Encountering Internationalism on the Circuit Around Sydney

Bollen, Jonathan

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_6

Jonathan Bollen⁵

Part of the book series: Transnational Theatre Histories ((TTH))

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Abstract

International revues presenting song and dance from other nations toured widely in the 1950s and 1960s. Some were commercially produced operations, infused with the spectacle of tourism; others toured under government direction with the state approval of their nation. Exploring the connection between international touring and post-war migration, this chapter investigates three occasions on circuits around Sydney where audiences encountered artists from other nations: Oriental Calvalcade (1959–60), an ‘East-meets-West’ travelogue revue; Cafe Continental (1958–61), a television variety show; and the Central Coast Leagues Club at Gosford, north of Sydney (1964–76). Drawing on studies of tourism and performance, the chapter argues that internationalism shifted the balance in entertainment from an artifice of theatricality towards an authenticity of presence.

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Notes

1.
Productions recorded in AusStage, http://www.ausstage.edu.au. The ‘intra-national’ within Australia also took the form of revue: An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the Dark , was produced and performed by an all-Aboriginal cast at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, 23–27 June 1951, and Aboriginal Theatre , produced by Stefan Haag of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust with Aboriginal performers from communities in the Northern Territory, played at theatres in Sydney and Melbourne in 1963; see Sylvia Kleinert, ‘An Aboriginal Moomba: Remaking History’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.3 (1999), 345–57; Maryrose Casey, Telling Stories: Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Performance (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012).
2.
Veronica Kelly, ‘Orientalism in Early Australian Theatre’, New Literatures Review 26 (1993), 32–45; Daryl Collins, ‘Emperors and Musume: China and Japan “On the Boards” in Australia, 1850s–1920s’, East Asian History 7 (1994), 67–92; Brian Singleton, Oscar Asche, Orientalism, and British Musical Comedy (Westport, CT; London: Praeger, 2004).
3.
Sketches of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, and Tower Bridge from Here from There were reproduced in The Tourist Trade, with the addition of regional motifs from the South Pacific: a beach with palm trees and a dancing girl in grass skirt and bikini; programmes from the Tivoli Theatre, Australian Performing Arts Collection (APAC), Melbourne.
4.
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 94.
5.
MacCannell, The Tourist, 101.
6.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Authenticity and Authority in the Representation of Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Tourist Production’, in ‘Kulturkontakt/Kulturkonflikt: zur Erfahrung des Fremden’, ed. Ina-Maria Greverus, Konrad Köstlin, and Heinz Schilling, Notizen 28.1 (1988), 59–69, at 61.
7.
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London; New York: Routledge, 2003, reissued 2018), 59.
8.
Christopher Balme, Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 188.
9.
Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xv, xx.
10.
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 3.
11.
Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order, 3.
12.
Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order, 8–9.
13.
In particular, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation established international institutes for theatre and music that assisted nations to preserve folk cultures and convene forums for cross-cultural comparison and international display; see Fernando Valderrama, A History of UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1995).
14.
Stephen Alomes, ‘The Search for a National Theatre’, Voices 3.3 (1993), 21–37; Don Batchelor, ‘Political Manoeuvring Behind the Scenes: The Development of the National Theatre Idea in Australia during the 1940s’, Australasian Drama Studies 40 (2002), 58–73.
15.
John West, Theatre in Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1978).
16.
Leslie Rees, The Making of Australian Drama: From the 1830s to the Late 1960s (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1978).
17.
Margaret Berkeley, ‘Russian variety artists to visit Australia’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 9 May 1962, 7.
