“I’m the incendiary device;” says Angela Antony cheerfully of her role in the establishment of the Bruce Mason Centre (and a number of other North Shore arts initiatives). “But nothing happens with just one person.”
Equally, it seems, nothing would have happened without that one person, variously described as enthusiastic, determined and indefatigable in what became a 12 year quest to ensure that the North Shore had a theatre that was big enough for full-scale music theatre events, and that could serve the needs of both professional and community performing arts.
It all started when Takapuna’s Tudor Theatre (now the Berkeley) came on the market in February 1984. Angela and her husband John were actively involved in North Shore Operatic. Its base was The Pumphouse, but it was too small for larger shows; those were presented in the hall at what was then the teacher’s training college in Akoranga Drive. “When AUT took over, we lost access to that and needed another theatre,” says Angela. “I wrote to the paper and suggested that as the Tudor was up for sale, why not do it up as a theatre to complement The PumpHouse.”
The incendiary had been thrown. “I had phone calls from just about every arts group on the Shore saying, ‘Yes, we should’.”
Angela and a few others checked out the Tudor. Verdict: not suitable. Movie theatres don’t have backstage space, the screen was set right onto the back of the building and creating the required backstage area would necessitate building out into the carpark.
But the ambitions of 30 community arts groups had been ignited, and aspirations exploded as fast as the community support. North Shore, it seemed, needed not only a larger theatre. It lacked a civic and conference centre; the proposed theatre could also serve this purpose.
During the next few months Angela presented to the five councils then looking after local affairs on the Shore, without any spectacular success. “You think you’re having trouble with one council; just try five,” she mutters.
In September a steering group meeting of more than 200 people (limited to three representatives per group because of the level of interest) crammed the North Shore Operatic rooms. The Steering Committee was established, and within two months it had developed and signed the North Shore Theatre and Conference Centre Trust deed. It had also elected prospective Trustees.
“Trustees were picked for a balance of skills,” Angela says. People with educational, theatre, business, dance, television and interior design experience lined up.
“I also knew we needed a good lawyer on the Trust.” On the advice of a friend Angela rang a young lawyer called Geoff Clews, who she was told was interested in the arts. Geoff was keen and would have attended the initial steering group meeting in September, but for his wife giving birth inconveniently early to twins. “I hadn’t met Geoff at this stage,” says Angela. “It was just phone contact. But he was still prepared to come on the Board.” Ever-prepared, Angela “had the whole thing set up” when Geoff arrived for the first Trust Board meeting two months later; she handed him the papers she’d prepared for the Chair, and he graciously accepted the role with a droll “fait accompli, is it?”.
Without the Antony-Clews partnership the Bruce Mason Centre may not exist today. Angela took on the role of Director and kept the momentum going. Geoff’s legal skills proved invaluable, and when, 12 years later, the Centre was built and the Trust was devolved into a Board of Management appointed by Council, he and Angela were the two Trustees who continued their (still voluntary) work for “The Bruce”. Geoff stepped down from the Board only in 2009; Angela continues her association to this day, as a community adviser to the staff from Regional Facilities Auckland, which took over management of the Centre two years ago.
The years between the formation of the Trust and the turning of the sod on the site in The Promenade in April 1995 were littered with hiccups that seemed to stall the project at every turn: the withdrawal of a major property development partner post-sharemarket crash; unexpected land purchases and land redesignations; and the amalgamation of the five councils into North Shore City, to mention a few. But from 1992, when the Council endorsed the partnership with the Trust and agreed to proceed in a joint venture, things began to look up. Major funding support from ASB Trusts and the Lotteries Grants Board followed, and success was in the air.
“But for the wonderful mix of trustees, we would have given up years ago,” Angela reflects. “There were certainly times when we could have thrown the towel in, and without all of us supporting each other we may have. We all, with our partners, became very good friends. We had wonderful Christmas parties at Trustees’ homes each year to celebrate surviving another year.”
