Today I took the opportunity to go & see the musical stage show King Kong being performed at the Regent Theatre in Collins St. Reports are Melbourne is the only Australian city where King Kong will be staged. I'm only guessing, but this may be due to the stage requirements in terms of space to house the Kong figure & the particular nature of the stage, which was able to rise & fall & tip on an angle.
The Regent Theatre is a 162 seat theatre. It is listed by the National Trust of Australia & is on the Victorian Heritage Register. It's history, however, hasn't always been so illustrious.
When it first opened in 1929, as part of the Regent Theatre franchise, it housed 3250 seats & included a ballroom, "the Plaza", in its basement. The Regent's history includes being gutted by fire, rebuilt & reopened; being bought by Hoyts & being replaced as a cinema by a complex in Bourke St; surviving potential demolishment by Melbourne City Council; closure; being declined heritage status by the National Trust in 1974 then in 1977 being declared a landmark by then Victorian Premier Rupert Hamer, essentially saving the Regent from any ongoing threat of demolition. The building lay derelict for 26 years. Sadly, Melbourne City Council's plan to make way for a city square project resulted in the theatre's interior being gutted leaving only the original ceiling intact. The interior was able to be reconstructed from photos to resemble its original appearance. The exterior of the Regent is nearly identical to Sydney's now demolished Regent theatre.
The building reopened in 1996 with a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevarde. It has hosted many musicals & shows since, including We Will Rock You, The Lion King, Cats, Westside Story & the ballet Swan Lake. Wicked is due to return in 2014 for a second season.
Photo: the foyer of the Regent Theatre
Photo: view of the stage
The story of King Kong is set in New York in 1933, during the Great Depression, where poverty contrasted vividly with excess. Ann Darrow is fired from her job & lands a position with maverick movie maker Carl Denham. Carl hires a boat & sets out with Ann & first mate Jack Driscoll to find an island steeped in mystery, where they come face to face with giant beasts including Kong. Being the entrepreneur he is, Carl grabs the opportunity to capture & ship King Kong back to New York to be displayed as the eighth wonder of the world.
The show features 140 cast & crew. While the cast was great & all had magnificent voices, the star of course, was the giant puppet of King Kong. The Kong figure is a hybrid animatronic marionette. This technology is from the same people who developed the animatronic technology for Walking with Dinosaurs. He was manipulated by 13 puppeteers, who physically have to lift & move all his limbs, his head & even his body. These puppeteers were dressed in black to minimise their presence on the stage, but to me, this was the most impressive & mind boggling aspect of the show. It sometimes took two men to move a paw. They even climbed on his back when required & like gymnasts, would swing down to the floor. At other times, they would pull on harnesses attached to Kong's shoulders in order to lift him to full height. Amazing.
The set included an LED screen which measured the width of the stage. This allowed strobe lighting to add to the special effects. Having a discounted $55 seat, I was up the back of the theatre right in front of King Kong's sound crew. This crew did all Kong's vocalisations.
Photo: these photos are taken from the King Kong website, as you weren't allowed to take photos
Some extra info for you, taken from the King Kong programme:
- 65 tonnes of steel were used in the construction of the set & equipment
- Kong weighs 1.1 tonnes & is 6m tall
- inside Kong there are 300m of electrical cables, 1500 connections & 16 microprocessors
- the final Kong (there were two prototypes & four scale models) took a year to build by 50 specialists across the fields of engineering, fabrication, electronics & digital media
No comments:
Post a Comment