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Musical · 2008 · The debut — Okinawa & Adelaide

Once Upon a Midnight

A bilingual horror rock musical.

Synopsis

The work that started everything. Once Upon a Midnight is a bilingual, bicultural horror rock musical — written across two languages and two theatre cultures, and staged first not in Australia but in Okinawa, Japan, where it inaugurated the Kijimuna Festival.

It then travelled home to play the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide, where it sold out — an unusually international debut for a first produced work, and the beginning of a preoccupation with genre, myth and the gothic that runs through everything since.

Together with A Stab in the Dark, it formed the body of work recognised by the Independent Arts Foundation Literature Award.

Production photographs

A schoolgirl in a red cardigan sits on the end of a floral bed, oblivious, while three monsters in torn costumes and white face paint rear up behind her mid-scream.
The monsters behind the bed
A performer in white face paint and heavy black eye make-up, in a black cape over red and black vinyl, stands in profile beside a figure in a red coat.
White face, black vinyl
A figure in a red cloak and mohawk, face painted white and streaked with black, holds a bearded performer in a fur-trimmed coat as he falls back across the stage floor.
Held up in the red cloak
A singer in a long red coat and white face paint takes the microphone under red and purple stage lights, the band and company arrayed behind him around a drum kit.
The band, mid-number
A performer in white face paint and a red-and-black costume stands beside a schoolgirl in a Hello Kitty T-shirt, mid-cry, with another figure watching from the dark behind them.
The girl and the demon
The full company, some twenty performers in monster make-up, costume and street clothes, piled up on a set of black stairs for a group photograph.
The full company, 2008
Three of the company with their arms around one another, laughing — a figure in a red cloak and white face paint, a young man in a rising-sun headband, and a woman in a purple scarf.
Three of the company

Poster

The OzAsia Festival poster: an illustrated girl in a red kimono beside a smaller figure, under the title Once Upon a Midnight.
Poster — OzAsia Festival, 2008