Our song: MTC’s What Rhymes with Cars and Girls

When Tom Stoppard’s radio play Darkside – based on Pink Floyd’s seminal album The Dark Side of the Moon – premiered in Britain in 2013, Sydney Morning Herald music writer Bernard Zuel wondered whether it might be time we saw an Australian version of the project, suggesting “Brendan Cowell adapting You Am I’s Hourly Daily; Hannie Rayson taking on Paul Kelly’s Gossip; Andrew Bovell diving into Sarah Blasko’s What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have; [or] maybe, David Williamson and Kylie Minogue’s Impossible Princess…” It’s almost as if playwright Aidan Fennessy heard Zuel’s challenge and decided to raise him one, as a year and a half later, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls opens at the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Very much inspired by – as well as emerging from – the fabric of Tim Rogers’ 1999 solo album of the same name, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls is the story of Johnno, a hapless pizza delivery boy, and Tash, a smart-mouthed singer who’s running from everything. While featuring a live three-piece band (led by Rogers himself), Cars and Girls is not so much a musical as “a play with songs” in the mode of Poor Boy, albeit with more charm and heart. But where Poor Boy’s songs were somewhat outside the action on stage and became ghostly musical refrains, Rogers’ songs here become integral to the play’s success and charm and, as in a musical, come to express the characters’ thoughts and feelings in a slightly heightened form.