Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide’s new triumph of the arts, has been one of the great victims of the pandemic.
Its gala opening concert is on indefinite hold.
Years of fundraising and an extraordinary execution of design and construction end with a few privileged media reveals and more waiting.
As a scribe for this fine online arts website as well as resident critic of the ABC’s Sunday Smart Arts program, I scored alongside Peter Goers, an invitation from Festival Centre CEO, Douglas Gautier, to be among those first people to have a private tour of the new theatre.
No, it is not a “revamp” as people keep saying. This is $66m of completely new state-of-the-art theatre. All that remains of the old Her Maj is the gracious Grote Street facade and the Pitt Street wall. Even the stage door has moved down Pitt Street, as I discovered when I went to meet our guide.
What lies within is a whizz-bang contemporary wonderland, a modern theatre which will be the envy of the world.
Of course, theatre history sings its way into the 2020 entity. Her Maj was once called The Tivoli, The Prince of Wales, The Opera Theatre…
Hence, the first thing one encounters once through the Stage Door, is a magnificent Signature Wall. On the bricks lovingly rescued from the demolition are the autographs of performers who graced the stage of the old theatre. It is a thrill of beautifully-salvaged nostalgia, a century of memories with bricks aplenty for the future stars to sign their names as the years roll on.
The new stage is breathtaking. It is a massive expanse, much bigger than the old one.
Technicians working on all the new facilities have been responding with enthusiasm. Excellent, they say.
And there, as one stands above the orchestra pit, the splendour of the auditorium is revealed, a sea of svelte red seats. Above the stalls, a dress circle and grand circle arc elegantly. We used to call the upper circle “the gods” because one is close to heaven when one is in them, so perilously high do they feel. Of course, they are also what’s known as "the cheap seats” and many of us in our frugal student days had our nascent J.C. Williamson's experiences up there. We wax lyrical with nostalgia.
I had felt somewhat concerned when I heard that there would be no centre aisle in the stalls of the new theatre. I like a centre aisle. As a professional audience member, I am well known for highly defined preferences and ease of egress is at the top of the list. “A quick exit is a good exit,” say I.
My reservations evaporate the moment I walk through the auditorium. The gentle curve of front stalls not only has leg room even for tall people but also room to walk in front of said tall people. No standing up to let people pass. Oh, it is so generous and civilized.
Not only but also, every seat has a handsome circular plate beneath it. These are air vents which enable the air conditioning to circulate freely, for each and every audience member to have their own source of air. This is my idea of bliss. No foetid old-school people-soup air for this grand new venue. The best technology has been employed. It is state-of-the-art.
There are two good, broad aisles at the back area of the stalls and, I realise with joy as I try sitting at different vantage points, there is not a bad seat in the house. The sight-lines are superb.
Even the handrails along the auditorium walls are gorgeous. There is a lot of wood in this theatre, magnificently crafted and designed. Wherever one looks, there are thoughtful details. Some are reiterations of old Edwardian theatre designs and some are subtly innovative. There’s a period pressed-tin ceiling, for instance.
There are also lifts, because no matter how handsome the stairs may be, it is still a long climb up there to the gods.
There are bars and foyers with luscious red banquettes on all the floors. There are brass celebrity tiles embedded in the floors, again recalling those who have been part of the theatre’s history.
And way up at the very top of the building, the only part as yet unfinished, is the gallery and formal home space planned for the state’s Performing Arts Collection and special exhibitions.
Douglas leads us into a perilous no-man’s land, the high eyries of the lighting and flying technology.
“Hope you’re not scared of heights,” he says. I fake nonchalance. It is scary up there.
Of course the performers also score very nice new digs. Backstage on two floors are snappy new dressing rooms; big for the chorus and small for the principals. The piece de resistance backstage is the most utterly superb rehearsal room. It is a vast space with mirrored walls, a barre for dancers and a sleek polished-wood sprung floor.
“This meets the size requirements of the biggest Disney-style touring shows,” says Douglas. And maybe acts as its own separate performance space? “Indeed,” says Douglas. One begins to imagine cabaret festival shows therein.
The main foyer is now at the western side of the theatre.
The neighbouring Grote street building was purchased for this purpose.
It is now new, tall, glass-fronted and geometrically handsome. Sophisticated bars, tall drinks tables, and fancy seating features are on the different floors. The higher the floor, the better are the city views out over the old market. One can imagine standing with a glass of champagne, looking out across the night lights.
