Blue Wizard
Belvoir presents
Blue Wizard By NICK COYLE Belvoir’s production of Blue Wizard opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Saturday 21 February 2015. Dramaturg ADENA JACOBS Design Consultant RALPH MYERS Lighting Designer DAMIEN COOPER Composer & Sound Designer STEVE TOULMIN Stage Manager EDWINA GUINNESS With NICK COYLE
Presented in association with Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
Originally commissioned and presented by PACT centre for emerging artists
THANK YOU Ace Metalwork COVER IMAGE Nick Coyle by Julian Meagher PHOTOGRAPHY Katy Green Loughrey DESIGN Alphabet Studio
Creator’s Note Nick Coyle Hey! Thanks for coming to the show or picking up the program in the foyer. A few years ago I was at a party in Melbourne and a drunk girl, who in hindsight was clearly an oracle, gave me a blue wig. When I tried to give it back to her at sunrise she looked into my eyes and whispered: ‘Keep it’. I didn’t see what happened next but I assume she turned into a fruitbat and flapped off over Brunswick, but the point is I had a real connection with this wig. So I wrote a show where I could wear it. Blue Wizard, the flaming representative of a distant crystal planet, was born. It strutted and fretted for two weeks in 2013 at PACT centre for emerging artists as part of Tiny Stadiums Festival, to some acclaim and bewilderment. If someone had told me at that party I’d be performing in a one-man show wearing that wig at Belvoir I would have said: ‘What is this, an oracle party? Great!’ The synopsis of the show is simple: a wizard crashes to earth in a comet, casts spells and dances magic dances in an effort to return to his home planet. What else, if anything, you take from it, I won’t hazard a guess; I’ll just nod smugly with my eyes closed and say ‘exactly’ when you tell me what you think it means.
I have no idea what it is now, but in the beginning I wanted to write a show that pitched beauty against reality and endowed beauty with secret steroids. I wanted to write a show about being gay, about sickness, about alienation, loneliness and despair, but that was still a whole lot of fun. Tonal gear shift! I was born the same year AIDS woke up in America. While I was an adorable baby, a girly boy, a rollerblading teen, a terrible number of gay men were dying. And lesbians were caring for them. And the whole gay community was fighting – for help, for drugs, for legislation. That huge recent trauma is hard to grapple with when you weren’t there, when you sometimes doubt whether or not the ‘gay community’ even exists any more, when there’s nothing you can really do with gratitude. In the play it’s a whole planet that’s gone, because that’s how it feels. Anyway, that’s only important if you’re studying this play for the HSC and for some reason it has been left off the syllabus. I go to the theatre for the same reasons filthy illiterate peasants went to church five hundred years ago: for magic and miracles, for wonder and knowledge, for solace, and for love. And for wine. These are the things I’ve hunted and killed and laid at your feet.
It’s been amazing to revisit and rework this show with the support of Belvoir and the diamond mind of Adena Jacobs; giving a play a second chance at life is too rare a privilege in Sydney. I’m severely grateful to everyone who worked on the show, for their time, effort, and genius ideas which I will take credit for. And to you, for coming. Thanks!
Biographies NICK COYLE Writer / Performer Nick is a writer, director and performer. Blue Wizard originally premiered at PACT as part of the Tiny Stadiums Festival and was awarded the 2013 FBi SMAC (Sydney Music, Arts and Culture) Award for Best On Stage. Recently, Nick wrote, directed and starred in Double Tribute, which had seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, London and the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Nick’s play for children, Uh Oh Tony! (TRS), premiered at the Bondi Pavilion in 2013 and toured regional NSW in 2014. He performed and recorded a radio play, Batfeet, at 107 Projects for FBi Radio in 2013. Nick’s one-man show Me Pregnant! premiered at the Old Fitz in 2011, then played at the Melbourne Fringe Festival (where it was awarded the Powerhouse Outstanding Comedy Award), the Brisbane Comedy Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Nick won an FBi SMAC Award for the production. Nick’s other shows include Rommy (Old Fitz); The October Sapphire (New York International Fringe Festival); and Hammerhead (is dead) (Griffin’s Stablemates). His work Kittenbone Bridge was produced as part of Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf2Loud season and the Imperial Panda Festival, and later reworked as a radio play broadcast on FBi. As Pig Island, Nick co-wrote, directed and produced Simply Fancy (The Old Fitz Theatre, Downstairs at Belvoir, Melbourne Comedy Festival and
