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Christie Whelan Browne has been performing Britney Spears: The Cabaret since 2009 – “how many reprisals can one show have?” she says – and while much has changed in the life of the troubled American pop star, the show remains “about 98 per cent” the same.
“We change about two lines at the end to make it relevant to what’s happening today,” Whelan Browne says ahead of a one-night-only reboot this week. (This time there will probably be a nod to the fact that Spears has just entered rehab, again, after a DUI arrest, and maybe an update on her endless dancing videos on Instagram.)
What has changed is how people respond to the tale of the former Disney child star, whose mental disintegration, substance-abuse issues and custody and divorce battles played out in the full glare of the public spotlight.
“I think at the time we all viewed Britney’s breakdown as entertainment,” Whelan Browne says. “We watched it on the front of the tabloids. We watched her shave her head and hit paparazzi with umbrellas, crying, holding her children, driving with her children on her lap. We watched it all, we couldn’t look away, it was like a car crash – that this pop icon was so young and beautiful and perfect in everyone’s eyes, and it was just all falling apart. And we watched it as entertainment and fodder.”
Today, she says, citing the response to Carlton footballer Elijah Hollands’ recent on-field mental health episode, there would be much more compassion.
When Dean Bryant – writer of the My Brilliant Career stage musical (with Sheridan Harbridge and Mathew Frank) and now artistic director of Malthouse Theatre – came to her with the idea of a Britney cabaret, “we both thought it would be a fun, pop, silly show”. They each came to Britney as a fan – “my cat is called Britney Spears”, she confesses – but as Bryant handed over each monologue as he finished writing it, the tragedy of her story became ever more apparent.
“It was quite a dark look at a family who put their children into entertainment at a very young age, and moved the family to different parts of the country to make fame a goal,” she says. “And the more we looked into it, the darker and sadder it became.”
Still, when she first performed it at the height of Spears’ tabloid infamy, “people laughed heartily at her being put into a mental institution and being put under the conservatorship, people would roar with laughter. And I remember thinking, ‘what are they laughing at?’”
These days, those parts of the show “are mostly met with silence … I think we realised this young woman, who had the world at her fingertips, how quickly we all turned and watched her mental health crisis, and it didn’t seem like anyone was stepping in to help”.
Though Whelan Browne is best known as a musical theatre star, her six-season stint on Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell is, she says, “the thing I’m recognised for the most”.
At least once a week she is stopped at the shops by someone telling her how much they miss the show, which Micallef called time on in 2022 after 15 seasons. “I don’t think I was ever aware of the impact the show had and the joy it brought people, especially during COVID,” she says. “I think people relied on it a lot for a lighthearted look at a world that was, you know, crumbling. And people always say to me, ‘bring back Mad as Hell’. Because I think now more than ever people really need to escape and have a laugh.”
Do you ever tell Micallef the same?
“Yeah, all the time. I mean, everyone does. If people are saying to me bring it back, I can’t imagine how much they say it to him.”
There’s another reason Whelan Browne might be familiar to people who don’t often attend the theatre, and this one is no laughing matter: the long-running and bitter legal fight over claims she was sexually harassed by Craig McLachlan in 2014 during the multi-city run of The Rocky Horror Show.
The claims first surfaced in January 2018, when this masthead reported that Whelan Browne, Erika Heynatz and Angela Scundi had accused the former Neighbours and Doctor Blake Mysteries star of touching them inappropriately and/or exposing himself during the production. Within days, two more cast members had come forward with allegations.
Over the next six years, Whelan Browne was in and out of court as the matter played out in three separate trials: a criminal investigation (McLachlan was found not guilty, though the magistrate said in her decision that “were the current law applicable it is possible the result may have been different”); the defamation action he brought against Whelan Browne, Fairfax newspapers (then publisher of this masthead) and the ABC, seeking $6.5 million in damages (he abandoned his case, a move that reportedly cost him about $2 million); and the case she brought against the production company GFO, seeking $2 million in compensation for lost earnings and damages (it was settled outside court in September 2024, on confidential terms, with Whelan Browne saying she was “extremely happy with the outcome”).
