Why the guys behind hit musical That Bloody Woman have made a TV comedy about amateur theatre – with songs.
When composer Luke Di Somma came up with That Bloody Woman, his rock musical about suffragette Kate Sheppard, he tapped actor-writer Kip Chapman to direct it. The 2015 Christchurch debut season became a national tour seen by thousands. Late the same year, Chapman’s Hudson & Halls Live! also debuted, quickly becoming a phenomenon and playing throughout the country.
Now the pair have reunited for a musical comedy that may become their most widely seen work. It harks back, not to New Zealand political or cooking show history, but to the siege of Troy. Well, the story of Paris, Helen, that wooden horse and the rest, set to music and performed by Pizzazz, a drama society from the musical theatre mecca of Tauranga.
It’s called Happiness. It’s a television show, and possibly the most ambitious half-hour sitcom in Kiwi television history. After all, there is singing and dancing involving almost a dozen characters. There are Di Somma’s original songs (sample title Troy Boy) which are performed in the show-within-a-show.
And there is a story about Charlie (Harry McNaughton), who has graduated from precocious child star of Pizzazz productions to a directing career on Broadway. Only, he’s had to come home to mum Gaye (Rebecca Gibney) due to visa problems. Gaye thinks he should help out with the show. But Pizzazz’s overbearing, talent-challenged resident director Adrian (Peter Hambleton) thinks otherwise.
You get the feeling that both Di Somma and Chapman must have dealt with a few Adrians in their am-dram days. Is he based on anyone?
“No comment!” shouts Di Somma with a laugh on Zoom from Melbourne. “Don’t touch that, Kip.”
Chapman, at home in Warkworth, adds: “I’ll just say what every person who’s worked on the show has said about Adrian Templeton and that is ‘we know an Adrian Templeton’.”
Having hit it off on That Bloody Woman, the duo worked on some projects afterwards, but none came to fruition. But during the Covid lockdowns, they spent every Tuesday morning for six weeks brainstorming. Initially leaning towards a film, the basis of Happiness was formed quickly.
But with a funding application turned down, the idea went to the bottom drawer. But when Harriet Crampton, head of drama at production company Greenstone TV, asked Chapman what ideas he had, he showed her Happiness.
Reshaped to a six-episode series that would fit Three’s regular local comedy slot, it won New Zealand On Air backing to the tune of nearly $3 million.
The pair, who had mostly written for the stage, found themselves having to recalibrate when it came to half-hour – in actuality, 22-minute – comedy episodes. Chapman: “Our biggest culture shock from writing stage stuff was just how much plot TV can absorb.”
They soon found storylines they thought would be entire episodes could last only until the first commercial break. With each episode having just enough room for four minutes of music, Di Somma found his songs had to get from verse to chorus faster than anything he had to do in the Kate Sheppard musical.
“You still want the catharsis of song structure. You still want that journey. So rather than just taking a bigger song and cutting it in half, I just made smaller songs.”
Still, the series has at least one belter that sounds more like a Disney-princess-they-just-don’t-understand anthem than a comedy ditty. The Tauranga Airport baggage claim area does go a bit La La Land to mark Charlie’s return in episode one – but that’s it for the spontaneous song outbursts you might see in a screen musical. The pair didn’t want a full jazz hands bombardment to scare off viewers who might be musical-theatre allergic.
Chapman: “We worked pretty hard on the rules of engagement around how the music fits within the show … we were quite clear that the songs couldn’t come out of nowhere.”
When it came to casting, Gibney’s agent got in touch. “We received the startling news that she wanted to audition for the role,” says Chapman. “We’re like, ‘does Rebecca Gibney need to audition?’ Her audition was exactly what the part was. Right from the start, she has been all in – learning the dancing, learning the singing. She has given us so much and her Gaye is sublime.”
McNaughton’s role as Charlie follows his own shift from acting to writing and producing, which included last year’s sex work comedy Madam.
“He’s got a star quality, and he’s got a challenging role – he’s the gay straight man to all of the other slightly crazier characters.”
Charlie’s Broadway ambitions have career parallels with both Chapman, who took his interactive space shows Apollo 13: Mission Control and Destination Mars overseas, and Di Somma, who did postgraduate study and taught in New York. It might be a breezy, backstage comedy but it’s named Happiness for another reason, says Chapman.
“Luke and I work in this industry because we had a joy of doing it when we were children and innate talent, but through our 20-year careers, it almost becomes a job. You lose some of the joy because you’ve got to pay a mortgage, and you have to accept lots of compromises.
“But the people who work at Pizzazz or who do musical theatre or any hobby, they’re doing it purely for the joy of it. A question that we’re always deliberating with this show is: ‘Who’s having a better life?’
“You’ve got Charlie, who’s the professional who is deeply unhappy, and you’ve got these people who, let’s face it, aren’t the best at what they do but they are truly happy.”
Happiness brings a different sort of contentment for Di Somma, who worked on NZ Opera’s contentious 2023 Unruly Tourists production.
“I can write for New Zealand Opera. I can do Auckland Theatre Company but more people will hear my music in these six episodes than have heard all those things combined, probably,” says Di Somma.
“I think, as you get to your mid-career, you want to start having an impact. You want to start having your work out there resonating with people and it’s so us, this show. It’s so authentically our tone. It’s very queer. It’s very Kiwi. It’s musical theatre. It’s all the things that we love. And someone has let us do it.”
Happiness, Three, from Thursday April 3, 8.30pm, and ThreeNow.
