From the opening number of Australia’s newest home-grown musical you can almost hear the rhythmic wop, wop, wop of helicopter blades as memories come in to land.
Weaving anthemic rock songs into the story of the world’s first televised war as told by three young combatants, Rolling Thunder Vietnam has “hit” written all over it, literally.
The show features the music of Steppenwolf, Joe Cocker, Billy Thorpe, Bob Dylan, Santana, Russell Morris and Jimi Hendrix: soldiers of song who defined the Vietnam era and amplified the coming-of-age of Australia’s baby boomers.
But while every lyric of this ambitious “concert drama” will be as familiar as solid-gold classics, the cast – for the most part – will not.
Rolling Thunder Vietnam has been cast largely with theatrical newcomers, among them Will Ewing.
The youngest of 10 children of a Mortlake sheep farmer, Ewing might not seem an obvious candidate for musical theatre. But then folk were also surprised when he won a place at the renowned National Theatre Drama School on a full scholarship. “I remember, after getting to acting school and people finding out I came from a farm, and other students saying, ‘Geez, what did your parents think of that?’.”
In fact, there’s plenty of family pedigree. “My mum – a music teacher and artist – is an amazing singer with an Eva Cassidy-type voice and all her family was very musical. Her father was in one of Australia’s longest-running dance bands, The McKinnon Dance Band, and my uncle was in Madder Lake – the ’70s progressive rock group that toured with The Stones.”
If that wasn’t enough, Ewing is also distantly related to the swashbuckling Hollywood matinee idol Errol Flynn and the sainted Mary MacKillop. “It’s a very colourful family tapestry,” he says, laughing.
Certainly it seems someone is looking out for him. Ewing had his ticket booked and was planning to head off to America when the audition for
RTV came up. “I hadn’t done a musical since I was 16 (and played Jean Valjean in Hamilton’s Monivae College production of Les Mis) but I really do love the opportunity to blend the singing and acting so I rocked along,” he says.
When director David Berthold (Holding the Man, Cosi) put Ewing on the spot, demanding a farm story – befitting the background of one of the young soldier characters – he didn’t need to travel beyond the back paddock of the family farm.
As we sit in the cosy lounge of a boutique hotel on Bourke Street, Ewing retells the somewhat grisly story of removing a dead lamb from the contracted uterus of a ewe that had come down in winter grass, complete with sound effects and contortions. By the time he reaches the part about discovering its live twin, half the lobby staff plus two guests seem to have found their way into his orbit and there is a workman plastering over a non-existent hole in the wall by his head.
We all want to applaud when he reaches the happy denouement, “and that lamb went on to win the best spring lamb at the Noorat grand annual show”. Evidently the audition panel was similarly impressed.
Ewing, 25, is not only a born storyteller but also a talented musician. His group William and the Tells featured on Neighbours after which Ewing stuck around for a year playing Griffin O’Donahue. “I jumped at the opportunity, being straight out of school,” he says. “I’d done screen classes, but nothing professionally and this was like on-the-job training.”
More recently he appeared in a new Australian play by actor and dramatist Kevin Summers performed at La Mama.
Patient 12 tells the story of four young men in World War I and, like RTV, challenges the morality of war and includes popular songs of the era.
“What I have learnt about war in the past six months has been incredible.”
“One of the saddest, most chilling facts to me was that 50 years after World War I ended … in 1968 there were still guys with such physical and mental scars they hadn’t left Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital,” Ewing says.
Closer to home, he remembers his sister-in-law’s father, the loveable late larrikin Bluey McIntyre, who came back from Vietnam never wanting to share his story, but sometimes found himself unwillingly transported back there just by the waft of a hand-rolled cigarette on a hot night.
Former Sydney Morning Herald arts editor and theatre critic Bryce Hallett spent the best part of two years talking to veterans such as Bluey, reading letters to and from home and travelling to Vietnam before scripting the show.
When it came to casting, the directors chose to avoid the usual suspects. As musical director Chong Lim put it: “There’s plenty of great singing talent in Australia, but we also had to get those who could act and were young enough to represent the era.”
It’s a first professional theatre role for the best-known member of the cast, Australian Idol winner Wes Carr, who is joined by The Voice contestant Tom Oliver, and 2013 graduates Matthew Pearce (NIDA), and Kimberley Hodgson and Vanessa Krummenacher (both from Queensland Conservatorium of Music).
“It’s a new production, all original writing that’s never been put on before – just the fact they are calling it the world premiere is pretty cool,” Ewing says, chuckling.
But it’s the list of songs running through Acts 1 and 2 – Most People I Know, The Real Thing, All Along The Watchtower, Black Magic Woman, Help Me Make It Through The Night, Paint It Black – that makes this a production that could really take off.
The music, coupled with the inclusion of an American soldier alongside the two Australian protagonists, one a conscript, the other not, gives it real appeal to overseas markets.
As narrator and on-stage swing (standing in for all male characters), Ewing has to know the roles of all three soldier characters, Johnny, Andy and Tommy, inside out. He is acutely conscious of RTV’s musical pedigree.
“They are big, big songs,” he says. “This is the soundtrack of our lives.”
» Rolling Thunder Vietnam plays at Hamer Hall on August 22 and 23. rollingthundervietnam.com
» Bookings: www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/whats-on/popular-music/rolling-thunder-vietnam
