The Presbyterian Musical

If you were there, I was the young man in a dinner suit on the stairs you overheard saying, “Good evening, Dame Bridget.” On other nights I got to say, “Good evening, Dame Peggy” and “Good evening, Dame Ninette.” Greeting Richard D’Oyly Carte’s granddaughter was a lesson in theatre. Gilbert and Sullivan needed D’Oyly Carte to produce their plays; because of him the Savoy Operas are part of our theatre tradition.

Outside Sadler’s Wells it was winter, and on some nights audiences wandered into the foyer peppered with glinting snowflakes. It was the sort of thing that delighted Australian eyes. Every night of the D’Oyly Carte season I saw a Victorian-era Pollock’s Toy Theatre come alive on stage. Before the season the theatre staff talked about the G&S audiences and warned that they were something special. They were. Many of them came night after night and had a fanatical, sometimes eccentric, devotion to the operas—and this was not long after another season had just ended in another part of London.

The D’Oyly Carte productions appeared to make few if any concessions to changed tastes and because of this they had a fascination and appeal which self-consciously modernised productions lack. You get some idea of what they were like from the 1966 filmed version of The Mikado (available on DVD). The filming isn’t great and the colour is milky but it is worth watching to see John Reed as Ko-Ko (he was the lead at the time I saw them) and Valerie Masterson as Yum-Yum. Watching Reed offstage was interesting. Idolised by the regular audiences, he would be applauded, sign autographs after the show, and at the end of the night walk quietly away into the darkness. He was a very solitary star.

Now, it’s winter 2011 at Melbourne’s State Theatre, and it’s “Good evening, Mrs Pratt.” Jeanne Pratt is the chairman of the Production Company, an organisation which every year offers Melbourne excellent short seasons of musical theatre. Before each performance she stands at the top of the Arts Centre escalator welcoming the audience. Without her there would be no Production Company, no Kismet. It’s typical Production Company: comfortable seat, free program, big show. The program is a good read with an interesting essay about the play’s history by Frank van Straten. You also get a full-page article by Jeanne Pratt, plus author photo—and it does look like her. The Arts Centre wine is expensive and comes in provocatively nasty plastic containers. Another good thing, Production Company shows start on time.

I do like a loud overture. It’s nice to wallow in the coming tunes and it drowns out the talkers. I’d been overdosing on the Kismet original Broadway cast album with Alfred Drake and, in comparison and because I didn’t have my hand on the volume control, the Orchestra Victoria opening was somewhat muted.

As with all Production Company performances the staging is very basic. On one side of the stage is the orchestra and on the other the players. I saw Kismet between two giant heads in the row in front but, fortunately, the bit of the stage I saw was the players’ side.

In these colourful, lively, stripped-back productions you don’t find yourself clapping the scenery. The actors hold your attention. There was a raised platform and, behind that, scaffolding supporting several levels of staging. Bright light, bright colours, flashy dancing, great songs, great singers (mostly).

This is the second work in this year’s season of three musicals. First came Cole Porter’s Anything Goes in July and the next will be the 2006 musical Grey Gardens in November/December. I didn’t really get into Anything Goes but it was my fault. Seven hours stuck in an airport not knowing if a broken Virgin would be fixed (it wasn’t), a race from Melbourne airport to the city on a Saturday night, then a Very Big Man who had been swimming (recently) in Old Spice in the next seat. Curtain up and out came his Mary Poppins-sized carpet bag of drinks and food. Even with crumbs in my seat and through the fog of Old Spice enveloping Row P I couldn’t help noticing the flood of musical standards. How amazing is this Cole Porter musical? A silly story with music and (among others) “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “You’re the Top”, “Easy to Love”, “It’s De-Lovely”, “Anything Goes”, “Blow, Gabriel, Blow”, and “All through the Night”.

