New Bijou Theatre

Theatre above Victoria Arcade, opened as Academy of Music 6 November 1876. Architects: Read and Barnes Renamed Bijou Theatre 1880. Destroyed by fire 22 April 1889. RebuiIt and opened 5 April 1890. Architect: George Johnson. Demolished 1934.

The Bijou Theatre, always praised as comfortable and intimate, was above the Victoria Arcade which ran from Bourke Street to Little Collins Street. Stairs rose from an entrance in Bourke Street to a gallery, 36 metres long by 5.7 metres wide, that gave access to the theatre. Along the full length of the gallery, overlooking Royal Lane, was a 19th-century version of a glass curtain wall in arches and filigree cast-iron. The opposite wall repeated the arch motif in mirrors. The space was replete with statuary, urns, tessellated flooor and large basket chandeliers on the ceiling. Next to the gallery was an even longer billiards saloon.

The theatre appears to have been a three-and-a-half level house, seating up to 1500 persons, with a modest stage which backed onto Little Collins Street. There was no pit, but only stalls surrounded by a dress circle at stage level – half a level above the stalls floor. Posts supported a family circle and gallery above. An alderman, Joseph Aarons, built the theatre and leased it to the entrepreneur George Lewis, who managed it as the Academy of Music. The Italian actor Eduardo Majeroni took it over and renamed it the Bijou Theatre in 1880. The theatre was the Brough-Boucicault Comedy Company’s Melbourne home until fire reduced it to bare walls. After a coroner’s inquest into two deaths caused by falling bricks, Lorgnette magazine attacked the Victorian Board of Health, which licensed theatre. It also condemned fire brigades for ‘their petty squabble, their concentrated detestation of each other, their puerile punctiliousness, their contemptible intriguing, their peculiar appropriation of funds granted by Government, their drunkenness, thievery and insubordination’. All this indicated why fires were rarely brought under control.

The Brough-Boucicault company returned to the rebuilt theatre, which seems largely to have retained its original features, though the auditorium was now on three levels, with the stalls extending beneath the dress circle, and the capacity was 1700-1900 persons. The proscenium was 9 metres wide by 13.8 metres deep, with small dressing rooms in the flies. The old groove system of scenery, with its many ropes and pulleys, had been discarded.

In the early 20th century the Bijou had no long-term lessee until Fullers’ took it over, together with the smaller Gaiety Theatre in the same building. Fullers’ decided in 1929 to convert both theatres to cinemas, with the aim of eventually demolishing them and building one or more new theatres. Then a company of unemployed actors performed at the Bijou until it was demolished in 1934. No theatre was built on the site.