The Long Road to Overnight Success, page 4
I don’t even know if I knew I could sing like that, I just wanted to be in the show. If you hand a kid a ball and they kick it a long way, they don’t know if it’s a long way until an adult says, ‘Wow, he’s got a big kick on him.’ All I knew was that I was auditioning, and I had to stand up and sing nice and loud. At home, being loud was mainly confined to screaming and carrying on, but for the first time I wasn’t being angry, I wasn’t being silly, I just had to sing with the piano. So I did.
Over the years I’ve sung in rock bands, wedding bands, barber-shop quartets, cabaret acts as well as on stage with true greats like Marina Prior. Last year I recorded a song for a compilation album called The Spirit of Christmas and had a chance to perform solo at Carols by Candlelight, as I had done back in 2007 with the principal cast of Guys and Dolls. Singing is a part of my professional life now, but back then I had never even vaguely considered doing anything like it. I knew I wanted to act, but as a ten-year-old the idea of singing professionally as well never crossed my mind.
At that audition I had to dance a few numbers too, and it turned out I could move okay as well. Coming from a house full of dancers with a mother who was a dance teacher, Mum and David weren’t too surprised that I could come up with a few moves there. Then I had to do a little bit of acting, and I was in.
Over the next months we rehearsed the entire show, which was to be performed at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne. Once again I was going to be in a massive room full of rows of seats, but this time I wasn’t going to be sitting down and waiting to be entertained. It was my job now to entertain.
The Palais holds more than 2000 people, and on our opening night it was packed. I was standing at the side of the stage, as nervous as a duck in Peking, peering between the curtains to catch a glimpse of the audience. I could see the pit full of musicians fronted by a guy called Ken Bailey, the conductor and the director of the show, standing there with a stick in his hand. In a few minutes the curtain would go up. The cast were running around saying ‘Chookas’ and ‘Break a leg’, and I had no idea what either of those meant. I thought it was the oddest thing for someone to tell me to break a leg. It took me a long while to learn that in the theatre you say ‘Break a leg’ to wish someone good luck before a performance, and in Australia ‘Chookas’ means much the same thing.
Our show was about the press, so I was dressed as a newspaper boy in a yellow cap and overalls, a bag over one shoulder and a pretend paper in one hand. As the curtains went up a group of us would walk out and sing a song called ‘Paper, Read All About It’.
This is the real deal now. I’ve got my makeup on and my costume on and there’s a real live audience sitting out there waiting for me. I’ve got to perform eight items, dancing and singing, and in between I’ve got to go backstage to my dressing room and get changed and come back and do another routine as a different character and I’m only ten years old.
What if I trip over? Will I remember the words? What if my voice cracks? There was so much to worry about. But just before I walked out on stage I remember turning to my friends Brad List and Troy Sussman and a bunch of other mates. We all looked at each other. ‘Let’s go and do this thing,’ I said, and we all shook hands and stepped out on stage.
I walked out into the lights until I reached my spot. I looked out at the audience, opened my mouth and somehow the words came out. As nervous as I was just moments before, I didn’t forget where I had to be, my voice didn’t crack — like magic, it all just worked perfectly.
I walked out with my heart going like a jackhammer and I knew instantly this was where I wanted to be forever. I hated to think that when the song finished I would have to walk off the stage. I wanted to stay there and keep going.
Acting in front of a live audience is a little like bungee jumping: you’re nervous, your heart is pounding, your palms are sweating, but you’re still going to take that leap. That’s where the joy comes in, and it wouldn’t be there if anticipation didn’t make your heart flutter. These days I still want to get out there and do it, and do it better than ever before, but I don’t have those nerves.
Throughout the years that followed, I never lost that certainty that somewhere, somehow, I wanted to be on a stage. I didn’t have a plan, I just knew that was where I was heading. If someone is lost in the bush, they truly don’t know where they are going. All they know is that they have an inner drive to survive and they’ll do whatever it takes. There’s no planned path if you want to become an actor. You can do drama courses, but there are no guarantees they will lead to anything. It’s not like training to be a doctor, where you can set up your own practice. I couldn’t go and do a drama course then hang up my shingle outside a studio where people could pay to watch me sing and dance every day between nine and five.