Kismet, as you know, is the story of this sweet little lesbian suicide bomber who succeeds in blowing up a Zionist day care centre which is owned by a crafty, hooked-nose chocolate salesman named Benjamin Wonka. Sorry, sorry, that’s the new production opening at the Salzburg Festival some time next week. This Kismet was the old Kismet, the one with “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “Stranger in Paradise”, about “Presbyterians” and the problems of a public poet with unmarried daughter, and Omar Khayyam, and a wicked Wazir and his tempting wife, and a young Caliph who meets a girl, loses a girl, and finds a girl. The simple production techniques lent themselves to memorable moments. Josh Piterman and Janet Todd stood inches apart singing of their vain search to find each other. Behind them long white filmy curtains came from the flies. As they sang lovely schmaltzy “And This Is My Beloved” you pretended to believe them because they really did look like young lovers. It was another accomplished production by director Terence O’Connell.

My old Kismet recording seemed clunky after the shiny bits of talent in this show. The Melbourne production was so good that I came out feeling dissatisfied. It doesn’t feel right. All these good things on stage, a sparkling production, a crowd pleaser, and it ran for six performances. The night I was there they even had some empty seats. I would have liked to go home and play the CD of what I had just seen. Naming the players is to list some fine and very versatile talents: Gary Rowley as Hajj, Janet Todd as Marsinah, Mitchell Butel as the Wazir and Chelsea Plumley as his wife of wives Lalume, with Josh Piterman as the Caliph.

But is it old or new? Apart from a one-night concert version in Melbourne in 1994 Kismet hasn’t been seen on a professional stage in Australia since 1956. Surely neither performers nor most of the audience had ever seen a production. The stripped-back performance offered a timeless show that didn’t need to be unnecessarily made relevant—and the Production Company saves us from pointless modernisations.

Some of the dreariness of recent G&S productions comes from the attempts to modernise by rewriting. The DVD of the Australian Opera’s 1989 Sydney Opera House production of The Gondoliers is, I find, unwatchable. Part (only part) of the problem with this version is the text. Perhaps in the late 1980s audiences found it a delight, now it’s execrable. The alterations to make it modern and relevant seem to have consisted of inserting names—a thing Gilbert never did. In the comedy of name-dropping, Dame Edna was meant to make you smile, Sir Les to get you giggling, Fred Nile to have you chortling and Susan Renouf to have you on the floor thrashing about in merriment. They must have been simple souls in the 1980s.

What was happening on the Kismet stage was not the staging of a museum piece. This could be a way of staging new musicals. Cut it back further for a small orchestra and smaller cast and it would be possible to breathe life into modern musical theatre. Small musicals could, if anyone wanted, be a way of turning away from the expensive mega-musicals. And taking a new small musical to work on in Hobart or Adelaide, where you have sophisticated audiences and accomplished talent, before sending it on to Melbourne or Sydney could make commercial sense.

The Kismet audience was older, the performers (mostly) younger. It would be an advance if our audiences were more mixed but this may not be a bad thing. The numbers of older audiences are going to grow over the coming years. All that talent on the performers’ side of the stage is also a good thing, it’s promising for the future. 

Australia has a lively cabaret culture. Cabaret brings performers and audiences close together. It uses familiar and new songs, though it can overdose on Sondheim. This is great education for entertainers, but it is even better for writers. Some of what is on show in cabaret venues is inner-city ghetto, self-conscious and pretentious, but it is a good training ground and there are accomplished artists who could speak beyond the fringe to popular, larger audiences. To foster talent there are cabaret seasons and festivals in different cities. One of the best is the annual Adelaide Cabaret Festival, whose director for the last two years was the singer David Campbell. He brought international performers such as Bernadette Peters, Olivia Newton-John, Michael Feinstein and Chita Rivera to mix with local talents. It was intelligent planning which appealed to a wide audience. For the next two tears the director will be singer and songwriter Kate Ceberano, who could take it in interesting new directions.

If the will exists, and it may not, the writing and performing talents found in cabaret could be a base for developing an Australian musical theatre. Surely, amongst audiences, there must be some interest in seeing new Australian musicals—whose stories don’t make us cringe. The performers are certainly with us, but the writers need to be found. And the other missing element is an inspired entrepreneur. It needs a producer aware of the market demands and with the taste to develop and nurture talents. We could do with a Richard D’Oyly Carte, Jeanne Pratt, or a young and hungry local version of Cameron Mackintosh—one not addicted to chandeliers, staircases, furry animals or helicopters.