Firstly, we have different ideas of what constitutes a big theatre budget. For instance, the forthcoming (and troubled) Julie Taymor-directed Spider-Man Broadway musical has a capitalisation of around fifty five million US dollars (not a typo), about half of which will be spent on reconfiguring the venue. Now THAT’S a big budget for theatre! US$55M is more than DOUBLE what the entire STC – with its A$28M pa income – turns over in a year across ALL of its main stage, development, education and touring productions. (The budget’s so big in fact that the show will never make its money back. Investors are going to take a bath.)

Secondly, now matter how much actually was spent, I’d argue that the production aesthetic of The Mysteries was in fact very pared back. If you didn’t know what the Wharf 2 normally looked like, if you didn’t know that a carousel cost 15 grand, then all you saw was a black box and some revolving mattresses which could have been achieved by having a couple of stage hands hidden inside, pushing around a fixed axis. The design emphasised the performances and the text rather than the sets, and when visual elements did come to the fore, they did so with elegance and simplicity (like bringing on the snow in Eden or the ash of Lucifer’s fall). Contrast that with a show like, say, Priscilla Queen of the Desert where every last cent of its $10M (I think it was) capitalisation is ostentatiously visible on stage in the form of moving buses, frills, sequins and road kill.

Now I love the big budget shows … but I also love the no budget shows, or the shows that LOOK like no budget shows. One of the more memorable theatre performances I’ve seen was Seneca’s Oedipus which featured Robert Menzies alone on a bare stage for the entire play (except for one sequence when Kosky forgot to restrain himself).

Not going to get into the traditional owners acknowledgement issue other than to say I think it’s great when organisations choose to do it, but I’m certainly not going to take anybody to task if they don’t.

… Which, for me, is precisely what happened. I was blown away by The Mysteries: Genesis and believe it’s the best production I’ve seen this year. A case of the actor, the space and the audience coming together in, yes, an amazing, transforming piece of theatre.

The text was true to the source material in the ways that mattered (from what I recall of the Bible), and when it departed it did so with insight and dramatic purpose (eg the Penguin).

The Residents’ performances were all impressive and direction produced gripping moments of theatricality.

And the promenade format was an eye-opener. For me it created a theatre experience simultaneously communal and personal. It added to my idea of what theatre can do and how it does it. Not being familiar with the history or the purpose of this format I didn’t know that what we got was a “Claytons promenade”… but neither does that matter to me.

Not sure I understood your comments about the huge budget. I thought that the show had a very sparse feel to it, production-wise. The design team put very little on stage: a chair, ash, fake snow, a rope, masking tape, mattresses, some mechanics and sound. If money was spent reconfiguring the space then there was certainly no sense of the production values and design overwhelming the performances, given the entire piece took place, almost literally, in a black box. But then, my idea of a big budget show where production elements dominate is Wicked or Beauty and the Beast.

The nudity I thought was entirely appropriate to the setting and the story. It’s not like nudity in the theatre is particularly noteworthy these days. In the past year I think I’ve seen about half a dozen such shows, the most recent being The Only Child. Well, unless you count the puppet nudity in Avenue Q. 😉

While I’m being nitpicky, it’s probably more accurate to say that this was the main stage season debut of The Residents. They’ve been featured in various development initiatives and shows such as The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. This might however be the first time the entire troupe has appeared in one production.

Oh, at a wild guess, I’d venture that Audi and Armani are so consistently thanked because it’s written into their sponsorship contracts. 😉