The Rabbits

This new music hall opera targeting the kids has already been acclaimed at the Perth and Melbourne festivals and awarded four Helpmanns. 

Based on John Marsden’s book, illustrated by Shaun Tan, The Rabbits is about their colonising arrival and the pain and displacement they cause the native marsupials.  It’s a witty, sometimes heavy-handed, often moving primer on Aboriginal experience and environmental destruction, adapted by director John Sheedy to a libretto by Larry Katz. 

The star is Kate Miller-Heidke’s music, whether discordant and trumpeted jazz for the brash rabbits or more Broadway melody for the perplexed marsupials. The composer herself stars as a more operatic, white feathered spirit hitting the high notes and observing the pantomime like a chorus. 

She stands atop an enormous centre-stage spiral anthill in Gabriela Tylesova’s noteworthy design. Tylesova’s costumes are even more fantastical, with the marsupials as heavy hipped, ochre-coloured native rats and the rabbits as comical, mechanised tyrants, strutting and wheezing, and inexplicably with the huge beaks of a pelican.

Some words, spoken and sung, are lost in a production which oddly still needs some punctuation. But many moments soar, musically and theatrically, like the marsupials weeping for their stolen children, floating about them in baskets, and the rousing final song calling for a better future. Here, amongst the rabbit’s smokestacks, skyscrapers and ticking clocks, is their one moment of doubt.  Only the last image brings a whiff of reconciliation, as one (the most lowly) Rabbit and a Marsupial peer together into the pond.

Perhaps though the biggest applause goes to Opera Australia working with the small Perth company Barking Geko and WA Opera to create a rare Australian musical original.

Martin Portus 

Photographer: Jon Green.