Resource | Text: Article | |
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Title | Criterion Theatre | |
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Source | Philip Parsons, Victoria Chance, Companion To Theatre In Australia, Currency Press with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, NSW, 1995 | |
Page | 168 | |
Date Issued | 1995 | |
Language | English | |
Citation | Ross Thorne, Criterion Theatre, Companion To Theatre In Australia, 1995, 168 | |
Resource Identifier | 64704 |
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Theatre on corner of Park and Pitt Streets, Sydney, opened 27 December 1886. Architect: George Johnson. Partially rebuilt 1892. Architects: Backhouse and Laidley. Closed 13 July 1935 and demolished.
For almost 50 years the Criterion Theatre was Sydney's major intimate playhouse. When it opened in 1886, with the operetta Falka, it was noted that the stage curtain was gold-fringed, dark red plush instead of the green baize of Georgian-Regency convention. The Sydney Morning Herald said the theatre 'made the spectator feel far nearer to London than usual', the nearest approach being the 'pretty little' Bijou Theatre in Melbourne. It was 'a great advance in Sydney theatres'. The NSW Government Architect thought otherwise in 1887, when he inspected it as a postscript to a royal commission on the safety of theatres. He complained that the smell from poorly ventilated dressing rooms and their lavatories was so overpowering as to make him sick. He described a forced ventilation system that seemed to move air from this malodorous basement into the auditorium and expel it into the stalls urinals whence 'it must find its way back to the parts of the theatre from which it was drawn, carrying with it a proportion of the vitiated air from the urinals and closets'.
George Johnson, the architect who designed the theatre for John Solomons, had previously produced a nightmare for officialdom in Melbourne, the Opera House in Bourke Street. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed a capacity of 1500-1700 for the Criterion, but the Government Architect calculated seating for only 991 persons on the three levels of the auditorium-stalls, dress circle and a combined family circle and gallery. After only five years another firm of architects was commissioned to redesign the auditorium, push back the proscenium wall, raise the roof by 3.7 metres, build new dressing rooms that could have light and air, and improve the foyer space. The high proscenium was lowered and widened, opening onto a stage 11 metres deep by 17.7 metres wide. The ceiling of the auditorium was raised and a dome with a sliding roof was inserted. Now the interior was in keeping with the solid, deeply modelled Victorian, neo-baroque Renaissance exterior.
This work was undertaken for the Brough-Boucicault Comedy Company, which leased the theatre for a few years. Later, The Kelly Gang was performed with sensational stage effects in 1898, and William Anderson presented Australian melodramas, including George Darrell’s The Land of Gold and Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan's The Squatter s Daughter in 1907. Modifications in 1905 increased the seating capacity beyond 1300. Frank Musgrove bought the theatre in 1913 and in 1915 it passed to J.C. Williamson's and as the Firm's Sydney outlet for West End comedies from London. The Criterion also housed the Australian premiere of the musical comedy Irene in August 1920 and specialists such as Dante the Magician in 1933. It closed in 1935 with The Patsy by Barry Connor.