Kookaburra, a new company dedicated to the production of musicals in Australia, opened with great fanfare earlier this year in Sydney, and although Pippin, their debut production, was neither a critical nor commercial hit, it set up their stall as a company prepared to go off the map. Pippin is a personal favourite of mine – I’m planning on naming it as one of my “Five Essential Musicals” when I am guest of Elaine Paige’s Radio 2 show soon — though I’ve yet to see a production of it that actually works. (Alas, I missed the original seminal Bob Fosse production, and perhaps it ultimately needed Fosse to give it life – as the “Magic to Do” sequence in Fosse showed, he was a magician of the theatre).
But for just their second show in June, Kookaburra scored a major coup: staging a revival of Sondheim and Furth’s 1970 Broadway classic Company, they managed to lure the 77-year-old composer all the way to Sydney to see it earlier this month, and he held an audience Q&A, too. The company was now moving up a significant notch in terms of its standing in the global theatrical community.
However, it has now just squandered that goodwill overnight, with a decision last week that was simply so dumb that it beggars belief. Last Wednesday, one of the company of Company rang in sick; and since Kookaburra does not employ understudies, a quick re-think had to happen. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Kookaburra’s “founder and chief executive, Peter Cousens, reportedly ordered the director, Gale Edwards, to radically recraft Wednesday’s production. Two songs, including a bedroom scene and a duet in the second act… were jettisoned along with lines of dialogue.”
”Just wing it!”, Cousens was reported to have instructed the company, according to another report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The report goes on, “No announcement was made, despite the songs being listed in the program, as well as the names of the characters and the actors performing them. Was the audience to assume that April, a chatty air hostess, had missed a connection and was stranded in Tel Aviv for the night? The musical finished 20 minutes early and the equivocations of the protagonist Bobby about marriage and commitment were considerably weakened.”
Cousens, who in the first Sydney Morning Herald report denied issuing the instruction that the show must go on regardless, was said in the second report to have “met the cast on Saturday, apologised and accepted full blame for the fallout”.
The company have now issued a statement and added a performance to try to make amends: “In response to the adverse reaction to an edited performance of Company at the Theatre Royal on Wednesday 18th July, caused by the serious illness of a cast member, Kookaburra would like to restore the integrity of this performance, by holding a special charity performance of Company in support of Oz Show Biz Cares, one of the writers’ favorite charities and the Actors Benevolent Fund”.
But the error of judgement, it has to be said, was spectacular, showing such a disregard for the integrity of the work itself that there are those wondering now if the company can survive. I hope it does. I am looking forward to their productions of Three Brides for Three Brothers, Less Miserables (cutting the barricade scenes!), and Maury Yeston’s Nine being restored to its original Fellini source by being staged with a cast of 8 ½. But what happens when the chorus rings in ill for Sweeney Todd and the fabled barber doesn’t have enough victims to despatch to their deaths? Oh, hold on, that’s already happened – John Doyle’s Newbury revival that somehow ended up on Broadway ran out of people to kill, too.
