How a legal stoush with Rachael Gunn elevated a comedy musical to a whole new level
Breaking: The Musical is certainly not about Olympic breaker Rachael 'Raygun' Gunn, assures the show's creator.
It's about dreams, self-confidence, public condemnation, taking the piss, Olympic breakdancing and fighting an image problem with legal threats … but again, it is emphatically not about Raygun.
It's actually about a 36-year-old Olympic breaker called 'Spraygun', the stage name of university lecturer, Sprachel Gunn.
As the opening graphic disclaims, any resemblance to any other public figure is merely a coincidence.
Comedian Steph Broadbridge, who also stars as Spraygun, had initially written a similar show, Raygun: The Musical, which was slated to debut in a small Sydney venue in December last year.
The controversy catapulted the show into the spotlight, with the comedian working the legal stoush into her craft, opening to sold-out shows across the Sydney Comedy Festival, Melbourne Comedy Festival and Adelaide Fringe.
After wrapping in Sydney on the weekend, it will begin a regional tour and Broadbridge has flagged a possible run at the Edinburgh Fringe.
The show opens on Hornsby Shire in Sydney's suburban north, where Rachael Gunn grew up. It also happens to be where upper-middle class Sprachel longs for a life beyond her white picket fence.
She meets a breakdancer at the local Police Citizens Youth Club and he convinces her that breaking is not just for the urban minorities who developed the style, but it is indeed her calling.
As her love for the genre grows, so does their romance.
"I might be a B-girl, but I'll always be an A-girl to him," Sprachel sings.
An unfortunate pulled muscle rules her boyfriend out of the running for the Olympics, and he pours his efforts into her success.
A vampiric lawyer lurks off stage, emerging from the shadows whenever a character attempts the infamous kangaroo move, asserted to be the intellectual property of Gunn.
The script and songs are dense with clever comedy, not just about she-who-will-not-be-named, but about Australian society in general.
The levity is pierced with a ballad when Spraygun faces international backlash after her Olympic flop, showing Broadbridge isn't purely making jabs at her alleged subject, but also the public's level of animosity.
The cast is unserious and unpolished, and the Microsoft Paint-style graphics remind you that the production isn't trying to be anything it's not.
But that's not to be confused with amateurism — the show itself rises beyond cheap gags on a well-known public saga and has a surprising level of depth and wit.
At the end of the show, the audience is goaded into getting up to join in the Spraygun dance.
Looking around the venue, it's clear that while we all laughed at Gunn's Olympic attempt, none of us are exactly gold medal contenders.
Gunn became the stand-out figure of Paris 2024 when public indignation ironically fuelled her stardom.
Now she's gifted that same ironic logic to Broadbridge's show, with her own criticism of the musical elevating the project to a whole new level, proving once again that giving air to a PR crisis can turn an ember into a bonfire.
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