Theatre was always my first love. ‘I’m going to be an actor,’ I’d say to my sister Kim. ‘I’m going to be an actress,’ Kim would reply. ‘Yeah, but mine’s not a pipe dream,’ I would reply. ‘I’m actually going to do it.’ I never said it to be mean or rude to her, and she knows that; I just wanted to make it known to the world at large that this was real and serious for me. I just didn’t know I’d get distracted from it for so long.
Out of all the types of dance I was exposed to as a kid, tap was the one I loved most. Being a calisthenics teacher, Mum was very well connected with the local dance mafia. From the age of ten she sent me to her friend Renee Anne Martini, who taught tap at a church hall about a ten-minute drive from home.
Once a week Mum would take me to that hall, I’d put on my tap shoes and subject myself to Renee Anne. She was a terrifying woman and a hard taskmaster. Round the hall she would chase me with a wooden stick as thick as a chair leg. ‘Faster, faster, yes, yes!’ she used to shout at me. It scared the heck out of me, but I certainly learned my tap dancing. What a teacher: I would describe her as a coconut, with a hard outer shell but all soft and sweet in the middle.
Every morning I’d do five or ten minutes of tap practice before school. Tap is kind of noisy and not friendly to polished floorboards, so I practised outside. Our house was on a sloping block, with the front of the house raised off the ground and a flight of stairs running down to ground level. Each morning I’d put down a piece of chipboard on the balcony out the front and tap dance on it. The local kids walked past on their way to school; I was aware they might see me, but it didn’t worry me enough to stop me, even though tap dancing in the western suburbs was about as common as a nun with facial tattoos.
As my skills developed under Renee Anne’s less than tender hand, I entered a few tap-dancing competitions and did pretty well. That was all quite separate to my school life, until one day the school invited me to dance in a concert they were putting on for the students and for any parents who wanted to come along. It wasn’t a big deal, just a daytime event that was most likely compulsory for students. I said yes, and got to work rehearsing a number for the concert.
Renee Anne had another male student who was a little older than me, and I would get the costumes he had outgrown. He had amazing costumes in vivid colours, made of velvet or adorned with sequins — the type of costumes figure skaters wear, though marginally less tight-fitting. God knows where they are now. And if not God, my mum does. Either way, it’s just as well they’re being kept from me, because I’d dearly love to try one on now just for a giggle, even though I have no doubt I wouldn’t be able to pull one up over my foot, let alone my whole body.
When concert day came round I put on my spangly costume and performed a full tap routine in front of the whole primary school. I was so focused on the performance, it wasn’t until after it was over that it dawned on me that I had just tap danced in a tight-fitting bright-red velvet outfit before the whole school.
Straight after the performance I went to the school toilets to get changed. I was in a cubicle, peeling off my costume and getting back into my everyday clothes, when the school tough guy, a kid called George, came in with three of his cronies in tow. He was like The Fonz with his little entourage. ‘This is where it’s about to go very wrong for me,’ I thought. ‘This is where they beat me up because I was dancing.’ It was truly the first time it had crossed my mind that I had just done something exceedingly dangerous.
These four rough-headed guys were standing around me as I walked out with my costume bundled under my arm. George jerked his head at me and said, ‘That was full on. Where d’you learn to do that?’
‘Been learning to do it for a while,’ I replied.
He stared at me for what felt like the time it would take to build an ark. He gazed into my eyes, nodded his head very slightly, and said, ‘That was really good. That was cool. Good on ya.’ And walked out. His cronies looked slightly confused because I’m pretty sure they thought they were going in there to hit me everywhere bar the roof of my mouth and the soles of my feet. It’s unlikely that they thought they were coming to give me the stamp of approval. I certainly didn’t.
