My earliest theatrical 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.