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Eddie Perfect developing new Australian musical through three-year WAAPA residency
(www.artshub.com.au)
It might be musical chairs at the upper echelons of FMG, but over at Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s social impact arm Minderoo they’re getting behind an actual musical, the Eddie Perfect-devised Tivoli Lovely.
The Minderoo Foundation is sinking part of a $900,000 pool of funding into a production that Perfect is developing with musical theatre students of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, which is planning to use it to christen their new campus in the Perth CBD.
Perfect said that since his musical would premiere in the academy’s new central city campus in 2026 he wanted to create a work that would celebrate the theatre.
His musical, which is tentatively titled Tivoli Lovely, is set in 1954 in golden age of the Tivoli, a circuit of Australian theatres that staged variety shows and came to an end with the arrival of television.
“It’s got singing, it’s got dancing, it’s got animal acts, it’s got love and romance, and it’s got murder,” said Perfect, who has spent the past two weeks working with WAAPA students on the first act of his musical.
“Australian theatrical history is broad and rich. I thought it was very important for us and for students to know what a night in the theatre might be like and for students to know the artists who came before and the shoulders they stand on.”
Perfect said that Australian musical theatre artists spend most of the time replicating musicals from overseas, most commonly from the US, which has a huge musical theatre tradition. So the opportunity to create a new musical theatre piece from scratch is a rare and valuable one.
“It’s a muscle we don’t get to flex very much as Australians,” Perfect said.
“What we’re doing is giving actors an opportunity to try stuff, to see whether it works, to let it fail in front of everybody, to be able to deal with value judgment.
“It is the single most important thing in the theatre – the ability to try something to die a death and to not have it undermine our central view of ourselves.”