And, that is what we are waiting for - the nights of champagne, of laughter and applause.
They will come.
When they do, Her Maj will be able to welcome 1500 of us at a time.
For the moment there has been just one little “soft opening” with a Slingsby youth production; small audience and social distancing. More small shows are on the cards. But, come hell or high water there will be a big show and then another and then another. It is just a matter of time.
And we can’t wait!
Samela Harris
Photography by Samela Harris
With eleven wildly successful festivals ratcheting up records for the state economy, Adelaide has taken its beautiful festival balloon and pushed it skywards and into the international future with a university course in Festivals Management.
This is another brilliant Adelaide arts initiative which thrusts the state into the pioneer limelight again.
One is cheekily tempted to start putting down bets as to when the frenzy of interstate emulation may begin.
Adelaide always has led the way with arts administrators. They have been a proud, albeit unofficial state export for generations.
Now, via today’s revelations from Festivals Adelaide CEO Christie Anthoney, we are formalising the qualifications and creating an exciting broad-church, artistic directors' and festival managers' springboard straight out of UniSA.
Students may major in Festivals Management as they do their Bachelors of Creative Industries degrees.
The doyens of the eleven festivals will be teaching their skills to the upcoming generations, reveals Anthoney.
WOMADelaide’s legendary Ian Scobie will lecture on budgets, for instance, and the Fringe’s ever colourful Heather Croall will teach her ways of successful growth and the joys of digital platforms.
Others of our eleven festivals include SALA, Adelaide Film Festival, Feast Festival, Oz Asia, the Guitar Festival, the Cabaret Festival, and of course, the Adelaide Festival itself.
As Festival Management students contour their courses, they will be able to add their own specialist elements, from philosophy and fashion to tourism and art.
Anthoney says they have been studying the various specialties and expertises of festival management people and finding their qualifications highly diverse.
While she admits that one of her favourite things is a spreadsheet, she would like, if faced with the choices, to add philosophy and psychology to her academic palette for such a course. "This is just the beginning of the syllabus,” she says. "It will continue to evolve through the rest of this year.”
Interestingly, as Anthoney points out, there is already a Festivals expert on the staff at UniSA. He is Adrian Franklin formerly of Tasmania’s renowned MOFO festivals and his expertise includes an understanding of the historical question of why people have always come together to celebrate.
This is a phenomenon Anthoney herself finds heart-warming, fascinating, and profoundly significant.
Arts festivals have been a substantial source of serious employment in SA. The 2018 economic impact study showed the gross economic expenditure rose by 29.2pc to $345.9 million and a wonderful 1045 full time equivalent jobs added in that year.
But Anthoney readily admits that the arts which breathes so much financial vigour into SA is a truly ephemeral and mysterious thing. There is much to learn and understand about its extraordinary human chemistry.
Anthoney sees the wisdom of academia and experience as a possible way to “put a light” on it all.
Of course, she adds, a university qualification will not be the only way to open the door into festivals. Volunteering has been a solid path into the industry and it will remain so.
Indeed, Festivals Adelaide has been researching our “really resourced, cultured army” of about 3000 festivals volunteers.
It is a solid, devoted squad which has come to be used by all the festivals. Where once it was largely over 60s demographics, it has been expanding. It is a significant resource with its own strong potential.
But Adelaide Festivals has been working widely within the arts support community, and, with the support of the Office of the Ageing, there has been considerable research into how the powerful and dollar-rich older demographic interacts with diverse festivals. To that end, says Anthoney, various changes quietly have been underway, among them such things as increased watering stations and bag drops at WOMAD.
Both the Festival and the Fringe recorded record growth for 2019 before figures even emerged from the other festivals. The children’s Dream Big festival, formerly and famously known as Come Out, finished only recently with bumper sell-out seasons which some critics protested really needed to be longer to allow more audiences to attend. The History Festival was massive and now the city’s winter arts celebration, the Cabaret Festival, is at its height and packing out its diverse venues spread around the Festival Centre. Artistic director Julia Zemiro can only bask in its sequential triumphs, many reviewed here on this website. Our critics have noted an exciting, daring surreal edge to her program.
In a new study on behalf of Economic Research Consultants, Professor Barry Burgan has revealed that in 2018 alone the combined economic impact of our 11 festivals has lavished the city with no less than $109.1 million of “new money”. That is a 27.7pc increase on 2017.
