Hey,

Dylan and Earl here, the writers of Clancy of the Outback: A Musical Adventure.

We wanted to share with you an update on how our project is shaping up, showcase some photos of a recent showing of the work and give you some teasers of what to look forward to.

Firstly, a bit about us. We both come from different parts of Victoria, with Earl growing up in country town Mildura, much like the hot-headed Little Bill in the books, and Dylan growing up in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, not too dissimilar to the titular Clancy. We met at university, as part of the Monash Uni student theatre and quickly bonded over our love for silly, entertaining, musical theatre. Since then, we’ve written two shows together - one about a tree and another, ghosts - before we were approached to adapt the incredible work of Phil Kettle and Bob Andersen and the entire Clancy of the Outback book series was placed on our doorstep. Since then, we’ve been hard at work on taking Clancy’s adventures off the page and onto the stage.

After about six months of work, we are close to reaching the end of the writing process. There’s just a few rhymes to tweak, a few songs to reprise and a few chords to play, but that hasn’t stopped us from putting some of the show out there already. Phil Kettle has already shared some of our song demos on country music radio and we were lucky enough to present two of the songs live, with a full cast, at Antipodes Theatre HQ in South Melbourne, last Sunday. Through a ‘Song Showcase’, run by AMTAC (Australian Musical Theatre Artists Collective) we performed our upbeat opening number ‘Way Out To Woop Woop’ and Clancy’s solo ‘Take Me Back”, amongst a plethora of other upcoming, local musical theatre talent. We were able to bring these songs to life with the expertise of our incredible live cast, which included Declan Stewart Ryan, Akansha Hungenahally, Ursula Searle and Vincent Brown (all pictured). The audience response was beyond encouraging and has given us both the confidence that we are heading down the right path with this work.

In terms of the future, we are looking at multiple avenues to bring the best possible version of the show to life. The priority at the moment is finishing and refining the writing first, so we don’t have any official dates for you just yet, but are certain you’ll be able to come see it sometime this year… maybe where there’s already some country roots. In the meantime, we look forward to sharing more snippets of the show as we continue to develop it. If you’d like to stay up to date on the project, check-in regularly with the website, follow @clancyoftheoutback and @marshallandmarrows on instagram, and if you’d like to learn more about AMTAC look no further then @antipodesarts on instagram too.

See ya,
Ya galah!

Take Me Back - Live at AMTAC 2/3/25

Way Out To Woop Woop - Live at AMTAC 2/3/25

AMTAC Song Showcase

Writing Clancy of the Outback