Mick Jackson’s 1992 romantic thriller The Bodyguard is a curious old thing. A musical film that regularly features on lists like ‘The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made’, it features more cheese than a fondue night in the Eastern Suburbs, yet it sports songs like I Will Always Love You, I’m Every Woman and I Have Nothing, and at 45 million copies worldwide it remains the best-selling soundtrack of all time. In other words, while it may look on paper to be the ultimate in bankable jukebox musicals, there’s a risk involved in staging a film that comes with descriptive baggage like ‘melodramatic’ and ‘potboiler’.

^{Paulini and Ensemble. All photos © Jeff Busby}

I guess that gives a creative team a little leeway. As long as you deliver on the audience’s musical expectations, you can afford to serve up a little schlock along the way, and that’s just what Thea Sharrock’s hi-octane, occasionally high-camp staging delivers. When the ‘thriller’ moments come, in the best B-movie tradition the audience is as likely to laugh as gasp. And plenty of the deadpan lines drew guffaws on opening night. Surely it can’t be...