Bendigo’s Stunning New Prison Theatre
Launching a new theatre is a daunting enough challenge, but try doing it inside a former prison, while premiering a new musical about Australia’s most notorious bushranger at the same time. David Spicer reports.
In the middle of the 19thcentury the streets of Bendigo were virtually paved with gold. A grand and gracious city sprung up as the modern day equivalent of nine billion dollars of the precious ore was extracted underneath the town near Melbourne.
Just over a century and a half later the civic leaders are working to engineer a new boom, this time in the performing arts.
It’s come because a few bright sparks put their heads together. The Bendigo Senior Secondary College was gifted the town’s decommissioned prison to give students some desperately needed space. The school principal Dale Pearce was granted eight million dollars to ‘play with’ to turn the prison grounds into an educational facility.
So he gave the local theatre manager David Lloyd (pictured below right) a call to see if they could make something more of it. Eight million became 26 million and an extraordinary fusion of theatre, education and heritage was created.
“We now have this range of facilities - a 953 seat theatre with the largest stage in regional Australia, a 485 seat theatre, a black box studio and the connection to the school,” says the beaming marketing manager Anne Henshall.
“The school has music rooms, a drama and dance studio, a teaching kitchen, an alfresco café…as well as access to the theatre itself for school assemblies.”
There is also a high wall around to keep the students inside, but the barbed wire is no longer needed.
To enter the Ulumburra Theatre requires a walk through the dark past of the town.
“The entrance is a grand staircase down the centre of the two cell blocks. Each cell block is still in original condition apart from a number that we interfered with to put in a box office and a cloak room.
“You come down to the central guard tower (in the middle) and step through arches into a grand open foyer and the theatre.“
The theatre itself is connected to the former prison by a glass roof. There is a tunnel between two upstairs foyers and a staircase that runs right to the roof of the prison.
“You can put your foot on the top of a jail door that had its razor wire on it and look straight out at the guard tower.“
Another spooky feature is the hangman’s gallows, that look ready for action. There is the wooden beam and trap door underneath that was used for a small number of executions.
Can you hang critics? “Absolutely,“ she laughs.
Not content with having fabulous new facilities, Bendigo now wants to entice producers to stage their shows in the town and also try out new productions.
When the theatre heard that a Bendigo local Adam Lyon was working on a new musical about the life and times of Australia’s most notorious bushranger, he was commissioned to premiere the show in the new theatre.
He says the prison theme for the theatre is perfect for his musical Ned, which he describes as being a fusion of Irish and rock music.
“I was at the Victorian College of the Arts studying Opera and at a piano where I improvised a song about an Irish father talking to his son. This morphed into the first song in the show. I then wrote a second chorus number, ‘Such is Life’. From there I approached some writers and quickly realized that this was something special,“ he said.
“We are book-ending the story with aspects of his childhood, from him as a young man in prison the last time, to his death.”
Key scenes include the massacre at Stringybark Creek and the siege at Glenrowan.
To stage these properly you need a decent sized cast.Thanks to a donation of $400,000 by some local ‘angels’, a fully-fledged try out of the musical will take place in May at the new theatre.
Whereas most commonly new Australian musicals have small casts, this production has 27 paid actors on stage, including ten chorus members from local Bendigo theatre companies.
“Others productions get locked into trap of being hamstrung because of forward thinking about touring. We are focussing on what does the story need.”
Adam says he is walking on air after attending the first rehearsal and delighted at the atmosphere created by the venue.
This is not the first new musical that Adam Lyon has been involved with of late. He played Carl Denham in King Kong.
He notes the irony that his musical has had more opportunities to be workshopped and refined along the way than King Kong, which had an astronomical budget.
Anne Henshall is hoping to make Bendigo the out of town try out capital of Australia.
“We now have a range of facilities in a town that is only an hour and forty minutes out of Melbourne.”
And now the Ulumburra Theatre is being launched with a baptism of fire on stage.
