Todd McKenney – Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
Come on, move those hips. Feel the rhythm, really feel it!
Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks is a gorgeous comedy follows the unlikely friendship that tentatively blossoms between feisty, ageing belle and resident of Florida, Lily Harrison (Nancye Hayes) and her new private ballroom dancing instructor Michael Minetti (Todd McKenney).
A delectable piece of theatre, this play not only has dialogue that spanks along at a cracking pace, it explores some of the stereotypes around sexuality and aging with gentle, thought provoking humour that acknowledges, yet doesn’t succumb to, clique.
My big tips for Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks are, firstly, do not miss this play (call your mother and cancel her birthday if you have to), and secondly, take many, many tissues with you. There will be tears streaming down your cheeks from both laughing too hard and crying, and you really can’t sniff and snort in the intimacy of the Playhouse Theatre, can you now?
I recently caught up male lead in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, the ever effusive and delightful Todd McKenney, for his take on…
Growing up in Perth: I grew up in Tuart Hill. I left here in 1983 to do a musical and then a string of musicals and just stayed over [east]. There’s not enough of what I do based out of Perth and the airfares would have killed me to stay here, but I have fond memories of it. It feels like home when I’m home.
…and Going to Dancing Lessons…Well, it was just part of my life. It was something that I never had to think twice about what I was going to do. It was natural, I enjoyed it and it was fun and I just turned my hobby into my career and it was really easy. Mum ran a dancing school, so all of my friends were dancing friends. When all of my friends would gather after school and go and do after school stuff i.e. hang out, I was straight in the car and straight to dancing. It used to start at 4 o’clock, so my whole world was dancing, and it still is really.
What Kind of Dance ‘Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks’ would be: Oh God! It would be a medley! It is a medley! It’s what they call a boulevard comedy, which means it’s conversational, very back and forth. There are one-liners left, right and centre and a black sense of humour. But it also covers a whole stack of issues, like AIDS (to a very small degree), homosexuality, prejudices and abortion all wrapped up in this guise of a little tiny play. People come in and they laugh and then they cry. And there’s this beautiful twist in the show and these two most unlikely people who bark at each other for the first half of the show, just form the most unlikely friendship. So, the thing that attracted me to it is about not judging a book by its cover and really leaving yourself open to understand other people’s problems. It deals with issues like the elderly becoming invisible as they get older and people talking over their heads. It’s really important if you’re getting older. It happens to Nancy. It happens to people.
But the main thing I love about it is it’s funny, it’s seriously funny.
How Dancing Informs Life: How to move and think with other people, how to move in the same time as other people and not be out there on your own trying to prove that you’re waving your own flag. If you want to fit into society, you can’t just be bang, bang, bang, bang! You’ve got to actually move as one and understand each other.
How Life Informs Dancing: That’s where people either hit or miss in dancing I think, whether they can bring their life to it. Your personality has got to come out. I think that’s the thing. Being the judge of Dancing with the Stars, the people who do well in that show are the ones who let their personality comes out.
Working With Baz Luhrmann (on Strictly Ballroom): Well that was surreal to me because I actually auditioned for the lead role, which Paul obviously got, and then I was booked in another job. So I didn’t have a job on it, and then someone got sick the day before they had to shoot and they needed someone who could dance and my job had since got cancelled and I was doing nothing. So I actually did that show without having read the story or anything. But I had worked with Baz previously in a Sydney festival job. Interesting, at that point it was very cutting edge and it was outrageous and out there so it was really interesting to watch the process in action, the process of Baz and his way of working in action. It’s quite intense. He really looks at you, but he sees the broad picture. But [although] you really feel him looking at you, he’s not actually looking at you, he’s looking at the way you fit into all the other bits he’s got in his head. But you see him …and it’s quite daunting….
Pauline Hanson: I came to like Pauline Hanson a lot. I worked with her heavily for a year with my cabaret show which I loved the fact that she said yes to and that she had the guts to give it a go. We didn’t really talk politics, but I did sit her down one day. ‘Cos everyone was saying ‘How can you work with her?’ and I was saying ‘Yeah? I don’t know!’ Then I realized, I don’t know what her real political stance is, only what I’ve read. So I sat her down one day. She sat in my room till 3 in the morning and talked to me about the whole thing. Pauline is one of the most honest people and she wants Australia to be the best Pauline Hanson thinks Australia should be. Whether you agree with her methods of getting it there or not is two completely different stories. But I love that passion and I’m fiercely patriotic and came to really like her.
At the end of every show, she would go and stand at the front door and shake people’s hands as they left the theatre. I feel that so many people would go “Oh. What do you know? Pauline Hanson!’ and give them a good feeling. I didn’t even know she was doing it. She’d say ‘Oh well, you were too tired.’ But I thought it would be nice to have a personal touch at the end. I really, really appreciated it. Things like that! And for having a go! She wasn’t a great singer, she just had a go and I came to admire her a lot.
She told me, ‘Todd, it’s really important that I do this show because there’s this thing out there that I hate gay people. I don’t! I’m not for gay marriages.’
She said that, and that it’s been misconstrued as ‘I hate gays.’ She said ‘It’s really important that I do this show for that reason’. Then I thought, well, good on her. You know? And we get on like a house on fire.
Character Michael Minetti: I’ve really had to develop the character. The character is dangerously close to me in dialogue, but it’s not me out there and we play around with it each night… It’s the first time I’ve ever had to really focus on getting a real three dimensional character together because they don’t spend that much time in musical theatre on that. A lot of it is to head towards the song and dance numbers all the time. We don’t have that here. We really hit a dramatic point and there are some beautiful moments which need to be hit and when you hit them in the sweet spot, the play just sits beautifully and really brings people to tears.
What’s Next? Now I’ve got the acting bug. I’d love to do another straight play. But I’d love to do something really dark and meaty drama, like full on. You know. Heavy!
[So you’re the next Hamlet?]
Not Shakespeare, I can’t do Shakespeare. Oh I can, but I’ve got a very short attention span. It’s like those films that are too long. They start the beginning at the end and the continuity is no good. I need a short 1 and a half hour play where I can go beginning middle and end and I can get of. I’m a simple boy at heart. I go there, I get about an hour into it and then I start looking at the set. It just loses me. Harry Potter movies do the same thing…
Coming Home: This will be the first time I’ve been back for an extended stay since I did Cabaret, which was a few years ago now. It’s a nice place to chill out. I like the light in Perth. It’s a really interesting light. Do you notice that? It’s clean, you don’t have the smog. But it’s really crisp and I always feel motivated here.
Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks is showing at the Playhouse Theatre in Perth from August 1-18.