Edinburgh Fringe Festival); The Glass Boat (Melbourne Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Arts Festival) won the Golden Gibbo Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Nick created the FBi radio show Versus. Nick Coyle’s Guided Meditation, an hour-long show developed from the meditations on Versus, recently debuted at Giant Dwarf in Sydney, and will go to Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. DAMIEN COOPER Lighting Designer Damien’s designs for Belvoir include Radiance, The Glass Menagerie, Coranderrk, Miss Julie, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peter Pan, Private Lives, Conversation Piece, Strange Interlude, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Neighbourhood Watch, The Seagull, Gethsemane, Keating!, Toy Symphony, Peribanez, Stuff Happens, The Chairs, The Spook, In Our Name, The Underpants, The Ham Funeral and Exit the King. His other theatre credits include Cyrano de Bergerac, The Effect, Children of the Sun, The Long Way Home, Storm Boy, The Splinter, Under Milk Wood, Pygmalion, Bloodland, Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness, Zebra!, Blood Wedding, The Women of Troy, The Great, Riflemind, The Art of War, Ying Tong, The Lost Echo, Fat Pig, A Hard God, The Cherry Orchard, Summer Rain, Metamorphosis, Boy Gets Girl, Julius Caesar, Far Away, Bed, Thyestes, Morph, The Shape of Things, These People and
King Lear (Sydney Theatre Company), among many others. Damien has also designed for Opera Australia, Canadian Opera Company, Houston Grand Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, Chunky Move, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Australian Dance Theatre, Legs on the Wall and KAGE Physical Theatre. Damien has won three Sydney Theatre Awards and three Green Room Awards. EDWINA GUINNESS Stage Manager Edwina graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts’ School of Production in 2006. At Belvoir she has stage managed A Christmas Carol, Hedda Gabler, Small and Tired, Persona and Beautiful One Day; and has assistant stage managed The Book of Everything, Conversation Piece, The Business and The Power of Yes. Edwina has also stage managed Jump for Jordan, Dreams in White and The Boys (Griffin Theatre Company). She has assistant stage managed One Man Two Guvnors, Under Milk Wood, Bloodland, The Mysteries Genesis, Elling, The War of the Roses, Convicts Opera, Riflemind (Sydney Theatre Company); Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Malthouse Theatre); Faustus, Just Macbeth, Othello (Bell Shakespeare); Optimism (Sydney Theatre Company/Malthouse Theatre); The Grenade (Sydney Theatre Company/Melbourne Theatre Company); Poppea, Orphee et Eurydice (Victorian Opera); and La Cenerontola (Opera Australia).
ADENA JACOBS Dramaturg Adena is Belvoir’s Resident Director and the Artistic Director of Fraught Outfit. Adena graduated with an Honours degree in Creative Arts from Melbourne University and a Masters of Theatre Practice from the Victorian College of the Arts. Adena’s directing credits include Oedipus Rex, Hedda Gabler (which she also adapted, Belvoir); Exil (Sydney Chamber Opera/Carriageworks); On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (NEON Festival – Melbourne Theatre Company); Elektra (The Dog Theatre); The City (Red Stitch Actors Theatre); This Is For You (La Mama); and Cleansed (Victorian College of the Arts). In 2013 Adena’s Fraught Outfit production of Persona (which premiered at Theatre Works the previous year) was presented at Belvoir – it won five Green Room Awards in 2012 including Best Production and Best Direction. Adena was the recipient of the Melbourne International Arts Festival’s Harold Mitchell Fellowship (2010), the Female Director in Residence at Malthouse Theatre (2012), and is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. RALPH MYERS Design Consultant Ralph is Belvoir’s Artistic Director. For Belvoir he has directed Peter Pan, directed and designed Private Lives, and designed Kill the Messenger, Is This Thing On?, The Government Inspector, Coranderrk, Hamlet, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, Death of a Salesman, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The Seagull, The Wild Duck, Measure
for Measure, Toy Symphony, Parramatta Girls, Ray’s Tempest, The Spook, The Fever, Conversations with the Dead and The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. Ralph’s other credits include The City, A Streetcar Named Desire, Blackbird, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Kind of Alaska/Reunion, The Lost Echo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Boy Gets Girl, This Little Piggy, Far Away, Morph, Endgame, The 7 Stages of Grieving and Frankenstein, which he also directed (Sydney Theatre Company); Enlightenment, Cruel and Tender, Dinner, Frozen (Melbourne Theatre Company); Othello (Bell Shakespeare); Wonderlands (Griffin Theatre Company/ Hothouse Theatre Company); Borderlines, Sweet Phoebe (Griffin Theatre Company); Eora Crossing (Legs on the Wall/Sydney Festival); Black Box (Ballet de l’Opera de Lyon); Caligula (English National Opera); The Marriage of Figaro, Peter Grimes, Così fan tutte (Opera Australia); La Bohème (New Zealand Opera); and Two Faced Bastard (Chunky Move). STEVE TOULMIN Composer & Sound Designer Steve’s composition and design credits include Radiance, Is This Thing On?, 20 Questions, The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe, The Seed, Scorched (Belvoir); Little Mercy, Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness (Sydney Theatre Company); Twelfth Night (Bell Shakespeare); Beached, A Hoax (Griffin Theatre Company); Great Falls, Liberty Equality Fraternity, Circle Mirror Transformation (Ensemble); That Face (Queensland Theatre Company); Tender Napalm, Julius Caesar and Hamlet (La Boite Theatre Company). He was music director for pop artist Ricki-Lee from 2012 to 2014, and wrote and produced for her most recent album Dance in the Rain.
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The gayest one-man show ever!
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