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The year is drawing to a close with all the wonderful festival things that go with it.
Our superb musical is now in full swing. It’s a wonderful show meeting all the criteria we all seek. Outstanding music, laughter, costumes, set design, actors, and overall show perfection.
Don’t miss it and remember tickets to see it, make a special Christmas gift too!
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Over the past few months, the staff and Board have been under a lot of work pressure with the new leadership and structure. The Friends wanted to show their understanding of this difficult time and produced a mouthwatering morning tea for the team which was very well received.
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I'd like to take the opportunity of wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year!
Ngā mihi
Annie Bonifant,
Chair - Friends of the Court Theatre
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Audience Interactive
On Sunday 5th November the Theatre invited patrons to an ‘Audience Interactive’ session. The artistic team are aware and listening to the concerns voiced by patrons over the selection of plays.
About 100 people attended and were given a voting preference sheet. After being given information by the Artistic Director about each play in the four categories they were asked to select their preferred shows and then give reasons for their selection.
This provided interesting discussion and the feedback provided will be analysed by the artistic team feeding into their future planning.
This was a great opportunity to have some involvement in the choice of plays. We cannot underestimate the complexity of putting a season together. The criteria of budget, copyright, popularity, timing, variation, Creative NZs requirements, and more are all taken into consideration.
As Ross had so often said “it’s like a rubic cube, when one thing changes so does everything else. Good luck to the team with this huge task and thank you for listening to us patrons. They know they won’t please everyone!
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Associates
These five Court Theatre Associates were caught on camera together at the “Audience Interactive” event recently—a rare occurrence.
Left to Right:
Lynda Milligan, Bryan Aitken, Averill Lockhead, Paul Barrett, and Yvonne Martin
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The Bromley Family
As you may know the Bromley name is synonymous with The Court Theatre.
Yvette Bromley along with Mervyn Thomson founded the Court Theatre in 1971.
Derek Hargreaves writes in his book The History of the Court Theatre “They agreed Christchurch needed a professional theatre.” “They decided that the new theatre would have to be different in every respect from the short-lived Canterbury Theatre Company. Its artistic planning would need to suit the city and not be some sort of cultural imposition; and above all it would need to win the confidence of amateur theatre people who had been critical of the earlier venture.”
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Yvette led the charge in every way and after months of rehearsals under her direction The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie open in the Provincial Chambers on April 21, 1971.
Yvette’s daughter Elizabeth Moody became one of the iconic actors in the early days of the theatre and was a founding member of permanent company on a full-time contract. Sadly, she passed away in 2010. Yvette passed away four years later aged 100, leaving us the wonderful legacy of The Court Theatre.
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It's great to see the progress of the new Court Theatre in the Performing Arts Precinct.
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Friends’ Sponsorship 2024
As Friends of The Court Theatre, you are very likely to be aware that most years we are able to make use of our funds to sponsor a play at the theatre in the same way as business or commercial sponsors do. This has usually been a mainstage play, although this year we sponsored the children’s production Kuia and the Spider.
Next year however, we are going to be doing something a little different. We are seed funding a campaign to further The Court’s Education, Youth and Outreach programme. The Court Theatre is so much more than plays on the stage. It is after all a community theatre and reaches out into the community through such activities as school tours, term time classes, theatre sports and youth company scholarships.
Yet this work is not widely known about or celebrated enough. It’s definitely time to change that and the theatre is looking to extend the activities of its education department. Even now though, some of the statistics around this programme are impressive. Thirty–five schools were visited during the 2023 schools’ tour and some 8,000 children watched the performances. There were 4,000 participants in the theatre’s evening drama classes, 264 participants in theatre sports in 2023 and 300 school backstage tours. There are now also 20 members in The Court Youth Company, 17 Jesters Youth Company members and 42 Youth Ambassadors in 15 high schools across Canterbury.
As part of our $30,000+GST funding we have naming rights for a The Court Youth Company Scholarship which will provide assistance to a promising young performer for whom finances would otherwise be a barrier. We will also receive year-round brand recognition and profile as a supporting partner of education at The Court and as a sponsor of The Court Theatre.
