In a rehearsal room at Perth’s ABC Studios, Eddie Perfect is fine-tuning his brand new musical, guiding more than 40 performers through tap routines and comedy sketches, showgirl numbers and even a Scottish jig. “It’s a huge show,” he laughs. “We’ve got 64 people on stage between the cast and the orchestra, and we’re refining and rewriting it as we go. It’s wild and very exciting.”
Premiering on 7 November at Perth’s Heath Ledger theatre, Tivoli Lovely – written by Perfect and directed by Dean Bryant – is performed by musical theatre students from Perfect’s alma mater: the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Set in 1954, the work resurrects the golden world of Australian vaudeville, where comics, crooners and chorus girls kept the nation laughing through two world wars and into the television age.
(L-R) Dean Bryant, Hanna Bourke, Sebastian Cruse, Eddie Perfect, Chloe Taylor and Stephanie Graham in costume for Tivoli Lovely, Perfect’s new musical about Australia’s Tivoli circuit. Photograph: Stephen Heath Photography
Developed over three years with support from the Minderoo foundation, Tivoli Lovely was conceived as both a training ground and an act of cultural excavation. It follows an 85-year-old former chorus girl and a teenager working on a school project as they unearth the story of the Eleven Kevins, a dance act that once lit up the stage.
“As I’ve gotten older I think a lot more about where our theatre came from,” says Perfect, well-known for his hit musical adaptation of Beetlejuice. “I wanted to resurrect that world. It’s a love letter to Australia’s theatrical past.”
A glittering, bawdy institution
The Tivoli circuit began in the 1890s as a string of theatres in Sydney and Melbourne before expanding nationwide. By the 1930s, under producer Frank Neil, it had become a cornerstone of Australian show business. “It was fun, lively – a party, really,” says the former Tivoli performer and theatre historian Ivan King. “You’d have a chanteuse, jugglers, comedians, tumblers, a band and that famous lineup of dancing girls. There’s nothing that compares to it today.”
Performers on stage in Tropical Holiday at the Tivoli theatre in Melbourne in 1959. Photograph: Zeus A Merfield/Reproduced by permission of the Zeus Amphion Merfield estate
Over the decades, the Tivoli drew a roll-call of global stars. Harry Houdini escaped from its stages in 1910; Anna May Wong brought Hollywood glamour to Australian audiences in 1939; and a young Shirley Bassey performed in 1957, showcasing the voice that would make her a star. But the real heartbeat of the theatre was homegrown: the Tivoli Lovelies, a chorus of high-kicking dancers who shimmered across its stages through the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
The Tivoli was also a place that flirted with danger. Performers revelled in innuendo and satire that mocked class, politics and propriety. “Variety theatre certainly pushed the boundaries,” says Prof Richard Fotheringham, who’s spent decades tracing the Tivoli’s history. “They’d stage tableaux of nude showgirls posing as statues – the ‘Venus de Milo’, or ‘The Renunciation’ – so it was technically art. But everyone in the audience knew what they’d come for.”
‘It was technically art. But everyone in the audience knew what they’d come for’ … topless Tivoli performers on stage, circa 1950s. Photograph: Supplied by Arts Centre Melbourne
If the Tivoli Lovelies brought glamour, the comedians brought grit. Chief among them were George Wallace Snr and Roy “Mo” Rene, performers whose brash, bawdy humour was later echoed by comics such as Graham Kennedy and Paul Hogan. With his gravelly voice and working-class wit, Rene turned his alter ego Mo McCackie into a national folk hero. His catchphrases – “Strike me lucky!” and “Don’t come the raw prawn with me!” – became part of the Australian lexicon.
Among the women who held their own in that rough-and-tumble world was Jenny Howard, who arrived from England in 1940 and became one of the Tivoli’s biggest stars. During the second world war she led a troupe of Tivoli girls on a tour through the Northern Territory and Queensland, performing for soldiers on a stage bolted to the back of a truck. “She kept spirits alive,” says Fotheringham, “and stayed in Australia for the rest of her life.”
Another star who changed the game was Winifred Atwell, the Trinidad-born pianist who came to Australia at the height of the White Australia policy. Her honky-tonk hit Black and White Rag smashed box office records and racial barriers, as she toured the Tivoli circuit to sellout crowds. “She stayed in the country afterwards and became an Australian citizen,” says King. “Audiences adored her.”
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Winifred Atwell, pictured in 1962. The Trinidad-born pianist became an Australian citizen after performing to sellout crowds. She died in Sydney in 1983. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Curtain call and revival
By the late 1950s, the Tivoli’s lights were fading. “When television came in, business slumped alarmingly,” says King. The shift was swift and brutal: audiences stayed home to watch the same comics and singers who once filled the theatres, now beamed into living rooms across the country.
The circuit’s performers scattered: some found work in early Australian television, others shifted to RSL clubs, cabaret venues or cruise liners. “What I miss most are the raunchy, gutsy people,” King adds. “They were fabulous characters, the real heartbeat of the Tivoli.”
Performers on stage in Nats in the Belfry, Tivoli theatre, Melbourne in 1961. Photograph: Zeus A Merfield/Reproduced by permission of the Zeus Amphion Merfield estate
Perfect’s musical picks up just before that final curtain in 1954, somewhere between glitter and decay, capturing the last gasp of a golden era and paying tribute to the performers who paved the way.
“I didn’t want the show to be a museum piece,” Perfect says. “It’s not a history lesson but something entertaining and emotional in its own right.
“There are generations of performers who don’t know what came before. We need to keep telling the stories of our past. They’re so likely to be forgotten.”
