Julius returns
Jason Allen is deep in an advanced Riggers ticket assessment today with Gravel Samsonofrof, so he threw the editor gig in the air and Julius quickly seized the opportunity. Accordingly you are fore-warned, as the usual considered precision of this newsletter is suspended.
WHAT WE KNOW -AND- WHAT WE DON'T KNOW. The gossip:
• Sydney's (Dark-too-long) Theatre Royal should have a new operator but the announcement is on the QT. The State Government said recently they HAD signed a 40 year lease, which means someone blinked over the $37 million 'up front contribution' that the building owner demanded. Which no potential operator would ever pay. So, we think this is GOOD NEWS.
• Big Mal Pierson passed away last week, a giant of theatre stages everywhere. As a sign of respect and so that all of the theatre family can mourn together, there's a suggestion that all the Stages in Australasia next Monday 8th July at 10am should fly in Line 22 (His birthday) to its bottom dead (if not possible to use Line 22 then House Rag into half) during Smoko in remembrance of our mate (and lets be honest big Mal Pierson flew & rigged in all of them). So if you got em' then definitely smoke em' & enjoy a Coffee and stories of Mal and how he’s taught us all to be better riggers & fly-peeps and made all the shows he’s rigged safe and amazing installations. SAD NEWS.
Steve Schäfer's STAGEHAND HUMOUR Facebook group now has 92,000 members and he is real good at filtering out political crap. So the riff this week started with someone complaining they didn't get a Paul McCartney T-Shirt after crewing a show. This quickly became a voyage into the quirks and quibbles of Sir Paul, who it appears requires all food in his presence be vegan. And apparently, not too many others had ever got a T-Shirt from him either. NOT NEWS!
While composing this week's feature on RADELAIDE, our new music capital, CX was reminded again about how social media has changed. The subject band, Hindley Street Social Club has all its music online on facebook, and also on YouTube. At Facebook, the views are amazing. At YouTube not. This jives with what we saw when we ran CX-TV between 2010 and 2017. Those pioneering days we went from Vimeo to YouTube to Facebook and beyond, finding audiences as big as 40,000 a month for LIGHT-TONIGHT and then some of our clips on Facebook were huge while others not. It did our head in, and we couldn't find a media dollar so we withdrew. BAD NEWS.
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