Murder Horse - BMEC

Murder Horse – The Musical 

Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre

Something is waiting in the wings at BMEC. It has four legs, a body count, and no intention of losing.

Sweeney Todd meets Succession. That's the pitch. The Succession reference holds up beautifully: a dying patriarch plays his children off against each other in a battle for inheritance, and the plot structure has that same delicious, dynastic rot. Sweeney Todd, though? Less convincing. Murder Horse is murderous in name and gleefully bloody in spirit, but where Sondheim chills the blood, this show wants to make you howl. And largely it does.

The setup is a dark horse of a premise. Feckless rich boy Des, desperate to save the family gaming empire, stumbles upon a bizarre racehorse - one that starts winning him races. Des revels in his fortune, until he discovers the truth: this horse is killing anyone who stands in its way. How the creative team brings the horse to the stage? That would be telling. Let's just say you won't see it coming and neither do the victims.

The title alone is genuinely intriguing - gothic animalia, if you will - and when the horse does its work, the show is darkly, deliciously effective: successful in both horror and comedy in the same breath. But Murder Horse is ultimately a grab bag of tones, and it takes real rigour in the writing to keep a show on track when it's pulling in many directions. Because of its length (and it needs shortening) it could be darker, more pointed, more dangerous. Instead it has, at times, a "look-what-we-made-mum" feel. The love in the room is palpable. The discipline is still catching up.

This is the third production from the Hansen-Dodds-Thomson stable, following Schapelle Schapelle and Fast Cars - a track record of sharp, satirical, regionally rooted musicals that consistently punch above their weight. Here, they've set their sights on Australia's national obsession with gambling, and there's rich territory to mine. One might wish, though, that the show had pressed harder on its own discomfort.  Because revelling in the glamour of the racing world while simultaneously skewering it is a tightrope, Murder Horse doesn't always stay on the right side of the fence. A production that truly wanted to bite the hand that feeds might have found a sharper critique of the industry at its centre, not just the corpses it leaves behind.

The men behind the writing also perform, which is either brave or optimistic depending on the scene. Tim Hansen is the exception: seasoned, magnetic, with charisma to burn - a thoroughbred in a field of promising two-year-olds. The others are patchier - and if we're talking horses, the pitching is uneven. They could also have taken a knife, appropriately, to some of the overwriting. As a two-act work it does become flabby, and a tighter dramaturgical hand would have it racing home rather than pulling up short.

The women, however, are running a different race entirely. Jacqui Bramwell Dodds as Di Denning brings genuine accomplishment. She is a singer and dancer of real quality. Alice Litchfield gives off awesome Jessie Buckley energy across a panoply of ensemble roles, which is no small feat. And Ruby Teys, choreographer and a central Janice Jorgensen, is frankly incredible. Her timing, her comic chops, her devil-may-care aliveness on stage: she's the kind of performer you can't stop watching even when she's not the focus. A dark horse? Not anymore.

Annemaree Dalziel's scenic design is functional and gets the job done, but hasn't quite found its central metaphor yet, the literal visual world of the show is still searching for the image that will make it truly run. Becky Russell lights the show with musical theatre aplomb - as well as anyone could in the cavernous BMEC Showroom, a venue that presents its own challenges. Amplified sound in that space is a genuine beast to tame, and on occasion the balance tilted against the lyrics. Words lost mid-gallop, which in a musical is never ideal.

A cracking band drives the original score with aplomb, and it was a genuine pleasure to be in that room with such collective competence. Kate Smith (PhD) pulls it all together as director. Musicals are hard. If this is a proof-of-concept production, one can only imagine that future outings will be sharper, leaner, and hungrier for having had the generosity of a Bathurst audience to test themselves against.

Regional theatre is vital. Full marks to BMEC for keeping local production alive, kicking and occasionally homicidal.

But here's the question the show raises and then sidesteps: in a country where gambling losses per capita are the highest on earth - where the punt is practically a national sacrament (not to mention the entire issue of animal cruelty) - is a campy, affectionate romp really the form this story demands? It gave this reviewer pause. Murder Horse is at its most alive when it's darkest; it's at its most uncertain when it wants to be loved. The good news is that Create NSW are on board, the talent is undeniable, and Bathurst contains creative gold. The challenge now is to go back to the drawing board, take a knife to the indulgences, trust the darkness, and make the next iteration the one that truly draws blood.

The horse has bolted. Now somebody needs to ride it.

Review by Kate Gaul