AustLit

'In the all-singing, all-dancing stage musical update, this narrative and its implicit social commentary is almost unrecognisable. Gone is the bolshy ending; instead, a character who barely had four minutes of air time in the film – Brice, literally the first person Muriel kissed – returns to declare his love and drive both her and Rhonda to “happily ever after” on a bicycle trailer. While in the film, Muriel walked away from her faux-relationship with the hunky visa-chasing South African swimmer David after their first copulation; in the musical, her husband is a closeted Russian who realises the truth about his sexuality only after sleeping with Muriel. Crucially, where Muriel desperately sought marriage as proof of being “somebody”, she now not only desires marriage but, as importantly, Insta-fame. In conflating such disparate desires, Hogan not only identifies himself as belonging to the techno-panic generation, he also calls into question the very thing that endeared feminists to the film: its criticism of marriage as the pinnacle of female achievement.' (Introduction)