The Glasshouse Theatre gets a lot of things wonderfully right.
QPAC’s new venue is big and grand right where you want it to be: in the entranceway, with its wide, sweeping staircase, and in the yellow-carpeted foyer bar, a nod to the state’s golden beaches. This bar area is vast and airy, with the celebrated billows of glass offering a clear view from Grey Street through to the Wheel of Brisbane and beyond.
At Thursday’s opening gala, the foyer was packed with the great and good, but the design by Blight Rayner and Snøhetta felt less constrained than the bar spaces of Robin Gibson’s Concert Hall and Lyric Theatre, which it echoes. While some parts of QPAC can be like a funnel when crowded, this addition has been built with the flow of people in mind.
That said, I found my pathway to the toilets hampered by post-event partygoers. But I’ll reserve judgment on that for an evening when the champagne isn’t free.
As promised, the auditorium itself feels close and intimate when you’re in your seat. I enjoyed an excellent sightline way back in row Q, and the 1500-seat venue didn’t seem any larger than the 850-seat Playhouse next door. Dark-green carpeting and upholstery evoking a rainforest floor enhances this impression, as do the slight curve of the seating around the stage and the close-in back wall.
At least two wheelchair users were present, and accessibility appears good, with safety handles down the centre of the aisles and a dedicated platform to stage left, where a succession of Auslan interpreters worked furiously to keep up with the song lyrics.
MC Leigh Sayles promised an “amuse-bouche” of Queensland’s live performance industry, although degustation would be more accurate.
Directed by Daniel Evans, the show had many of Queensland’s major companies presenting bite-sized offerings. The Queensland Ballet’s Lucy Green and Edison Manuel performed a sensual pas de deux from Dangerous Liaisons, and Opera Queensland mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas sang a Handel aria.
Their on-stage accompaniment was Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra, who stole the show with a stunning rendition of a Romanian traditional piece that gave free rein to two violin soloists to go the full Paganini.
Queensland is a strong circus state, and we got both the Gold Coast’s ARC Circus with the Yugambeh dancers dramatising a Yugambeh and Bundjalung creation story, and Circa executing seamless trapeze work joined by QSO violinist Rebecca Seymour.
Top local actors Bryan Probets, Christen O’Leary and Ryan Hodson held the crowd with their Shakespearean monologues, which bodes well for the staging of spoken theatre in the venue.
Literary star Trent Dalton read one of the better excerpts from his book of Brisbane residents’ tales, Love Stories, and Kate Miller-Heidke sang her Eurovision entry.
Musicals will be central to the Glasshouse’s fare – Sting’s The Last Ship weighs anchor here in April for an Australian exclusive season – and the gala kicked off with a medley of songs from West Side Story performed by students of the Queensland Academy of Excellence in Musical Theatre at Griffith Uni. They’re easily at professional standard, of course. Alumni Nina Korbe, Billy Bouchier and Kimberley Hodgson joined them to sing the lead roles.
It would be a shame if this lovely glass case by the river displayed mainly imported treasures.
The evening ended with The Little Red Company, representing Brisbane’s rich vein of scrappy, crowd-pleasing independents. Channelling the tradition of ’70s and ’80s variety shows, Naomi Price, Tom Oliver, Irena Lysiuk and Marcus Corowa performed popular Australian hits such as Love Is In the Air. Then the curtains parted to reveal a massed choir joining them on a medley of Queensland songs by the likes of Savage Garden, the Bee Gees and (hilariously) Regurgitator.
In her speech, QPAC director Rachel Healy referred to the new building as “a recognition that the arts matter”. We live “in a world increasingly mediated by screens”, Healy said, and the building was no less than “an investment in the human spirit”.
Yeah, about that. Some might argue the $184 million construction cost ($159 million from the Queensland government, $25 million from QPAC) would go a long way to support both companies that put on shows and the universities that train artists. It would be a shame if this lovely glass case by the river displayed mainly imported treasures.
Sydney and Melbourne may not be accustomed to the idea of Brisbane as an arts city, but with 2032 looming, this is an issue of national concern. Only a few months ago Queensland Ballet dancers were issuing on-stage pleas for more federal funding. Long-time artist training ground Metro Arts (a couple of blocks away) is struggling for want of Creative Australia support. Meanwhile, QUT, which stopped offering degrees in dance, is far from the only university to sacrifice the creative arts as a first measure while the cost of degrees in the humanities skyrockets.
If this opening night demonstrated anything, it’s that there’s a large repository of world-class performance available in Queensland to draw upon at any given moment.
Short of Chinese robots stealing the spotlight, it seems a safe bet this theatre precinct, now the largest under one roof in the country, will be one of the last refuges for skills no Large Language Model can swallow up.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
