Monday, April 23, 2007
SHOW PROVES AN EMBARRASSMENT
A bold prediction last year from the Independent’s Kathy Marks:
The Australian government would prefer the world to forget about David Hicks, an Adelaide man detained at Guantanamo Bay. That is unlikely to happen, with the opening of a theatrical work highlighting his plight at the Sydney Opera House.
Honour Bound, by a leading Australian director, Nigel Jamieson, was created in conjunction with Mr Hicks’ father, Terry, and stepmother, Bev ...
The show will prove a severe embarrassment for Australia ...
But the show turned out to be more of an embarrassment for its producers:
What hurt was the failure of their two bigger shows, the David Hicks-inspired Honour Bound and the drama, Eldorado, to attract audiences.
“In retrospect, they weren’t production failures so much as victims of our expectations,” [executive producer Stephen] Armstrong says.
Yes. You expected people to turn up. But, despite rave reviews ...
The best show I have seen so far this year is HONOUR BOUND. Reading all the harping about the theatre on this site there seems to be only one other entry re HONOUR BOUND. Not surprising really - it gets rave reviews but I saw it with an audience of 25.
Just a timing problem, according to Armstrong:
“We were one-and-a-half steps ahead of public interest (in Hicks),” he says. “If the show had been on five months later it would have sold out.”
Interesting that those rave reviews did nothing to generate public interest.