How it all started…
 
In 1974, I’d set up my own graphic design and promotional business in partnership with my friend, Greg Simmonds. The town where we lived and worked, Wonthaggi, in South Gippsland, Victoria (Australia), was a former coal mining town. The mines had closed some years before, and the Miners Union, based in New South Wales, had no assets left in Victoria except the local theatre, where we often performed or went to the movies.

They offered our local amateur theatre company, The Wonthaggi Theatrical Group, the chance to buy it for a very modest sum, and they accepted. Then reality set in. Local theatrical productions in country towns don’t make a lot of profit, and that year a series of power strikes impacted badly on our takings. We risked losing the theatre if we couldn't find a "hit" production.

Since Wonthaggi was in the heart of the South Gippsland beach resorts, I suggested to the committee that the group stage a summer pantomime season. They thought it was a great idea, but there was one problem — most of the regulars would be away on vacation at that time.

Never one to be daunted by such trifles, I volunteered Greg and myself to write, produce, direct and perform the show. And compose the music!

Then came the crunch… the committee wanted to hear the plot outline and at least two songs before finally deciding. I found out about this less than an hour before the committee meeting was to start. Panic stations!

I called up vivid memories of an old story from a second grade reader horror story called The Hobyahs. It was a shocker. A whole generation of pre-baby boomers had had their personalities twisted by this gruesome tale (mine was the last year to use this book — it was replaced by the following year by the banal John and Betty series of books.)

I quickly revamped the storyline into a more palatable form (we could not, after all, get away with progressively dismembering a little dog on stage, then put it back together again, without drawing some adverse attention). Then, while Greg drove us nervously to the meeting, I sat in the back of his Volkswagen Combi with my guitar and wrote two songs, one of which I had no time left to compose new music for, so I lifted the melody from a love song I'd written for Lynne some years before. (She has still not forgiven this apalling breach of good taste and breeding, more than a quarter of a century later.)

To make a long story short (well, shorter), the committee accepted the proposal, the show was a smash hit and we made enough money to pay the mortgage commitment for that year on our theatre. Phew!

But we’d created a monster. Next year, we had to create a sequel, Captain Lightning and the Smugglers, then another and another. Davy Dogood and the Black Diamond Mine, then Professor Timothy Tickywinkle and his Tantalising, Terpsichorean Time Machine. Each had its own unique challenges and rewards.

By now, Marnie and Josh, my two eldest children (for whom I'd really written The Hobyahs, because of the dismal quality of most available kids productions at the time — most were written by television writers and, while spectacular visiually, were lifeless, static and boring for young kids) were old enough to perform, too, so the shows were a real family affair.

Note: The Hobyahs is still my favourite of all 13 shows I've created, and has been produced several times over the years since then, the latest by the Wonthaggi Theatrical Group, featuring some of the original cast. I reprised my original role as a member of the band… the notorious Gloomy Gullies Gala Goodtime Orchestra. (My granddaughters adored the latest version.)

About this time Lynne returned to teaching and was given responsibility for mounting primary school musical productions. She created a fabulous production of The Wizard of Oz, then followed it up with an even more spectacular production of The Hobbit (for which I wrote some supplementary songs and incidental music).

The following year, however, she seemed to run out of material. Every show she looked at lacked decent plots, music and style. She asked me to look at some of them and make my suggestions. Little did I realise what she had in mind.

I was so appalled by the standard of the writing, music, etc that I tossed them back to her in disgust, with the comment that I could write better in my sleep.

Big mistake. BIG mistake. H-U-G-E! (as Julia Roberts would say many years later.)
 
Lynne leapt on my comment and set it in concrete. I was stuck. Couldn't get out of it.

Thus was born Wonder Witch, the first of the three Wonthaggi Primary School musicals.

These musicals were actually set in the school, with staff and students playing themselves and — in some cases — some rather odd (and ugly!) alter egos.

The shows in this series were Wonder Witch, Toadquest and Uncle Angus’s Magic Attic. These shows have had numerous school productions over the years.

Somewhere in all that, I managed to create another musical for Marnie and Josh’s secondary school, Newhaven College. This was The Phantom of Phillip Island, a fantasy treatment of part of the Island’s history. It was a spectacular production with almost 150 people involved. Actually, Josh was still at Primary (Elementary) School at the time. A week before the show opened, the young lead actor fell seriously ill on the other side of the country, and Josh was co-opted into the role. We sent him off to Grandma Ure’s for three days. As one of Australia’s finest stage actresses and directors of the 1930s and 40s, she soon whipped him into shape. He never missed a line. We were very proud of him.

