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TIVOLI SYDNEY - Photo by AL CURLEY FRAZER - STATE LIBRARY OF NSW -

NEW TIVOLI DECORATED FOR THE 1954 ROYAL VISIT

Source - The Sydney Morning Herald Mon 8 Feb 1954 Page 4

Review - Royal Concert At Tivoli The Queen did not see and hear Australian opera, ballet and orchestral playing at their best during the hotchpotch programme of the Royal gala performance at the Tivoli Theatre on Saturday night. There was a bishop beside a brewer and a ballerina beside a footballer in the large and full-plumed audience, so it was perhaps not inappropriate that the programme should offer comparable incongruities^-a quipping fore- word by the English comedian Tommy Trinder; a few short ceremonious English pieces by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Sir Bernard Heinze; a performance of the comic opera “Devil Take Her” by Australian Arthur Benjamin; more joking by Mr. Trinder; and the new Beth Dean version of John Anthill’s “Corroboree” ballet.

All of these performances ran along with lively compe- tence, yet never took wing. The big audience, rather stiff and constrained and watchful both of its manners and of the Royal box, could not let itself go, and the applause, unlike the stifling atmospheric temperature, was seldom more than lukewarm. The rebellious arts do not know how to thrive on good manners.

Indeed, it was such a constrained occasion, on stage and off, that if the compere had introduced himself as Thomas Trinder no one could have been much surprised. The implications of official ceremony in some of the orchestral pieces did not really help to create a genial atmosphere of relaxation and enjoyment.

A little spontaneity would have been a blessing. “A careless tune, with a little nonsense in it now and then” -according to Horace Walpole-“ does not misbecome a monarch.” But the programme-builders had forgotten it.

Contributed by Greg Lynch -