18.
‘The Prime Minister changes the itinerary’, in Katharine Brisbane, Entertaining Australia: An Illustrated History (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991), 284–85.
19.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Objects of Ethnography’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 386–443, at 421.
20.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Objects of Ethnography’, 428.
21.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Objects of Ethnography’, 421–22.
22.
Analyses of touring troupes include Anthony Shay, ‘Parallel Traditions: State Folk Dance Ensembles and Folk Dance in “The Field”’, Dance Research Journal 31.1 (1999), 29–56, a survey focused on the Moiseyev Dance Company; Joshua Cohen, ‘Stages in Transition: Les Ballets Africains and Independence, 1959 to 1960’, Journal of Black Studies 43.1 (2012), 11–48; William Peterson’s chapter on Bayanihan in Places for Happiness: Community, Self, and Performance in the Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 98–128; Berenika Szymanski-Düll, ‘“A tour to the West could bring a lot of trouble…”—The Mazowsze State Folk Song and Dance Ensemble during the First Period of the Cold War’ in Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Berenika Szymanski-Düll (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 73–85.
23.
Memorandum from Mr Maver to Mr Cooper, 20 April 1959, box 1, Tivoli Theatre records, 1893–1968, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 8961.
24.
Veronica Kelly, ‘A Complementary Economy? National Markets and International Product in Early Australian Theatre Managements’, New Theatre Quarterly 21.1 (2005), 77–95.
25.
Tibor Rudas signalled his intention to apply for naturalisation under the Nationality and Citizenship Act in 1953 in an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1953, 28.
26.
Programme for Revue Continentale, Tivoli Theatre, Melbourne, 23 August 1948, National Library of Australia; Sugar Baba and the Rudas Twins also performed in Variety Cavalcade, Tivoli Theatre, Melbourne, 5 September 1949.
27.
John Brennan, ‘Unique school for young Sydney acrobats’, Sunday Herald, 27 August 1950, 2; Frank van Straten, Tivoli (South Melbourne: Lothian, 2003), 182. After marrying Tibor, Sugar Baba was known as Anna Rudas, dance teacher and choreographer.
28.
‘Fabulous Rudas Dancers feted at Opera House, Ang Tibay’, Manila Times, 5 October 1958, 18; advertisement, Manila Times, 8 October 1958, 15.
29.
‘Dancers off to Calcutta—but they’ll be back soon’, Straits Times, 6 April 1958, 4.
30.
Advertisements in Straits Times, 1 May to 14 June 1958, and China Mail, 25 July to 9 September 1958.
31.
Japan Times, 12 February 1959, 5.
32.
Advertisements in China Mail, 29 May to 23 June 1959.
33.
‘Opening Bill’, Pix, 13 June 1959, 17–19.
34.
Programme for Oriental Cavalcade, Tivoli Theatre, Sydney, 19 October 1959, Australian Performing Arts Collection (APAC), Melbourne.
35.
In Brisbane, over the summer holiday period, Rudas used the production’s Orientalist design and imported cast to present a matinee season of the pantomime Aladdin .
36.
Programme for Oriental Cavalcade, Tivoli Theatre, Sydney, 19 October 1959, APAC.
37.
Colin Kerr, ‘East and West Meet on Stage’, The Advertiser, 23 April 1960, 6; emphasis added.
38.
Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 1949, 28. There were some cast changes during the tour: Will Mahoney, Johnny Lockwood, and Johnny Ladd took the comedian spots in subsequent seasons.
39.
In solo segments in the second half, the comedians appear to have presented their own material, unrelated to the ‘East-West’ theme.
40.
Betty Stewart, A Survivor in a Star Spangled World: An Autobiography (East Blaxland: Betty Stewart, 2000), 114. The Kawashima Dancers are credited in the programme as ‘Sachiko Kawaguchi, Chiaki Tanaka, Sumiko Ubara, Yoshiko Sekine, Ki Nin Shin, Eiko Shimuzu, Mitsuko Ezoe and Tokiko Muto’.
41.
The Rudas Dancers were Dawn Cabot, Mikey Collier, Robyn Isted, Evelyn Jago, Janice Kingham, Noeleen Race, and Yvonne Whiting.
42.
‘Spectacle and color in new Tivoli show’, The Age, 19 August 1959, 16.
43.
Advertisements in Manila Times, 25 October 1958 to 28 May 1959.
44.
Advertisements in China Mail, 18 November to 13 December 1958. Performing in Singapore, they are billed as Chong Che Chung and Koon Ma La; advertisements, Straits Times, 2 May to 27 June 1959.
45.
The Duo Sylvanos were Arthur Smith and Delores Harris; Straits Times, 6 July 1955, 5; Straits Times, 12 January 1957, 10; China Mail, 16 August 1960, 4.
