The British soap opera Coronation Street is being turned into a stage musical. Like The Reduced Shakespeare Company's The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Coronation Street Abridged Live! will romp through all 50 years of the northern soap, including "115 deaths, 37 births and 86 marriages", according to the Mirror.

The stage musical will be penned by Coronation Street writer Jonathan Harvey who once-upon-a-time wrote the hit British play (and later a film) Beautiful Thing about two teenage boys falling in love against the backdrop of a council estate and music by The Mamas and the Papas. The right man for the job then.

The concept of turning a soap into a musical has been proven to work already. The British put the Aussie drama Prisoner onto the boards in 1995 (and again a decade later) as Prisoner The Musical, and then repeated the trick (to much critical acclaim) with their own cult TV caged-women drama Bad Girls selling out in the West End as, yup, Bad Girls: The Musical.

So when will Australian producers capitalise on their own rich legacy of internationally recognised soap opera? Why rely on imported dreck like Mamma Mia! when you can knock out your own just-add-music TV adaptations? Australia, this is a financially reckless brain-drain crisis - get busy.

Here are just a few suggestions. We can work out royalties later...




Neighbours

At 25 years old this year the timing is certainly right. More to the point, Neighbours can boast a rich legitimate musical legacy having gifted the world Kylie, Jason, Natalie Imbruglia, Holly Valance, and Delta, as well as featuring guest appearances by Lilly Allen, Molly Meldrum and Emma Bunton. If nothing else, Neighbours - The Musical! would surely make the multi-talented Stefan Dennis feel very good indeed...





Home and Away

If Lassiters isn't the most inspiring backdrop for a stage musical then perhaps Summer Bay caravan park has that feel-good "holiday" vibe that helped give Mamma Mia! such box-office clout. Re-instate that lesbian kiss, throw in Jodi Gordon with a chorus of hot bikies, and somehow lure back Dannii Minogue and they just might be on to something. Or not...





Sons and Daughters

Tears, sadness and happiness. What more could you want? While the Machiavellian adventures of Pat the Rat might not, at first glance, seem to offer much in the way of musical opportunities, this classic Reg Watson production does have some musical heritage worth mining. The sepia-tinted theme song was released as a single in the UK in April 1984 (the same month as "The Locomotion", unfortunately) reaching the heady chart heights of number 68, and there was even a cash-in album featuring the cast performing cover versions (the b-side was handled by the cast of A Country Practice). Scottish band Sons and Daughters (named after a dream about Bob Dylan and not the cliffhanger-laden soap, they say) could contribute a tune or two with numbers such as "Killer" and "Gilt Complex" proving a ready-made fit...
 





The Young Doctors

The British have already shown they're unafraid of stealing a campy Aussie show and setting it to music for their own warped entertainment. Somewhere Down Under a canny, musical-loving, TV writer should snap up the rights to this lethal dose of melodrama before they strike again. Running, okay staggering, from '76 to '83, this not-so-medical drama about the loves and lives of young staff members at the Albert Memorial Hospital was campy guilt-ridden gold, bolstered by shockingly cheap production values, a scenery-chomping Cornelia Francis as resident bitch Sister Scott, and the ever quotable, kiosk-based gossip Ada Simmonds. One for "the greys and gays" perhaps, but a one-off as part of next year's Midsumma festival could reignite interest. Plus, if the show wasn't cult enough, it also holds the dubious (to some) distinction "of having never won any sort of television award." Bravo! Give it a Garth Merenghi's Dark Place twist, book a few music acts to the hospital's disco/restaurant "Bunny's Place", inject an appearance by ex-pop star and former Young Doctor Mark Holden and it writes itself. Alright, it's a stretch, but if Victoria Wood and Julie Walters could wring a hit West End musical out of an Eighties TV comedy sketch that lampooned shonky soap operas, anything is possible. The disco scenes glimpsed in this opening intro even suggest a possible "Velvet Goldmine" angle...






Arcade

As a recent British arrival to Australia, discovering that this quickly aborted soap-in-a-shopping-mall even existed is one of those incredible Back To The Future 2 type "alternate reality" moments you experience here, like finding out about Warwick Capper for the first time, or watching this psychedelic 1969 ('ish) Aussie Coca-Cola commercial. That soft-rock-soft-drink jingle was sung by a certain Doug Parkinson, who would soon be summoned to provide a fitting theme song to “Australian television’s most ambitious production yet"; an Altman-esque (I imagine) exploration of the interwoven lives of shopkeepers working in a nondescript (okay, ugly) Sydney shopping mall. A notoriously expensive flop, it was discontinued quicker than Coke 2.0.

But we will always have Doug Parkinson's remarkable disco-inflected theme song, and a title sequence that introduces us to the thrilling shopping options to be experienced while "Walking in the Arcade", including Kitty's Record Bar, Aristocrat Dry Cleaners, and the glittering Flashback Leisure Centre (a truly mind-bending 'arcade within an arcade' concept). Imagine Showgirls as Shopgirls and let the magic of Doug Parkinson do the rest...





Skin Deep

Perhaps the cruelest cut of all, this "glamourous" Aussie drama from 1983 never made it past the pilot movie stage; clearly because it was so ahead of its time. Pre-Gianni Versace perhaps, general audiences weren't sufficiently curious enough to peek behind the catwalk curtain, and they obviously weren't ready for dangerous looking car-phones, or a wild-haired Nicole Kidman as next-top-model "Sheena". It also won't have helped that producers were aiming for haute-couture glamour on a sweatshop budget. Thirty years on, however, and post-Devil Wears Prada the world is primed. Frankly, this has "remake immediately" embroidered all over it, in any medium, even if its audiobook, so it may as well jump to its logical conclusion as a stage musical where it can become become the next Priscilla. If The Boy From Oz could work for Middle American tourists on Broadway, then you can only imagine the money making potential of mixing Dynasty with The Eyes of Laura Mars, cinched with some Brenda Dickson for good measure. Gay TV producers of the world, you may want to sit down for this...