By Tian Nie
Typically I wouldn’t resort to plagiarism to write a review, but “in light of tHeSe UnCeRtAiN tImEs”… I’ve evolved. Watching musicals in theatres is so 2019. Zoomsicals – that is, a musical comedy on Zoom – are where the action’s at. No longer bound by the laws of “respectability” and “integrity”, this year it’s perfectly acceptable to watch live shows with no pants, in a bathtub, or just anywhere but a brick-and-mortar venue. Yes, I’m talking about Medleys 2020 – Spa Wars: A New Soap. Produced by Josh Bouwhuis and Aviva Green alongside the University of Melbourne’s very own medical students, this innovative production pushes the limits of virtual theatrical storytelling, leaving the audience bubbling with laughter.
This inventive show exploits the many functionalities of Zoom webinars to their full extent; actors pop in and out of scenes, change screen names to indicate character changes (may Red Shirt and Red Shirt Backup rest in peace), and change backgrounds to signal changes in location. Co-directed by Sophie Avramoudas and Felix Todd, it uses a mix of live scenes and screenshared pre-recorded music videos to create 2020 theatre magic. A Zoomsical also has several surprising benefits. The handovers were smooth, with none of the awkwardness of delayed scene changes while the crew fumble around in the darkness on stage. Having the character names available on screen at all times meant I could actually match faces to names, and fully appreciate the puns being made. I could see facial expressions in detail that wouldn’t be possible from theatre seats, and even the mumbled dialogue was crystal clear broadcasted over Zoom’s audio. The music videos incorporated clever video graphics, background changes (possibly a TARDIS interior at some point?), character “interactions”, in-sync choreography, and was skillfully edited together – no easy feat when there’s 20 videos to handle and a plot to push.
The script itself is a gem, peppered with pop-culture references and jokes and acted with excellent comedic timing. The plot doesn’t touch much on spas – in fact I still don’t understand the spa reference – but there’s definitely the melodrama of a soap opera. With spies, misunderstandings and betrayal, this show crammed as much as it could and more into a 90-minute showcase. The lighting was excellent across all the actors’ screens – none of that strange, quintessentially-Zoom backlighting here. The costumes were cheap but creative, and worked well to convey the personalities of even the characters with minimal lines. There’s the knock-off Dalek janitor made out of dollar store crafts, Darth Sidious/Palpatine wannabe wearing a bald cap (or pantyhose pretending to be a bald cap?), and many more interesting death star groupies. The coordinated physical backgrounds, props passing through screens, and well-timed screen filter changes added to the sense of continuity, almost as if it was legal for 20 people to be in the same room at the same time.
Now, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. As a livestreamed performance, there was no closed captioning. Some platforms lend themselves more easily to captioning than others; Google Hangouts, Skype, and Teams offer live captioning in their software. Zoom requires more work to set captions up – but considering the amount of effort put into the rest of the show, it wouldn’t have been a much more difficult step to add them. The script did a good job of ensuring only one person spoke at a time, so nobody interrupted or spoke over top of one another unless the chaos was intentional. But there were times my Zoom lagged, and I missed portions of the dialogue. Having captions would improve accessibility significantly, especially when the audio problems common with living online nowadays arise.
My biggest beef, as the kids say, was with the sound quality during the song numbers. As already mentioned, the video quality was fantastic, but the audio was clearly just layered on top of itself with minimal editing. I’m familiar with the difficulties of mixing songs (I’m the music director of an acapella choir on campus, which happens to be streaming our live concert this Friday October 30th), but even the smallest things like turning down the volume of the distorted audio would’ve improved the sound quality considerably. I suppose even a Zoomsical must have sound issues, otherwise it wouldn’t be a student-run musical. Still, given the quality of the rest of the performance, it truly feels like a missed opportunity to take it to the next level.
Medleys 2020 made me rethink what is possible and accessible in today’s theatrical landscape, and thoroughly exceeded my expectations. Now in its 95th year, the Medical Medleys seeks to provide fun while raising money for charity. This time the virtual tickets were free, but donations to Black Rainbow were strongly encouraged. If you missed it last week, fear not, for it was only half of a usual Medleys show. You can still catch their sketch show coming out later in the year. If it’s anything like this Zoomsical then it’s definitely not a show you want to miss!
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The Dialog 