The backers of musical theatre productions are spending big on four new shows to reach Melbourne audiences. But can they all make a profit? Reid Sexton reports.

IN THE next year, Melbourne will go from a musical famine to a musical feast.

Including Phantom of the Opera, four musical behemoths will take up residence.

The private and public investment in the shows is estimated at tens of millions of dollars and the four productions will create one of the busiest times in Melbourne’s theatrical history plus spin-off benefits to the economy.

For some of the producers, the rewards will be large. But whether every show can be a financial winner remains to be seen.

Phantom is likely to replay its critical and perhaps its financial success with its new run, which began on Thursday.

By the time it closed in Melbourne in 1993 after a 2-year run, it had grossed $300 million. And while it is playing for a strictly limited season this time around, the Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber production is expected to again dazzle at the Princess Theatre.

The producers won’t reveal any detailed financial information but do say the Melbourne show attracted “several million dollars” of private investment from Melbourne, New York, Korea and South Africa. Already about $12 million worth of tickets have been sold a figure that comes as no surprise to at least one industry observer.

Professor Anne-Marie Hede from Victoria University says the show’s timing is perfect.

“There will be people who are trying to engage in this nostalgic experience of ‘let’s go back’,” she says. “But there’ll be a new market that’s curiously interested in Phantom. It should be a big success.”

And big successes equal big money, and not just for investors.

The Victorian Major Events Company, which convinced the Phantom producers to return to Melbourne, says hotels, restaurants and taxis all reap spin-off rewards from big shows. That is why they flew a team of three to New York for successful negotiations with the producers of record-breaking Broadway show Wicked, which is due here next year.

They fought equally hard for Monty Python’s Spamalot, which starts in November at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

The Lion King which played from July 2005 until its close on June 4, 2006 at The Regent Theatre brought $93 million to Victorian business from interstate or overseas.

The Melbourne run of The Producers generated $28 million in economic benefits.

Victorian Major Events Company chief executive Peter Abraam says it is too early to assess the economic impact of Phantom or the recently closed Miss Saigon, but both shows are certain to have boosted the city’s economy.

The benefits aren’t always just financial. “There’s great cultural opportunities which benefit not only the precinct but are great in winter and provide a great atmosphere,” he says.

Veteran publicist Suzie Howie, who will handle media relations for the $18 million production of Wicked when it opens next July, says the knock-on effects of big shows are well-known.

“You have to remember that when someone comes in to see a show, the theatre producer only makes whatever the ticket sales are,” she says. “The taxi drivers make money out of these shows, the hotels make money, the restaurants make money. The producer probably makes less than everyone but that’s fine.”

When Priscilla, Queen of the Desert opens in Melbourne this October, it will already be a success.

The show’s Sydney debut was so popular that the outlay of $6.5 million provided by investors including Mel Gibson’s business partner, Bruce Davey, and a French rock-concert promoter has already been recouped. The show will have grossed almost $40 million by the time it leaves Sydney and producer Garry Quinn believes that success will be repeated.

“All the indicators are incredibly positive for Melbourne,” he says “We are hoping for at least 300,000 sales we have already grossed $5 million, which is a little over 50,000 tickets.”

But with so many shows in town, can they all be winners?

Yes, according to Professor Hede, because successful theatre breeds a hunger for other shows.

“They are always going to be in competition that’s only natural,” she says. “But they can have a synergistic effect on each other. They create excitement and an interest in cultural events.”

Mr Quinn agrees. “Four big shows in 12 months; theoretically it’s possible they can all work,” he says.

“The bigger issues are the shows themselves because audiences are not silly. If the shows are good enough, they will invariably work.”

And if they’re not good, they lose money.

Sustainability and animal welfare drive this pig farmer’s business, writes Liz Porter.

CLAIRE PENNICEARD loves watching the way her pigs organise themselves into groups of differing social status, each with its own leader.

“I have often pondered what makes a pig a leader,” she says. “Small pigs are rarely leaders. When they are, they do it like politicians with minders. One little pig was the leader of a middle-ranking group his two minders would shoulder other pigs away.”

Ms Penniceard is the owner of The Pig Pen in Euroa, an environmentally friendly operation that rears 28,000 pigs a year for export to Singapore.

At the moment she is unable to take even the smallest peek at her animals. “Biosecurity” is the reason.

Her pigs are about to go to market and their meat must pass Singapore’s “zero tolerance” standards for purity.

Accordingly, they have to be shielded from contact with any substances that might make them ill or show up as a contaminant when their meat is tested. Human cold or flu viruses are an obvious risk.

In the crucial few weeks before sale, the pigs are handled only by their full-time carer, the farm’s stockperson.

“They test for anything that is not pig,” says Ms Penniceard, a former high school principal who began a second career as a pig farmer just over seven years ago.

She also cannot visit her own pigs within a week of visiting another pig farm, an abattoir, a saleyard, or an overseas country where foot and mouth disease is an issue. Fly control at the piggery has to be organic as do the materials used to clean sheds and equipment.

Ms Penniceard raises pigs for the giant Singaporean-owned company QAF, taking in seven-week old piglets weighing 16-20 kilograms and sending them off for sale five months later, weighing in at 90-95 kilograms. The pigs are housed on deep, soft litter bedding in large sheds, where they can wander freely and have feed and water 24 hours a day.

Automated misting systems cool the pigs in summer, while the sheds’ side curtains can be raised to let in fresh air in summer and lowered to shield from winter’s cold winds and rain.

Last year, Ms Penniceard won a Victorian Telstra business innovation award for her use of grape marc, the residue of grape skins left after wine-making, as deep litter bedding for her pigs.

