Maxwell Simon on REBEL: A New Musical, Rock and Roll, Queer Truth, and Riding the “Wild Track” as Davey

Maxwell Simon does not talk about REBEL: A New Musical as if it is a neat package, sealed, labelled, and ready to go. He talks about it as something alive, something still becoming, and that energy, equal parts intelligence and impatience, is exactly what makes this new Australian work feel so compelling in the lead up to opening at the MC Showroom in Prahran.

REBEL follows David as he chases rock and roll to outrun his past, moving from fireside guitars to big city nightlife, and into a story of love, loss, and the harsh realities of being queer in a world that refuses to see him. When tragedy calls him back to Texas, he must confront the life he abandoned and find a way to build a future that honours both his heart and his family. Featuring a Greenroom nominated score, the two act musical runs approximately one hour and fifty minutes including intermission, and comes with content advisories for mature themes, haze, flashing lights, and sudden sound effects.

Simon, a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts Music Theatre program, has already built a career that moves confidently between cult favourite intensity and big commercial spectacle. He earned critical acclaim, and a Glug Award for Most Outstanding Performance by a Newcomer, with his professional debut as The Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald in Assassins at Hayes Theatre. More recently he led Woodward Productions’ Little Shop of Horrors as Seymour, and toured extensively with Moulin Rouge The Musical! as principal cover for Christian and The Duke. His credits stretch from American Idiot to Muriel’s Wedding, from Shakespeare with Melbourne Shakespeare Company to the screen in Bay of Fire and The Five Minute Call.

Yet for all that range, what makes Simon so watchable, and what makes him such an intriguing Davey, is not polish. It is his appetite for risk.

When asked what clicked instantly with Davey, he begins not with psychology, but with the audience. “Davey’s sense of ease and ability to speak to an audience as a close friend was the first thing that I really identified with,” he says. “He is really at home on stage. The stage often feels like a playground to me.” That remark lands like a mission statement, and it neatly frames the kind of performer Simon is. Even in roles that carry darkness, his work tends to feel conversational, as if he is leaning in to tell you something, and daring you to lean back.

But in REBEL, that ease does not equal comfort. Davey’s rebellion, Simon suggests, is not a posture. It is a form of clarity. “His rebelliousness feels really rooted in honesty,” he says. “He’s honest about what he wants from life and in the world of this show, that makes him rebellious.” Then he pivots, immediately, to the contradiction that complicates that honesty. “What surprised me is how emotionally avoidant he is. It’s really interesting to have a character that’s so honest and avoidant at the same time.”

It is one of those observations that instantly makes a character feel three dimensional. Honest, but avoidant. Brave, but guarded. That friction, between what Davey can articulate and what he cannot yet sit with, appears to be one of the engines of the show. REBEL is also explicit about queerness, but not in a way that isolates it as a theme, or an issue to be addressed. The show threads queer identity through family, grief, ambition, and the search for belonging. Simon’s approach to that is precise.

I never approach any character as trying to play their sexuality,” he says. “I investigate their relationships and go from there. If I play the relationships honestly, an honest multi dimensional picture will emerge. If I try to make a statement about what queerness is, a one dimensional picture will emerge.

It is a quietly sophisticated way of describing the work. He is not interested in performance as declaration. He is interested in performance as relationship. And he is generous about where the weight belongs.

Rebel is so deeply about queerness and from my perspective the writing has already done that work,” he says. “I read it and read it and read it and just see how it moves me. I see where I as a person meet the writing and am curious to find out how I will, in a sense, harmonise with the writing. What does the writing plus me equal.

It is a striking phrase, “what does the writing plus me equal”, because it reframes acting as collaboration rather than interpretation. Simon is not trying to control the meaning. He is trying to discover it, night by night. That philosophy also explains his attraction to stories that sit on the edges, and characters who do not take the easy road. From Assassins to American Idiot, from queer nightlife to small town expectations, Simon seems pulled toward material that asks, bluntly, what a person is willing to risk to be themselves. “I am drawn to characters who are making their best efforts to do what they want to do,” he says. “I find it so moving when a character, or a real person, is trying their hardest and pursuing what they want even if the world is telling them not to.”

In Davey, that choice is vividly embodied. “He has the easy option to be an ‘Ordinary Cowboy,’ or he can go on the hard and painful journey of being who he wants to be.”

