You can walk straight past Circl Wine House in Punch Lane, even if you’re looking for it, staring at the blue dot on your map app and trying to match it to some kind of signage or street presence. I know because I did just that, and so did my lunch companion. But perhaps that’s entirely appropriate, since he also keeps a low profile but packs an extraordinary wallop in the world of live theatre.
Torben Brookman co-owns GWB Entertainment, which has produced a mind-boggling number of shows, from School of Rock to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Miss Saigon to Death of a Salesman, Matilda to A Christmas Carol. But Brookman does very little press, running a global theatrical empire with wife Richelle in Adelaide, rather than London, New York or even Sydney, and allowing his productions to speak for themselves.
Low profile but packs a punch: Torben Brookman at Circl Wine House in Melbourne.Credit: Simon Schluter
I’ve met Brookman on the eve of opening night of A Christmas Carol at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre, though he rather sheepishly admits he’ll be back and forth to Adelaide in the next 24 hours before the show opens, to see his eight-year-old’s end-of-year school nativity play. “She probably won’t remember me being there, but she might remember me not being there, so it’s important for her,” he says. “Those things come first.”
Like the nativity play, A Christmas Carol has the makings of a festive family tradition for Melbourne. The Old Vic production is now in its third year in Melbourne, with a different Scrooge in each iteration – Packed to the Rafters’ Erik Thomson is the current reformed miser.
“We always brought it here with the intention that it could be something that would run year after year, but you’re never sure if that will work,” Brookman says. “And each year, we try to find another person to interpret Scrooge: David Wenham and Owen Teale and now Erik Thomson find a different nuance, a different flavour to it, but then it still has the warm heart and overarching show around it.
“So I think for audiences, they come and they have the nostalgic feeling of knowing what they’ve seen before previously, but with a slightly different intention to that lead character.”
Erik Thomson and Alison Whyte in A Christmas Carol.Credit: Eugene Hyland
Brookman says that in the show’s first year, he spoke to a family from Perth who bought tickets on a whim and loved it so much that they now plan a pre-Christmas Melbourne pilgrimage around the production.
Brookman has chosen Circl Wine House because of its proximity to the Comedy, though neither of us have been here before and find ourselves overwhelmed by the novel-sized wine list. We decide to throw ourselves on the mercy of Xavier Vigier, venue manager and head sommelier, who recommends three 50-millilitre serves of different Australian chardonnays, in lieu of one glass.
Brookman decides on the tuna crudo with dill oil, buttermilk and caviar to start, followed by the snapper with lobster sauce. I opt for stracciatella with charred leek and, after dismissing envious thoughts vis-a-vis the snapper, choose the whole rainbow trout with small mounds of egg salad, which ends up being a showstopping dish of deboned, bifurcated fish.
Whole trout with egg salad at Circl Wine House.Credit: Simon Schluter
Despite coming from an artistic family (his father, Rob Brookman, AM, is a former Adelaide Festival executive director, and his mother is award-winning playwright Verity Laughton), Brookman did not think he would follow his parents into the performing arts, and instead pursued a degree in exercise physiology and pharmacology.
But a summer job as a gopher at WOMADelaide change his life.
“I needed a summer job, and this seemed interesting, and they needed people, like a runner, to do things. So I sort of did bits of everything. And a lot of what I ended up doing was sort of the co-ordination of international artist travel and that sort of thing.”
He loved the job, but he had a problem: he was due back at university before he got to see the fruits of his labours.
Snapper with lobster sauce at Circl Wine House.Credit: Simon Schluter
“I got to this pivotal moment of, gosh, this festival is getting close. It sounds like it’s going to be fascinating. I want to meet all these people, but I have to finish three weeks before the festival to start my honours. I was like, ‘I can’t let this go, I’ll just defer the honours by a year, and I’ll follow through, and I’ll work on the festival’. So I deferred by a year, worked on the festival, and loved it. Needless to say, I never went back.”
Instead of becoming an exercise physiologist, Brookman and friend Lee Cumberlidge (now the creative director of Illuminate Adelaide) decided to collaborate.
