Why Christine Anu broke her ‘no more musicals' rule

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

No one was as surprised as Christine Anu herself when she agreed to star in the Australian production of Tony Award-winning New Orleans jazz-inflected musical Hadestown.
Her team knew she had a hard and fast rule: no more musicals. She'd been performing in musical theatre since 1992 and played the part of Mimi in the first Australian production of Rent in 1998. After four decades of saying other people's words and singing other people's songs, she was done.
'I'm not doing that any more. I deprived myself of creating original music for a very long time, and that's where my entire energy and soul wants to reside for the time being,' she says.
But her management thought the role of narrator and messenger god Hermes would be a good fit for Anu, and they knew just how to get her to consider it.
She was visiting her daughter, Zipporah, who was living in a share house in Newtown in Sydney. 'I went over to meet the girls in the house, and one of the girls said Hadestown was her favourite musical, that it had the most amazing soundtrack that she had ever heard,' Anu says.
'We started talking about it, and I had already said at the beginning of the day that I wasn't going to do it. And then after that conversation with the young ladies, I said, 'OK, why not? I'll give it a go.' I went and listened to the album straight after that and just fell in love with the music.'
We meet at Melbourne's famous Flower Drum, a restaurant Anu hasn't been to since she dined with Jamie Oliver and others on Melbourne Cup Day in 2002.
The menu is somewhat overwhelming, so we decide to take our waiter's suggestion and share a selection of things: Paspaley pearl meat with spring onion, Peking duck pancake, quail san choi bao, black Angus eye fillet, vegetables in garlic sauce and roast pork and prawn fried rice.
We also decide to have an alcohol-free Tsingtao each. Anu cut out alcohol entirely at the start of last year, when she was caring for her mother in Queensland. 'I'm an all or nothing person; I'm either drinking or I'm not,' she says. 'When I was looking after Mum, I was drinking quite a bit ... And I just went, 'Well, I reckon Mum's not looking too great, so I'm going to just cut it.''
She says 'once a drinker, always a drinker', and that the desire to drink will always be with her. 'But the idea to not want to is always there, and it's stronger.'
Anu's mother died in October last year, and her grief was unbearably fresh as she went into rehearsals for Hadestown in January.
'I was like, I can't remember any of the material because my mum's grief is inside my brain, and I cannot retain any information,' she says.
'It was so soon afterwards, doing the rehearsal, I've never done anything so hard, like I was loving it and hating it at the same time. But isn't that what creativity is about, and art and expression – you're demolishing walls to build up new ones, and each brick is something that you're placing inside of yourself, which is growth. This immense growth that I've had has been a symbiotic experience. What you give Hadestown is what it gives you back.'
The 2016 Tony-winning musical is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and for those whose classical studies were a while ago, a quick primer: Orpheus is a renowned poet and singer, and madly in love with his young wife, Eurydice. When she dies, he walks into the underworld and plays his lyre so beautifully that the king of the underworld, Hades, takes pity on him and says he is permitted to bring her back, so long as she walks behind him out of the underworld, and he does not turn to check that she is there. And, well.
Given that the whole show is about death, grief and loss, was Hadestown the ideal show for Anu to break her 'no musicals' rule for?
'It's within the journey of Orpheus that I place my mum,' Anu says. 'The thing about Hermes is Hermes is stuck in perpetuity, always chasing the same thing, hoping that the next Orpheus won't turn around this time.
'When I hit that rut in Sydney, my body was jamming up. Everything was getting inflamed, and it was my grief saying, 'You've got the show in your body now. You really need to acknowledge that this has happened, and while it's been on the back burner, it's time to bring it through. You're in a safe space for that.'
'If I didn't have Hadestown, I don't know where I would be with the grief of my mother, to be honest with you. And I mean that I probably would be in not a great place. I carried her through the whole rehearsal process, and the grief of her, it's always been there, and it's just melded in. It's just gently there now, and it's landed beautifully, safely, and it is what it is. It's a love like no other. And she's there every night.'
Our pearl meat arrives, delicate slivers of pale pink flesh presented on an iridescent, peachy shell the size of two spread hands. 'Look how spoilt we are!' Anu says.
She says she has a bigger version of this kind of shell in her home. 'They sell them for tourist stuff in the Torres Strait on Thursday Island, and the farming happens on Friday Island. And I wanted a souvenir, but also, anything that says, I'm proud of my Torres Strait heritage, I will buy. I'm used to seeing this as an ornament, not a serving dish. It's so beautiful.'
Anu's latest album, Waku: Minaral a Minalay, honours that Torres Strait heritage. Many of the songs on it were written by her grandfather, a Torres Strait Island composer and musician.
'You know for some songs we don't know who the author is, and on the royalties, the songwriter says traditional because we don't know who the author is. Well, I found that out about my granddad's songs, that a lot of Torres Strait Islanders know these songs. I'm only just coming into knowing them, and I watched old documentaries on the Torres Strait, and they're using a song that my granddad wrote ... These songs have belonged in people's lives before, even though they're my family songs and they belong to my maternal grandfather, I'm bringing my people's songs back to them with a new lens.'
As soon as she hangs up Hermes' winged sandals (the costume department found cassowary feathers for Anu's Hermes to wear on her suit, as that is her totem and she wanted to present a Torres Strait Island Hermes), Anu will be heading out on a concert tour for Waku: Minaral a Minalay with her band. 'There's so much more I can share with people when it's my roots,' she says. But she knows that there is one song her audiences will always expect.
'I'll never be able to leave the stage without singing My Island Home – that's a given,' she says. Her breakout hit featured on her debut album, Stylin' Up, in 1995, and was named song of the year by the Australasian Performing Right Association the same year. It is the song most associated with her, but she did not write it. Neil Murray wrote it for George Burarrwanga, lead singer of the Warumpi Band, in 1987. But Anu says it became such a part of her life that perhaps the song was always destined for her.
'Sometimes I wonder, who was it written for?' Anu says. 'Maybe it was written for George, but maybe it was written for me as well.'
She met Neil Murray in 1992, and she became a backing singer in his band the Rainmakers. Murray had become tired of performing the song at every show and suggested Anu sing it instead and move from backing singer into the spotlight. 'I didn't know how to say no, [and I thought], 'Well, why am I scared of it? Why am I scared of this idea of singing this song?'
'I just had this vision of getting booed off stage because I've got nothing to do with the original singer. I don't know what my idea was, but I had come to understand how well loved the Wurumpi Band was ... I knew the song was sacred to some people. The idea of a song to people can become very territorial. And I felt that I was stepping on people's toes while doing that, I really did. And Neil said songs are stories. The stories come from people out there, and then they come through you, and they belong out there again.'
That assuaged her fears, and she started performing the song. 'I just tried it on, like a beautiful jacket, and it fit, and it was lovely, and it got a great response every time I sang it,' she says.
She performed the song at Stompem Ground Festival in Alice Springs and found herself face-to-face with George Burarrwanga at the side of the stage.
'When Uncle George came up, I was petrified. And as he stood next to me, I started talking, and it was awkward to begin with, and he said, 'You know, we never knew that you sang this song.' Next minute, people are telling us, there's this girl singing your song. And I'm not going to lie, I felt a lot of sweat started coming up. I really felt like I was getting grilled, or I felt like I was in trouble – obviously, clearly, I was not, and that was not what was happening ... He says to me, 'Now, you know your uncle, Torres Strait Islander man Fred Artu?'' Anu recognised the name of her mother's first cousin. Burarrwanga told her: 'Well, he's my brother-in-law. So we're all Island people, we're all saltwater people. So you're right. You're right to sing that song, because you're family.'