Creating a new dance musical about Australia’s legendary Tivoli theatres was like creating Jurassic Park.
Writer, musician, comedian, actor and composer – and former WA Academy of Performing Arts student – Eddie Perfect, has spent three years developing the musical Tivoli Lovely which premieres in November at the Heath Ledger Theatre.
He’s not trying to create a piece of history, but he does want to pay homage to the Australian entertainers who performed in theatres around the country before we had television.
“It feels like Jurassic Park. I’m bringing these things back to life.
“Are they exactly as they were? Probably not, but I feel every page I read and every page I write about the Tivoli, I have such an affinity with these people,” Eddie says.
While there is much to draw from, there is no video from the era and many of the acts who travelled the circuit around Australia are a mystery.
“Little Miss Evelyn McKay, the girl with the smile. Now, what is that act? I don’t know what she did, but she was from the USA. She was a child performer and they were very popular.
“That was her thing, the girl with the smile. Well, I’m going to put her in the show. and I just have to kind of use a combination of what I can read in reviews and read about their act. And then I must invent it.
“I do feel a sense of responsibility to try and give people a sense of what the Tivoli was but at the same time, I’m not creating a museum piece, I’m creating a musical that just happens to be set in the Tiv.”
Eddie has had plenty of time to think about it.
“WAAPA, my old drama school came to me with a pretty irresistible idea,” he said.
“The university is opening a new campus in Yagan Square. Inside that campus is a new theatre and back in 2021 the college thought it would be great to commission a new Australian musical to open this new theatre.
“Now, of course, new buildings are incredibly unpredictable and because this project is a three-year project and it doesn’t look like we’re going to have a fully working theatre by the time 2025 runs out, we thought it would be safer to put a booking on the Heath Ledger and do it there.
“That was the original genesis of the idea, commission a new Australian musical work to celebrate the creation of a new theatre. I feel we can still do that without physically being in it.”
Eddie went in search of a subject that would utilise the large number of students who are on hand, but also says something about theatre.
Eddie was performing in a show at the Art Centre in Melbourne where the staff cafeteria walls are covered in photos of the Wirth Family Circus from the turn of the century.
“They’re amazing black and white photos of this travelling circus.
“And it reminded me of some images and passages I’d read about the days of Tivoli and Variety in Vaudeville in Australia. And so the idea came really quickly to set the piece in the world of the Tivoli.
“In 1954, just before television comes in, as vaudeville is in its dying gasps in Australia, even though it hung on in Australia longer than it did in the US or the UK, I wanted to write a piece that celebrated our theatrical past, of which not a huge amount is known.”
“Slowly I’ve created this work of historical fiction, which celebrates the conventions and the personalities and jobs found in the Tivoli circuit of the 1950s, all around Australia. I wanted to make this crazy piece about a dance troupe called the 11 Kevins and what happens when one of the dancers is in a stage accident and the name doesn’t rhyme anymore.
“That’s essentially the concept for the story in the past, but it also exists in two frames. Tivoli Lovely is being told in the present by an 85-year-old ex-Tivoli dancer by the name of Kitty. And it’s a little bit like an Arabian Nights type situation where she’s telling her story to a young, troubled student.
“Over the course of many days as she tells the story, it comes to life and the story starts to affect her and it starts to affect the young girl. Telling of the story and the receiving of the story creates a relationship between the old woman and the young woman in the past.
“It’s my real big love letter to theatre, especially to Australian theatre and a period of Australian theatre that exists pre-digital and is at real risk of being forgotten about entirely.”
“The 20 performers from third year will be augmented by the 20 students from second year who will be in our ensemble and playing small parts. We’ve got the opportunity to put 40 people tap dancing on stage at the Heath Ledger with an orchestra of 24.”
Eddie said with that size production, he was grateful for the sponsorship from Minderoo, which was something of a rarity.
“I graduated from WAAPA at the end of 2001, and I’ve been writing and performing my own songs for the theatre since then. It’s culminated in writing a bunch of musicals and even a couple of musicals for Broadway.
“But I’ve never once been commissioned in Australia to write a new musical. But that happened in 2022 when my old drama school called and said: ‘do you want to write this musical?’
Bookings at www.artsculturetrust.wa.gov.au.
