Hello and Merry Chrissy to you all, my wonderful supportive Wandering Journo Tribe! Whether you are wiping the sweat from your brow Down Under or sheltering from snowstorms like my friends in the US, I hope you’ve been able to have a few moments of peace and gratitude before we kick it all off again in 2023!
And The Wandering Journo is here to help! I’ve got your road trip listening sorted with a burst of podcasts that I have coming over the next few weeks to help you pass the time in this blissful nothing week between Chrissy and New Year!
Vidya Makan is an absolute delight—not only an incredible talent of musical theatre, she’s also making her mark writing and composing musicals as well, and at such a young age! Her work making performances on stage and off a more inclusive and diverse space for all is so powerful—I had to tell you all about it!
Performing in Six the Musical’s Australian tour is the culmination of a lifelong journey for the Queensland Conservatorium graduate, and the realisation of a dream that she could be accepted for her true self on stage.
“I remember when I auditioned for Six, I didn’t realise what I had been missing in that it was the first time I was ever seen as a woman in an audition room as a full three-dimensional woman,” Makan recalls. “Not someone trying to fill an archetype, not trying to be a race that I’m not, because there aren’t many musicals that are written for Indian women.
“And I think the very real impact that Six has had on the industry, you’re seeing these new shows, you’re seeing so many new Australian musicals that are written by local talent, with local people that look like who we look like when we walk around. Not this weird thing that I was always fed as a child.”
The critically acclaimed Brisbane actor, singer and composer/lyricist has forged her way quickly into the ultra competitive world of musical theatre.
She stars as Catherine Parr in Six the Musical, and as she tells us on Streets of Your Town, it’s a show close to her heart.
“I think the word that for me rings true is electricity—you leave feeling electric,” Makan said of Six the Musical’s appeal.
“Imagine the hottest pop band in the entire world and it just happens to be the six wives of Henry VIII. And we give you a 75 minute long show where we talk about the archetypes that we’ve been painted as all these 500 years. We kind of break that down in our own way.
“We begin the show introducing ourselves and we say, OK, we’re going to run a competition of which one of us had the worst time with Henry. And then my character gets to do something really cool and it flips the show on its head. I won’t say too much, you’ve got to come and see the show, but it’s a very, very, very cool piece of theatre.”
Such is the popularity of the show that the Broadway album of the soundtrack has just been nominated for a Grammy Award, and songs from the show have been streamed more than 23 million times worldwide, making it one of the most successful recordings in musical theatre history.
Makan is constantly amazed by the dedication of fans of Six the Musical—with many fans in the audience emulating their favourite character on stage by meticulously copying their complex costumes to the most intricate detail.
“Sometimes you will look into the audience and go, that’s my costume—how are they wearing my costume? The dedication to perfection is incredible,” she said.
“The costumes in themselves are a part of what makes this show a cult following. They are so iconic in the colours and the styles.”
It is hard to believe how close Makan came to not envisioning herself in an onstage role at all, despite her obvious talent.
“As a kid, I was a soccer player and a musician. So growing up my dream was to play soccer for Australia and then also be in the pit of the orchestra for musicals,” she said.
“I was always obsessed with musicals but never performed in them. And then at Somerville House [High School], that was when I started to get into performing and fell in love with it. I was really lucky. Somerville had an amazing music department and the teachers that I had, I’m still friends with to this day."
Not only has Makan shown her chops as a skilled performer in a range of professional productions, but also as a writer, winning awards for two musicals of her own creation now in development, one of which is slated to debut in Sydney’s Hayes Theatre in May next year.
“I’ve been a composer, lyricist my whole life. It’s something that I love sharing with Catherine Parr who we’re playing in Six because we’re both writers," she said.
“Whenever I would see people of colour, particularly on Australian stages, we were always reduced down to these very racist stereotypes.
“So I started writing a show about what it means to be Australian from the voices of the margins. And that is basically what our show is. It’s an exploration of who we can be.
“This particular show, The Lucky Country, I’ve been myself working on for about five years...and it’s just been announced to premiere at Hayes Theatre in May next year.”
She’s relieved to finally now see real progress in the performing arts in its representation of diversity on stage.
“We’ve always known that we've been here, people of colour and minority voices,” she said. “We’ve always been here and we've always been extremely talented and we’ve always been extremely capable. I think now the rest of the industry are going, oh, oh, you’re right.
“I wrote a song called I Need You to See Me. It featured 101 BIPOC, culturally and Linguistically Diverse Artists, aged 18 to 25. We did this song and it blew up.
“And I’m so proud of the splash that it made because so many of those kids who were all young people who were in that video and in that original song are now just working professionally from job to job to job. And I feel very, very proud of the very real impact that the song has made on each of them.”
In other news
And in the biggest news for my Wandering Journo year—the release of Making Waves! This five-part podcast is perfect road trip listening—five one hour episodes exploring how Australia can better manage its water resources—featuring stories from First Nations and lesser-heard voices from around this nation! We travelled from Brisbane to Cairns to Castlemaine to Broome to bring you this sizzling face to face audio, so that you can close your eyes and actually imagine yourself in this country. (Maybe not while you’re driving! Ha!) It’s up on Soundcloud now, and we hope it will be up on Apple podcasts and Spotify and all the major poddie providers early next year. I’ll keep you posted but feel free to listen in now through Soundcloud!
You can also watch back the launch which featured one of our amazing interviewees Professor Anne Poelina from her home country at Broome. She explains so eloquently the need for a broader vision of how we manage our water resources such as the Fitzroy River, and how First Nations people see these waterways as ancestral beings that should be protected by National Park status. She explains it much better than me though, so have a listen!
Thanks so much for your ongoing support of my audio adventures my wonderful Wandering Journo Tribe! I plan to keep bringing you slices of Australian audio life through 2023—and your support of this newsletter keeps my tank filled in Mildred the Cantankerous kombi!
See you on the flipside of 2022!
Talk soon!
xx Nance
Vidya Makan on playing Catherine Parr in Six, the musical story of Henry VIII's wives