Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life is very much Amity Dry's baby. Dry – a musician and songwriter who gained fame as one of the couples on the reality TV show The Block – wrote the book and lyrics, co-wrote the music with Mark Simeon Ferguson, is one of the performers, and says she "became the producer by default". She put up her own money when nobody else would.
And even though it's that rare and difficult beast – an original Australian musical theatre production – Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life has been doing well touring around Australia for the past few years and playing to appreciative audiences.
In 2013 it was selected for a production at the New York Musical Theatre Festival – "a phenomenal experience" – and last year it was performed at the United Nations as a side event to the Commission on the Status of Women conference. In January this year it had its European premiere, with a Norwegian production.
So just what is this show, Dry's first musical theatre creation?
"It started as a one-woman cabaret show in 2009 at the Adelaide Fringe Festival," she says, an autobiographical piece exploring her own feelings about motherhood. Not long after, she reworked it into a four-character musical to tell different stories of motherhood and womanhood, drawing not only on her own experiences but on those of family, friends and others she had heard about.
The show follows a year in the lives of four best friends and is set in the cafe owned by one of them.
"My character, Kate, is very ambitious," Dry says. "She's not interested in having kids but when she becomes pregnant after a one-night stand she has to decide whether to have the baby."
Rachel McCall plays Jessie. Dry says, "She's been waiting for five years for her boyfriend to propose; he does and she becomes a Bridezilla. She spends most of the show planning her wedding."
Jessie is young and naive and thinks everything is going to be perfect but her more worldly friends set her straight on that score.
Bec, played by Nikki Aitken, used to work with Kate but is now a stay-at-home mother with three children under three.
"She's trying not to lose her mind. It's the biggest comic role; she tells it like it is and is relaxed about it."
And finally, there's Lily, the owner of the cafe, played by Susan Ferguson.
"She appears to have the perfect life with her husband, who's the chef, and two school-aged children," Dry says.
"They all aspire to be like her but things aren't as great as they seem."
Dry's aim in writing the show, she says, was to find "the beauty in the ordinary", focusing on the everyday lives that are not usually shown on the stage. Dry, 37, says she is from the era of women who were told, "You can have it all; you can do it all", but has found it a bigger challenge than it might appear to balance family and career.
Although the show is told from a female perspective, "it's not a man-bashing show"; it's about relationships and parenthood and friendship and other topics anyone can relate to, with the approach that "let's just take the pressure off and maybe feel a little bit better now".
And there are 21 songs, blending Dry's pop-rock writing with Ferguson's jazz and musical theatre background.
Dry lived in Canberra for four years as a teenager, attending Lyneham High School and Lake Ginninderra College, but has not been back to the ACT region since she was 17. The Queanbeyan performances are part of an 11-week, 45-show regional tour that began in August and runs until October.
Mother, Wife and the Complicated Life is on at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre from September 15-20 and 22-27. Bookings: theq.net.au.
