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Arts body calls SBS Broadway doco “an error of judgement”

An SBS documentary about two Australian musical theatre composers trying to mount a show in NYC has come under fire.

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An SBS documentary about two Australian musical theatre composers trying to mount a show in New York has come under fire from an Arts body.

Live Performance Australia represents employer groups in live theatre and the arts including The Australian Ballet, Dainty Consolidated Entertainment and Bell Shakespeare Company. Its president Andrew Kay said the decision to commission the four-part fly-on-the-wall series was an ‘error of judgment.’

The four part doco, Angels in New York, follows Marcus Cheong and Ken Lai who wrote the musical Angels. It tracks their ambitious journey raising money and flying to New York, where they auditioned 1500 actors and employed a professional cast and crew -despite not having raised any of the $16 million needed to mount the ambitious show.

“Australian productions and producers have fought really hard to win the respect of American producers and investors,” he said. “America is the home of the musical and we’re reliant on the flow of productions and funds to create musicals here. Why a government-funded authority would support a program that inadvertently undermines our industry and focuses on negative aspects of it when there are so many positive stories to be told (escapes me).”

If there was misrepresentation by the musical team to professionals in New York then the film crew’s role may come into question. But New York is a pretty tough town. It would be hard to hoodwink Actor’s Equity. Otherwise it’s a perfectly legitimate story to film aspiring music theatre composers, even if their dreams are overly-ambitious. There haven’t been many Aussie musicals making a go of it in NYC (The Boy from Oz being the most well-known), let alone succeeding. The documentary allows extraordinary access to this process, for better or worse.

SBS’s Denise Eriksen said, “It’s not our job to judge whether those dreams are realistic,” she said. “They attracted the work of some good people in New York and good luck to them.”

Episode three airs tonight.

Source: The Australian

6 Responses

  1. One month to go for the SBS arts channel which they are delivering to Foxtel as a new channel, sorry a replacement channel.

    The move to replace Ovation will be judged on not just a documentary programme but a whole channel.

  2. I love the series especially as I’m not interested in musicals.
    I love the concept behind the musical and like so many things in life, requires luck, hard work and perseverence to make it big in the world!

  3. The criticism form Live Performance Australia & Ronnie below are totally unfair!

    How come SBS is under the spotlight for commissioning this when ABC was quite happy to throw money & promote rubbish like ‘The Choir Of Hard Knocks’? Aren’t we all ignoring the usally excellent arts documentaries that air on Saturday afternoons on SBS1? Also, what about their new arts Pay TV channel, STVDIO, & the SBS Youth Orchestra? Yeah, what would they know about the arts, huh?

    Some people should just calm down because it’s just another prime time fly-on-the-wall programme. It’s not meant to be taken seriously.

    Btw, is wrong of me to think of Chris Lily’s ‘Ricky Wong’ when I watch these two guys? 🙂

  4. It occurs to me that if the doco had shown an overwhelming success story, then this organization would not have seen it’s commisioning as an error of judgement. I’m pretty sure the funding organizations are there to fund docos that capture reality. Alternately there are productions that portray exclusively positive images of an organization or industry or vested interest group: they’re called corporate videos. Any one with enough money can produce one with a beginning, middle and end, exactly to their liking. A documentary is quite a different thing.

  5. I have found the show a little odd, with the boys New York or no where attitude. I wish Marcus & Ken all the best with their grand vision but sometimes you have to crawl first before you can fly. As a person who has written a musical and is trying to get it on stage i know how tough it is but i really want my show produced at home first. I have done a lot of leg work and I know there is more to come. Oneday I hope to walk to say “hey I wrote that” !!

    Good luck guys.

  6. I’m totally over SBS’s faux-factual, tabloid and lowbrow approach to commissioning. They need a strategic re-think and no better time to do it – they have no money to spend on commissioning so look internally. Why should the government give them more money to commission more rubbish? I read somewhere that Matt Campbell said they spend $21M on commissioning. That’s only 10% of a $200M budget. Why don’t they just merge with the ABC and spend $200M commissioning from independents? Why have a chronically underfunded national broadcaster in this age of multi-channelling? Why have two complete infrastructures? The ABC could programme 6-8 channels including everything great SBS does at a fraction of the cost, liberating money where it’s needed most – quality content.

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