With Showbiz Queenstown entering its second half-century with Into The Woods starting next week, it’s surely time to make a song and dance about it.
As the Queenstown Musical and Operatic Society it launched in 1974 with Salad Days, in which Fae Robertson played "an attractive and saucy Rowena".
She says it grew out of a loose group of entertainers, The Gaiety Club, who’d sing for Paddy’s Day and the like.
She subsequently had singing/dancing roles for 18 years and also served as president and secretary.
A set builder, her stepfather Owen Lockhart also wrote the 1979 show, Beyond The Moonlight, depicting local history.
"We paid an actor because we were short of a male lead and every time a coconut he missed the cue to lead us in."
Later, when helping out at the bar during a show, she got her drinks mixed up — "instead of asking a customer if they’d like an RTD, I said, ‘would you like an STD?"’
"He said, ‘how much?’, I think I said ‘10 grand’ and he said, ‘is that enough?"’
"That was a momentous step," says Greg Thompson, who was president when the first director came onboard for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in ’88.
"It just lifted everything up and improved the way we did the show including lighting and sound.
"Since then we’ve come full circle almost in that we’ve got our own people being directors who have learnt through it."
An example is Marty Newell, who’s trod the boards every year, except three years, since 1995.
After serving as assistant director he directed Jesus Christ Superstar in 2014, co-directed Annie in 2016 and is director again this month.
He says "it’s also very good to bring in a professional to bring in new ideas and teach people different things".
"The standard just keeps getting better and better, and I think we push ourselves every year to be better and better.
"We want to be the best — we don’t want to be an amateur musical society, so people come in and experience a show they could see in Christchurch or Auckland."
Two hugely ambitious shows were 2017’s Mamma Mia!, which used the Events Centre, and Les Miserables in 2009, where the Queenstown Memorial Centre had a revolving stage.
"Les Mis was something we were told we could never do, which of course just fired us up to actually do it," Newell says.
Thompson, who renamed the Queenstown Musical Society Showbiz, says he and other long-timers have experienced three ever-better iterations of the Memorial Centre.
"Until the first modification it was absolutely awful — we had to hang scaffolding pipes so we could hang lights up and we put in temporary power supplies because we would have blown up the whole thing otherwise."
Someone who knew the venue well was the late Glenn ‘Scooter’ Reid, whom Thompson brought along when he taught at Wakatipu High and who later ran the lighting for about 20 years and also served as president — the light and sound booth’s named in his honour.
Someone else who’s grown through the society is Nicole McLean, who played Velma in 2013’s Chicago and is now choreographer for the second year running.
Another is current president Emma Pullar, who originally played an orphan in Annie in 1989 and whose daughter Ruby was an orphan in the next Annie in 2016 when she was 7.
A special repeat was Showbiz’s The Sound of Music in 2012, when cast from the show 30 years earlier visited for a reunion.
They included Stelios Yiakmis, who went on to act in TV dramas like Shortland Street and McLeod’s Daughters.
In the ’82 version "I was singing Rolf’s song, I am 17, going on 18, on my 17th birthday," he told Mountain Scene.
Thompson says his only regret is Showbiz, which can no longer use its Isle St rehearsal room, is homeless.
"Every other society I can think of in Otago and Southland has got their own space, and poor old Showbiz has been shoved around from pillar to post."
Reader giveaway
Our friends at Showbiz Queenstown are giving us two double passes to next Thursday’s opening night of Into The Woods, to give to you.
To be in to win, just email ed@scene.co.nz — subject line ‘Showbiz’ — by noon Tuesday, May 13, and we’ll notify the winners directly.
Into The Woods is being staged at the Queenstown Memorial Centre till Saturday, May 24 — for more info, or to buy tickets, visit showbizqueenstown.com
