The ability to say ‘oh I saw it in a four-seater pub toilet before it went so mainstream’ is the whole point of a fringe festival for some people. Producers, promoters and even punters will spend their entire season looking for the next big thing, and in many ways Breaking The Musical could very well be just that. That’s why it’s such a shame that technical problems, abysmal sound and an under-rehearsed cast prevent it from being a big thing right now.

Perhaps Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn’s well-publicised legal intervention in the show’s Sydney season has had an impact on prep and rehearsal. Mind you, that’s a double-edged sword because one suspects that the subsequent rewrites (the show is now a ‘completely legal parody’ rather than a retelling) helped push Steph Broadbridge’s original script to become the thing of absolute beauty it is today.

From the rhyming couplets of the prologue to the parodies of other musicals (still laughing at the Rent reference), to the mad judge that pops up every time the script gets too close to what foolhardy writers might call ‘the truth’, to the hilariously pointed original songs: heck, even the legal disclaimer displayed as we enter is funny. And kudos to a cast who keep going through it all: they clearly love the material as much as we do. Broadbridge also has a serious point to make about why this all matters: like everything else in the script, it’s on point, and it’s this that elevates the show from an extended joke into a piece of music theatre with real legs. Tidied and tightened (maybe even extended?), this show has the potential to go gold. 

Breaking The Musical, The Garage International @ Adelaide Town Hall, until Sunday 2 March, 7.10pm