History

Juggler Paul Cinquevalli made four visits to Australia between 1899 and 1914. He was a skilled showman who perfected the art of juggling to a degree seldom seen. One of his favourite places became Australia until fate intervened. Cinquevalli was Polish and started his performing life as a trapeze artist. However a bad accident transformed the mediocre acrobat into the world’s greatest juggler. Cinquevalli called it ‘the fluke of my life’.

Leann Richards reports on how the whiff of backstage shenanigan’s made the front page in 1901, when actors used their skills in a courtroom drama of love and jealousy.

With composer / lyricist Stephen Schwartz’s latest musical Wicked recently opened in Sydney, Peter Pinne looks at why Schwartz ranks right up there alongside Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe with musical theatre audiences ‘down under.’

Stephen Schwartz had his first break in 1971 with a small, off-Broadway entry, Godspell. Based on The Gospel According To St. Mathew, this soft-rock, pop-biblical show took off and ended up playing 2,124 performances.

Who now remembers Florrie Forde? It’s nearly seventy years since she died and her art is all but forgotten, but many of the songs she introduced and popularised are still sung with nostalgic gusto. For four decades this jolly, buxom songstress sauntered across the music hall stages of Britain. She was billed, accurately, as ‘the world’s greatest chorus singer’ – and she came from Australia.