It’s the classic COVID love story. Boy meets girl, they play lovers in hit musical, tear off jackets to reveal “Stupid/I’m With Stupid” t-shirts, they move in together as a pandemic rips their lives and livelihoods apart, ride horses along a beach and he proposes.
Happily ever after. This is not a deep story, but you can’t hear it without smiling.
The big reveal: Haydan Hawkins and Nadia Komazec as Sammy and Holly in The Wedding Singer Musical.Credit:Nicole Cleary
Nadia Komazec, 32, and Haydan Hawkins, 33, are in love and in love with love, they giggle and tease each other. It’s joyfully cheesy, just like The Wedding Singer musical they perform in.
The production came together after the country’s first pandemic lockdown, a brutal time for Australian performing arts.
Like many in the industry, Komazec and Hawkins had serious soul-searching to do. Hawkins had been trying to make ends meet post-lockdown working in his mum’s Sydney cafe – devastatingly, it burnt down.
“I was faced with the choice of going back to performance or continuing down another path, “he says. “COVID had completely wiped out live performance ... I made the difficult decision to walk away from my life as a performer.
“About six weeks later, the phone rang with the offer to play Sammy in The Wedding Singer.”
Komazec plays his on-stage on-off love interest, Holly. She, too, had been asking herself hard questions. “Lockdown for me was a big moment: what’s important in my life, who do I want to be?”
And their eyes met in the rehearsal room. It was an instant friendship, says Komazec, that quickly became something more: “it was like, oh, this works, this is everything I’ve been looking for and hoping for”.
Haydan Hawkins and Nadia Komazec just after he proposed on a Victorian beach.
At one rehearsal, she performed Right In Front of Your Eyes, the musical moment Holly realises she’s in love, reveals her ‘I’m With Stupid t-shirt’, and Sammy reveals ‘Stupid’.
“And I sang the song to Haydan, and I started crying and the whole [rehearsal] room’s crying ... I know, it sounds so corny.”
“Maybe I went too ‘method’,” butts in Hawkins. He would buy her lunch. And then it was “oh, I’m in trouble here”.
The obligatory “intimacy training” for the show was a hilarious, careful, respectful process where they were guided through “three quick pecks”: by that time, they were doing a lot more off stage. Soon their chemistry became pretty obvious to the rest of the show.
After the show’s Gold Coast run, the pair went into another lockdown: they ended up stuck in Melbourne spending every waking second with each other, having big conversations, learning more about each other and themselves.
One morning, the pair were sitting reading together as it rained outside, and Hawkins realised “I’m going to marry this girl”. He consulted his sister, ordered a ring delivered to Melbourne, and in between winter lockdowns took Komazec for a “surprise three-month anniversary” horse ride and picnic on a Surf Coast beach.
Komazec had no idea what was coming as Hawkins walked her to the picnic blanket. She was preoccupied with worrying about how she was going to get back on the horse without a ladder.
And then he got down on one knee.
When Haydan Hawkins proposed to Nadia Komazec a passer-by caught the moment.
“And I said ‘will you be my person, will you do life with me, will you marry me’,” says Hawkins.
Says Komazec: “it was amazing, and I cried, and he cried.”
Now the show is coming back: opening in early January at the State Theatre in Sydney, then back to Melbourne’s State Theatre for an encore season in late January. They’re going into rehearsals soon, buzzing with energy and hope, with their lives to look forward to.
Tickets for the Sydney and Melbourne seasons of The Wedding Singer go on sale October 28
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