Stage Provides Rich Pickings As Market Went Belly Up

by Jason Blake

(excerpted)

It was an anxious start to the year. Would the consumer spending squeeze dent the box office? Would the corporate sector feather their support or the “doctors’ wives” forgo their subscriptions? We won’t know what effect the global financial crisis had on the theatre industry’s bottom line for a while but if there’s more red ink than usual, it’s not because the quality wasn’t there. 2009 was an annus horribilis for shareholders and superannuation funds but for smart investors in theatre tickets, returns were better than average.

After reinvigorating the Sydney Festival, outgoing artistic director Fergus Linehan farewelled the city with an exceptional program of theatre including Robert Lepage’s epic Lipsynch, Belarus Free Theatre’s uncompromising Being Harold Pinter, and one of the best productions of a classic I’ve seen: Katona Jozsef Theatre’s Ivanov.

One show I’ve had no doubts about since I saw it is ‘Gatz, presented by New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service (Sydney Opera House, May), a word-for-word staging of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Great Gatsby’. From start to finish — about seven hours — I was completely gripped by its slow metamorphosis, from a show in which a bored office worker begins to read ‘Gatsby’, to a show that becomes ‘Gatsby’.

View the original article on the Sydney Morning Herald website here .