In the vein of shows and films like 'Workaholics' and 'Waiting', 'Price Check! The Musical' aims to bring the same comedic justice to a new kind of minimum-wage employees: supermarketers.
The performance tells of five very different people and their lives at a local supermarket: greedy, divorced store manager Mr Butler can't dance; widowed checkout chick Narelle Sims likes to sample merchandise in the form of her coworkers; Zayeeb Dash is a fruit and vegetable nut and is trying to master Australian slang; geeky Dave Fisher is hoping his arts degree will net him a promotion and in turn fix his marriage; and regular customer Mrs Zimmerman is an old Jewish lady with a sharp tongue who can't work out why she's so lonely.
Catherine Campbell, who plays the cheeky Narelle Sims, excitedly explains a little about the show. “It's so rare to work on a new musical in Australia, and when I say new, I mean not yet performed. I think the last one they did was about Shane Warne.”
© Noel Anderson
“It's very exciting. And the feedback! I thought, how much mileage are you going to get out of a musical about a supermarket? Then doing it there are so many great characters and fantastic songs. The song that the fruit and veg manager sings about his fruit is hilarious. He's written some really hilarious songs, but then there's a couple that are really frightening in there too.”
“The characters are very human. They're very relatable. That was something that struck me straight away; as we were performing we were really enjoying these characters and kind of missing them when they weren't around. My character has been let off the leash completely. She has a much more tragic past and she's kind of on the make with all her colleagues. My reading is that she's just a bit bored. She never got to do the things she wanted to do in life because of circumstance, and I like her for that. For that honesty; she's not trying to pretend to be anyone else.”
© Noel Anderson
On working with the show's composer Sean Weatherly: “You always say yes. That's the bottom line. And then you worry about what it is later. He said, 'You're the checkout chick'. And I said, 'Aren't I a bit old?' And he said, 'Yes, that's the point'. The options are closing for her basically and she's had this life that has set her on a different path and I think there's something really lovely about that. We're not trying to make it into Shakespeare or something, but it's real. We're dumped in to the middle of the story and she's there, not by choice, and she's not bitter, she's trying to make the best of it. But the comedy of how she's trying to make the best of it, I really relate to that.
“It is essentially comical, but it's that human comedy; that human experience that we all share.”
'Price Check! The Musical' performs The Bakehouse Theatre in Adelaide 6-16 July.
