The light-filled rehearsal room for Windmill’s newest show has all the signs of creative chaos. On a props table sit plastic tiaras, a boom box and an umbrella. Across one wall, sheets of paper map out the show with scene titles: “stop, slammer time”, “family that stays together, slays together”, and “princess of drop”.
The director, Sasha Zahra, stands at the front of the room, patiently watching as the cast find their feet in a new work punctuated by moments of silliness and laughter. The show is Rella, a retelling of the Cinderella story which centres the ugly stepsisters, here named Afa and Sika, and played by Samoan Australian drag queens Fez Faanana and Thomas Fonua.
Faanana and Fonua are both credited as co-creators of the show, alongside Zahra and playwright Tracey Rigney. Rella has been a chance for Zahra to bring her ideas for children’s theatre together with artists she has worked with in drag cabaret settings on the fringe.
In this retelling, Prince Charming is a record company, which only wants to sign the “pretty” daughter in this family, Rella, played by Carla Lippis. Rella’s “ugly” sisters must step aside. And so at the core of this reworking is the question: “What is ugliness?” asks Zahra, during a break from rehearsal. “What is beauty? And how do Afa and Sika find their place in this commercial world?”
Rella, Faanana says, is about how we “navigate finding our place and discovering the beauties in our oddities – and celebrating our differences.” We have been sold, he says, “the Disney formula about what a princess is”, but this formula shouldn’t be applied to contemporary Australia.
“I didn’t ever feel like the hair that I had was beautiful, because it’s not the hair that I see on a Pantene ad,” says Zahra, who is Lebanese. Beauty, she says, can be a complex picture made up not just of physical attributes, but also culture and of language. “If I think back to my childhood I was so ashamed of speaking another language …”
She trails off and Faanana finishes her thought: “… which is why we don’t speak fluently.”
Rella is about normalising and celebrating our differences: having people of colour and queer people on stage in a show talking to teenagers and then, Faanana says, “just delivering a great piece of theatre.”
This new story is a coming of age tale through what the pair calls a “camp journey.” Over the course of Rella, Afa and Sika discover they are Samoan. Through that, they learn about the Faʻafafine, Samoa’s third gender.
“It has existed always,” Zahra says. “It’s not something that has been questioned or has to be explained. It’s just part of culture. Faʻafafine has existed in Samoan culture forever and western culture is only just playing catch up.”
A children’s show featuring drag queens at its centre is something Faanana couldn’t have imagined “even five years ago”, he says. He has been performing in drag since 1999, and has been leading the male burlesque circus show Briefs for seven years, including a family-friendly version. But until this year, Faanana was hesitant to perform for children in drag.
“I’ve got a camp 70s suit on, I’ve got lashes and makeup,” he says. “But I never really felt comfortable enough or felt like I had the right weaponry to be able to engage with the kids.”
The fear, he says, is of the ability of young people to “just undress you with honesty.”
“I don’t know how to respond to a kid who’s coming for me, but out of innocence,” he says. “I know how to respond to a kid who’s being a brat, but I don’t know how to respond to a kid who would ask me something personal and real.”
As we talk, big questions keep coming up: how does queerness exist on Australian stages? What does it mean to centre a diverse family in a children’s theatre show? What are the functions of a fairytale, and how can that be subverted? “Oh my god. The layers of the show!” Faanana laughs as we prise it all apart.
But underneath these big questions, at the heart of making Rella, is a sense of joy. “One of the things I really wanted to do was have fun,” says Zahra. After two years of the Covid pandemic, she wanted to “just do something that allows us to be really joyous in the room together, make something that is inherently full of laughter, that is joyous and has kick arse songs and dance moves. A celebration.”
Rella is on at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide festival centre, 26-28 May then 3-4 June.
