Australian Touring productions vs. US touring productions

I’ve been seeing a ton of images for the North American tour of Moulin Rouge and I am just completely underwhelmed by the set. They were able to include the windmill and and elephant, but besides that it is lacking regarding the intamcy with the audience… I’m not surprised, but I am perplexed how the show was able to recreate the intamcy for the Australian tour, but had to go small scale for the North American tour. I wish the creative team was able to tour the can-can seats and the passerelle, but looks like those won’t be happening.

I find this is a common occurrence where Australian tours are able to copy the sit down productions physical package more so than their North American tour counterparts. Is there just more money to be spent down under?

Edit:

my original message didn’t include a single thing of what I wrote for some reason. So bare with me… sorry.

Updated On: 3/3/22 at 03:20 PM

The cast members instagrams and Broadway in Chicago have been posting some stuff

From Broadway in Chicago

Alex Timbers

Updated On: 3/3/22 at 03:33 PM

The Australian touring market has fewer opportunities than North America, with only 4 or so main cities to visit. The physical design of the show only needs to be scaled/altered to fit a handful of venues for longer runs.

The North American tour has more markets available, meaning the physical production needs to be adaptable for many more theatres. North American tours also extend and add cities when successful, so there's an amount of "future proofing" built in as well.

Passerelle's are a pain because they kill seats, alter the house layout and require a reassessment of fire evacuation routes; Not always worth it for a few weeks.

The Australian professional theatre scene is a bit of an anomaly when viewed from other major theatre countries.

Rather than having a single hub of theatre (e.g. Broadway, West End, etc.), a large handful of cities are considered on equal footing. As a result most productions will essentially do a sit-down production that lasts anywhere from 6 months up to 3+ years in a city before moving on to the next big market. So shows will likely know each of the 5 or so theatres it will occupy across its multi-year life cycle and will have tweaked the set with those venues in mind from the beginning. Houses are generally around 1500-2000 seats for reference.

Typically these initial seasons are in Sydney or Melbourne, with a bidding war taking place for the opening season (Hamilton was in Sydney, Book of Mormon and Wicked were in Melbourne for example). The show will then go to the other city, typically make their way up to Brisbane, and then go to the other of the 8 capital cities in the country for shorter seasons. Usually a show will finish domestically with a return season in the original opening city before moving to a more 'typical US-style tour' setup to cater to the New Zealand and the Asia markets.

This is partially that Australia is so big (almost same physical size as America) with a tiny population (2/3 of the population of California spread across the whole country). So each city has only a handful of theatres available due to population. Additionally, any domestic travel is a more laborious process due to sheer geographical spread, so audiences rarely travel en masse to see a show when it'll likely come to them in a few years. I will say, typically these shows do very well and nearly all sell at full capacity - it's a market with a high proportion of theatre-going public and being a repeat customer to the show is very normal even for general public who don't consider themselves as being particularly interested in theatre.

Obviously there are exceptions and different levels of theatre but for the big Broadway replica productions this is the typical way the market works here.

Updated On: 3/3/22 at 07:03 PM