2024: The Sunshine Club by Wesley Enoch AM

 

The Sunshine Club by Wesley Enoch AM. HIT Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, August 1 2024

Reviewed by Frank McKone

Creative Team:
Writer & Director: Wesley Enoch AM
Composer: John Rodgers; Musical Director: Shenzo Gregorio
Choreographer: Yolande Brown; Lighting Designer: Ben Hughes
Set& Costume Realiser: Adrienne Chisholm

Cast:
Frank Doyle – Garret Lyon; Rose Morris – Claire Warrillow;
Aunty Faith Doyle – Roxanne McDonald; Pearl Doyle – Tehya Makani
Reverend Percy Morris / Bill Harris – Dale Pengelly
Dave Daylight – Leeroy Tipiloura; Lorry Hocking – Colin Smith
Peter Walsh / Doorman / Jimmy Daily – Rune Nydal
Patti Maguire (Rose Cover) – Chloe Rose Taylor
Mavis Moreton (Pearl Cover) – Jade Lomas-Ronan

Band: 5-piece live

The cast and five-piece live band
in The Sunshine Club 2024

Ostensibly, The Sunshine Club is an intriguing rom-com, until – like Romeo and Juliet – the dark forces of social discrimination wreck the rom and eliminate the com.  

Claire Warrillow and Garret Lyon
as Rose Morris and Frank Doyle
dancing in The Sunshine Club

Is there any real hope for change for the better, as Frank Doyle starts on the alcohol path in angry frustration in the final scene?  Will Rose achieve the professional singing career she deserves?  How will Dave and Pearl manage bringing up a white man’s child?

Yet the terrific up-beat band (who unfortunately are not acknowledged in the printed program); the always lively precision choreography; and the careful direction of the mood changes, light the drama with sunshine from within.  What makes it intriguing is that the show is simply enjoyable to watch even while the reason for needing mixed blak/white weekly dance clubs brings up clouds and even thunder and lightning.

Rozanne McDonald as Aunty Faith Doyle
bringing on thunder and lightning
in The Sunshine Club by Wesley Enoch AM

In fact – and this is a worry about how far we have improved in view of last year’s referendum – I (a 1950s immigrant) had never known about the Sunshine Clubs that some claim were set up around the country after returned Indigenous World War II soldiers realised their fighting for freedom didn’t mean theirs.  

Perhaps I’m wish-fulfilling: in offtheleash.net.au “The Sunshine Club is a fictional place but it's based on a real place called the Boathouse in Brisbane that a lot of my Elders went to. They'd tell stories of the dances they'd go to, how they'd have to sneak in and sneak back out again,” Enoch says.

But then again, after explaining he wrote the musical in 1999 “in reaction to the late 1990s and the Reconciliation movement”: “There’s a song right at the end, and I don’t want to give away too much, but when we wrote it in the 90s the sentiment was that we have to make change. The lyric goes: “If not now, then when? If not now, then show me a world where it can,” says Enoch.

Despite the brilliance of The Sunshine Club, I fear I still can’t see that world yet.  I was surprised to see much less than a full-house audience last night, while to me it is a great shame that it gets a run of just one night in Queanbeyan.  

I can only hope, as Enoch writes in his program Creative Note, that “you see The Sunshine Club as a great celebration of our history but also, through our history, a way of talking about the situation that we [were in] twenty years ago in the 1990s when I first wrote it.  In 2024, we need to focus a lot more on how we work together and how reconciliation is possible in the future.”

But is this the last of HIT Productions’ presentation of this entertaining and important show?  Their web page, https://www.hitproductions.com.au/theatre/come-on-down-to-the-sunshine-club  last updated May 2, 2024, lists the performances through 2023-2024:

2024 PERFORMANCES:  Sydney Coliseum, NSW; Tanunda Soldiers’ Memorial Hall, SA; Murray Bridge Performing Arts and Function Centre, SA; Nautilus Arts Centre, the SALT Festival, Port Lincoln; Mildura Arts Centre, Mildura; Broken Hill Civic Centre, Broken Hill; Wangaratta Performing Arts Centre, Wangaratta; Ballarat Civic Hall, Ballarat; Kingston Civic Hall, Moorabbin.

2023 PERFORMANCES: Far more than I can record here, in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland.

So I hope I need not worry so much, since as Wesley Enoch says “This play is a way of having our voice heard and our world view expressed so we can be heard” and that it’s people who go to plays who make things change.

Claire Warrillow as Rose Morris with Garret Lyon as Frank Doyle
Their first touch in The Sunshine Club by Wesley Enoch AM