Turning Retail Routine into Musical Comedy with Checked Out: The Musical (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

Fresh from a musical about group assignments, Josh Connell and Steph Lee are turning their attention to the soul-sucking grind of retail work for this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. Checked Out: The Musical draws on their own experiences in the service industry to explore the challenges, annoyances, and unexpected absurdities of customer-facing jobs, all set to an engaging, lively soundtrack, while also providing a cracking critique of the wider systems that define modern work culture.

"It has definitely been super fun to turn retail experience into this heightened version of reality," Lee tells me. "But also the work has an element of saying ‘stuff you’ to these corporations that you work for. It feels freeing to release pent-up frustrations through humour and song."

It’s a premise that will hit home for many, since most people’s first job is generally retail or some form of customer service, including Connell and Lee, who have brought in stories from people they’ve encountered in the work space, though not without a dash of creative licence. "We for sure took inspiration from our time in retail and a few of the characters are heavily based on people we have worked with (you know who you are)," Connell laughs. "However, I would say that we turned the real into the unbelievable more than we needed to cut things for being too out there."

"Unfortunately our wacky retail tales from the last couple of years are mainly us being yelled at by customers or expected to go ‘above and beyond’ for minimum wage. It’s just that in real life, people don’t sing bangers while getting mad at you," Lee adds. "I did work in a small retail shop that mostly sold eggs, and I can tell you the outrage about changes in egg prices is very real, which has made its way into the show."

However, Checked Out is not only about the jokes. The pair also want to raise awareness of the prices and profits that supermarkets are in the news for. "The show tries to walk the line between believable and extraordinary circumstances, using price gouging as a way to ground the absurd work drama in the real world," Lee says. "But we are really trying to highlight the hypocrisy of how these mammoth supermarket chains tackle the criticism they face about prices and profit. The entertaining part comes with bringing in satire to poke at company policies and statements they make to cover themselves when they are held accountable by the public."

"The truth is that retail is an uneventful grind," Connell tells me. "We think that’s a perfect setting for a satirical comedy about the lives of retail workers in their early 20s. Combine that with songs about mops and falling in love in aisle 9, plus a fab cast and you’ve got a Fringe show that is going to be a lot of fun."

The pair found it surprisingly easy to shape the music and the script, working in tandem to keep the show grounded while still heightening the comedy and drama. "When starting to write this show, weirdly the songs became apparent first as the plot points came to us in song concept," Connell explains. "Once those concepts turned into demos, the story wove itself together quite nicely. It's that music theatre thing where if a character wants something or wants to say something intensely, they should sing it. Especially when it comes to their hopes and their dreams, which in this case makes for comedic moments as the show combines deeply earnest, grand revelations within a super-boring, mundane environment."

"We also found ways to have a couple of almost ‘diegetic’ musical moments," Lee continues. "For example, the show being centred around a supermarket, it made sense to create a jingle for the company ‘Woles’. Playing with song as something the characters are aware of, and also unaware of is always enjoyable - and it is fun to pretend to be ad writers (who knows maybe that’s our next career move!)."

From the dreaded university assignment to the fluorescent aisles of the supermarket, Lee and Connell mine the daily slog for interest and intrigue, all circling back to one word: capitalism. "Capitalism sucks," Lee tells me. "I think A Zoom Group Project and Checked Out have been ways of exploring how the rat-race seeps into every element of our lives, from uni group projects to part-time retail jobs. With A Zoom Group Project our message was about how grind culture contributes to climate change by encouraging a ‘we don’t have time for this’ mentality and our need to work together toward solutions."

"Creating the story for Checked Out, we wanted to make it relatable to a wider audience, not only retail workers," she says. "Our main focus isn't to give audiences an insight into the lives of everyday workers (although inevitably you do get that insight), it is more to bring attention to the greed of these big corporations which everyone is suffering from at the moment."

"At the end of the day, if an audience member leaves with the line ‘they can take their record profit and I’ll tell them where to shove it’ stuck in their head, then we've done our job," Connell laughs. "We just hope that audiences leave laughing, singing our tunes, and maybe with the knowledge that community and collectivism is the solution to fighting capitalist hustle culture."

Whether it’s a group project or a checkout shift, Connell and Lee’s work highlights how ordinary jobs can reveal bigger truths about the world we live in. Checked Out: The Musical won't be open for long, so grab your tickets on the Fringe website, like it's a Black Friday deal you don’t want to miss.

FRINGE FIVE FAST ONES

1. A song I could listen to on repeat forever is
Steph: Down The Line by Remi Wolf.
Josh: State Lines by Novo Amor,

2. One object I can’t live without backstage is
Steph: tape. there isn’t anything it can’t fix.
Josh: a piano, I'm the piano guy.

3. My favourite word is
Steph: slay because it just rolls off the tongue, plus I named my last show SLAY and it is my favourite thing I’ve directed.
Josh: muppet.

4. Something unexpected that brings me joy is
Steph: anything that is rhinestoned.
Josh: saxophone solos.

5. If I could live one day as someone else, it would be
Steph: The CEO of Woolworths because I too would love to be paid over $8 million in a year.
Josh: I wouldn't want to live a day as someone else, I'm perfect just the way I am and nobody can say otherwise. Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Show Details

Venue: Trades Hall, Cnr Lygon & Victoria Sts, Carlton
Season: 8 - 12 October | Wed - Sat 9pm, Sun 8pm
Duration: 60 minutes
Tickets: Full $35 | Concession $25 | Wednesday Hump Day $26.25
Bookings: Melbourne Fringe Festival

Image credit: Josh Connell