Fresh off the back of the MARVELous The Show run in Sydney, we catch up with director Samwise Holmes as he prepares to bring his parodied Marvel spectacular to Melbourne.
“We launched the show in Sydney for the first time,” Samwise Holmes, the director of MARVELous The Show says. “Now, it’s about refining. We found out what things worked and didn’t work in our opening run. Surprisingly, there was very little that didn’t work.”
While some may take that glowing feedback as an excuse to sit back for a few weeks in between production runs and soak in the glory of the first instalment of the show going so well, Samwise and the team behind MARVELous The Show are still hard at work.
MARVELous The Show
- Wednesday November 6 to Sunday November 10
- The National Theatre, St Kilda
- Adults-only
- Tickets here
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Part of the reason to that might be that this is no ordinary stage production. MARVELous The Show is a re-imagination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, brought to life through musical numbers, dance sequences, character crossovers and pop culture references, with a dash of risqué adults-only flavour in the mix. To put it simply, this is the MCU like you’ve never seen it before.
“I was genuinely convinced that there would be a lot more that didn’t land the way I’d hoped it would when writing it,” Samwise admits. “Because we do try and create things that are completely unique and things that people wouldn’t have seen before, or combined styles people wouldn’t have seen before.”
The Marvel universe, reimagined
A testament to the success of the production so far, it seems Samwise and the team behind the show have found a gap in a market that could appear, from afar, oversaturated. Take a closer look, however, and you’ll find a wealth of consumers thirsty for both familiarity and fresh takes. They want the characters they can recognise, in ways they could never imagine.
MARVELous The Show is here to quench that thirst. “The idea is to create a fresh twist on a genre that’s typically family friendly,” Samwise says. “The risqué element is just one of the many elements, like the live singing and acrobatics and stunts and aerial acts and dance and everything that we use to create those parodies.”
Beginning its Melbourne run from Wednesday November 6 at St Kilda’s The National Theatre, MARVELous The Show invites both MCU fanatics and anyone and everyone interested in boundary-pushing live performance to get in on the action.
More than just Marvel
As Samwise points out, the show isn’t just a raunchy take on Marvel characters and storylines. The production draws on a myriad of references from the deep well of popular culture icons that offer a knowing wink and a nudge to its audiences.
“We focus so heavily on creating a great show first, a Marvel parody second,” Samwise says. “While there’s absolutely the Easter eggs and stuff for big Marvel fans, there is so much more to it. We don’t just parody Marvel, but we parody The Greatest Showman and Dirty Dancing and Magic Mike and Flash Dance and all these other well-known things.”
No pop culture reference is out of bounds here. Samwise emphasises the importance of providing something for every kind of audience member to be able to grab onto. “It forms a core, forms a basis for a show that is Marvel in theme, but is not exclusively for Marvel fans,” he says.
“One of the biggest challenges in creating it is to create something that is accessible by a wider audience. And I think we’ve achieved that really well.”
“If you don’t know your stuff, you’ll get eaten alive”
Another challenge that arises when creating a production that centres around a cinematic universe that’s so well-known and beloved by such a devoted fanbase is the tango between the audience knowing more about this universe than the ones behind reimagining it.
“Inherently, if you’re creating something that ultimately targets fans of a nerdy franchise, if you don’t know your stuff, you’ll get eaten alive,” Samwise says. “But, you know, we’ve gotta play on the things that Marvel fans know so well. So, it’s definitely a bit of a juggling act.” In order to break the rules of the MCU, you have to know them first.
MARVELous in Melbourne
The testimonials that have come from the show after its Sydney run speak to both MARVELous The Show’s team’s deep understanding of the rules at play, as well as to their bold competency in knowing how to break them in just the right way.
“One of the scariest things when creating a show is the anticipation of, ‘What are people gonna think?’” Samwise says. “You put in all of this hard work and you go through hell for a few months to put it all together. And for us to get to opening night and to get rave reviews and for the audience to have such an overwhelmingly positive reaction, it is such a relief and such a high point.”
You can get tickets to MARVELous The Show in Melbourne here.
This article was made in partnership with MARVELous The Show.
