The story goes that it all started with Tim Finn at Brisbane Airport. The musician, of Split Enz and Crowded House fame, was looking for a book to read on his flight. He happened to pick up The Women in Black, Madeleine St John's Australian classic looking at the lives of a group of women working in a department store in Sydney in the 1950s.
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By the end of his flight, Finn had not only finished the book, he had started writing the songs for a musical based on the novel. Once off the plane, he felt compelled to call internationally-acclaimed director Simon Phillips, planting the seed for an original musical. And the rest, as they say, is history.
"It's amazing with Tim. It seems like he can read almost anything and think, 'I can make a musical out of this' - the most unlikely subject matters he thinks he can make a musical out of. But in this case I thought he was really right," says Phillips.
"I don't get much of a chance to read novels in my profession, I'm always reading scripts. So when [Tim] said have a look at it, it was surprising to me how much of a page turner I found it. I got really engaged with the characters and how vividly they were portrayed and their predicaments and you just kind of fall in love with them. So I really found it a compelling read.
"And for a theatre person, Madeleine's so good at creating the moments of epiphany, or intensifying emotional conditions and I think that that also felt appealing you could feel the drama - it's small drama but you could feel the drama in those moments of the book."
Phillips is well-versed in the world of musicals, having developed Priscilla – Queen of the Desert from a film script to a hit musical and currently working on the upcoming Muriel's Wedding theatre production, but it was the first time for Finn.
"This is his first bash at writing a musical and the very best thing about it is we started with songs - and it's so lovely to start with something that's so melodically pleasing," Phillips says.
"Tim's not a music theatre writer in that respect - he's a songwriter and but what he proved to have was a really great sense of embodying character. He could write from an individual character's point of view and transform his own sensibilities and the melodies along with it to the individualities of character and the show."
Like the book, the play centres around the story of starry-eyed school leaver Lisa, played by Sarah Morrison. She's finished high school and completed her leaving certificate, which was quite unusual in those days. While waiting for her grades, she gets a casual job at fictional department store F.G. Goode's where she's taken under the wing by a group of sassy older women. Lisa also desperately wants to go on to study at university, but has to face the hurdle of her father, who believes study is strictly for boys.
Fresh-faced Morrison was the first to play Lisa when Ladies In Black premiered in Brisbane and Melbourne back in 2015, and she's reprised the role for the show's 2017 national tour to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Canberra.
"It's rare enough that you originate the role in a show or a musical in this country and even rarer I suppose to have the opportunity to return to it with a little more age and a bit wiser," says Morrison.
"I'll never forget my first day of rehearsals. Walking in the door I was so nervous, very like Lisa and her first day at Goodes. I'm in a cast of incredible older women and men - I'm the baby of the cast so it is very much like having all these fabulous aunts and uncles and big brothers and big sisters."
As far as theatre goes Ladies In Black is unapologetically lighthearted - the characters are loveable, the one-liners witty, the songs often tongue-in-cheek and the costumes fabulous - but it also explores deeper narratives that are entirely relatable. From the young woman trying to break glass ceilings and achieve her dreams, to the woman pushing 30 who feels like she can't find happiness and has been 'left on the shelf', or the woman facing infertility and problems in her marriage, and the mother facing the predicament of her daughter growing up and leaving home.
"It is kind of unashamedly stuffed full of happy endings for everyone but it feels like what it does is it captures the kind of aspirations that 90 per cent of the population have," says Phillips.
"I don't think people ever begrudge a good time in the theatre - and I think that people do deserve it. We do all need to keep thinking about the kind of predicament we're in, and that's the other thing that theatre does, but I think people also deserve a treat and that's really what this is - it's that particular nostalgia and that sense of style about it."
The show is also unashamedly about the ladies. In the cast of 11, eight are women, and the central female character's main ambition is to better herself and get an education. Even more refreshingly, she doesn't have a male romantic interest ever appear in the show - quite the feat when you consider it's a story based in the '50s.
"The book was written in the early '90s about the late '50s and we're now performing it in 2017 and it's got a very seamless transition. The '50s might feel like it was a long time ago - it really wasn't," says Morrison.
"For a lot of the audience especially the older women that are coming - I've been approached by numerous women after the show who think their story isn't worth telling but it is. It is so worth telling.
"Because of those women, women like myself can jump online, and enrol in a masters degree if I'm feeling bored because those options are there for me but for them, they weren't. They left in the intermediate level because no one thought there was any need for them to finish their education - why bother. And that breaks my heart that that was just the way it is. So I think this story's so important."
Ladies in Black is on at Canberra Theatre Centre March 27-31. Tickets at canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
