QPAC celebrates 40 years: These are the best shows
As QPAC celebrates its 40th birthday, we mark the occasion by uncovering Queenslanders’ favourites.
Des Houghton
Don't miss out on the headlines from Des Houghton. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Queensland Arts Minister John-Paul Langbroek saw Wicked at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in 2011 and was captivated. It was so good he said, he took his whole family back to see it again.
But Wicked (I remember Bert Newton played the Wizard) was not Queenslanders’ favourite show. That honour goes to The Phantom of the Opera. It has run at QPAC twice, 11 years apart.
Langbroek compiled a list of the Top 10 shows to mark the anniversary of the opening of QPAC by the Duke and Duchess of Kent 40 years ago this week. The three-day celebration came with street parades, fireworks — and a RAAF flyover that drowned out the duke’s speech.
Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, derided as a hillbilly dictator with little interest in the visual or performing arts, backed the QPAC project from day one. He said it would change Queensland forever, and he was right, as usual.
“The Premier received the loudest and longest applause,” Sylvia da Costa-Roque wrote in The Sunday Mail on April 21, 1985.
I was in the audience at the Concert Hall for the gala performance before the royals.
We listened to Queensland composer Colin Brumby’s South Bank Overture and works by Tchaikovsky and Berlioz.
Langbroek told me 30 million people had visited QAPAC since that night.
Some highlights included performances by the Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera Ballet, La Scala Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet and the London Symphony Orchestra. My favourites were the performances of the Australian Ballet.
Queenslanders went to QPAC in their millions to see Bruce Springsteen, Angela Lansbury, Julie Andrews, Sir David Attenborough, Eddie Vedder, Billy Connolly, Joanna Lumley, Gladys Knight, William Shatner, Billy Crystal and Lin Manuel Miranda.
Sir Joh had opened the Queensland Art Gallery two years before. Queensland had arrived as a cultural hot spot.
The QPAC precinct remains incomplete. Architect Michael Rayner’s exceedingly beautiful “glass box” playhouse is a 1500-seat theatre now under construction and is the last missing piece in the QPAC puzzle. Langbroek believes it is an important milestone.
“It will be the fifth theatre, making QPAC the largest performing arts venue in Australia under one roof,” he said.
A search is underway for a name. Obviously, the name should be the Bjelke-Petersen theatre to honour our most idiosyncratic premier who supercharged the arts scene with a new art gallery as well as the QPAC theatres.
Langbroek said he will be looking for more opportunities to enhance the sector in the lead up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
I hope he encourages the Australian Ballet and Opera Australian to return. Shamefully, they scrapped their Brisbane seasons about a decade ago. It means, in effect, that Queensland taxpayers are subsidising NSW and Victorian theatregoers.
Why is there such a Sosso uproar?
A public outcry has been manufactured against a man whose work was so admired that he was promoted by the Premier at the time, writes Des Houghton.
Landmark puberty blocker decision a blow to transgender activists
A Family Court judge dealt a blow to transgender activists this week by giving a father the custody of a boy whose mother was trying to put him on puberty blockers, writes Des Houghton.