Apart from being relieved that I wasn’t about to be beaten up, that moment stays with me because it was the one that made me think, ‘It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. I’m going to keep doing this.’ If tap dancing wasn’t going to get me roughed up by the school bully, nothing else was going to stop me. Of all the people to get a compliment from, I never expected it from George, so it meant an enormous amount.
The sad part is, George died in a motorbike accident not long after we finished primary school. He didn’t even get to see his life through high school. I was gutted that I never got to thank him for that moment; I felt like a little piece of me had died. George went to his grave not knowing that he’d given me something positive that meant the world to me. He would never have known the good he did just by nodding and saying, ‘Good on you, keep doing that.’ Underneath it all I felt that he was saying, ‘It doesn’t matter about all this other rubbish. You want to dance? You dance, buddy.’
CHAPTER FOUR
STREET GANGS AND GANG SHOWS
My school report always said ‘easily distracted’. Why did the teachers write that? Because it was true. At school, the one thing I focused on was being distracted, and there was only one threat that ever had the power to pull me into line. At the end of one particularly distracted year, Mum and David said to me that if I didn’t do everything I could to make sure the words ‘easily distracted’ didn’t appear in my report, I wouldn’t be allowed to do Gang Show. That was enough to make me change my ways because Gang Show meant the world to me. To take it away would be like losing a limb or a close friend.
Other than my parents, I don’t think I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for two things: Scouting and Gang Show. Scouting gave me confidence but Gang Show took it to a whole new level because it taught me all my stagecraft. Along with Scouts, it was also where so many of my most enduring friendships were forged. Birds of a feather flock together and the colours of my feathers definitely matched everyone at Gang Show. That was my acting tribe. In the western suburbs of Melbourne I was a bit more colourful than some and I definitely had more to say than most, but at Gang Show we were all like that.
Back when I was involved, it was the largest budgeted amateur theatre show in the southern hemisphere. But all of the money earned from the front of house went back into buying wood and glue and hammers and nails so we could make the props, and the only way for something like Gang Show to survive was for everyone to volunteer to do a bit of everything.
The beauty of it in my eyes was cross-pollination between the technical requirements and the acting. I found it all equally fascinating. The burning inside me was to act, but a part of me got huge joy out of the mechanics of it all, making the props and being part of all the other behind-the-scenes work. It didn’t satisfy the hunger I had to act, but it was enough to keep me from starving entirely.
Apart from Gang Show, I can’t think of anything else that would have satisfied that hole in me that needed to be filled with performance. I enjoyed sports, and I got a buzz out of being part of a team, but the only way that something like football could have really satisfied me was if at quarter time, half time and three-quarter time I could have gone out and done a spot of comedy and then sung to the audience. Thanks to the variety format of Gang Show I didn’t need to use footy for that.
Because my first performances with the Gang Show were at the Palais Theatre, it will forever be my favourite venue on Planet Earth and its surrounding planets. There are other venues that can impress me more: Hollywood Bowl is amazing, there’s something special going on in the Sydney Opera House, and when you stand in the Colosseum where the floor was once covered in sand soaked with the blood of gladiators, there is no feeling like it. But when I walk into the Palais Theatre, the child in me is released. If I had to make a movie of that moment, the camera would pull wide and you would see a shot of me as I am now standing beside me as a ten-year-old, the two of us looking at each other going, ‘Wow, we’re back here.’
Many years after those first Gang Show performances I went on to be the house technician at the Palais, looking after lighting and sound and the fly system. I worked alongside a wonderful old theatre tech called Peter Turley, who like all good old techs had spent a lifetime backstage in the theatres of the world, with bright colourful stories to tell of the shows he had done and the amazing people he had met. To me the theatre technicians’ stories were sometimes greater than the shows they worked on.
