Cover Image: The Tivoli Lovely creative team and cast bring old-school glamour to life. (Left to right) Dean Bryant, Hanna Bourke, Sebastian Cruse, Eddie Perfect, Chloe Taylor and Stephanie Graham. Photo: Stephen Heath Photography.

Musicals are big business.

Cha-cha into Crown Perth almost any night of the week and you can see an Oz or even West Oz version of a hit musical that began life on Broadway or on the West End (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats opens in December with Pretty Woman, Anastasia the Broadway Musical and MJ: The Michael Jackson Musical lined up for next year).

Musicals are also an expensive business, with the average cost of developing a show now an eye-watering $25 million.

This combo of cost and cultural cringe is why there are so few original Australian musicals. There have been a few hits over the years — The Boy From Oz, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Shane Warne: The Musical — but the form is regarded as too expensive, too risky and with little chance of following in the footsteps of The Lion King, The Producers and Hamilton to become global hits.

So it is hardly surprising that it has taken two institutions with deep pockets and major resources — the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and the Minderoo Foundation — to get behind one of the country’s most celebrated musical theatre creators, Eddie Perfect, to give us a big new Australian musical, Tivoli Lovely.

Set in the dying days of the Tivoli Circuit, our version of vaudeville, Tivoli Lovely features a cast of 41 performers made up of second and third-year WAAPA students who have been involved in the evolution of the show.

“It’s an expensive process because there are a lot of people involved, especially a show as big as this. We wouldn’t be able to do this without the involvement of WAAPA and Minderoo,” Tivoli Lovely director Dean Bryant tells me in a break from rehearsals at the ABC.

“It is an incredible philanthropic gesture on the part of WAAPA and Minderoo that is allowing us to create a Broadway-scaled musical in a country that doesn’t have the infrastructure for this kind of thing. We would never have written a musical of this size without their backing. It would never have got to the workshop stage,” argues Bryant.

Even though the version of Tivoli Lovely that Bryant and Perfect are launching this week at the Heath Ledger will be trimmed down when it leaps from the academic to the professional realm, the skills needed to create a new work are just the same. Indeed, it is a rare opportunity for students to be a part of the creative process.

“You are training students to develop new work, which is something they don’t get enough of in the real world. These students will all leave knowing how to discuss dramaturgy and understand what it means to have a number built on them,” explains Bryant.

“Perforers have an important role to play in the development of new work. So to have such a large group of early-career performers skilled in the process of creating a new play or musical is one of the great things to emerge from doing Tivoli Lovely,” he says.

It was undoubtedly also an opportunity for the WAAPA students to be taken back to a time before television and variety shows took place inside of theatres, which was not as long ago as you might have imagined.

While the equivalents of Tivoli in the United States and Great Britain, vaudeville and musical, faded during the early part of the 20th century, the Tivoli Circuit in Australia lasted into mid 1960s. Remarkably, Tivoli survived the arrival of television and even contributed to small-screen variety shows.

“It was marked by extraordinary variety,” Perfect recently told Michael Cathcart on Radio National. “[It had] jugglers, acrobats, mind readers, singers, dancers, they had an orchestra, they had what they called the ballet corps, comedy was very big. Australia had its own unique variety of theatre. It is also the building blocks of contemporary variety.”

To capture the over-the-top nature of old-school Oz variety show Perfect, who after graduating from WAAPA created Shane Warne: The Musical and Beetlejuice, has conjured a suitably loopy plot, a kind of Arabian Nights tale in which an 85-year ex-Tivoli performer named Kitty in an assisted-living home in Fremantle (Caroline McKenzie) telling her story to a troubled teen. 

The story she tells over several nights is about the accidental on-stage death of a member of a dance troupe called The Eleven Kevins and the race to find another bonafide dancing Kevin.

“The first 20 minutes of Tivoli Lovely is basically a Tivoli show in all its glory. Audiences will be taken back to the early 1950s and be given the show that their grandparents and great grandparents would have seen, with an MC and dancers and singers and animal acts,” says Bryant, who also graduated from WAAPA who and has written musicals (his My Brilliant Career was a big hit for the Melbourne Theatre Company). 

What promises to make Tivoli Lovey a spectacular evening’s entertainment is the emphasis on movement, with so many dance numbers that both Perfect and Bryant call their show a “dance musical”.  It is also why they recruited one of Australia’s leading choreographers, Kelley Abbey, to put the WAAPA students through their paces. 

“I’ve never done a show with 15 dance numbers. I’ve just done Guys and Dolls, which is one of the most dance-heavy shows, and there are more in this show,” says Abbey, who won Helpmann Awards for Hugh Jackman’s The Boy From Oz Tour (2007) and Fame the Musical (2010).

Abbey says that what is wonderful about doing a show about people putting on shows is that she has been able to employ a variety of dance languages.

“I grew on a steady diet of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, so I have embraced that classic Hollywood style for some of the numbers. There is tap dancing, there are showgirl numbers, there are vaudeville performances. It has turned out that the young Kitty is a  mixture of Cassie from A Chorus Line and Charity from Sweet Charity . And there are even actors dressed up as sheep,” says Abbey, skills with others lead her to becoming the choreographer on the Oscar-winning Happy Feet.

While the Tivoli Circuit has disappeared from the consciousness of all but the oldest cohort of Australians both Perfect and Bryant believe that the spirit of Tivoli has infused the new wave of musicals that are being produced in this country.

“What is really interesting about the Australian music theatre as it is being formed now is that . . .  It is irreverent, it knows what the music theatre form is from America but is weaving in the Tivoli vibe — the comedy, the way Australians really talk, be funny, don’t be too sentimental, be sentimental when it really counts,” Bryant told Radio National.

Perfect believes Australia’s rich tradition of variety is under-appreciated because of the cost of creating original work. 

“Musical theatre is by and large a received culture. We import our musicals. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of skill to make musicals, Perfect told the ABC. 

“Tivoli Lovely was inspired by a desire to create a new work of music theatre that strengthens our connection with Australia’s theatrical past,” says Perfect.

“As one who treads the boards myself, I feel proud to be a part of a rich, ongoing tradition that has provided art and entertained Australian audiences for generations,” he says.

 “These stories are as fantastical and wild as they are fragile and prone to extinction. We have our very own brand of show business here in Australia, and in writing Tivoli Lovely I hope to honour the ghosts of Australia’s extraordinary theatrical past whilst celebrating our bright future with the next generation of performers.”

Tivoli Lovely is on at the Heath Ledger from November 7 to 14.
For more information, visit: https://www.artsculturetrust.wa.gov.au/venues/state-theatre-centre-of-wa/whats-on/tivoli-lovely/