The Seymour Centre recently officially launched its 2008 debut season of Sydney theatre. If you’re wondering why a theatre is making its debut thirty years after it opened its doors, fair question.
Consider first, however, what they are about to put on offer. In finally staking a pennant in the Sydney theatrical landscape the Seymour may yet prove to be a star worthy of the dream that once ignited the imagination of its benefactor, Everest Reginald York Seymour.
What Julie Mullins, General Manager of the Centre has done for the first time in the Seymour’s history is to go out and encourage some of Sydney’s most celebrated entrepreneurial theatre companies to take up space in the Seymour not only as itinerant occupants but as co-producers. They are going to share the risk as well as taking the reward.
Mullins has successfully packaged, through a strong personal bond with these companies, a divertissement of stage productions the likes of which won’t be seen in any other venue in Australia. It combines musicals, drama, children’s theatre and of course a return of ‘Keating’. This musical it seems is destined to do more for this theatre than ever its namesake could have hoped to.
The season will consist of The Hatpin, music Rutherford, book Millar, world premiere Australian musical, The Good German, Wiltse, Australian premiere, La La Luna, Bowart, Times of MY Life, Lamond/Sheldon, Death of a Salesman, Miller, Altar Boyz, music Adler/Walker, book Del Aguila,The Happy Prince, Wilde (adap. Tulloch) then Keating, Bennetto, followed by Valley Song, Fugard, Steven Berkoff’s One Man, Milli, Jack and the Dancing Cat, King and wrapping up with Chocolate Monkey, Hussey, an impressive debut by any standards. It’s packaged as a year’s subscription season to a dozen shows parcelled up in offers of three, five, seven, nine or all twelve performances. They’re available for an outlay from a very modest forty-nine dollars to four hundred and ninety nine dollars for the full season.
The Seymour’s launch may well bring a new hybrid to Sydney Theatre, an independent theatre company.
Currently Sydney can boast two main types of theatre venues, independent theatres which include the Theatre Royal and the theatre companies which have emerged from permanent performance based groups such as the Belvoir.
At the risk of stating the obvious independent theatres are ‘use specific’ spaces for the production of live entertainment but generally have no performance based company attached to them. These theatres might as well be office blocks or stadiums. They’re run strictly on commercial lines and are available for lease to production companies that mount a variety of shows. They include venues ranging from the opulence of the Opera House (although acknowledged as home to the Australian Opera), to the somewhat threadbare Tap Gallery and everything in between.
On the other hand the theatre companies are entrepreneurial performance based companies usually permanently occupying their own premises. While they enter into arrangements with outside producers they take an active role in both production and marketing, generally favouring a certain style and content in dramatic presentation. The STC is arguably the flagship of this group occupying two permanent venues in Sydney.
There are other types of theatre spaces in Sydney, venues that are variously used to display live performances but aren’t specifically designated for that purpose such as hotels. Then there is the Lyric which occupies a unique position in being aligned to the Casino. Many of the performance spaces in Sydney were never designed with such a purpose in mind.
Mullins under the banner of the Seymour Centre is now proposing a third tier for Sydney, an independent theatre company. Where the independent theatres present the work of others and theatre companies contrive to present a ‘trademarked’ experience of their own the Seymour will offer an opportunity to see a wide selection from across the spectrum. Mullins set out to see what was on offer, made an artistic decision based on personal experience and judgement, booked the shows and is about to present them to Sydney audiences as one of the most diversified programmes on offer in one of the most creative spaces for live performance anywhere in Australia.
Mullins is hoping to host a successful subscription season but faces the prospect that it may take three years to carve out an audience. In the mean time she has to preserve what she can of the ‘Keating’ talents, there’s little or no likelihood of any other funds coming her way. So she has devised a programme that shows a marked theatrical savvy worthy of Keating himself in an effort to win both the ‘door stop’ and the ‘ballot’.
Its opening salvo the new Australian musical, The Hatpin, book by James Millar, music by Peter Rutherford will be directed by Kim Hardwick staring Caroline O’Connor, Peter Cousens and Melle Stewart.
It’s based on the infamous ‘baby farmers’ case of the late nineteenth century telling the story of the tragic deception of the young mother, Amber Murray. It rather curiously provides an allegorical insight into why it has taken so long for the Seymour to spread its entrepreneurial wings. The story was prompted by the fate of a child whose young mother’s abject poverty sees it given up to the care of another couple in the hope of a better life. The foster parents however aren’t interested in looking after the child and it dies.
