Now Showing!

Editorial

When: 11 June - 6 September 2010
Where: Festival Theatre foyer, Adelaide Festival Centre
Tickets: Free entry

Complementing the many acts performing at this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival is this extraordinary exhibition, which pays tribute to the early years of the artform in Australia, when vaudeville was king and performers travelled from state to state playing the Tivoli Circuit.

From 1893 until the introduction of television to Australia in 1956, the Tivoli Circuit was the major outlet for variety theatre and vaudeville in Australia, with performers moving in a steady stream between theatres in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. As well as scantily-clad show girls known as the Tivoli Dancers, the Circuit played host to local and international musical, variety and comedy acts, as well as acrobats, comedians and ventriloquists.

For a time, television programs such as In Melbourne Tonight inherited the mantle of the Tivoli Circuit, but slowly the memories of its heyday faded away.

Now Showing! celebrates the golden days of the Tivoli Theatres and their many performers including the comic Roy Rene (best known for his bawdy character Mo McCackie), song and dance man Chic Arnold, and the dead-pan, slow-motion act The Two Maxwells.

Exhibits include an oil painting of Roy Rene by Harold Thornton entered for the 1948 Archibald Prize, donated by Sharon van der Sluice (Roy's daughter-in-law); several ventriloquist dolls, each over one hundred years old, given to local ventriloquist Raymond De Cean; original photographs, scripts, posters and programs; and reflections on and reminiscences about the Tivoli Circuit.

You'll never think of early 20th century Australia as being staid and boring again!

Richard Watts, Citysearch