Revisiting Shane Warne: The Musical – this brilliant show should be considered an Aussie classic

In response to the tragic death of Shane Warne last week, actor and composer Eddie Perfect took to Facebook to express his shock and surprise at Warne’s sudden passing.

“I just don’t want to say goodbye – there was so much more life to come,” he wrote.

Before Perfect was the composer for the Tony award nominated Broadway musical Beetlejuice, his first full-length musical was something much closer to home: Shane Warne: The Musical.

The musical started as a joke. In 2005, Perfect was on tour performing in The Big Con with Max Gillies and kept seeing Warne’s name all over the newspapers. He made an offhand comment in a phone call to his manager, Michael Lynch, that someone should write a musical about the cricketer.

To his great surprise, Lynch (a great cricket fan) told him to go for it.

The resulting musical is an overwhelmingly faithful rendering of Warne’s life, staging both his triumphs and his downfalls.

It took Perfect three years to write the show, in which he read every book about Warne he could find (he joked in his Facebook post he has a master’s degree in Warney) before a full production opened in Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre in December 2008.

In 2009, it went on tour, playing seasons at the Regal Theatre in Perth and the Enmore Theatre in Sydney.

While it was critically acclaimed, it did not perform as well as expected at the box office and closed early.

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In response to the tragic death of Shane Warne last week, actor and composer Eddie Perfect took to Facebook to express his shock and surprise at Warne’s sudden passing.

“I just don’t want to say goodbye – there was so much more life to come,” he wrote.

Before Perfect was the composer for the Tony award nominated Broadway musical Beetlejuice, his first full-length musical was something much closer to home: Shane Warne: The Musical.

The musical started as a joke. In 2005, Perfect was on tour performing in The Big Con with Max Gillies and kept seeing Warne’s name all over the newspapers. He made an offhand comment in a phone call to his manager, Michael Lynch, that someone should write a musical about the cricketer.

To his great surprise, Lynch (a great cricket fan) told him to go for it.

The resulting musical is an overwhelmingly faithful rendering of Warne’s life, staging both his triumphs and his downfalls.

It took Perfect three years to write the show, in which he read every book about Warne he could find (he joked in his Facebook post he has a master’s degree in Warney) before a full production opened in Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre in December 2008.

In 2009, it went on tour, playing seasons at the Regal Theatre in Perth and the Enmore Theatre in Sydney.

While it was critically acclaimed, it did not perform as well as expected at the box office and closed early.

Five years later, in 2013, the musical was revised and presented in a revamped concert version. This iteration added new material covering Warne’s retirement from international cricket, his dramatic weight loss and his high profile relationship with the actress Elizabeth Hurley.

While the musical may have started as a joke, in style and substance it is anything but. It deserves to be considered an Australian musical theatre classic.