REACHING FOR THE STARS

The new ‘Muriel’, effervescent Natalie Abbott, is still flying after winning the coveted musical role over 500 other theatrical hopefuls. She chats to MiNDFOOD about her journey & her hopes for a future on the Australian stage.

The new ‘Muriel’, actress Natalie Abbott, chats about winning the coveted role.

Two years after graduating from Sydney’s Australian Institute of Music with a degree in musical theatre, Natalie Abbott was still waiting for her big break, working in retail and auditioning for theatre roles whenever she could get her foot through the door. Unfortunately, that wasn’t often.

“I was working in a surf shop and a book shop, going to auditions and getting no callbacks. It was really tough,” she recalls.

By the time auditions for Muriel’s Wedding the Musical came around in March last year, Natalie’s selfconfidence had taken a nose-dive. “I thought, ‘What’s the point sending in my audition tape? They’ll never pick me’. I decided not to bother, but my friend, Caroline, said, ‘If you don’t do this, I will never speak to you again’.”

So Natalie capitulated – one of 500 young women across Australia to apply for the role of lovable, smalltown misfit Muriel, who dreams of the big lights of Sydney and a fairytale wedding. After her initial audition, when she sang Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, Natalie was thrilled to get a callback… then another one, then another one, until – after a total of eight auditions – she got a call at work at the surf shop.

“How would you like to play Muriel on stage?” the casting director asked. Natalie shrieked and fell to the floor. After recovering from the shock, she resigned from her retail jobs (“I was so ready to leave!”) and began rehearsals.

Having grown up in the NSW south coast town of Bomaderry (population: 6,661), it’s easy for Natalie to relate to Muriel’s culture shock when she flees her (fictional) town of Porpoise Spit for Sydney. “It felt very fast-paced when I arrived in Sydney in 2015,” she says. “I got off the train from Bomaderry at Central Station and three people barged right past me, which is so different to where I grew up.” She struggled at first to fit in with the other, seemingly more sophisticated students on her course.

“My first year at uni was hideous. It seemed like the other people had been doing musical theatre since they were four years old – and all I’d done was a couple of school productions. It was very daunting.”

Gradually, however, Natalie found her feet, and her confidence grew. She knew that the chances of making her fortune as a performer were slim (“no-one’s in it for the money”). But the country girl who had grown up idolising the Spice Girls and Britney Spears decided to give it a “red-hot crack”, as she knew that singing and acting were the only things she really enjoyed, and any other career path would always be second best.

Now, with the shock of landing the most coveted role of 2019 just about absorbed, Natalie, who was one of three students nationally to win the prestigious Bell Shakespeare Scholarship when she was in

Year 11, would like one day to be able to promote new Australian works.

“If there was an opportunity for me to go overseas to the West End or Broadway, I would not pass it up, but telling Australian stories is so important and special – it’s my dream. I think Australian theatre is under-rated. There is so much creativity going on here.”

• Muriel’s Wedding the Musical begins its national season at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, from 12 March.

“Telling Australian stories is so important and so special.” NATALIE ABBOTT

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