Similarly, Angela could not have maintained her unrelenting schedule of work for the Trust as well as for other arts organisations (more of which later) without the support of husband John, himself a stalwart of the Shore arts community until his death in March 2015. Angela and John had met when they both appeared in a Wellington Operatic production of The King and I. John was a priest and Angela “a temple dancer, straight out of school”. When they moved to Auckland a couple of years after they were married, they joined North Shore Operatic. Musical theatre has always been what Angela and John did; John sang, acted and directed shows and was president of North Shore Operatic three times before becoming President of Music Theatre New Zealand.
“I’m very lucky that John and I had the same interests or we’d have been divorced. I probably couldn’t have kept going,” Angela comments. In the first five years after the formation of the Trust she had small children and worked full-time on the project. “He supported me right through. He understood where I was coming from – and he wanted it too. We were always going to continue to do shows after we had kids – it ended up with me building a theatre and him directing shows. I remember someone once saying to me, ‘Look, I know your husband likes directing shows – but do you have to build him a theatre?’.” Cue chimes of Angela’s bubbling laughter.
But Angela’s involvement in the arts and theatre on the Shore and beyond are not limited to her commitment to the Bruce Mason Centre. Her professional profile cites a background in arts marketing and administration, advertising, research, public relations, photography, design, journalism and promotions. She’s worked extensively with councils, libraries, business associations, arts groups, major arts organisations and community arts councils. In short, Angela is fanatical about the arts. She was a dancer for 15 years, and was on the Board of Management at ‘The Bruce’ when it was finally built. She was active on committees for Arts Advocates Auckland, Shore Arts Forum and Artformz (the North Shore Winter arts festival), and was an administrator par excellence at Centre City Music Theatre and most recently (and still) at Tadpole Theatre Productions. Oh, and she worked as Promotions Co-ordinator for Takapuna City Council and then North Shore City Council, and was a Takapuna Community Board member for three years in the 1990s. She has also had long involvement with The PumpHouse Theatre, initially through North Shore Operatic, was last year appointed the first Patron of The PumpHouse ,and is currently undertaking extensive archive research in preparation for its 40th anniversary next May. No surprise, then, that in 1997 she received a Queen’s Service Medal for Community Service in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for “over 30 years’ service to the arts, including the establishment of the Bruce Mason Centre”.
But that was yet to come. When it came to the turning of the first sod in April 1995, “we really turned the sod; several sods! We’d made it! We all had spades and we dressed up in 1920s/’30s flappers outfits and did the ‘End of the Golden Weather’. Diana Mason [Bruce Mason’s widow] came up [from Wellington] and she and her daughter turned the sods with us.” It’s clear that while there was hard work involved, Angela rarely misses an opportunity to party, and this major milestone was celebrated with appropriate élan.
The official opening, on 6 August 1996, by Governor General Sir Michael Hardie Boys, was by comparison a more reserved affair, though it featured a cultural performance choreographed by Zella Morrison, and an excerpt from The End of the Golden Weather.
Progress in opening the Centre to the community and in attracting professional performances has been slower than Angela or her fellow trustees might have envisaged back in 1996. The Trust’s projections of financial sustainability were predicated on feasibility studies that incorporated commercial space and the adjacent carpark in the theatre’s operations. “The restructuring that councils made us do from what we’d intended originally, meant we were financially cash-strapped and not able to pursue things we would have liked to in the early stages. Theatres are very expensive to run. We had intended that all the community could have access either through audience participation or through groups being able to hire it. You’ve got to have commercial aspects of the theatre to subsidise that – and it didn’t happen….” Despite widespread misconceptions to the contrary, The Bruce Mason Centre neither operates the carpark, nor leases the commercial space included in the building.
The other issue was that it took longer than anticipated to attract people from “the other side” to shows at The Bruce. “Now that we’ve got parking and fabulous restaurants, it’s easy.”
That said, Angela is confident that under Regional Facilities Auckland management and manager Terence Harpur, ‘The Bruce’ is now offering both an exciting range of professional shows, and rebuilding the community connection that she and the 30 art groups envisaged 32 years ago when they set off in pursuit of Angela’s “impossible dream”.
Looking back, Angela believes all the work, all the meetings, planning, reports, set-backs and fundraising has been worthwhile, for the friendships formed and the goal achieved. “When I sit in there and the Royal New Zealand Ballet is on ‘my’ stage, I think, this is why I did it.”