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We start the year with a bang—or rather a train whistle, a snowstorm, a murder, and an eccentric and meticulous Belgian; it is the classic Agatha Christie's,Murder on the Orient Express,
beautifully adapted for the stage by Ken Ludwig in a fun and lush production. (2 March – 6 April)
Next, we have a rather special and intimate piece, Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan MacMillan with Jonny Donahoe. This one-person play will be staged in the Pub Charity Studio. Every Brilliant Thing actively involves the audience in the journey of a list, begun at age 8 by the narrator to draw their mother out of sadness, and continued into adulthood; this is a list of “every brilliant thing” from the colour yellow to the way Ray Charles sings the word “you”. (6 April – 4 May)
For tāmariki during the school holidays, we have Tusk Puppet’s adorable musical puppet show, The Lost Sock. The Lost Sock is suitable for ages 5-9, or anyone who wonders where that lost sock really went? (16 – 27 April)
The beloved Mark Hadlow and Lara MacGregor take to our stage in Gregory Cooper’s hilarious backstage comedy Mr. & Mrs. Macbeth of Heathcote Valley Road, playing husband and wife and professional actors, in the dressing room, 30-minutes before the curtain rises on a production of “the Scottish play”. (18 May – 22 June)
Continuing the successes of Disney's Moana Jr. and Disney's Frozen Jr., we dive “under the sea” with Disney’s The Little Mermaid Jr., again featuring two alternating casts of performers aged 18 and under in the magical musical adventure, sure to delight the whole family during the holidays. (9 – 21 July)
For our mid-year musical, we have Fun Home. Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s 2006 best-selling graphic memoir of the same name, Fun Home is a Tony Award-winning musical by the celebrated musical-writing duo, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron. It’s a moving personal story with superb music. (10 August – 14 September)
We are delighted to welcome the latest production from legendary Aotearoa theatre company, Indian Ink: Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream. This beautiful piece stars the virtuosic Jacob Rajan as a multitude of characters, alongside an incredible vulture puppet skillfully animated by Jon Coddington. Set in 1990s Mumbai, Paradise is funny, sweet, serious, and charming. (19-28 September)
Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 ground-breaking, realist classic A Doll’s House (in a translation by Christopher Hampton), comes to our stage in October. Centred on the Helmer family, this powerful work is Nora’s story out of the “doll’s house”, constructed by a restrictive society. Famous for “the door slam heard around the world”, A Doll’s House stands as one of the most important plays in the theatrical canon. (12 October – 9 November)
We finish the year with sequins, ruffles, and romance: Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical. This fun and frivolous musical is adapted from the beloved 1992 film, and contains familiar hits, such as “Love is in the Air”, as well as original music by a host of celebrated artists. This will be a feel-good ballroom sensation. (23 November 2024 – 1 February 2025)
As well as our mainstage shows, we’ll have plenty of offerings from the fabulous Court Jesters, including Scriptless, long-form special shows, and the Early Early Late Show, and our Court Youth Company will be presenting She Kills Monsters, a funny and moving play by Qui Nguyen that enters the fantastical world of Dungeons and Dragons (20 – 31 August).
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Our journey in putting a season together...
Artistic Director, Alison Walls tells us a little about Rights and Licenses
As we put a season together, we begin with a huge collection of plays and musicals; some that have been on our minds for some time, others that we’ve just come across. We read and research extensively. Often, we start with a few “anchors”; the shows that absolutely have a place in the season and then begins the complicated and iterative process of putting the other puzzle pieces together to create a varied, balanced, and exciting season.
Before a show finds its place in our season, we determine who holds the rights and if they are available. The first step is an enquiry to the rights holders, either directly or via an online application. Licensors require details on planned production dates and theatre capacity and may also ask for things like average ticket price.
Licensors (as representatives of the playwright or playwright’s estate) often also require approval over possible directors, and sometimes cast and design (this is more likely to be the case with more recent classics that have an especially protective estate, such as that of Samuel Beckett, or where there are very specific casting requirements, around, for instance, cultural identification). Unauthorized productions or alterations to the text can result in a lawsuit. Copyright lasts the author’s lifetime, plus a minimum of 50 years (70 in the U.S. and the U.K.). Once we make the official request and it is approved, we receive an agreement, which will include details like royalties, it is signed, and a deposit paid. Licenses also stipulate
things like how the show must be credited.
We have a relationship with the major licensors and there can often be some conversation around our plans. Some licensors recommend shows to us also. When rights are denied, it is usually because another theatre or a touring production has already acquired them for similar dates, or a longer run or international tour is anticipated. New pieces from the U.K. and U.S.—especially big hits from Broadway and the West End—are unlikely to be available for licensing until their run ends. The availability of rights does therefore sometimes change. Most Aotearoa plays are held by Playmarket NZ, and we are in frequent communication with them. Even international licensors are sometimes able to attend our productions; Stuart Hendricks from Music Theatre
International joined us for the opening night of Something Rotten! Some playwrights hold the rights to their work themselves, in which case we make an agreement directly with them.
We look forward to celebrating our final season in The Shed with you through engaging, hilarious, moving, thought-provoking and memorable theatre.
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