This was published 2 years ago
Opinion
Forcing audiences into casinos to see theatre is just what Sydney doesn’t need
Nathanael Cooper
Executive Producer, audioAfter 15 weeks of darkness, the lights will go up on in Sydney theatres again this week. The producers of Hamilton and Come From Away will shake the dust from their sets and iron the creases from their costumes and audiences will fill the Capitol and the Lyric once more (at a 75 per cent capacity because we all know how good Delta is at counting).
Not everyone who wants to see Hamilton will get a chance due to the show’s truncated season. Credit: Daniel Boud
Come December, Jagged Little Pill will open at the reopened Theatre Royal, only a few months after it was originally meant to reopen.
From a commercial theatre point of view, that’s it. That’s the lot. When Broadway opened last month, the curtain went up on 41 theatres.
For fans of Hamilton, the sold-out blockbuster about Alexander Hamilton, it leaves 155 performances of the show before it shuffles off to Melbourne at the end of February. By time Hamilton leaves Sydney, it will have been closed for nearly as long as it was open.
The sad fact is, not everyone in Sydney who wants to see it is going to be able to. That isn’t the producer’s fault; he has a theatre booked in Melbourne, another show going into the Lyric and Sydney’s sad lack of commercial theatres means he has nowhere else to put it if he wanted to.
Sydney’s lack of commercial theatres – with more than 1500 seats – means that no one has anywhere to go because every house is booked from here until just before the end of time.
Moulin Rouge will open in Australia’s cultural capital, Melbourne.Credit: Steven Grace
Successive governments’ inaction on the matter of making new theatre space available is at the core of Sydney’s cultural black hole.
It took a decade for a reasonable plan to be put in place to bring the Theatre Royal back to life and even then not at a size to fit blockbuster musicals such as Hamilton or Moulin Rouge or new productions from Broadway such as Eddie Perfect hit Beetlejuice, which is waiting in the wings for a home in Australia.
Melbourne gets to call itself the cultural capital of Australia purely because it has more places to put things. Sydney, which is home to the national opera company, one of the best theatre companies in the world and a really iconic building made for the single purpose of hosting cultural events should hold that title.
And yet, here we are with two operating commercial theatres, one that will open soon, and bizarre thought bubbles about what to do next.
The Daily Telegraph reported in August that a plan was being cooked up to convert the barn-like function space at the Star Casino, the room where they host the ARIA Awards when COVID isn’t happening, into a 1550-seat theatre and a 1000-seat live entertainment space. According to the report, the theatres are being thrown in as a sweetener for Star to obtain additional poker machine licenses.
There’s nothing I love more than the sound of pokies underscoring Kim’s death in Miss Saigon and wandering lost through cavernous gambling rooms to find the theatre.
How uniquely cultural.
Sydney does need new theatres but solving that challenge by worsening Australia’s gambling problem isn’t a solution the state or the community needs. While the government certainly has bigger problems on its hands at the moment than where to put theatre, a government should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Live Entertainment injects about $36 billion into the Australian economy in a year it’s allowed to operate. It deserves governments to consider it with the same energy that the industry drives the economy.
Further, locking precious cultural spaces into institutions that recent investigations by the Herald and The Age demonstrate are, at best, devoid of sensible corporate governance and, at worst, dens of criminal activity, does not seem like the best way to ensure the longevity of desperately needed theatres.
Sydney finds itself in this position because governments allowed theatres to be knocked down. It would be helpful if the government could think of a way to create new theatre spaces that aren’t beholden to gambling and don’t force people who simply want to watch Hamilton to do so at a casino.
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