THE NEW YORK TIMES: Musical about Aussie breakdancer at Olympics a fringe hit, just don’t mention Raygun

It was Saturday night at Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and a woman dressed in the green and gold of an Australian Olympian was belting out a number about her journey to becoming the world’s most notorious break dancer.

“I wanna achieve all my dreams,” she sang, “I wanna dance like no one’s watching.”

Her story, told through silly songs, was remarkably similar to that of Ms Rachael Gunn, better known as B-girl Raygun, the breaker whose unconventional routines at last summer’s Paris Olympics — including a kangaroo impersonation — spawned mockery, memes and Halloween costumes.

Yet at the start of Breaking: The Musical, running at the Pleasance King Dome through August 24, a disclaimer on a screen at the back of the stage insisted that the show wasn’t about Raygun at all — it was actually about a completely fictional break dancer from Australia … called Spraygun.

The disclaimer was essential. Last year, Ms Gunn tried to shutter Breaking: The Musical, saying that it would damage her brand. A promise not to use the name Raygun was part of a legal agreement that allowed the show to go on.

Ms Steph Broadbridge, the Australian comedian behind the musical, said in an interview that she had assumed Raygun would have wanted to be in on the joke and give her Olympic saga a happy ending. The musical, added Ms Broadbridge, 42, was “nicer” to the dancer before the legal action. Since then, she added, “There’s been a few rewrites.”

Raygun turned down an interview request for this article, as did her legal team. Her talent agency, Born Bred, said last year that “while we have immense respect for the credible work and effort that has gone into the development of the show, we must take necessary steps to safeguard Rachael’s creative rights and the integrity of her work.”

Parody musicals and plays are a staple of the Fringe, the annual arts festival that takes over hundreds of venues in Edinburgh each summer. Last year, two of the biggest shows were about a 2023 lawsuit involving Gwyneth Paltrow and a collision on a Utah ski slope.

Breaking: The Musical, whose songs include Breaking Down and I Pulled a Muscle, has all the makings of another Fringe success. This spring, critics raved over its Australian debut. Mr Sean Tarek Goodwin, in a review for the Australian Broadcasting Corp, said the show “rises beyond cheap gags on a well-known public saga and has a surprising level of depth and wit.”

In Edinburgh on Saturday, the show received a partial standing ovation from an audience of around 120 attendees, and six of them said in interviews afterward that they had loved it.

Ms Bella Roberts, 23, said the musical was surprisingly “funny and inventive” considering that it was based on “just a meme.”

Ms Broadbridge said that, at first, she hadn’t watched Raygun’s performances at the Olympics, during which the breaker — who is also an academic at Macquarie University in Sydney with research interests including hip-hop culture and gender politics — scored zero points.

In the days afterward, Raygun became a figure of fun and hate as social media users accused her of scamming her way to the Olympics and appropriating Black culture — even though she had previously represented Australia in several international breaking competitions and none of the female breakers who won medals in Paris were Black.

It was during this time that Ms Broadbridge became fascinated by the dancer and the over-the-top reactions.

“She should have been a meme for a day, and six months later we were still obsessed,” Ms Broadbridge said.

Ms Broadbridge, a performer of both stand-up and comedy songs, channelled some of those thoughts into Breaking Down, an empathetic ballad about coping with trolls. More songs came, and within weeks, the comedian had drafted a musical that both mocks Raygun and celebrates her.

“I wrote the whole thing assuming she would be in the front row,” Ms Broadbridge said. “I can be a bit of a roasty comic, but if I can’t say it to someone’s face, I won’t. That’s my rule.”

In December, Ms Broadbridge booked a basement venue in Sydney to run through the script for an audience of 50 friends. Somehow, she recalled, a journalist learned of the performance and wrote about it.

Then Raygun’s legal team sent Ms Broadbridge a cease-and-desist letter and demanded 20,000 Australian dollars in damages and legal fees.

A stunned Ms Broadbridge sent Raygun’s team a recording of the Breaking Down song. “I was, like, ‘This is the tone, if that changes your mind at all,’” she said.

After Ms Broadbridge announced the show’s cancellation on Instagram, several lawyers offered to take on her case, arguing that celebrities shouldn’t be able to shutter a parody.

Soon, the parties came to the agreement: Ms Broadbridge apologised and promised not to perform Raygun’s moves in the same sequence as at the Olympics. With its main character renamed, the show carried on.

The legal action is almost a subplot in the musical. At several points, when a character comes close to saying Raygun’s name, a lawyer appears onstage to hush them.

The audience laughed at those moments on Saturday, but the biggest reaction came when the nine-person cast performed some of Raygun’s Olympics moves.

Ms Broadbridge swaggered onstage and started dancing as a narrator rapped instructions. “Paws to the left / Paws to the right,” he said as she re-enacted the kangaroo dance. “Now dance like a drunk auntie at Christmas.”

The rest of the cast joined in, and it wasn’t long before the audience was on its feet, dancing too.

“If you’re the only one having fun / Then you’re doing the Spraygun,” the narrator rapped. It felt like the only person who might not enjoy the moment was Raygun herself.

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