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WAAPA city campus to launch with a Forrest-backed new Australian musical

It might be musical chairs at the upper echelons of FMG, but over at the Western Australian mining company’s social impact arm Minderoo they’re getting behind an actual musical, the Eddie Perfect-devised Tivoli Lovely.

The Minderoo Foundation are sinking $900,000 into a production Perfect is developing with musical theatre students of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, which is planning to use it christen their new campus in the Perth CBD.

All that jazz: WAAPA musical theatre students taking part in the development of Eddie Perfect’s new musical

All that jazz: WAAPA musical theatre students taking part in the development of Eddie Perfect’s new musical

The generous Minderoo investment is also bringing to WAAPA the internationally renowned British theatre company Cheek By Jowl, who will be working with acting students of Perth’s celebrated Fame school on a new production of a classic text from the Elizabeth period.

These two projects will also involve students from several other disciplines within WAAPA, such as dance, Aboriginal performance, music and production design, as well as draw up on the talents and skills of arts organisations and community groups beyond the academy.

This latest investment is part of Minderoo’s ongoing support for WAAPA’s visiting artists program and builds on 2022’s collaboration with Germany’s renowned Pina Bausch Foundation.

WAAPA’s Executive Dean, Professor David Shirley, is thrilled that his students will have the privilege of working with Perfect and Cheek By Jowl founders and co-artistic directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, acclaimed artists who are at the top of their games.

“Cheek by Jowl and Eddie Perfect will be commencing a wonderful three-year journey culminating in two extraordinary productions – a newly commissioned musical and a staging of a classical play,” Shirley said during last week’s unveiling at the King’s Street Arts Centre.

2001 WAAPA musical theatre graduate Eddie Perfect is excited by the opportunity to develop a new musical with the resources of a major performing arts institution.

2001 WAAPA musical theatre graduate Eddie Perfect is excited by the opportunity to develop a new musical with the resources of a major performing arts institution.Credit: Eddie Jim

“These will mark and celebrate our arrival at ECU’s state-of-the-art city campus. It is a major landmark in our history that WAAPA has been able to attract these trailblazing artists, something that would not have been possible without the support of the Minderoo Foundation.”

Perfect is a multi-talented performer who since graduating from WAAPA’s musical theatre course in 2001 has gone on to create such acclaimed works as the Helpmann-winning Shane Warne: The Musical and the Broadway musical Beetlejuice.

Perfect said that since his musical would premiere in the academy’s new central city campus in 2025 (ahead of ECU’s official opening the following year) 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.”

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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.”

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