Early Stages

I’d been to a couple of pantomimes at the Tivoli in Melbourne which I remember thoroughly enjoying at the age of eight or so, The Wizard of Oz in 1963 with Patti McGrath being the most memorable. But my first introduction to legitimate theatre came in 1970 with the J.C. Williamson revival of My Fair Lady at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne when I was thirteen. From the first chords of the overture I knew I was in for something really special.

When the show-curtain scrim dissolved, revealing the chorus dressed in their Cecil Beaton opera cloaks and dinner suits against Oliver Smith’s superb Covent Garden set, I heard an audience applaud something visual for the first time. I found this incredibly exciting and the same excitement followed on the Ascot scene reveal, again to Beaton’s breathtaking costumes, and again to Eliza’s appearance at the top of the stairs in Higgins’ study in her white ball-gown before leaving for the Embassy Ball. The first time I had heard an audience applaud an actual costume. I knew this was something special, and that feeling of excitement would remain special every time I experienced that sound, since. The absolute wonder of watching the wonderfully theatrical onstage transitions from the Tenement set to Higgins’ study and from the study into the The Embassy Promenade set. It all certainly worked its magic on this very impressionable boy, even more so when the set transitioned into The Embassy Ballroom with its twin revolves swinging columns and stairs archways and windows into position, the four layers of chandeliers dropping in and finally the ballroom dome coming down, all while the orchestra played The Embassy Waltz.

Bunty Turner—who created the role of Eliza in Australia in 1959

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Art Centre Melbourne

Eliza’s Embassy Ball gown—on display at Beleura, 2022

Author’s collection

It was also my introduction to JCW, something which would be a lifelong fascination for me. I would study the programme religiously, reading every biography and every technical credit over and over. Only a couple of years later I found a little pile of old theatre programmes which I snapped up and also read from cover to cover, noting which performers seemed to appear in JCW shows regularly. Chorus members included! Who painted the sets? Who made the costumes? Who were the Stage Managers on the different shows? What were the names featured over and over in the Williamson programmes compared to those in the Garnett Carroll programmes from The Princess Theatre? Occasionally the same names would appear for both production companies. This all fascinated me, no end! Little did I know that in five years I'd be living my dream and dancing on that same stage, working for Williamsons myself.

Gabriel Joffe’s steamer trunk

Author’s collection

JCW musical director Gabriel Joffe

Author’s collection

Jump forward forty-odd years and I would own five of the costumes from the original 1959 production of My Fair Lady which would ultimately be displayed around the country during the 2016-2017 recreation revival of the show for John Frost and Opera Australia. Along with twenty costumes from other JCW productions, they were displayed at theatre giant Sir George Tallis’ home Beleura in Mornington. How do I find these treasures? Well, somehow they tend to find me! My latest acquisition being a steamer trunk which belonged to JCW Musical Director Gabriel Joffe, “G. Joffe. JCW” painted on the side of it. Just something else to carefully restore and add to my collection of, well, unusual, JCW treasures.

Kevin with some of the stage dresses he has restored

Photo by Barrye Dickinson

My earliesttheatrical memories are being taken by my mother and grandmother in the 1940s to sit in the stalls at matinees at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney to see the variety shows which they presented twice daily.  I was born in June 1937 so I would not have been more than a toddler, but I can still recall the chorus line of beautiful girls wearing fishnet stockings and I was particularly fond of Jenny Howard, who sang the comic repertoire of Gracie Fields as well as other popular songs. I am fairly sure that the local comedians George Wallace and Jim Gerald were in those shows but I cannot recall their acts although I do remember acrobats and jugglers, and performers who balanced on tight-ropes or slack-wires. There were also three microphones on stands across the front of the stage that rose up vertically when required and then subsided again back into their holes in the stage like snakes from a snake-charmer’s basket. These always intrigued me!

The one act that impressed me the most was the American-born Music Hall star Ella Shields, who was making a return visit to Sydney in March 1947. Immaculately dressed in men’s white tie and tails, with her silver-grey hair cropped in male fashion, she stood alongside a grand piano and sang songs like ‘If you knew Susie’, ‘Let Bygones be Bygones’ and ‘Cecilia’.  Then as a separate act, in front of a painted backcloth representing the Thames Embankment in London, shabbily dressed, she performed her immortal signature song: ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’. She sounded neither male nor female, but her voice had a unique quality that captured one’s imagination and made her one of the greatest stars of her era. She made a number of gramophone records and can be heard on YouTube singing ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’

Theatre program for the Tivoli show Laugh and Be Happy, starring Ella Shields

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

French strip-tease artist Micheline Bernardini

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

I continued to attend the Tivoli throughout the 1950s and saw stars like Tommy Trinder, Gus Brox & Myrna, Micheline Bernardini (a French strip-tease artist who first introduced the ‘Bikini’ two-piece swim suit), and Chico Marx (of Marx Brothers fame from the movies), whose comedy matched his cheeky piano playing. But in 1960 I travelled to London where I have lived ever since. My memoirs of theatre-going, working for a major record company and playing piano professionally for Music Hall and Variety can be found on Theatre Heritage Australia under the title The Adventures of an Australian in London: A Double Life in Music.

So much for my early memories of Variety. But, thanks to Trove, I can say with absolute certainty that the first stage musical I ever saw was White Horse Inn at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, between December 1942 and April 1943, when I would have been about five-and-a-half years old. I recall that when we entered the stalls to take our seats we noticed that the auditorium had been decorated to resemble a picturesque Austrian inn, like the real White Horse Inn on the lake in St Wolfgang in Upper Austria. The show starred Strella Wilson and Don Nicol and I was completely entranced by the singing and the dancing, but especially impressed by the scenic effects. The First Act ended with a rainstorm and a real curtain of water fell across the front of the stage. Then at the very end of the performance, what turned out to be a central revolve in the middle of the stage went slowly through a complete revolution to reveal the scenes we had seen earlier in the show. These theatrical wonders made such an impression on me that I can still remember them to this day. Many years later I visited the real White Horse Inn (Weissen Rössl) on the Wolfgangsee in Austria, which was reached by a ferry across the lake, but nobody was singing any songs or dancing and it was a bit of a disappointment!

Tommy Trinder with Toni Lamond at the Tivoli

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Max Oldaker as the Red Shadow in The Desert Song, with Joy Beattie

Tait Family collection

After White Horse Inn, I have another memory of a stage musical at the Theatre Royal, which is The Desert Song starring the inimitable Max Oldaker and Joy Beattie, in late 1945. For some odd reason, the scene that sticks in my mind is when the Red Shadow, to demonstrate his strength to Margot, breaks a sword over his knee. From the ‘crack’ that it made when it snapped, the property sword was obviously made of wood, but instead of spotting that a real sword would have been made of metal, the thought that entered my eight-year-old brain was that this must have been an expensive show to run as they needed a new sword for every performance!

But then it was Annie Get Your Gun with Evie Hayes in 1948 that really hooked me on musical theatre and I have written more about this in my memoirs.

Flyer for the 1942/43 revival of White Horse Inn at the Theatre Royal, Sydney. SB&W Foundation, Sydney.