Elise McCann on performing in musicals and her app Hey Lemonade
Here’s my latest Streets of Your Town podcast filed from across the seas—the beautiful south-west of Ireland Dingle in fact!
Sometimes life brings you into the path of fellow travellers who help you along the way.
So it was was for award-winning actor and renowned Australian musicals performer Elise McCann, who together with her fellow performer friend Lucy Durack decided to try and turn around people’s woes by creating the app Hey Lemonade.
“We had this chat and Lucy was like, God, this is what I needed. A chat with a friend to just normalise all the things that overwhelm the stress, normalise those things, remind me of the skills that I’ve got to get through it and so I can keep going with my day,” Elise says.
“And so we basically decided to try and make what we now call a stress and motivation management tool that’s basically designed to circuit break smaller stresses, activate your motivation, and ultimately build resilience and build your coping mechanisms, so that you can deal with the everyday challenges and keep going with your day and not have them become too big and have them overcome everything, which often happens.”
In this episode of Streets of Your Town Elise McCann also gives us insights into her creative process, particularly of late in the musical adaptation of Groundhog Day which had a season in Melbourne.
The last time Elise and I caught up was during her run headlining the recent Australian revival of “Mamma Mia” as Donna Sheridan.
“It’s been a really crazy time,” she says. “We were in Brisbane with ‘Mamma Mia’ and then we came to Melbourne and then when this next show ‘Groundhog Day’ came on, I actually was doing what we call double duty.
“So I was doing ‘Groundhog Day’ rehearsals during the day and ‘Mamma Mia’ at night, which is really, yeah, it was crazy.
“You can only do it for small periods of time—you lose your footing a little bit after that. But yeah, it was definitely an adventure.”
“The shows are so different. That’s the thing, ‘Mamma Mia’ is obviously such a joyful show and music that we all know and love, with these great pop songs, whereas ‘Groundhog Day’ is all Tim Minchin, so it’s really wordy and really complex and crazy harmonies and different time signatures and it sings really high. So they’re both actually sang in completely different parts of my voice. So it’s been really lucky to be able to kind of stretch my vocal range back to singing all the different versions of it or parts of it that I would ever use.”
Elise admits that like anyone, there are days that get the better of her, and that’s how she decided to create the stress and motivation app Hey Lemonade to act as a portable pick me up in your pocket.
“We provide three minute short talks about a whole range of everyday specific situations like when your kids are being arseholes, if I can say that.
“Or when you have imposter syndrome or you need a gee up for a meeting or public speaking jitters or just when you're overthinking. And the goal is to really pragmatically really specifically just get you back on track.
“That’s actually been a really exciting thing because we basically decided to call on all of our friends in the entertainment industry. And so we’ve got an amazing group of writers like Benjamin Law and Virginia Gay and Jamila Rizby and the whole range of Michelle Law, Marieke Hardy, great people who write amazing things. And we have a team of psychologists who help us make sure everything is really scientifically sound and evidence-based. And then we thought, let’s find voices that suit, come from a whole range of different backgrounds so that they can essentially, we can have someone that resonates with everyone no matter where they’re coming from.”
Check out the app at: https://heylemonade.com.au/
You can also check out the Hey Lemonade Instagram feed and Elise’s own Instagram feed.
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