There are gasps of recognition throughout the Sumner Theatre as audience members notice the set for Aidan Fennessy’s The Heartbreak Choir. An old CFA Hall, the cornerstone of many Australian communities and even more childhoods, has been replicated with loving detail by the show’s set designer, Christina Smith. A dusty portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth looks down on hardwood floors lit by tinkering fluorescent lights; dirt brown curtains frame a disused stage, and a finicky heater sits next to an in-tune piano (for this we must suspend disbelief).
This is the rehearsal venue for the Heartbreak Choir, a community-led band of misfits that have broken off from the lead choir of a small town in regional Victoria in an act of protest. What exactly motivated this protest is the unsaid mystery that will propel us through much of the show’s first act. All we know is that we’ve come to this new choir as its members struggle to reckon with a tragic loss. Before the show begins, director Peter Houghton names another loss, that of the playwright, who passed away in 2020. There’s an empty seat left in the theatre for him, we’re told.
In The Heartbreak Choir, Fennessy has rendered a regional Victorian community with humour and an attention to detail that few could replicate. Like his previous work, The Architect, the show brings us all manner of personal grievances wrapped in a distinctly Australian brand of levity. This levity allows Fennessy to grapple with a wider issue – sexual abuse in the Catholic Church – by focusing on individual relationships.
As any good choirmaster will tell you, it is the quality of the chorus, rather than the quality of individual voices, that matters most. "We must connect," choirmaster Barbara (Maude Davey) declares. When these choristers enter the cobwebbed halls of this disused CFA hall for their weekly rehearsal, their individual struggles are suddenly shared in musical kinship; their differences and their grief come together in five-part harmony. "Hearts are breaking," as Houghton writes in the programme notes, but "they are not breaking alone".
This community is far from homogenous, and their differences produce inevitable conflicts that Fennessy celebrates. After all, the most interesting harmonies can come out of dissonance. Psychologist and choirmaster Barbara is an empathetic person struggling to act empathetically in the wake of gross injustice, and Davey expresses this inner conflict with a careful stoicism that we watch buckle under pressure. Aseni (Ratidzo Mambo) is a heavily pregnant doctor from Zimbabwe working in the local deli. Fennessy often writes comedy and drama in the same breath, placing dramatic monologues and quippy one-liners side by side. The effect is that each scene becomes a powerful testament to the idea that kindness and humour do not undercut strength. Mambo's ability to move seamlessly between fierce assertiveness and convivial warmth becomes the show’s most effective example of this idea.
Then there’s Mack (Carita Farrer Spencer), a country mum with a penchant for comic garrulity and embarrassing her daughter, Savannah (Emily Milledge). Musical director Vicky Jakobs has produced beautiful performances with this cast of capable vocalists, but it is Spencer and Milledge whose gorgeous voices provide some of the show’s most affecting moments.
As the benevolent, Totty, Louise Siversen offers a strong-willed stability that represents a feminine counterpoint to the grief-stricken instability of local cop Peter (William McInnes). Peter develops the most over the course of the play, and McInnes handles his character arc with heart-wrenching vulnerability. It is perhaps an inevitable result of Fennessy’s emphasis on community that the backstories and potential arcs offered by other characters are tantalisingly peripheral to the point of being underdeveloped. But this is a minor quibble motivated by the desire to see more of this richly drawn community.
Thankfully, director Peter Houghton’s keen eye for blocking group scenes allows each individual character to shine while sharing the spotlight. A hyperlocal soundscape brimming with Australian birds by J David Franzke also helps to evoke a vivid external world beyond the walls of the CFA. Matt Scott’s naturalistic lighting design adds to this effect, though it occasionally muddies the evening setting with warm colourings.
The Heartbreak Choir might be accused of viewing regional Australia through honey-coloured glasses in a way that risks smoothing the edges of the systemic injustices it grapples with. Fennessy began writing the show in 2020, a year when Cardinal George Pell was released from jail. The anger, pain and ongoing trauma for victims of sexual abuse was prescient then and, after the resignation of Hillsong Church’s Brian Houston in March, remains starkly relevant now. How should one respond to these events and to those impacted by them? There is no absolute answer to be found in The Heartbreak Choir. Instead, what Fennessy offers is just as vital – a call for community that empowers individual voices and works with, rather than against, differences.
With a simple trick of staging, The Heartbreak Choir ends by bringing the audience into the CFA hall to witness the choir perform for the local arts festival. As the chorus rings out across the theatre we are offered one last life-affirming testament to the power of community. Sitting in the audience, you’ll be forgiven should you think that, for a moment, our hearts might even beat as one.