Renascence

By Carmel Dean and Dick Scanlan

WAAPA Third Year Musical Theatre Class

Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre

Musical theatre is a thrillingly versatile vehicle to bring the wildest of subjects to life on stage.

From flesh-eating plants and dystopian public toilets to talk shows and spelling bees, it seems there are no bounds for the imaginative conjunction of book, score and lyrics. Even the refined world of poetry can be fodder for popular-culture consumption, as famously happened with T.S. Eliot’s collection of poems about cats.

Now another 20^th century poet has inspired a musical of her own in Renascence, which tracks the early life and art of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923 and hailed at the time as the finest female poet since Sappho.

Renascence makes its Australian premiere to open the 2026 season for the WA Academy of Performing Arts. With a score by WAAPA-trained composer Carmel Dean and its title taken from Millay’s most famous poem about rebirth and renewal, it’s a fitting start to a landmark year for WAAPA after moving into its new ECU City Campus.

WAAPA has a bunch of spanking new theatres available but, while this show was rehearsed and built in the new city home, this first season prudently had been programmed off-site in case of any building delays and to minimise stress on students in unfamiliar venues.

Dean and Renascence co-creator Dick Scanlan have built their show – which debuted off-Broadway in 2018 – around Millay’s early life and her breakthrough poem written when she was just 19. The poem’s publication, and the scandal after it was overlooked for a major prize, catapulted her from a poor rural family to literary stardom as a feminist icon and bohemian free spirit.

Dean’s music is beautifully set to the lyrics of Millay’s poems, and the production is a tremendous ensemble piece that gives each performer many great moments to shine in multiple roles through key solos, duets and singing as a full cast.

Millay is luminously embodied by Sara Watson as the brash young poet, and I’d expect the entire ensemble would all relate strongly to Dean and Scanlan’s explorations of youthful identity, family, art, ambition, and creative and social risk-taking.

Under director Katt Osborne, the six actors start proceedings in a writers’ room, stage left, nutting out the first lines of Millay’s 200-line titular poem. It bought to mind Pixar’s Inside Out characters as they externalise the poet’s inner ruminations in search of that elusive correct verse.

Luke Barker as the editor/narrator establishes a great early audience rapport as we then dive back into Millay’s impoverished rural Maine household through scenes effectively conveyed with smooth transitions on a tri-level stage.

Her single mum, Cora (a commanding Alice Williams), encourages values of courage, independence and a love of art in her young prodigy and her two sisters Kathleen (Harry Ortuso) and Norma (Tabitha Kerlin). Their divorced father lurks as a heartbroken shadow in the form of Hamish Stewart, whose vocal range and stage presence grows throughout the show.

The entire cast is charismatic and versatile in voice and movement, enhanced by Tyrone Earl Lrae Robinson’s choreography for some lovely physical vignettes. Ortuso and Kerlin also are quite enthralling as the sisters and in other supporting roles as, respectively, Millay’s early sponsor Caroline Dow and her first college love Elaine Ralli.

But this is a story as much about family as it is any exceptional individual. Much is made of the strong formative influence of Millay’s mother and sisters, and the sacrifices they made, along with her own ruthless pursuit of her art.

“Edna St. Vincent Millay,” noted her biographer Nancy Milford, “became the herald of the New Woman.” Or, as I read elsewhere, “the original riot grrrl” of her time. As her poem First Fig, sung as a delightful duet by Watson and Barker during a tryst on a chaise lounge, says: “My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – it gives a lovely light!”

The small orchestra, led on piano by music director Joe Louis Robinson, sounded both crystalline and voluminous in the Studio Underground. Some call-and-response sequences from woodwinds and strings to the sung voices were a particular highlight. On opening night, however, the playing occasionally overwhelmed the singers’ voices and dampened audience comprehension of the lyrics. This sound imbalance may have been rectified for later performances.

The show ends with a twist on the musical theatre finale, with a sweeping set-design flourish as the cast sing through the entire 15-minute titular poem that we first encountered in the throes of its composition in that head-box writing room. It’s a resounding, soaring conclusion to a most ambitious piece of theatre.

Dean’s focus on Millay sits alongside the WAAPA-trained composer’s song cycle Well-Behaved Women, her latest musical celebration of inspiring women across history from Cleopatra and Mary Magdalene to Frida Kahlo and Julia Gillard.

In that vein, Renascence’s short season at the State Theatre Centre is also the perfect companion piece to the extraordinary RBG: Of Many, One, another work about a fearless female trailblazer, the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, playing upstairs in the main Heath Ledger Theatre.

Renascence is at Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre, until April 1.