Tim Finn’s new musical will tour Australia in 2017 after enchanting audiences in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Director Simon Phillips describes Ladies in Black as “the mouse that roared” noting that Tim Finn’s musical comes “with none of the brouhaha” accompanying big commercial musicals from overseas. And yet, it has captivated audiences, with sell-out seasons in Brisbane and Melbourne. It also won the 2016 Helpmann Award for Best New Australian Work.

Now the Queensland Theatre Company production is to tour Australia, opening as part of the 2017 Sydney Festival on January 3 before moving on to Brisbane, Melbourne and Canberra. Announcing the dates at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre, where the tour will begin, Finn delighted the assembled throng when he picked up his guitar to play one of the songs from the show called Model Gowns, sung by the exotic “continental” Magda.

^{Naomi Price, Kate Cole, Lucy Maunder and Christen O’Leary in Ladies in Black. Photo by Rob Maccoll}

Adapted by writer Carolyn Burns from Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel The Women in Black, the show is set in the 1950s in Sydney’s top department store Goodes (a thinly disguised David Jones) where a whole new world of possibilities opens up to Lisa, a bright young school leaver – thanks in particular to Magda, a bohemian Hungarian migrant who runs the glamorous Model Gowns department and takes Lisa under her wing. As well as Lisa’s coming-of-age story, Ladies in Black looks at a city on the cusp of becoming cosmopolitan and at the burgeoning of women’s rights, interweaving the stories of several of Lisa’s female co-workers.

The score by Finn – the acclaimed singer/songwriter who is synonymous with the legendary bands Split Enz and Crowded House – features more than 20 original songs including the uproariously funny He’s a Bastard, while Gabriela Tylesova’s glamorous design includes over 30 custom-made gowns, frocks and suits.

The show premiered at QTC in late 2015 and then had a season at Melbourne Theatre Company at the start of this year. Phillips says that as soon as he started working on it with Finn and Burns, he felt that it had “an element of magic about it. There’s something at the heart of it that’s right for theatre and audiences have responded to that,” he says. “There’s such an abundance of happy endings in it – but they are little things that people want in life. There’s something about the audacity with which it delivers small fulfilments to deserving people. It’s also a touching weepie. Lots of people are terribly emotional about it.”

Finn says that he has loved the experience of writing Ladies in Black so much that he is now “hooked” on musical theatre and already has two other projects on the go.

Ladies in Black tours nationally from January to April

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