Bananaland review – Kate Miller-Heidke’s new musical comedy is a miraculous joy

Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane festival

Stacked with sly gags about the music business, this delightfully absurd show about a punk-rock outfit that rebrands as a kids’ band is a love letter to all kinds of dreamers

Art is inevitable. We are creatures who make art because we have to, even if it’s just in the care we take in plating an attractive dinner dish for a loved one or in posting a carefully framed selfie. To make great, resonant, soul-touching art, though – a song that tops the charts, a film that changes how we think about things – is so rare it’s almost impossible.

But to make a new musical that balances music, lyrics, sound design, dialogue, narrative, choreography, lighting, set design and more in perfect harmony to tell a story that moves and entertains? That’s miraculous.

I was only able to see Bananaland, now in its world premiere season at QPAC for Brisbane festival, on its very first preview (which was also the show’s first full run-through). It’s highly likely the show I saw is different from the one audiences have just seen on its opening night: it’s had time to smooth out its bump, work out the tech and make adjustments to script and story where necessary. It needed that work when I saw it, but that’s what the preview process is for.

I’m confident its foundations, bones and heart will have remained intact, and in those I saw something genuinely exciting: a musical that made me laugh and laugh and laugh. And then burst into tears. And then, somehow, it ended joyously – a gift of a feeling I could take with me back out into the night air.

With lyrics and music by Kate Miller-Heidke and her husband, Keir Nuttall (who recently co-wrote the music and lyrics for Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical), Bananaland is a celebration of and cautionary tale about making music, as well as a thoughtful exploration of both its limits and possibilities in offering us healing, solace and acting as a force for change.

Ruby Semblance (Max McKenna) is deeply committed to Kitty Litter, which is what you might call a punk protest band but which she calls an “onstage conceptual art slash music-oriented happening”. She’s joined onstage by her sister and protector Karen (Georgina Hopson), her lover Seb (Joe Kalou) and Ex (Maxwell Simon) – he isn’t Ruby’s ex, but he is devoted to her vision. With earnest, aggressive songs about consumerist pigs and Simon Cowell’s crimes against art, they mean to create social and political change … but that isn’t working out very well. They’ve played hundreds of shows and have exactly one fan (Chris Ryan).