Dangerous When Wet is the working title for a new musical theatre piece by Merran Hughes (playwright) Eliane Morel (playwright) and Joanna Weinberg (songwriter), which tells the story of Australians Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie, the first women ever to win Gold and Silver in a modern Olympic women’s swimming event at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

Eliane and Merran are both residents of the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney with a strong connection to their local artistic communities, and have extensively researched Australian swimming history. In 2021/22, with assistance from Waverley and Randwick Councils, and in collaboration with Soledad Cordeaux and Vashti Hughes, they wrote a play, Dangerous When Wet, which focused on the stories of Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack – the lens of sport providing a view into the social, cultural, and technological shifts that were occurring as Australia began to transform into a modern nation.

Expanding on this research, Hughes and Morel completed a very successful exhibition and lecture, ‘Sydney Mermaids’, focusing on Fanny Durack, Mina Wylie, as part of Heritage Week for Inner West Council. The research is now part of the Inner West library collection.

In 2024 Morel and Hughes successfully applied for a grant from Waverley Council to create a new musical, using the original play Dangerous When Wet as a starting point, but this time collaborating with musical theatre writer, Joanna Weinberg. The idea behind presenting the story as a musical is to allow for more characters to be introduced, and to allow those characters to outwardly express emotional depths, and to make the story fun, colorful and accessible to all.

We began working on the piece in November 2024, and the new show will be presented in the form of an old-time musical-hall variety show, featuring the types of acts and music genres that were prevalent in the early 1900s. Six songs have already been written and our intention is to have the script/songs complete by May 2025, and to begin workshopping the play with singers/actors from June 2025.