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Canberra Today 15°/19° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

The egg-cited Beanies’ egg-straordinary show

The Beanies… from left, Laura Dawson, “music wizard” James Court, Mim Rizvi and, front, Michael Yore. Photo: Grant Leslie

WHEN I catch up with three of the livewire Beanies, it’s hard to get a word in edgeways as they tell me of their “egg-straordinary” tour coming to The Playhouse on August 6.

“CityNews” last chatted with the Beanies  – Mim Rizvi, Laura Dawson and Michael Yore – in March, 2020, when they were about to appear in their Sydney Fringe Festival hit, “The Beanies’ Egg-straordinary Day”, at The Q. But after one show, covid intervened and the rest of the tour was cancelled – now they’re on the road again.

Covid, it turns out, wasn’t a total disaster because they used lockdown time to work with an ABC team, during which they edited and animated the show.

With a high presence on YouTube, an Aria nomination for Best Children’s Album and an Australian Podcast Award for Best Kids and Families Podcast, they’ve gone on to become regulars on ABC Kids TV and iView. 

Now that they’ve hit the big time, have they departed from their theatrical origins, which include working in kids’ theatre, performing as a band and writing a children’s musical? 

“We are all theatre people and a lot of our work is built on stage shows,” Mim Beanie says.

Laura Beanie, who’d played with Everyman Theatre and in “Les Miserables” and “Legally Blonde”, met Mim Beanie while working on the musical “Grease” in Canberra.

Michael Beanie, who says he’s been adopted by Canberra, is a Novocastrian who’d been working in kids’ Shakespeare, met Mim during a theatre-in-education schools tour where the pair played in gyms and halls, bumping in, performing the show and packing out, all by themselves.

The Fourth Beanie is pianist-composer James Court who, as their “music wizard”, has been responsible for more than 60 original songs they’ve released with ABC Kids.

So, what is “The Beanies’ Egg-straordinary Day” all about? It sounds a bit like the “Seussical” musical based on “Horton Hatches the Egg”, a lot of fun but with a strong moral.

Laura explains how they always try to involve an ethical lesson and Mim says: “We hide the vegetables in the spaghetti so that it’s not off-putting.”

The play, which has a happy ending, sees The Beanies placed in charge of looking after an egg for a day – a big responsibility, like any parenting. The moral for the kids is that your big people care for you, so give a bit of appreciation.

The payoff of having blokes in The Beanies, Mim says, is that they can show different faces of the problem, in this case parenting, so kids can see there are different ways to tackle different problems.

Michael, for instance, describes his character as “the dangerous sort of dad I want my child to be able to go mountain biking and engage in extreme sport.”

Mim’s parenting style is “anxiety-ridden, I want the egg to be a high achiever,” while Laura is a lot cooler – she’s an “Instagram mum”.

The publicity refers to hard boiling eggs – surely not the way to care for them – but fear not, The Beanies manage to get the egg back with the help of the audience – similar to helping save Tinkerbell in “Peter Pan”.

They’ve played in a lot of different places, but now in The Playhouse, they’ll be faced with a 600-seat theatre, a big shift, they agree.

For three of them it’ll be a real homecoming and a nice full circle for Mim and Laura, both of whom once worked as ushers at The Playhouse.

On tour they normally play to small audiences so it’s easy enough to do crowd control, with a hands-on style, Laura says, that sees the kids participate in helping solve the problems.

In the bigger theatre, the TV-style sound effects are very much to the fore, with James dashing around to play the piano, act as stage hand and do the sounds. 

If it sounds like madness, Michael unapologetically sums up the show as “Monty Python meets The Wiggles”.

“The Beanies Egg-straordinary Day”, The Playhouse, 10am and noon, Saturday, August 6.

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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