My Brilliant Career to be adapted into a pop-rock musical as part of Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2024 lineup

Stella Miles Franklin’s pioneering 1901 novel My Brilliant Career is getting its first musical adaptation, in a production that will cap off Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2024 season.

Announced on Wednesday, it will be the first musical directed by MTC’s artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, who has already cast her Sybylla Melvyn in Kala Gare, who played Anne Boleyn in the hit Australian production of Six.

“We’ll be injecting contemporary feminist thought into a century-old story,” Sarks said of My Brilliant Career, which will open on 7 November 2024. “We’re going to blow the roof off the Sumner [theatre],” she said, describing Gare as “the embodiment of fearless punk energy”.

With a book and music by Dean Bryant, Sheridan Harbridge and Mathew Frank, the pop-rock musical will tell the story of a free-spirited teenage girl growing up in 1890s rural Australia, forced to choose between a marriage and a life of writing.

“This is not a conventional romance. This new version is messy. It’s joyful. It’s chaotic. It gets us inside the mind of a teenager struggling to live life on her own terms,” Sarks said.

Bryant said the production will combine “the raucous energy of Six with the brashness of Fangirls and the actor/musician vibe of Once”.

An earlier version of the musical received a development workshop in 2019 at Monash University (prior to the involvement of Sheridan Harbridge as co-book writer). This workshop also produced that rare thing, an Australian cast recording.