It is an extremely good news story,
So thoroughly have the arts been rocking the pockets of the city burghers that Festivals Adelaide have celebrated by commissioning our distinguished and amazingly appropriately named artist, Peter Drew, with a commission to express our relationship to our festivals in new artwork. It soon shall be seen in the city and online.
Samela Harris
With the alarming flight of time, suddenly a big birthday has come around for the Independent Theatre Company.
Thirty-five!
Rob Croser and David Roach have been bringing the most elite level of theatre arts to this state for this seemingly epic time. Not bad, for something these theatre powers have been doing on the side while holding down serious full-time careers.
Croser is an award-w
inning children’s rights lawyer and Roach a one-time priest and former valued counsellor at Daw House.
But their love of good theatre, their affinity with the beauty of the written and spoken word, and their perception of the need for a brave new outsider company on the theatrical scene of Adelaide brought them together with Allen Munn and Pattie Atherton to establish their own Independent company.
Across the years, through various venues, it has survived and thrived, bringing daring new works to Adelaide audiences. It has been swathed with awards.
Now, suddenly, it is 35 years old and, dammit, it is going to throw a party to celebrate its massive history of classic plays, new plays, and plays by overseas writers.
On Sunday 24th March at its new home base, Goodwood Theatre, its assorted casts and supporters will perform scenes from favourite plays. They will tell stories of the company, play music, and exhibit pictures of past productions, a mind-boggling 200 of them.
And it will reflect on some of the company’s laurels. It was the first non-professional company to have been invited to perform in The Space Theatre and thereafter, for a decade, be a regular company in the Festival Centre’s theatres.
It struck another first in incorporating members of the Indian and African communities into productions. It was the first company in the land to cast an African actor as Othello. That actor, Shedrick Yarkpai from Liberia, went on to play assorted blind casting parts in a lot of classic and contemporary western theatre with the company and even became subject of a play about his journey to South Australia as a refugee.
Independent Theatre has had the strongest link to American theatre and culture of any company in SA and the American playwright John Logan has regularly given the company rights to first productions of his works, outside New York or London.
Then there are the Rob Croser adaptations. This skilled master of the theatre has adapted some of the hardest classics of literature, from Steinbeck’s East of Eden to Huckleberry Finn and The Magnificent Ambersons.
Among the company’s wealth of Australian premiere productions and introductions to Australia of overseas writers and new works have been:
- Frank Galati’s Steppenwolf adaptation and production of The Grapes of Wrath in 1992 and 1995;
- John Logan’s Never the Sinner (1992, 1994, 2004), Hauptmann (1993), The View from Golgotha (1996), Red (2011) and Peter and Alice (2014);
- Helen Edmundson’s Shared Experience production of War and Peace (2000);
- Jon Marans’ Old Wicked Songs (2001, 2002, 2018) and Jumping for Joy (2003);
- Charles Smith’s Free Man of Color (2009), and Les Trois Dumas (2010);
- Harper Lee’s and Christopher Sergel’s To Kill a Mockingbird (2007, 2012);
- Roy Sargent’s adaptation of Cry the Beloved Country (2006 and 2008);
- Adelaide, but London based, playwright, Samuel Adamson’s adaptation of All about My Mother (2011);
- Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Bracken Moor (2014);
- Lolita Chakrabati’s Red Velvet (2015);
- Ketti Frings’ adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (2018).
And Independent Theatre is not finished here. It is simply pausing to have a birthday party celebrating its mass of achievements.
Tickets at $25 are still available to the party on Sunday March 24 at 3pm in the Goodwood Institute.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Mar
Where: Goodwood Institute
Bookings: independenttheatre.org.au
The Adelaide Cabaret Festival have announced a taste of their June 2019 programme with the release of details on six upcoming shows and some alluring new spaces.
Amongst the early releases is an exclusive Australian premiere from global cabaret legend Ute Lemper who will perform Rendezvous with Marlene for one night only at the Thebarton Theatre, one of the new Cabaret Festival venues. The German chanteuse and festival headliner will create magic on stage, re-living a three-hour telephone exchange she had with Marlene Dietrich in 1988.
In another Australian first Flabbergast Theatre will bring their award-winning immersive show The Swell Mob from the UK to transport audiences into an historical epoch filled with thieves, fogle-hunters, dandies and deception. Hailed “a perfectly bizarre, uncomfortable, unmissable show”, it will run throughout the festival's 16 days and nights.
