Top five reasons to love High Fidelity:
1. Everyone knows people like these.
2. Jack Black's unhinged music snobbery.
3. John Cusack's klutzy marriage proposal.
4. Joan Cusack's righteous indignation.
5. An Australian premiere opening in Melbourne.
Number five may be the wild card for fans of the book and film of Nick Hornby's fizzy fable of arrested maturity. The new outing is a stage version of High Fidelity, now in rehearsal at Chapel off Chapel.
If going one step beyond is madness, this show is a musical. You read that right. Remarkably someone had the temerity to compose music for a story that's all about great music. That composer was American Tom Kitt, who also scored Next to Normal.
Opening on Broadway in 2006 to mixed reviews, Kitt's High Fidelity is apparently closer to the original novel than the 2000 film that memorably starred the Cusacks and Jack Black.
In Melbourne, director David Ward and a local ensemble titled Pursued by Bear will also go back to the original source.
"The book is considerably more cynical and bitter, which is not to say this production is, but we're taking the realism from the book," Ward says. "The wonder of the book is how relatable the people are. The fact they are identifiable is what makes them realistic."
Hornby's story loiters in a record store owned by his protagonist Rob. A not particularly terrible man, Rob painfully tries to understand why his relationships eventually combust. He wiles away time by organising his record collection, and coming up with top five lists of everything from heartbreak songs to tracks for a Monday morning.
Ill-equipped to guide him through emotional derailments are the store employees, Barry and Dick, who handle vinyl with more love than they'll probably ever show a woman.
Ward maintains the story is about far more than music; "It is as much about loss and moving on - loss of relationships, friends, and it's about love…"
"…the duplicitousness of love" adds Russell Leonard who plays Rob. A WAAPA graduate with dance training and musicals behind him, he has charm and an easy smile; useful in making the character his own.
"They are separate entities," he insists. "There is the book and the movie and the musical, even though some of the book is verbatim in this script."
The music jumps around the jukebox, he says, with each song "a derivative of a Pink Floyd or a Bruce Springsteen or an Axel Rose".
Ward suggests music is the very reason the story doesn't date - even if we often associate Hornby with a very specific period, 1990s lads' lit.
"This musical references music that is by its nature timeless. Its lineage is such recognisable forms of music, from Aretha Franklin to Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg."
The live band assembled for this production "has its foundation in rock and we expand on that - there are string and horns as well as the band musos. It needs to be extensive because it's referencing so much. You can't do Bruce Springsteen without a sax".
As for the set, designer Sarah Tulloch reveals "conceptually the show deals with the muddle in Rob's head, the mess in his life - what his brain would look like in physical form. The record store is in there and his bedroom".
Adds Ward: "It is him going through the back catalogue of all his heartbreak and loss. We imagine him as a little bit of a hoarder who hung on to everything, even the records he didn't like. He didn't sell anything, he never cleaned up, so the set is effectively a beautiful mess."
Discussion ensues on how quaint vinyl records and cassette tapes might seem for a younger demographic. "But there's been a reinfatuation with vinyl in the past five or six years," Ward says. "It's good timing to do something set in a record store."
High Fidelity – The Musical is at Chapel off Chapel, 12 Little Chapel Street, Prahran September 11-21.
