On other matters
To all those Victorians sulking about Queenslanders in the cricket team you are OK now. There are none full of NSW and Victorians. Shane, Kanimbla repeated calls to “evacuate, evacuate” rang out. Everybody sat wondering if it was part of the show or not as the ushers were standing in the doorways acting as if everything was okay. It must have been five minutes before we were actually ushered out of the theatre. After spending an hour outside and the fire brigade giving the OK, we were allowed back in so the show could start again.
Obviously then we had an audio problem. One set of standing microphones were turned up so loud that it hurt our ears, while the on-body mics were the opposite, so it was extremely hard to hear the dialogue. This continued until interval which became another extra long wait (with many people leaving) only to be told by the performers that the performance could not continue because of technical problems. This was our third time at this theatre that had some kind of bad technical audio problems during performance and so gives the impression that the audio system is not up to standard. Why build a beautiful new theatre which is let down by an underperforming audio system? I can’t recall this ever happening in the old Civic Theatre.
The whole night for us was very disappointing and since we had to travel from the Tablelands made it worse.
On a lighter note. The highlight of the evening seemed to be when we had been evacuated outside the theatre there was an announcement that the bar was open for free drinks. Ian Lummis, Tinaroo 1940: German forces invade Norway and
Denmark in World War II. 1966: Italian film star Sophia Loren marries director Carlo Ponti, who still has a wife in Italy. 1970: Paul McCartney seeks a High Court writ to wind up the Beatles business partnership, effectively ending the group’s career. 2006: Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer denies UN accusations his department was involved in alleged kickbacks paid by the country’s monopoly wheat exporter to Saddam Hussein’s regime. 2016: Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini confesses to being “the man in the hat” caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport in December 2015. 2017: Comedian and satirist John Clarke (above) dies aged 68 while hiking in Victoria’s Grampians National Park.