{"id":639671,"date":"2026-10-08T01:28:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T01:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/639671\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T01:28:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T01:28:12","slug":"can-young-theatre-makers-act-for-50-hours-straight-fuelled-by-pizza-and-determination-theyve-done-it-before-australian-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/639671\/","title":{"rendered":"Can young theatre-makers act for 50 hours straight, fuelled by pizza and determination? They\u2019ve done it before | Australian theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend kids at Australia\u2019s oldest youth-owned-and-led arts company Shopfront Arts Co-op are reviving their 50-hour act-a-thon fundraiser which helped keep the Sydney company going through tough times in the late 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n

The act-a-thon is a slightly bonkers theatrical endurance event (which will be livestreamed for the first time) that captures the scrappy and heroic nature of the Carlton company\u2019s history, now celebrating 50 years. Young artists will perform live in one-hour blocks from works they have devised themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll be performing in the 3.30am slot,\u201d says Nicole Pingon, who first performed at Shopfront at 13 and is now in her mid-20s. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing yet but I\u2019ll figure it out!\u201d<\/p>\n

Shopfront Arts Co-op\u2019s act-a-thon in 1977, in Hurstville, NSW. Photograph: Shopfront Arts Co-op<\/p>\n

Which feels about right. Shopfront has been figuring stuff out since it was formed in 1976 by two theatre directors, Errol Bray and Garry Fry. Among its alumni are playwrights Hilary Bell and Andrew Upton, and actors Trevor Ashley and Paul Capsis. <\/p>\n

It was a different world to some extent. Back in 1976, kids were being warned about becoming square-eyed watching the colour TVs only just introduced to Australia. The prime minister was Malcolm Fraser. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act was about to be passed. Abba\u2019s Fernando topped the charts for 14 weeks straight. And in Carlton, then a working-class suburb in south-west Sydney, theatre-loving kids were chasing their various dreams.<\/p>\n

\u2018I lied about my age to get in!\u2019 says founding member Liz Hill, pictured in 1976. Photograph: Shopfront Arts Co-op<\/p>\n

Shopfront has a radical history. When their landlord wanted to turf them out and sell the building in 1978, the kids, mostly aged 12 to 18, unanimously voted to buy the building. The adults were split on the vote. Some quit over it. But the kids raised a $43,000 deposit through act-a-thons and raffles, and later \u2013 with government support \u2013 bought the building. Shopfront\u2019s young people continue to have a say over the direction of the company.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was one of the kids who did the act-a-thons and costume parades, where we\u2019d go shaking tins up and down the train line on trains and asking people for donations. We really felt that kids could make a difference,\u201d says 61-year-old founding member Liz Hill, who joined Shopfront when she was only 10. \u201cI lied about my age to get in!\u201d<\/p>\n

Hill was there on the day the kids voted to buy the building. \u201cIt was quite a political meeting with different adult opinions, but we voted in favour of staying and working toward making the building owned by us. It had been an engineering factory and mechanic\u2019s garage, so it was greasy, and it needed a toilet block to get licensed as a theatre. We had to clean a lot of dust and junk.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s been a wonderful thing, given how many arts organisations have difficulties paying the rent these days. The fact that the Shopfront Co-op has ownership of a building is pretty amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actors Jacki Weaver and John Bell supported an act-a-thon in the 1985 when Trevor Ashley was a small boy. He\u2019s now a West End performer who has just completed over 500 shows in The Producers at London\u2019s Garrick Theatre. He joined Shopfront when he was five years old.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI was very little and obsessed with showbiz,\u201d Ashley says. \u201cMy mum didn\u2019t know what to do with me but then she found Shopfront and I really grew up there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ashley, now 46, learned lighting design, screen printing and video editing, alongside putting on shows, including his first drag show, Dressing Room Drags. \u201cI played Carlotta Carefree, and my friend Chris was Libra Fleur. We didn\u2019t even know we were gay yet because it was the 90s. I did Peter Pan where Bryan Brown was the narrator and I did Hilary Bell\u2019s first play. I was in Alice in Wonderland with Paul Capsis when I was five. I was the tiger lily and he was the mock turtle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Above all, he says, Shopfront offers children acceptance. Queer kids, First Nations kids, migrant kids and kids living with disability all have a voice here \u2013 something often denied them in the wider world or at school.<\/p>\n

Trevor Ashley, five, with Jacki Weaver and John Bell at the Shopfront act-a-thon in 1985. Photograph: Shopfront Arts Co-op<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a gay child who didn\u2019t really have any positive gay representation in my life apart from at Shopfront, and I really found my tribe,\u201d Ashley says. \u201cIt was the time of Aids, and I remember being eight or nine, hosting a big fundraising gala with a 17- or 18-year-old boy named Scott Redmond, and he was the first person I knew who had Aids, and he passed only about a year later. I met my first trans person there, who was in Alice in Wonderland with me.<\/p>\n

double quotation markOne day, I walked into the building and never leftNicole Pingon<\/p>\n

\u201cI became friends with amazing people, and when things were hard at home, I had somewhere to go, or I had friends I could go and stay with. It\u2019s a really special place, even for kids who don\u2019t want to be performers or writers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pingon, now a rising director, grew up in Carlton and walked past Shopfront every day to get to school. \u201cOne day, I walked into the building and never left,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Shopfront offered the space for her to figure out who she is as a person as well as an artist. \u201cThat\u2019s what makes it so special. It\u2019s a place that gave me so much as a young person and now I want to give that back. It\u2019s not about being the best actor, but actually just being the best version of yourself, or finding who you are. It\u2019s more than a theatre. Once you\u2019re part of Shopfront, you\u2019re always part of Shopfront.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also a facilitator at Shopfront, which sometimes means organising the fuel for the youth-led meetings. \u201cThey eat pizza at the AGMs and talk through everything and vote. It\u2019s fun. Young people are the funniest people with the best sense of humour.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This weekend kids at Australia\u2019s oldest youth-owned-and-led arts company Shopfront Arts Co-op are reviving their 50-hour act-a-thon fundraiser…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-639671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}