatorium prepare you for this challenge?
It’s been quite heartening to notice the unexpected ways in which aspects of my music theatre education have proven valuable in the creation of a new musical. Lessons in script analysis and lyrical interpretation have allowed me to approach our evolving text with a critical and analytical eye. The hours spent revising chord theory and learning modes and blues scales in my musicianship classes have undoubtedly strengthened my output as a composer. Classes on musical theatre history have given me a crucial understanding of the genre and canon to which I am intending to contribute.
The greatest gift I received out of my studies, however, was not the training itself, but the relationships I built during this time. Writing a musical is such a collaborative process, not just within the immediate creative team, but with a wide community of collaborators who contribute their skills, voices, and perspectives to the work. Of the eight-person team we have assembled for our Cabaret Festival development, six of us are Elder Con graduates or educators (or both!) — a testament to the built-in community and creative network that Joe and I are lucky to belong to.
Who are your biggest musical theatre influences, and where does PRIMETIME sit in the canon of musical theatre?
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I have a mental list arbitrarily labelled something to the effect of “I would faint if any of these people listened to the music from PRIMETIME” — essentially, my musical theatre compositional heroes. Stephen Sondheim is at the top of that list (given that he sadly passed away a few years ago I won’t be at risk of fainting due to his listenership anytime soon). Tim Minchin and Lin-Manuel Miranda are also in top spots; in my eyes they are the 21st century’s answer to Sondheim, as absolute masters of lyrical intricacy, precision, and wordplay. Jeanine Tesori, Alan Menken, Kate Miller-Heidke, Lawrence O’Keefe, Eddie Perfect, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and Yve Blake also feature on my list. The common thread of these artists’ work is a healthy dose of both humour and pathos, and music that is complex and surprising but still easily digestible on the first listen, characteristics that I aim to bring to the music and lyrics of PRIMETIME.
What can audiences expect from this work-in-progress showing?
Our audience for this work-in-progress showing can expect to play a vital role in the creation of our new work. PRIMETIME is first and foremost a comedy, and comedy requires an audience. This will be the first time the show material will be performed publicly, so our audience response will provide invaluable feedback as to what is landing and what still needs workshopping. We’ll even have QR codes to a survey on the tables so that viewers can submit their feedback to us! The audience’s response really matters to us and will influence how we continue to develop the material.
"I still feel smug about the fact that I was at the Cabaret Festival reading of Yve Blake’s Fangirls in 2018 before it really took off. I’m hoping that we can provide our audiences the same thrill of one day saying “I saw it first”."
Our Cabaret Festival audience can also look forward to an intimate behind-the-curtain peek at what a musical looks like before it is a fully fledged product. While PRIMETIME will ultimately be a full-length, two-act musical, in this showing we’ll have just 70 minutes to showcase the story and material as it currently stands. There will be no sets, no costumes, and actors will have scripts in hand, but it’s arguably the most exciting time to engage with the material: when it’s fresh and full of potential. There are also some bragging rights up for grabs if and when PRIMETIME goes on to make a big splash. I still feel smug about the fact that I was at the Cabaret Festival reading of Yve Blake’s Fangirls in 2018 before it really took off. I’m hoping that we can provide our audiences the same thrill of one day saying “I saw it first”.
Every great musical has a showstopper, a number audiences whistle on their way out to the theatre and struggle to hit the high notes in the shower. Can you tell us about your favourite song from PRIMETIME?
That’s like picking a favourite child! I love our whole score, but there are a few numbers that I feel particularly proud of. The big showstopper in PRIMETIME is a song called ‘Sell Yourself’ (the aim was to write our equivalent of ‘They Just Keep Moving The Line’ from SMASH, a textbook showstopper). In this song we see the character Kimberly, the most outspoken of the group, recount her whole career, from auditioning to be a prize model on Race Against the Clock as a teenager, to her tumultuous career on the show, to being fired in a blaze of glory some 10 years later. With a run time of about six minutes, it was an absolute beast to write, but I felt so victorious once I’d cracked it. Dee Farnell who is reading for Kimberly in our development showing sings it like an absolute dream, and I can’t wait for it to be shared with audiences.
I also love our finale ‘I Am The Prize’. It gave me an opportunity to write some very lush gospel-inspired harmonies for five powerhouse female voices, and draw inspiration from pop and RnB artists of the late ’90s and early noughties: namely Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and Boys II Men. Josh van Konkelenberg, our musical supervisor, has created a divine arrangement with a string section, and I melted when I heard it for the first time. From a lyrical standpoint, I’m also very proud of a number called ‘Dum de Dum’ which is chock-a-block full of wordplay. I won’t go into detail lest I spoil the gag, but I hope audiences get a kick out of it. This number was heavily inspired by Tim Minchin’s ‘School Song’ from Matilda — hopefully he’ll hear it at some point and I’ll spontaneously faint.
Writing a musical is a dream for many writers and performers, but it’s a hard medium to break into; how important is an opportunity like this work-in-progress, and where do you hope to take PRIMETIME next?
I simply cannot overstate how vital it is that opportunities such as this exist. The development process for new musicals is long, labour-intensive, resource-heavy, and, frankly, expensive. Although initiatives to support new Australian musicals and their writers are thankfully becoming more common, opportunities that fund the development of original musical theatre within Australia are still relatively scarce, and independent artists rarely have the means to get their work off the ground without significant financial support. Consequently, the opportunities that do exist, like Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s Musical in Development program, are so valuable, meaningful, and necessary. We’re incredibly grateful to Adelaide Cabaret Festival for this opportunity, and especially thankful to Sam Harvey and the late Frank Ford AM whose generosity has funded this particular development opportunity.
Our dream is that PRIMETIME will ultimately play a mainstage season within Australia, such that it can spark conversations amongst the general public. Thematically, the show tackles internalised misogyny (women’s learned competitive attitudes towards one another), the pressures of women aging in the public eye, misogyny in the entertainment industry and misogyny in the queer community. Given the subject matter, I’m motivated to get PRIMETIME to a stage (literally) where the general public can engage with it, ideally coming away from the show not only entertained, but resonating with the challenges and successes of its protagonists, and being prompted to have conversations that challenge patriarchal societal norms.
PRIMETIME will be performed in the Banquet Room at Adelaide Festival Centre on Thursday June 12