Page 2381 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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Mrs Dunne then quipped:
I think you took most of my supplementary.
I said:
That is why I went first.
But then Mrs Dunne said:
On that, is the vision that if we have a new theatre it is a replacement theatre or an additional theatre so that we would have a 600, a 1,200 and a 2,000-space?
Ms Elvin responded by saying:
I would certainly like to think that it is an additional facility. We feel that that would give us a suite of facilities that would be suitable for different usages, whether it is community use, whether it is town hall-type usage which I think would be very much what the existing Canberra Theatre could become. At the moment we struggle, to be honest, to accommodate a lot of those town hall-type uses like citizenship ceremonies, end of year dance performances, school graduation ceremonies et cetera. Typically those are very short hires and to try to accommodate them in a theatre which is also trying to provide a venue for longer hires means we are constantly juggling with dates. So I feel that there is a real opportunity for the new theatre to focus on the longer seasons, say a large musical, and for the existing theatre to become Canberra’s town hall, which we do not really have at the moment, and pick up a lot of that town hall usage.
Mrs Dunne then went on to say:
Could you give us an example of the sorts of things that we have not seen because of the technical limitations of the Canberra Theatre?
Mrs Jones said:
Disney on Ice.
Ms Elvin said:
Actually, we have done ice shows.
She went on to say:
It is a considerable challenge to set up the stage as an ice rink … Clearly with stars … and the costs of that touring production, you simply cannot amortise them over a venue that only accommodates 1,250. That is probably the argument for the larger auditorium.
There was then discussion about the Paris Opera Ballet that some had had the opportunity to go to and others had not. But what we had was quite a nice discussion
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