Toni Lamond helped me fall in love with Australian theatre before I’d ever stepped inside one.
The legend of Australian stage, who died this week at age 93, had a career that spanned eight decades, leaving generations of Australians with a Toni Lamond that feels like theirs: the vaudevillian of the Tivoli circuit; the star of musicals such as Anything Goes and Gypsy; on TV in Number 96 and as a frequent figure on variety shows (she even hosted her own).
Growing up in central west New South Wales, I wouldn’t see a professional play until I was 16, with my first musical a year later (Grease, in a circus tent at a showground).
But I’d already learned that theatre was the thing for me. As a child visiting my grandmother’s house, I discovered a VHS tape of The Pirates of Penzance that she had lovingly recorded during a live ABC broadcast. I fell in instant, dizzying love.
Directed by Craig Schaefer and filmed live in 1994 at QPAC in Brisbane, the Essgee production was created by Simon Gallaher (who plays Frederic), to capitalise on the success of the Public Theater’s beloved New York staging starring Kevin Kline.
This new production took the US production’s sense of fun, but made it uniquely Australian. Stacked with slapstick humour and tight-panted-irreverence from the pitch-perfect Pirate King, Jon English, the show draws on Australia’s long comic traditions, which had been formed on the Tivoli and variety circuits. The script is interspersed with punny patter, old-joke wordplay and fourth-wall winking, paired with retro-style close-harmony singing (thanks to girl-group act the Fabulous Singlettes), which turned the show into what they proudly labelled a “poperetta”. It’s riotously irreverent, gut-achingly silly and extremely Australian-accented (it also ends, gloriously, with a megamix).
Crucially, it is also performed at a startlingly high calibre – and Toni Lamond, as pirate maid-of-all-work Ruth, is its sun and moon, holding it all together and keeping its heart big, warm and generous.
Her first number When Frederic Was a Little Lad bears the brunt of the show’s early exposition, while setting up stakes that will be called back in a deliciously silly number in the second act. Lamond handles all these narrative requirements with deceptive ease: she’s in complete control of the stage, the wordplay, the pacing and the timing. She is twinkly, charming and effortless, and the band of pirates – quick to mock her – still have no choice but to hang on her every word.
Later, I would learn that Lamond’s masterful interpretation of songs like this one had been beloved for decades. But in my grandmother’s living room, it felt like a revelation.
That production, and that performance, has been a north star in my life and my career as an Australian theatre critic. This joyous, bold, surprising adaptation sits on my shoulder as I watch new generations of artists take old stories and make them new again. It taught me to love shows that take big swings. It taught me to value precision and care; to not throw away a piece’s integrity in order to make a joke, because we can have both. It shows me what it looked like to have a cast of artists at the top of their game – with lashings of joy besides.
It’s one of the sacred shared texts between my best friend and me, who have often stayed up late after a house party to watch it all over again. And it gave me the gift of Toni Lamond, at the time and place when I needed her, where I could carry her with me for ever.
When I finally saw her live, at the Sydney Cabaret festival in 2019, I remember the tears streaming down my cheeks. There she was: funny, starry, powerful, holding us all up with her voice and presence.
Future audiences can get to know Lamond thanks to the incredible digital archive on YouTube curated by her son, the performer Tony Sheldon. For me, and for the thousands of other audience members touched by her talent, her humour and her formidable voice, these moments will light up our inner worlds for ever.
Toni Lamond has always been, and will always be, a vibrant link in the chain that stretches through the history of this form I love so much – the one that persists despite funding troubles and shifting tastes, because nothing beats the magic of sitting together in the dark, experiencing extraordinary people filling the room with magic, taking our joys and sorrows and singing them back to us, making us, too, extraordinary.
Cassie Tongue is a theatre critic and arts writer based in Sydney