46.
Stewart, A Survivor in a Star Spangled World, 109–15.
47.
Stewart, A Survivor in a Star Spangled World, 111–14.
48.
The Bobby Limb Show, Episode 9, National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), 12000; the date of first broadcast for this recording is not determined. Chong Che Chung also appears in the Mobil Limb Show, Episode 22, c. 1960, NFSA, 440290 and twice on Cafe Continental, ABC Television, on 19 November 1959 and 16 November 1960.
49.
Programmes for Thanks for the Memory, Princess Theatre, Melbourne, 3 October 1953, and Many Happy Returns, Empire Theatre, Sydney, 28 January 1959, APAC. Meekin appeared at Maxim’s in Hong Kong in January 1959.
50.
‘Limehouse Blues’, by English songwriters Douglas Furber and Philip Braham, was first sung by Gertrude Lawrence in 1922. The song became a jazz standard in the 1920s and 1930s, lending its title to a 1934 crime film, set in London’s Chinatown, starring the Chinese-American actor, Anna May Wong; it was also the subject of an Oriental fantasy, danced by Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer in ‘Asian’ costumes and make-up, in the 1946 movie, Ziegfeld Follies ; John Seed, ‘Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–40’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), 58–85.
51.
The original lyrics refer to the residents of Chinatown as ‘chinkies’; Meekin replaces this with ‘the Chinese’, anticipating a similar revision by Julie Andrews in Star!, the 1968 biopic of Gertrude Lawrence.
52.
Desmond, Staging Tourism, xxii, 17.
53.
A similar transition was apparent when African-American singer and activist Paul Robeson appeared alongside blacked-up performers on Hal Lashwood’s black and white minstrel show; Hal Lashwood’s Minstrels , Christmas 1960, NFSA 331469.
54.
‘How to be a dancing star’, Pix, 30 January 1960, 25–27.
55.
‘Nightclub reviews: Latin Quarter, N.Y.’, Variety, 19 October 1960, 50, 54. Touring with the Rudas Dancers was Noeline Race, who married Pete Cruzado; see Chap. 3.
56.
Patricia Cruzado, The Song of Pete Cruzado, 2nd ed. (Marrickville, NSW: Paka Books and Music, 2005), 90; ‘Vaude, Cafe Dates—New York’, Variety, 3 May 1961, 72.
57.
‘House Reviews: Olympia, Paris’, Variety, 22 November 1961, 54; Peter Hepple, ‘Strictly For Playboys’, The Stage and Television Today, 18 October 1962, 7.
58.
‘They spin around the world’, Pix, 8 May 1965, 33–37.
59.
‘Aussie showman Rudas to make Vegas debut’, Variety, 4 November 1964, 56; ‘Tony Azzi exits Tropicana, L.V.’, Variety, 7 April 1965, 61.
60.
Some 2.7 million migrants settled in Australia between July 1949 and June 1970; John Murphy, ‘Immigration and assimilation’, in Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: The University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 149–67.
61.
Gwenda Tavan, ‘“Good Neighbours”: Community Orientations, Migrant Assimilation and Australian Society and Culture, 1950–1961’, Australian Historical Studies 28.109 (1997), 77–89. The ‘Good Neighbours’ programme was a government-led initiative that coordinated the activities of churches, charities, and other voluntary organisations to assist the settlement and assimilation of migrants and educate Australians to accept and welcome migrants.
62.
Tavan, ‘Good Neighbours’, 81.
63.
Tavan, ‘Good Neighbours’, 89.
64.
Ghassan Hage, ‘Republicanism, Multiculturalism, Zoology’, Communal/Plural 2 (1993), 113–38; see also Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2010), 97–98; Stephen Castles, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Michael Morrissey, Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia (Sydney: Pluto, 1988); Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rizvi (eds), Culture, Difference and the Arts (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994).
65.
Tavan, ‘Immigration: Control of Colour Bar? The Immigration Reform Movement, 1959–1966’, Australian Historical Studies 117 (2001), 181–200, at 184, citing J. Mackie, ‘The Politics of Asian Immigration’, in Asians in Australia: Patterns of Migration and Settlement, ed. J.E. Coughlan and D.J. McNamara (Melbourne: Macmillan Education, 1997).
66.
Eric Gorrick, ‘Anzac Economy Helping’, Variety, 10 January 1962, 212.
67.
The British Broadcasting Corporation produced a television show called Cafe Continental between 1947 and 1953. The version in Sydney made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission was produced by Harry Pringle, an experienced producer of light entertainment for British radio and television.
