Willing is the stage name of Will Hannagan, an interdisciplinary queercore theatre maker, performance artist and recording artist.
Will has an extensive career conceiving, writing, directing and performing theatre. Initially titled Housewarming, his musical The Gathering (**** The Age, ***** Theatre People), cocreated with Belinda Jenkin, had Melbourne seasons at Theatre Works for their Musical Works initiative and fortyfivedownstairs, before touring to New York for the New York Music Theatre Festival, starring MJ Rodriguez from the hit Netflix show Pose. Gaga V Assange gained notoriety when Julian Assange himself tweeted it and earned raves (‘A brilliant musical fantasia’ - The Australian). He also wrote a sequel to this, still in development, which had a reading at Melbourne's infamous Miscellania nightclub. His musical, Little One Lost, cowritten with Tim Hansen, was extensively developed by the Hayes Theatre, and given its scale is still seeking funding. Another show, Pop|Press was a hysterical hit. Part podcast, part musical thriller, it was also well noted (**** The Age). In 2021, he premiered his one-person play, Alibi (or Someplace Else), at Theatre Works in Melbourne for their seminal Glasshouse Festival and subsequently toured it to the Old Fitz in Sydney as part of Red Line Theatre's 2021 season. The Australian called it a ‘tour de force of writing and performance.’
Will started his performance career in the cabaret, performing numerous original works at The Butterfly Club for Fringe, Comedy and Midsumma Festivals. Notable shows include: Nowhere Fast; Highs, Lies and Shoestring Fries; and Affluenza (with Robbie Ten Eyck AKA famed drag queen, Ms Lazy Susan), which Arts Hub called ‘groundbreaking’ and Aussie Theatre labelled ‘deliciously silly'. Will has recently returned to the cabaret with his new show, On the Uncertainty of Signs, which saw him collate love stories from the DMs of the meme page he runs, @feryl.meryl. As a marketing gimmick, the show pressed him to do the unthinkable in the world of memes, admin revealing via a half page spread in The Age, before being well received in the same masthead, which called the show ‘breathtakingly sweet, achingly sorrowful in parts and acerbic in its wittiness.’ The show later rebranded to 0G Crush, playing a successful Edinburgh Fringe season, with a London show in the works.
Will’s theatrical endeavours have been the recipient of state and municipal funding from Creative Victoria and City of Melbourne as well as private philanthropy through the Anna Sosenko Trust.
Will also writes, produces and records music. He released his debut EP, Small Cruelties, in 2018 and accompanied it with a grand theatrical preview at fortyfivedownstairs directed by Mark Wilson and featuring original garments by six emerging designers. Willing has since built a cult following in Melbourne’s queer underground. Described by Subvrt Mag as ‘vibrantly saucy’ he is now, according to Wickedd Childd, ‘getting ready to take over the world’.
Achievements in music include headline spots at Midsumma Carnival and Gaytimes Festivals, being a finalist in the Hot Vox Isle of Wight Competition in London, and radio play on BBC 6 Music as well as a bunch of Aussie stations: 3RRR, Unearthed Radio, FBI, Radio Adelaide, 4ZZZ, PBS, SYN and of course, being added to rotation on JOY. He has also released music videos for four of his singles Hungry, Collusion, I Swear We Won’t Get Caught, and Arsenal.
2020 saw him drop his second EP, Pure Romance, which CultureFix UK labelled ‘an eclectic slice of queer pop heaven.’ His debut album, Unreal City, was released in January 2023 following a landmark theatrical preview of the work at Meat Market. 4ZZZ called the oeuvre ‘a vehicle for storytelling in a grand theatrical sense’ which had ‘advanced queer music in Australia.’
More recently, Will created an album’s worth of original electronic pop productions for Night Chorus at the Wilds, the flagship event of Melbourne’s Rising Festival. These were reimaginings of campy pop hits (from Cher to Beyonce), supporting an ecstatic pop choir who were serenading ice skating revellers surrounded by custom blow up sculptures by Tin and Ed at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
Will is also the lead singer of the hyperrock band, Free Entertainment. The group have recently completed an east coast tour, and are preparing their debut EP, It’s Not Like The Movies.
As he evolves as a creator, Will hopes to continue integrating verse, prose, song, contemporary dance and immersive AV into a modern take on Gesamkunstwerk, aspiring to be a world-leading artist, called on to make maximalist, site-specific works at major festivals, which meld his skills as a performer, playwright and musician.
