#sean hingston

(Sydney 1985: Laura Hamilton/Bishop as Rumpelteazer, Grant Smith as Bustopher, and Christopher Hall as Mistoffelees)

Time for the fifth production for my CATS 40th anniversary series: Australia 1985!

This production’s a tricky one - mostly because I am not aware of any footage for the first twenty years or more. By that stage, of course, it isn’t ‘the’ Australian production, but a whole family of productions sprung from that one source.

(Melbourne 1987: Femi Taylor as Bombalurina, and Sean Hingston as Plato)

Properly speaking, it’s the parent of the Hamburg production (though that later drew closer to the Broadway tradition). The original production continued like a long-stop tour for about a decade...

(A great shot from 1993 of the characteristic wig shapes (which only got wider from then on!).)

At the end of the 1990s it evolved in the Australian 'circus tent' tour. That was the basis for the South Africa / World Tour production (2001–05)...

(Circus tent tour, c. 2000: finale, and Cara Dinley as Demeter.)

... then it was also the parent of the the Korean productions in 2008 and 2011, the Australasian production of 2007–10, the China production of 2012, and the 2014 Asia tour.

From a technical point of view, it’s also the parent of the 2015 Australia revival and the 2017 and 2020 Asia tours, though the former was a curious hybrid of designs and the latter two have adopted the London revival designs and changes. So the major continuity is in management and a few key cast / artistic members who have been present though that transition (e.g., Thalia Burt, Holly Meegan, Aaron Lynch, and particularly Andrew Dunne).

But since I'm focussing on the earlier productions for this project, let's close with the curtain call sequence from the 2011 Korean production! Some actual footage, hoorah.

The first eight cats are the swings: all named, bringing the total number of cats up to 30!

So far as I can make out they are:

Girls (left to right): Jemima, Etcetera, Electra, Olivia

Boys (left to right): George, Victor, Admetus, Quaxo

Then the sequence is: