Ladies in Black

The Bridgetown Repertory Theatre's next production is a musical, Ladies in Black.

The Musical is by Carolyn Burns and Tim Finn, based on Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel, which studies women working in a fictional department store.

Set in Sydney in the 1950s, a post war city ‘a buzz with change’, the musical tells the story of school leaver Lesley who joins the sales staff in a fashionable department store, F.G. Goode’s.

Over a summer that changes her life, she befriends the colourful denizens of the women’s clothing department. Each of the characters are on the precipice of change; facing independence, working for a living and coming to terms with what it means to be a woman. A coming-of-age story for both the women and for the city they live in.

Robert Benson-Parry is directing the production and he tells us how the musical is progressing, “To bring this production to the Bridgetown stage it will be a collaborative effort, I have Wayne Paget-Steadman who is the choreographer and Julia Robinson as the music director.

“We have fourteen cast members, five of those are male roles. The leading role of Lesley will be played by a seventeen-year-old Ella McGuire.

“In our pre-production, when reading through the script, the cast members giggled and laughed at our societies attitude changes which have taken place since the 1950s, some of the attitudes back then have now become politically incorrect and are very amusing today.

“The musical will be performed with recorded music, so the timing of the play needs to be spot on.

“There are several stories running through the musical making it very interesting, but it’s not the usual boy meets girl musical story line. We enter the world of Goode’s through the eyes of Lesley, a seventeen-year-old recent high school graduate who has dreams of going to university, and becoming a poet. She renames herself Lisa on her Goode’s job application form; There is Fay, a 29-year-old woman who is worried she might never marry; Patty, whose husband has a fear he might be sterile; Miss Jacobs, a kind older woman with a mysterious past, and Magda, a Lithuanian refugee who has re-settled, along with her Hungarian husband, in Mosman. Magda is mocked and feared in equal parts by her co-workers - they call her the ‘crazy continental’

This very interesting Australian musical will remind us all of how far our society has developed in such a short time.

The musical will be staged over eight performances from April 20th to 30th, a performance which should not be missed.