Each year all the strands of my life seemed to pull together in a long and lovely cycle involving Gang Show. Early in the year you would audition, and then if you got in — which I did every year, thank goodness — you would rehearse a new show for months and months. Around August or September we would put on the show at the Palais Theatre and fill that theatre for a week. Towards the end of the year, we would have a Gang Show Reunion, which was like the best school camp imaginable. I couldn’t wait to go on it: you’d meet up with all the friends you had made in the show and do plays and have fun and party all weekend.
Christmas would come and go, then in the New Year we would adapt the show we’d done the year before and take it to country towns. A month or two beforehand a few of us on the production team would head to a town to do rehearsals. As well as performing, I used to be a production assistant, so I would take little groups of kids and teach them how to sing — not professional singing instruction, but how to project and how to put their heart into a song — and do simple dance routines. We would take over the local hall with a pianist — either one from the town or one we brought along — and we’d sit down with the local Scouts and teach them the songs.
A couple of months later we would come back to town in a bus with the rest of the cast and the crew and a few members of the orchestra, with a truck full of costumes, props, lighting and sound equipment. We would all arrive on a Friday night and be billeted out with families from the local area. That was a fantastic experience: for years I got to spend a few days living with families all over Victoria. Some of them were dairy farmers, some owned shops or worked at the local hardware store in town; one guy had an army duck, another family ran orchards; there were school teachers, truck drivers, bakers and butchers — we were billeted with all kinds of people. They didn’t all have children in the show but they wanted to help out these city Scouts who were coming to put on a show in their town. I remember going to stay with one family in particular. When I walked into their living room I saw a big lump under the carpet. ‘That’s a bit odd,’ I thought to myself. As I walked further through the room I saw another lump, and another. Curiosity got the better of me. ‘What are those lumps under the carpet?’ I asked. The father said casually, ‘Oh, when we had the carpet laid the kids were playing marbles and they didn’t pick ’em up quick enough.’
I spent my eighteenth birthday on the road in country Victoria, on tour with Gang Show in the township of Leongatha. I couldn’t think of any better way to celebrate.
The great thing about Gang Show on tour was that we didn’t just swing into town and put on a show for the locals: the town was part of the show. We played the leads but the local kids were part of the chorus and played small parts in the show. All day Saturday we would rehearse; the lighting crew would get the lights in and the sound crew would set up the sound and the orchestra would play along while we ran through each item. Bit by bit we would work through the routines: ‘All right, the people on this item come over here, the people on that item head over there.’ By evening everyone knew their parts; we put our costumes on, opened the hall doors and let the crowds in. Of course you’d fill the town hall because all the locals would come along to see this show their kids were involved in, acting alongside the Gang Show cast from Melbourne.
Audience and cast alike, everyone would have a ball. The curtain would close to thunderous applause, then the local Scouts would put on biscuits and scones and cups of tea. Anyone over eighteen would help load all the equipment and costumes back into the truck and then gather for a few beers. In the morning we would get together for a big barbecue to celebrate, then mid-afternoon we would pile back on the buses and head back to the city.
Even though I now make my living as a professional actor, I got just as much fun and satisfaction from acting when I was an amateur on stage with Gang Show. In fact, it’s possible I had more fun back then; there was a freedom to it, and having 130 friends around you when you’re performing is pretty special.
But I think the reason Gang Show appealed to me so much was that the shows were so exuberant; everyone loved being there. Nothing would stop me being a part of that, not even broken bones. One week at the Palais I did a dance routine with a broken arm. A bloke strapped it up every night in skin-coloured bandages and I would go out with top hat and cane.
One double act I did with my mate Damien Lippiatt was in the spirit of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Damien would open the act in straight-faced fashion, only to be interrupted by a ‘drunk’ in the audience. That was me. Damien remembers me being pretty forthright about it: ‘Shane would actually start climbing over people’s heads … which was a bit confronting. You don’t expect to have a 70-kilogram bloke coming at you in the stalls.’ Yes, as strange as it might seem, I once weighed only 70 kilograms.