By the way, Josh, now 31, has pursued his interests in music, theatre and stagecraft. Currently (January 2003) he lives and works in the USA. He performs professionally with Orlando Opera in Florida, as well as working with the company on stage design, property and special effects design and make-up. He also works for Universal Studios as a special effects make-up artist specialising in prosthetics (he won acclaim recently for his outstanding work on the theme park production of "Grinchmas"). In his spare time, he works as a professional make-up artists for a major modelling and talent agency, as well as for several upcoming singing stars for photo shoots, video clips and tours.

In 1986, our two young daughters, Miriam (then 6) and Naomi (then 4), having spent the previous summer at Melbourne's National Theatre for the professional production of The Hobyahs, decided it was time for them to tread the boards, and I was subjected to a lengthy campaign of emotional blackmail designed to get me to write a show for them.

This resulted in three seasons over the following 9 months of The Secret of the Silver Sorcerer. I wrote it for the whole family (minus Esther, who hadn't yet joined us) to perform, and we took it on a tour of 30 country schools prior to Christmas. It was exhausting. Then, in January, as soon as we’d finished moving house to Melbourne, we opened a week long season in the city. The director of the Geelong Saturday Club saw it and, together with the Victorian Arts Council, took us on a tour of several towns in the beautiful Western District during the winter school vacation in 1987. (We still haven’t fully recovered more than a decade later!)

The last show I wrote was for a shopping centre promotions manager who somehow heard about our kids’ shows. I was invited to create a 30 minute (!) production suitable for performance in the shopping centre during school vacation. It would be performed at 11.30 am and 1 pm each weekday for a week. I accepted, then promptly forgot about it.

The next thing I knew was when, three weeks before we opened, the promotions manager called me for details of the show for the advertisements that had to be placed that day. I told her I'd call back with the title. Two hours later, she called me back in a blind panic because the deadline was looming. Out of nowhere I plucked the title The Wicked Witch’s Wandering Wart. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I got busy again — and promptly forgot all about the show. Five days before we opened, the promotions manager rang to arrange for staging equipment, lighting and sound requirements. I was aghast. It was Wednesday. We opened Monday.

I threw together an outline in about 30 minutes, then began the search to find someone to play the third part, Warble the Minstrel. We needed someone with stage experience who could play a guitar (or lute) and sing, and who could act. We finally found a very good singer and musician who was the leader of a well-known bush band.

There was only one problem. He'd never acted before. It was now Thursday night.

We met Friday morning for our first rehearsal. It went well. I impressed on him that the most important things were simple: remember the plot line, not the script, and make sure the kids had fun. (The reason for not worrying about the script was that I hadn't finished writing it yet.)

He was away that weekend on band engagements, and we met around 9am Monday for a final run-through. He was terrified. I'd spent the weekend creating the scenery and props, and we had the costumes already in our extensive wardrobe.

At 10 am we headed off to the shopping centre, our accomplice roped and gagged in the trunk of the car to ensure he didn't flee (joking!).

We managed to get through the first performance relatively unscathed. Warble the Minstrel, a quaking tangle of nerve endings, collapsed in the changing room, astonished that we’d made it through without being lynched. After that, he relaxed and we packed the audiences in with our off-the-wall plot, oodles of audience participation and “kiss my ***” attitude. The promotions manager booked us for three more seasons on the spot.

The next year, at Eastland shopping centre, our friend Ernie Bourne, a long-time favourite with children on television and stage, joined us in the role of Warble — and the 30 minute show somehow blew out to 60 minutes. Shopkeepers began complaining that customers couldn’t get to their stores because of the hundreds of kids packing the central court for the show. They'd begin moving into position up to an hour early, then refused to leave until after the second performance. (The food court did a roaring trade.) The kids would also stop the escalators to they could get a better view! It was fun.

We haven’t done much in the way of theatrical productions in more recent times. There seems to have been more than enough drama and farce in our every day life! But I’ve noticed a few telling comments from Esther, our youngest, since we took her to every performance of The Hobyahs in 1998, and our eldest grandaughter, Ainsley, has also begun asking what’s next on the menu.

Sounds like things may be changing.

John Counsel
Executive Director
The Children's Theatre Company of Victoria

What The Children's Theatre Company of Victoria does