Charl Blignaut
LEADING music concert promoter Attie van Wyk said this week he wants to bring international actors to South Africa in an effort to rejuvenate the country’s languishing theatre industry.
He disclosed plans to add an International Theatre Division to his already successful Big Concerts promotions company.
To be headed by Bernard Jay, entertainment director of the computerised national booking service Computicket, the theatre operation aims to draw some of the biggest names in international theatre to South Africa for limited runs of modern plays and musicals. Jay has already given notice at Computicket and will be leaving in four months’ time to join Big Concerts.
“Over the past few years South Africa has opened up to pop music and to sport … I see no reason why the same can’t happen with theatre,” said Jay this week. “It’s time to bring the masses back to the theatre.”
South African theatre audiences have dwindled in recent years, and both he and Van Wyk are convinced the only way they can stop the rot is to attract the superstar theatre names to the country – particularly the movie actors who frequently return to the West End or Broadway to fulfil their love for the stage.
Van Wyk has been responsible for bringing 40 international artists to South Africa, including Tina Turner, Whitney Houston and Phil Collins. He plans to bring in Michael Jackson later this year and there is speculation that he will also handle the U2 tour in October this year.
The kind of names bandied about by Van Wyk and Jay this week include Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Gene Wilder, Glenn Close and Meryl Streep – all known for their stage performances between film projects. Close has recently played a season of Sunset Boulevard and De Niro has just come off a small off-Broadway production.
With this individual star pulling-power, combined with the obligatory local cast, Big Concerts feels it could fill a 1 000- seat theatre for a few weeks. It would hope to make use of existing theatres such as Pretoria’s State Theatre and Johannesburg’s Civic. There are no plans, as yet, to build new spaces for their envisaged projects, but this week Van Wyk did not rule out the possibility of developing new theatre property if the theatre plan takes off.
Jay stressed that Big Concerts will be filling gaps in South Africa’s commercial theatre market and not stepping on the toes of the likes of Pieter Toerien and Richard Loring.
This means the big musicals will probably not be handled by Big Concerts. Toerien is negotiating with Cameron Mackintosh, producer of such hits as Les Misrables, Miss Saigon, Phantom of the Opera and Cats, with an eye to staging Mackintosh productions in Cape Town.
Jay and Van Wyk left Johannesburg on Wednesday for a fortnight in London where they will meet actors, agents and theatre producers in an attempt to gauge interest in their project. They will also be spending time in New York.