Musical theatre performer and TV star Fiona Choi (The Family Law, The Let Down, Rent) will bring to life the story of Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star and international style icon, Anna May Wong, in her show Dragon Lady: The many lives and deaths of Anna May Wong. This intimate performance is set to provoke questions about cultural identity and ambition through sparkling musical numbers.
Australian cabaret icon Paul Capsis will light up rock music’s dark side in Paul Capsis with Jethro Woodward and the Fitzroy Youth Orchestra at The Famous Spiegeltent; another new cabaret venue! A most gifted interpreter of song, Capsis will belt out hits by artists including Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lana Del Ray, The Doors and Led Zeppelin.
In a world premiere, Adelaide’s own award-winning choreographer Larissa McGowan will perform Cher – exploring the persona and characters of the ultimate pop chameleon through contemporary dance. Also on the line up comedian Dan Ilic (ABC’s Hungry Beast) and Triple J’s Lewis Hobba will savage the news in a fast paced, satirical panel show called A Rational Fear described as ‘Q&A on crack’!
Megan Mullally and her band Nancy And Beth will find two friends - Megan Mullally and Stephanie Hunt - picking dope punk and vaudeville songs and singing them while dancing in matching costumes.
Adelaide Cabaret Festival Artistic Director Julia Zemiro says she is “Delighted to announce our early release shows, it’s an exhilarating mix of things to come. Classic German cabaret, TV folk as you’ve not seen them before, a dash of politics, old Hollywood glory, a cabaret favourite re-invented, a dance mash up plus an immersive show that will be on every night of the festival! Mes amis… this is just the beginning.”
Adelaide Festival Centre CEO & Artistic Director Douglas Gautier noted that “This year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival line-up may be our most diverse and exciting yet, with many Australian exclusives and premieres. Securing German cabaret star Ute Lemper’s only Australian performance is a great coup for Adelaide Cabaret Festival and it’s just the beginning of what’s to come this year. Julia Zemiro’s captivating vision brings new life to the festival in its nineteenth year.”
The Adelaide Cabaret Festival will run from 7 to 22 June 2019 with a full program launch expected in April. Tickets go on sale 3 February.
Adapted from a media release.
When: 7 to 22 Jun
Where: Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
Holden Street Theatres. Holden Street Theatres – The Arch.
While all weapons present moral challenges there are two kinds that stand out because the assailant is absent from the battlefield – nuclear missiles and drones. And I mean 12,000 kilometers away absent; there is no risk to the operator in this asymmetrical warfare. What if that operator is a mother and a pilot at the controls of a bomb-laden drone shortly after dropping the kids off at school? Have a nice day at the office, dear? Who are they killing anyway, and why? Do innocents die? And what does that do to you?
Adelaide theatre impresario, Martha Lott scours the Edinburgh Festival every year to bring to her Holden Street Theatres the very best for the Adelaide Fringe. Lott even offers a scholarship to a deserving company to make the journey; and the awards for her efforts are many. Last year, two different Holden Street shows won the Adelaide Critics’ Circle Award and the Fringe’s BankSA Best Theatre Award for the whole Fringe, and Holden Street shows garnered one or two weekly awards every week as well.
Besides producer and theatre manager, Lott is also a British-trained actor. She has kept this Grounded gem for herself and will be flying solo in this 70 minute monologue. Lott discovered American, George Brant’s Grounded at its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013. Years later, she decided to team up with British director Poppy Rowley for an acting vehicle and Rowley proffered Grounded. I asked Martha what attracted her to this work and she gave me a list: “The challenge to the actor; the way we are fighting war; the control and the God complex that America has throughout this war; the fact that as women, we give life, but as fighters, we take it away. That lives are dispensable, contrasting the psychology of the character and the war, and it’s frightening how much we are being watched.” “You can do the personality strikes if you are Top Shit.” Martha points out that the predictions made in this 2013 show have sadly come true, for added poignancy.
Winner of the National New Play Network’s 2012 Smith Prize for plays focused on American politics, Grounded was described as “Top Notch – a chilling portrait of future war…” by New York Magazine. (Sadly, it was already happening in 2012.) The play was named a Top 10 London Play of 2013 by the London Evening Standard. The Guardian described Grounded as “A searing piece of writing” while The New York Times labeled the play “Gripping.”
Personally, I find this a compelling combination – Martha Lott the producer returning to her love of acting, her European director and an American play on a hot topic that has been widely performed in twelve languages. A must-see of the 2019 Adelaide Fringe.
David Grybowski
When: 5 to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au