68.
Episodes of Cafe Continental, ABC Television, Sydney, 1959–1961, NFSA 5281, 5118, 331554, 331557, 331610, 746820.
69.
TV Times, Sydney, 16 August 1958, 31.
70.
‘Master of his craft born to perform’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 2013.
71.
Cafe Continental ran for three seasons on a fortnightly schedule: an initial run of twenty-four episodes from 21 August 1958 to 25 June 1959, was followed by two years of mostly continuous production from 24 September 1959 to 14 December 1961.
72.
Cafe Continental alternated fortnightly production with other variety shows that cultivated a racial discourse of theatrical nostalgia. Hal Lashwood’s Alabama Jubilee (produced between March 1958 to September 1961; also known as Hal Lashwood’s Minstrels ), was a minstrel show in the nineteenth-century style, presenting white Australian ‘regulars’ in black-face alongside African-American and Australian Indigenous ‘guests’—notably, Nellie Small (a West Indian male impersonator, well-known in Australian variety); the American activist-singer Paul Robeson, and jazz singers Heather Pitt and Wilma Reading from Cairns. The same studio at the ABC produced Gaslight Music Hall, a ‘gay nineties’ variety show with ten-minute melodrama in the British style of Victorian music hall, from September 1959 to February 1960, when it transferred to commercial television station TCN 9.
73.
‘They dance with the invisible man’, Pix, 20 May 1961, 42.
74.
Producers initially made an effort to book African-American artists touring Australia with the Tivoli Circuit. Dancers Georges Holmes, Joe Jenkins (who toured with Katherine Dunham), and the Two Earls were guests on early episodes in 1958 and 1959. Negotiations to book actor-singer Fredye Marshall were also made, although the outcome is not clear—Marshall was appearing at the Tivoli in October 1958, and previously appeared with Holmes at His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth; by April 1959 she was appearing at the Golden Phoenix nightclub in Hong Kong.
75.
Cafe Continental, ABC Television, Sydney, 17 December 1960, NFSA 746820.
76.
‘Baby Jane’, TV Times, Sydney, 7 May 1960, 6, 33; ‘TV Singer’s Runaway Marriage’, TV Times, Sydney, 16 July 1960, 3; ABC internal memorandum, 23 September 1958, in ‘Cafe Continental [Box 17]’, National Archives of Australia, SP727/2, TV9/1/20 Part 1.
77.
ABC internal memoranda, 30 August 1961 and 1 September 1961, in ‘Cafe Continental [Box 17]’, National Archives of Australia, SP727/2, TV9/1/20 Part 1.
78.
Cafe Continental, ABC Television, Sydney, 22 October 1960, NFSA 5281.
79.
Tavan, ‘Immigration: Control of Colour Bar?’, 191; Katharine Betts, ‘Attitudes to Immigration and Population Growth in Australia 1954 to 2010: An Overview’, People and Place 18.3 (2010), 32–51; Statistical Appendix, Part 2, ‘Migrant Numbers, Asian Immigration and Multiculturalism: Trends in the Polls, 1943–1998’, in National Multicultural Advisory Council, Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century: Towards Inclusiveness (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1999).
80.
Graham Gambie, ‘Shocks for Sydney’s glittering clubland’, Sun-Herald, 23 October 1966, 4.
81.
Figures from Frank Stevens (ed.), Registered Clubs Manual and Yearbook, 1969 (Darling Point, NSW: Aura Press, 1969); reproduced in Jennifer Cornwall, ‘For Members and their Guests: A History of Clubland in New South Wales 1880–1980’, PhD thesis (University of Technology, Sydney, 2010), 239.
82.
Les Allen Collection, 1964–76, Gosford Library, Central Coast Council, Gosford, NSW.
83.
The Club Show with Rex Mossop, RCA, 1969, NFSA 372435.
84.
In relation to Hawaii, Desmond writes: ‘Almost all tourist shows incorporate some version of this teaching-the-tourist-to-dance motif’; Staging Tourism, 22.
85.
Sitompul Sisters, ‘Rambut Hitam Matanya Galak’, Eka Sapta Mengiringi Sitompul Sisters Dan Mona Sitompul, Bali Records, BLM 7001, 1968; Anneke Grönloh, ‘Rambut Itam Matanja Galak’, So Long! Anneke Grönloh with Orchestra directed by Ger van Leeuwen and the Rivertown Dixieland Jazzband, Philipps, P 08070 L, 1962.

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School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Jonathan Bollen

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Bollen, J. (2020). Encountering Internationalism on the Circuit Around Sydney. In: Touring Variety in the Asia Pacific Region, 1946–1975. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_6
Published: 07 May 2020
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