What was it like to live through that, so publicly, for so long? “Tiring,” she says. “I often wonder what the cost of speaking up like that was, and even today the cost continues to be there.”
How so? “In that the man has started a podcast and continues to spit vitriol and therefore sends trolls in my direction, and abuse and threats. Sometimes you’ve got the capability to block, delete, move on, but some days you don’t. And so the cost is ongoing.”
Did you ever imagine yourself as a campaigner, as a lightning rod for the frustrations and anger women had felt for so long before #MeToo lifted the lid?
“Absolutely not. I wouldn’t have even called myself a feminist because I grew up privileged, we had money and I had opportunity, I had love and support. And this opened my eyes to how angry and hateful a lot of people can be to a woman who dares to speak up. And that’s not just men, it’s women as well. There’s a lot of people who just want you to shut up, and that’s weird to me.”
Knowing all that, if you could step back in time, would you do it again?
“I think I’d probably ... pause for thought,” she says, reflecting. “It happened at the time in my life where I wanted to have a baby, and that was proving incredibly difficult because of the strain my life was under. And I did have my baby, I had a beautiful IVF miracle boy, and he’s the light of our lives. And so I regret nothing, because I know I’m exactly where I am today, being his mum.”
Whelan Browne’s husband, Rohan Browne, is also an actor. The upside, there’s always someone there to understand the inevitable ups and downs of the life. The downside? “I do sometimes wish one of us had a normal job and some stability.”
Rohan recently finished a long stint – almost three years – in Beauty and the Beast, with Whelan Browne stepping away from work to look after their son, who has just turned five. “And there wasn’t one part of me that felt jealous or that wanted to be up there,” she says. “I think I was ready for a break and happy to have one. But I also now feel ready to get back.”
The one-night stand as Britney is but a blip in a run that has also included the one-woman show Life in Plastic, a role in Kimberly Akimbo, and a just-finished run (with Emily Taheny and Jess Harris) at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO CHRISTIE WHELAN BROWNE
- Worst habit? Complaining that I’m tired.
- Greatest fear? Not being with my son.
- The line that stayed with you? It’s not your job to like me, it’s mine (self-help author Byron Katie).
- Biggest regret? Worrying so much.
- Favourite book? Bryan Cranston’s A Life in Parts.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? Adele’s albums.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I have no desire to be anywhere else at any other time. I think I would offer it to a friend.
But the main event will come in November when she stars in Dean Bryant’s adaptation of the 1950 Bette Davis movie All About Eve, a role he has written specifically for his long-time muse.
“He knew I was looking for a challenge, and he definitely delivered on that,” she says. “I’m playing two roles, maybe even four roles. It’s going to be quite a task for me.”
At 43, Whelan Browne suddenly finds herself in what she calls “a weird age bracket”. She was recently asked to workshop a new Australian musical, and she thought it would be a chance to do something similar to Muriel’s Wedding (she played Tania in the stage musical). “And they said, ‘no, no, for the mum’. And I was like, ‘shit, I’ve moved age brackets’.”
She’s not afraid of ageing up, she says, it’s just that “what I do, what I bring, has been in the roles to this sort of age group, and now it’s just filling a different type of position – which I didn’t know I was ready to do.”
So far, she says, her son shows no signs of interest in acting. “He’s AFL mad, and he knows every theme song. He changes teams once a week. He’s got all the outfits. We live and breathe footy from 6am every day.”
On second thoughts, she adds, “I think it’s a performative version of AFL”.
And if that were to morph into a full-blown desire to tread the boards, what would you say to him?
“‘Have a backup, darling’,” she says, laughing. “But I would also say the thing that I never knew, which was, ‘of course, you can – and it’ll be a beautiful, wonderful time’.”
Britney Spears: The Cabaret is at The Round, Nunawading on Thursday, May 7. Details: theround.com.au