Previously, she had been using rice husks, creating a second highly saleable product in the process, because the pig waste turned the husks into a rich, pH-neutral, environmentally friendly mulch, highly valued as a farm fertiliser.

The substitution of grape marc added extra environmental benefits, creating a practical function for this formerly unusable grape byproduct.

A recent research report by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics has indicated that Australian farmers have become increasingly aware of the need to adopt more sustainable farming practices, with 80 per cent now farming to maintain the long-term capacity of their land.

But according to Ms Penniceard, her operation is unusual because the recent growth of sustainable and organic practices tends to be confined to small farms.

“The problem is finding reliable ways of doing it on a commercial scale,” she says.

Conversation about farming with Ms Penniceard may start with the scientific details of pig rearing: such as the 100 cubic metres of bedding used for each of the 24 sheds divided between her piggery’s two sites.

But it always moves swiftly to pig psychology. Pigs are impressively clever, she says. And their sense of smell is so acute that the Israeli army has been exploring using them, instead of dogs, to sniff out unexploded mines.

Listening to the passion with which Ms Penniceard speaks about her animals, you might assume she’d been around pigs all her life. Yet she began her working life in the city, completing honours in arts at Monash University and working as a university teachers’ college lecturer, a teacher and then a high school principal. Farming only became part of her life in 1988, when she became principal of Euroa High and moved to a local sheep and cattle farm.

By the mid-’90s, when she had retired from teaching and her marriage had ended, she thought of farming.

Already very concerned about global warming and environmentally sustainable agriculture, she studied the figures on land and water use, energy requirements and feed efficiency. Raising lambs required 8 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of meat on a 65-kilogram animal.

Raising pigs, only 2 kilograms of grain were needed per one kilo of meat on a 100-kilogram animal. The best option, she decided, was to set up a pig farming business that involved contracting her services out to a large company with a specialised requirement.

The Pig Pen has been set up with the aim of allowing pigs to live calmly and in their natural social groups. “They live highly complex social lives,” Ms Penniceard explains. “They are very hierarchical.”

Within two weeks of arrival, every piglet intake has organised itself into groups of 10 to 12, each with a leader. Every pig, and every group, knows its status in relation to the rest.

The Pig Pen’s sheds, with their feeders and water supplies arranged down the centre, are designed to allow the pigs to eat and drink in ways that minimise “stand-offs” and conflict between “high status” and “low status” pigs.

This stops them fighting, which is economically sensible, but for Ms Penniceard, it was also a philosophical decision.

“My pigs only exist because I took the economic decision to rear them. It is my ethical responsibility to make sure that the life experience they have here is the very best.” CV: CLAIRE PENNICEARD

Director, The Pig Pen Pty Ltd

Lives:

Age: 63

Family: divorced, two children, five grandchildren

Education: Camberwell High, Monash University

Career : lecturer Rusden Teachers College, teacher Canterbury Girls High, Malvern Girls High, principal Euroa High; district liaison principal, Goulburn North East region. Director, The Pig Pen

Awards: 2006 Victorian Telstra business women’s Innovation Award Winner Euroa

June 21, 2007 — “Shut up and look around,” architect Philip Johnson used to tell visitors to his Glass House, an iconic steel-and-glass home based upon a design by Mies van der Rohe.

Finally, the public has a chance to “shut up and look around,” too. The modern house in New Canaan, Conn., officially opens as a museum today.

Widely considered one of the greatest residential structures of the 20th century, the Glass House, which was completed in 1949, is as much about the outside as the inside. What Johnson called his “wallpaper” - the landscape - was ever-changing. The interior, by contrast, remained unchanged for more than 50 years.

Its hard to imagine someone actually living in the austere open space - in fact, it wasnt designed to be lived in - but Johnson spent weekends there until finally moving in full-time in the 1990s.

A rug, Mies van der Rohe chairs and a daybed (circa 1930) define the living room. Behind a partition of walnut cabinets is the bedroom, with its plain double bed facing a glass wall. The circular brick bathroom is tiny by todays standards, and the “kitchen,” with its small sink, refrigerator and stove beneath a folding counter, feels like it would fit on a boat.

Guided tours take visitors through the Glass House, as well as four other buildings that Johnson designed on the 47-acre estate, owned by the late architect and his partner David Whitney. They both died in 2005 and left it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Across a grass courtyard, the Brick House, also completed in 1949, is the antithesis of the Glass House. Other than skylights in the narrow hallway, the only visible window is a large circle in the study. Fortuny silk covers the windows and walls in the bedroom. The white ceiling vaults add to the feeling of enclosure. Like many of the design elements on the estate, they are historical references to an English building from 1824 and harbingers of Johnsons commissioned work.

The subterranean Painting Gallery, completed in 1965, reveals three circular spaces with “poster racks” that rotate to change the display of large modern paintings by Frank Stella, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and others.

The Sculpture Gallery, built in 1970, is a series of stairs leading to five levels with bays that display sculptures by Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris and more. Sunlight pouring through the glass ceiling casts an ever-changing pattern on the brick floors and white walls. (In the Glass Houses visitor center, tour-goers can view a video loop showing the change of light over 24 hours.)

Da Monsta is the last structure built, in 1995. Johnson abandoned the straight line and created a winged, warped shape using concrete. Originally designed to be a visitors center, the curved-walled interior is an enclosed, womb-like space with only one window.

Tours are limited to 10 people at a time, so an intimate experience with the buildings, art and landscape is all but guaranteed. Tickets cost $25. For information, visit www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org or call (866) 811-4111.