Larry Schwartz
TWILIGHT at Gantheaume Point, six kilometres outside Broome. A big, red sun hovers over Roebuck Bay. Dinosaur footprints can be seen at low tide. But we’re here for another kind of creature.
And then they pad on to a sandstone outcrop in this remote part of Western Australia. Grizabella, Rum Tum Tugger, Victoria and Bombalurina.
“Delia, can you angle your body a bit to get light on the beads?” resident director John Hackett cajoles a star. “. .. And go!”
Cats has come to town and is playing at a school sports ground. Four players have been pressed into service to promote the show.
Really Useful Productions, which is taking Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on a series of poems by T.S. Eliot on a two-and-a-half-year odyssey around Australia, will tomorrow fly its star, Delia Hannah, to Ballarat to formally announce the Victorian season early next year. Organisers say the Victorian Government will provide sponsorship to help bring the tour to towns, including Frankston, Albury-Wodonga, Shepparton, Mildura, Bendigo, Ballarat, Warrnambool and Geelong.
But, for now, Hannah is in the costume of Grizabella at the other end of Australia.
After lengthy discussions, the Sydney office has persuaded its London headquarters to allow it to stage the first ever promotional photographs outside a theatre setting. We are cautioned to avoid undermining the integrity of the show.
Rocks provide an “ambiguous” backdrop, its resident producer explains. Man-made or other recognisable objects (the lighthouse out here for instance) might spoil the illusion by presenting a way for prospective audiences to gauge the scale of characters.
We have even been issued with quotes from Eliot, supposedly to be used as captions for photos: “When will the summer day delay/ – When will the time flow away” and “Burnt out ends of smokey days”.
The show is set on a night when a group known as the “Jellicle cats” come out to play in the lead-up to the annual Jellicle Ball at which their leader, Old Deuteronomy, will announce the cat to be reborn to a new life.
On the rocky outcrop outside Broome, Grizabella, who has been spurned by the others throughout, is finally accepted. Within the furry white suit of kitten Victoria, first to extend a welcoming paw, is 18-year-old Emma Delmenico, from Lilydale.
She completed her VCE by the third term last year in time to join the show. She’d flown back home to family in Lilydale during the break between Mt Isa and Broome and was told by some friends she had adopted feline mannerisms. “I’m getting to see a lot of Australia, which is fabulous,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to see Australia.”
She was not yet born when it opened in the West End in 1981. Cats opened on Broadway the following year. The award-winning show has been seen by about 50 million people in 150 cities and 14 languages. It recently finished its Broadway run after 7500 performances. It premiered in Sydney in July 1985, came to Her Majesty’s in Melbourne in October 1987 and returned to the Princess Theatre in the early 1990s.
The show is now seen in the round, as is the case in London, in a 22-metre high and 57-metre wide, black Big Top that has been a fleeting landmark in recent months in Darwin, Alice Springs, Bathurst, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbor, Lismore, Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Mackay, Cairns and Townsville.
Technical manager Peter Baynes, 43, has driven the 3500 kilometres from the last stop, Mt Isa, and says he is “seeing an Australia I have not seen before”. Along with a contingent of circus satff, there are stagehands, sound, lighting and wardrobe people, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, a pysiotherapist and more.
But it is the players, he says, who are feted in towns they visit. “If you’re a Cat, you’re the bee’s knees.”
Markham Gannon, 26, from Mornington, who plays the mischievous Mungojerrie, says he is fortunate in gaining such a role in an industry where work is often erratic.
Andy McClintock, 19, a rugged mechanist from Mosman, Sydney, is enjoying a first look at Outback Australia. His duties include what theatrical backstage crew call the “bump in” (“pull up,” say members of a circus crew engaged to help with the tour) and “bump out” (“pull down”.)
For some, Cats promises a taste of razzle-dazzle from the Big Smoke.
“It’s like the city coming to the country,” says Samantha Gregory, Broome born-and-bred. She has bought matinee tickets for her nine-year-old Savannah and Zemeria, 8, and will see the evening show. “We didn’t ever have the facilities to have something like this here. It’s just unreal.”
You hear talk of people so eager they have driven up to 600 kilometres to the town that is gateway to the Kimberley, a region with population so sparse (just 27,500 in 423,000 square kilometres).
Kathryn Shiner, a 28-year-old public servant, has driven 220 kilometres from Derby. Her parents have flown 1100 kilometres from Kununurra. She’s seen “busloads” arrive from Fitzroy Crossing, 450 kilometres way. “Most of Derby is here,” Ms Shiner says. “I know nearly every second person here.”
Broome was established as a pearling port in the 1880s. The annual Festival of the Pearl recently featured a float parade and dragon races. You get to hear opera here, too.
Circuses have come and gone. But locals say they have seen nothing on the scale of the Cats production with its 96 vehicles, more than 150 cast and crew.
The show is about to start. Inside the big tent foyer, a burly bloke downs a can of Melbourne Bitter. The first he knew of Cats, he says, was the cost of tickets on his credit card bill. “My missus says, `You’re coming along too’ … By the look of things, there’s a few other blokes from around town who’ve been dragged along to this thing.”
White-bearded in purple outfit, the official greeter, Tom Catt, 80, (“How does that grab you,” he says), is telling people to take a good look; the facade will soon disappear. He once worked as a “magician illusionist”. So it comes as no surprise to discover the front has been dismantled by the end of the show.
By morning, the 6500-metre edifice of shiny black fabric is just a memory here; bound for Karratha, Geraldton, Mandurah, Bunbury, Albany, Kalgoorlie and Perth before heading on to Victoria.
Larry Schwartz and Craig Abraham travelled to Broome courtesy of Really Useful Productions.
Larry Schwartz Writer 