REBEL is a musical with big energy, but it also trades in quiet revelation, and that balance can be demanding. Simon’s method for navigating those swings is, perhaps surprisingly, not about manufacturing emotion. It is about arriving as he is, and letting the material do the work. “My approach to every show I do is, I start where I am and go from there,” he says. “I can’t make myself feel anything. That’s the writing’s job. The writing either takes me ‘there’ or it doesn’t. And I don’t even know where ‘there’ is.”

He talks about performance like an experiment, one with variables he does not try to eliminate. “If I’m pumped up and excitable then lets see where the writing takes that. If I’m feeling really down then that’s the journey we go on. I think of it like an experiment. I might start with a really low depressed energy and by the end of the show be bouncing off the walls.”

Then, almost as a mantra, he adds a quote that underlines his approach. “David Mamet famously says ‘invent nothing, deny nothing’ and I truly believe that is the best way to approach acting.” What emerges, in that way of speaking, is a performer who is not chasing consistency as sameness. He is chasing honesty as responsiveness. He is also acutely aware of the audience as an active part of the equation. “I also have a deep curiosity and care for the audience,” he says. “I want to know who they are and who I am in front of them.”

If REBEL is, as its creators describe, a tribute to the family we choose and the communities we need, then it is fitting that Simon speaks about theatre itself as a kind of family making exercise, one that changes from room to room. “Theatre is all about teamwork. That’s one of the reasons I love it,” he says. “Every show feels like a family, sometimes a deeply dysfunctional family, sometimes a strangely perfect family.” He is wary of packaging that into a neat lesson before the work is finished. “Rebel hasn’t finished yet so I don’t know if I feel comfortable saying what neat lessons I may have learned yet are, but I do know that so far this family feels like a good one.”

That sense of the work being unfinished, still in motion, becomes even clearer when Simon compares REBEL to the large scale touring shows he has lived inside. In a production like Moulin Rouge The Musical!, he suggests, the machinery is precise, with many hands keeping it stable. “A large scale touring show is a well oiled train that has many people keeping it on the track, monitoring its speed, and making sure it moves efficiently and safely.”

REBEL is not that.

I feel more creative space. There’s more room to play with the show. There’s more room to take ownership of it, and in a sense, rebel inside it,” he says. “If I wanna do something wildly different one night, I can. And I should. Rebel isn’t paint by numbers. A show like Rebel asks you to be yourself. The show wants to know what I bring to it.

Then he delivers the kind of metaphor you can already hear being quoted back at him for years. “A show like Rebel is a fast train, on a wild track with one driver who may or may not be sober.” It is funny, yes, but it is also revealing. This is a performer who thrives when the guardrails loosen, when the text demands presence rather than replication.

Asked what he hopes audiences might discover about him through Davey, Simon refuses the ego bait. He keeps returning to the show itself “I haven’t really thought about what I want people to discover about me,” he says. “I’ve found Rebel to be a really great story with really great songs and my ambition is to make that shine as much as possible.” His benchmark is the simplest one, and perhaps the most telling. “If people are as moved as I was on my first reading and love the show as much as I do then that would mean I’ve done my job.”

In an industry where new Australian musicals are both rare and hard won, REBEL arrives with a sense of urgency, and with an actor in the driver’s seat who seems energised by exactly what makes the form thrilling, the risk of it, the live wire of it, the way it can change depending on who shows up in the room.

REBEL: A New Musical is a two act work running approximately one hour and fifty minutes including intermission at MC Showroom, Level 1, 50 Clifton Street, Prahran, with parking options nearby on King Street and Izett Street. Audiences are advised that the production contains mature themes including sexual references, occasional mature language and domestic abuse, and that it uses haze effects, flashing lights and sudden sound effects.

If Simon is right, and if the writing does what it promises to do, it will not just take him “there”. It will take the audience with him, close enough to feel like a friend, and brave enough to choose the harder path.

REBEL: A New Musical hits The MC Showroom, Level 1, 50 Clifton Street, Prahran for a strictly limited season from Thursday 5 March to Saturday 14 March 2026, with evening performances kicking off at 7:00pm. If you want to catch Maxwell Simon’s Davey on that “wild track” in a venue this intimate, do not leave it late, seats will disappear fast. Tickets are on sale now via Ticketbooth.