As funny as it is that there was an unsuccessful Australian military operation fighting emus, it isn’t necessarily the first story you think of to adapt into a musical. But The Emu War: A New Musical takes this silly historical trivia and turns it into a funny, quirky tale about love, war, and wheat.
Our heroes are Greg and Steve, two World War One veterans trying to run a farm in the Australian outback, but emus keep eating their wheat. Greg writes to the Australian government asking for help (and some automatic weapons), and against the odds, the Minister of Defence accepts. Soon Greg and Steve find the Australian military on their farm engaged in bloody combat with these seemingly unstoppable emus. But amid the futile carnage, Greg and Steve wonder if this is what they really want.
The show makes very good use of a sparse set to convey a larger story. The only backdrop is the farmhouse, which actors can disappear through offstage as needed. The emus are portrayed through charming sock puppets each of the actors take turns using to be the emus. The musical accompaniment is a piano offstage and a drummer (dressed as an emu) onstage. The war scenes make clever use of all these elements, bringing together the music, blocking, lighting, and strategically-deployed emu puppets to convey a grand, brutal war.
The Emu War could have been very one-joke and outstay its welcome by the nature of its ridiculous conceit; however, the musical finds both humour and emotional weight through its likeable characters. The emotional core of the piece is the friendship between Greg and Steve, their loyalty to each other, and their ridiculously complicated secret handshake. The leader of the Australian army, Meredith, is portrayed as a hilariously hawkish major with an unexpected arc where he decides to join the side of the emus. But who really steals the show is Lotte Pearl as the extravagantly evil character, who has fun playing someone who becomes all-consumed with a hatred of emus.
The wheels of the story come off a little bit towards the end, which could just as easily be told in ten fewer minutes. However, The Emu War is a creative, fun, and surprisingly emu-tional take on a strange saga in Australian history.