“My middle brother, Geordie, was looking for a play [to direct]. He saw this play called The Return [and thought], ‘Oh, that would be nice’. We all got together and put that on at the Adelaide Fringe, and it went really well. We thought, ‘That was fine, so let’s take it to Edinburgh’.
“So we packed up and a crazy group of us took the play The Return to Edinburgh with no real knowledge of how to do anything. We sort of made it up as we went along, and it was just a delight, a crazy adventure.”
Tuna crudo with dill oil and buttermilk at Circl Wine HouseCredit: Simon Schluter
After a stint working for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, Torben and Richelle Brookman founded GWB Entertainment in 2009. They also have a London office, and the pair take frequent research trips to Europe and the US to scout for shows. But not everything that works abroad has worked here – many reviews of Sunset Boulevard were scathing, particularly in Melbourne, and a calf injury sidelined superstar soprano Sarah Brightman for a good part of the Melbourne run.
When asked to point to something that he loved but that didn’t end up selling as well as he’d hoped, he nominates Jagged Little Pill, the jukebox musical based on Alanis Morissette’s music with a book by Diablo Cody. The show garnered 15 Tony nominations and won two, but despite a rapturous response from audiences it did not sell well in Australia.
Natalie Bassingthwaighte, Tim Draxl and the company in Jagged Little Pill.Credit: Daniel Boud
“On paper, you would think [it would], Alanis Morissette was one of the biggest artists of the late ’90s and early 2000s, very strong female skewed in terms of her audience, and all of that audience who would have been 16 to 24 are now probably 45 to 55 – that’s the largest demographic of ticket buyers for musicals. Her music was something people had a real affinity with, so there’s a really strong emotional connection as well. It should be a slam dunk ... It’s hard to know what was COVID, what was the show, but for whatever reason ... it kind of got stuck in a certain lane and didn’t branch out as broadly as we thought it would ordinarily do.”
If Jagged Little Pill did not land with the female 45-55 demographic who love both Morissette and musical theatre, how will GWB sell next year’s Lord of the Rings musical?
Brookman says its challenge – that the audience for the books and films skew towards a certain type of male audience – might actually be its strength.
“The highest demographic on nearly every show that we’ve ever done is probably 45 to 54 or maybe 64,” Brookman says. “On Lord of the Rings, it’s 55-plus, and then 18 to 35, and while it’s still [a] slightly female skew, it’s a much higher male audiences than we’ve ever seen before. So it is fascinating. They are coming. They’re responding.
“I think, ironically, our biggest challenge is saying to sort of the established musical theatre audience that actually there’s no barrier here. This is for you too. It’s actually a brilliant story with amazing songs. I mean, there’s going to be Jemma Rix [as elf Galadriel] delivering one of the most amazing songs written for the stage.”
The original Toronto version of the show was enormous, with a budget of about $C30 million ($33 million) and a cast of 65 actors. It played to 400,000 people through its Canadian run but was far too big to be a successful touring show. The Watermill Theatre in London produced a much more intimate version of the play, which is what will come to Australia next year.
“Effectively, it’s saying to the audience, ‘You’re all in the company, you’re all hobbits. Effectively, we’re all hobbits. Come on this journey with us.’ And so they developed this beautiful, sweet, touching version, honed in on that hero’s journey of Frodo, but told from the perspective of the hobbits, and invited the audience to be part of it in that way,” Brookman says.
“It’s all actor-musician led as well. So you have Pippin, for example, with a cello around his neck going through the show and playing cello, while doing this, while doing that, and it’s an incredibly complex score.”
The bill: Lunch for two at Circl Wine HouseCredit: Cassidy Knowlton
In addition to Lord of the Rings, Brookman also has a new production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the works, starring non-binary dynamo Seann Miley Moore, who stole every scene they were in during a recent production of Miss Saigon.
Brookman says Hedwig is an example of what he’d like to do more of – a completely new production, rather than importing a show that has had success elsewhere. “While, yes, it’s an established show, this can be a new take on it for a new audience,” he says. “It’s an exciting project to be a part of.”
A Christmas Carol plays at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre until December 29. Lord of the Rings opens at the State Theatre in Sydney January 7, Crown Theatre in Perth on March 19 and the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne from April 26. Hedwig and the Angry Inch opens next year.
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