What happens when you meet someone who spins your world right round, but they don’t believe the world is round?
This question is at the heart of Flat Earthers: The Musical, the newest production from creative trio Jean Tong, Lou Wall and James Gales, playing this month and next at the Hayes Theatre. It follows the adventures of flat-earther Flick and globe-earther Ria through the depths of the dark web and beyond. “Also, it’s lesbians, cause that’s just what I do. I can’t make them straight, unless I really have to,” adds Tong.
The co-production from the Hayes Theatre Co and Griffin Theatre Company was originally created in the aftermath of the Trump campaign and beginnings of the ‘post-truth’ era, as the creators considered the ways that the internet and online communities were changing.
Tong, Wall and Gales wanted to explore the isolation that drives people into extreme viewpoints, which they decided to explore by pushing to the most extreme, choosing to “make a song and dance about it for two hours,” explains Gales.
“When a musical is done well, it provides a really entertaining frame to basically trick people into watching shows that are about politics or about big social debates, because nobody really wants to read another article about how society is really struggling to talk to each other,” says Tong. “But if we give them a comedy romance slash satire, like, suddenly you’re just watching this funny show and then because there’s that layer of entertainment on it, you’re given the space then to reflect on it after.”
“I think music’s like the perfect way for us to do that, and I think bangers are also the perfect mode for us to do that.”
While the trio has been developing the show since 2019 — including a workshop at the Arts Centre Melbourne in 2020 — Tong states that “the heart of the show hasn’t changed.”
“We always sort of knew roughly where we wanted to start the characters and where we wanted to end them. And then the plot, over the years, just got bigger and bigger.”
Flat Eathers is a two act musical with twenty new songs and nine cast members — starring Michelle Brasier, Lena Cruz, Manali Datar, Manon Gunderson-Briggs, Milo Hartill, Amanda McGregor, Mel O’Brien, Shannen Alyce Quan and Zarif — with creatives across AV, sound, lighting and more.
Creating this is no easy feat.
“Putting on a new musical in Australia is insane and huge and takes a mammoth amount of energy and takes a mammoth amount of funding and wish fulfilment from everyone and commitment, and I think we’re really, really lucky to have that,” says Tong.
“I think it is really meaningful that we have made this show and filled it in terms of cast and creatives across the board with people from marginalised gender identities, people who often don’t get that opportunity,” shares Tong. “I think we pushed really hard to try and find the most talented and fucked up weird people that are most similar to us because I think we sort of feel that way.”
“People are gonna look at this and go, ‘Oh my god, these people are so talented. Why didn’t we see them before’ and it’s like, it’s because you chose not to see them and they’ve always been there, so I think for me it’s always kind of a relief and a moment of joy to be able to bring that team and be a vessel for all these people to be seen by a bigger audience and be recognised.”
Having written five to ten additional songs that were cut over the years, Gales explains that the trio totally believes in everything that had remained in: “We haven’t just done a reprise for the sake of doing a reprise.”
The musical seeks to capture the energy of the internet, according to Tong. Using backing tracks and an electronic music style drawing influences from rave, hip hop and hyperpop, Gales says that “it would be wrong to do a show about the internet that didn’t sound like this.”
“Anyone who was raised on the internet, if they come to this show, you’ll feel it, just in the way that it’s pop music; it’s got that energy, slightly, sometimes, frenetic energy; but also that Geocities feel, even so far as going to Friendster,” says Tong.
“That sort of music that spans across all these different eras of the internet is a part of our show, a part of the music, a part of the sound design.”
Both Tong and Gales credit co-creator Wall’s existing writing practice for contributing to ease with which they can represent the internet in song. In their song “Perfect Girl”, the trio has even made keysmashes catchy. “For me, a hook is basically just a memeable section of a song that can carry forward outside of its context and be repeated and stay in your brain,” explains Tong.
Tong would love audiences to “walk away feeling more capable of coming out into the world and understanding that we can’t always force people to believe what we believe, but at the end of the day we all still live in the same world and we do need to find a way to understand each other and give each other a little more grace.”
“At some level, this show is about really serious stuff, like your family member who’s been radicalised or things like that, but at the same time we’re talking about it in a way that is a really silly song and dance,” says Gales. “We’re finding a spoon of sugar to talk about a really serious thing.”
“It’s about humanisation, it’s about looking past the actual proper nouns of whatever belief it is and looking to the feeling behind it, which is something that anybody can empathise with.”
Flat Earthers: The Musical is playing at the Hayes Theatre from October 11 to November 9. Tickets can be bought here.
