Greg Eldridge, from Melbourne, is a director of music-based theatre. He has worked on more than 80 productions across 14 countries and has previously been Professor of Directing in America and a board member of Stage Directors UK in England. He’s been an ArtsHub member since 2009.
In the video below, Eldridge discusses his work in opera, his training and his advice for others who would like to work in his field.
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Greg Eldridge: video transcript
So my name is Greg Eldridge. I’m a director. I work mainly in opera and music-based theatre.
So essentially, when you go to an opera or you go to a musical that I’ve worked on, everything you see is my fault.
It’s lots of fun. I think the most important thing in my job is to make sure I’ve got a really good team.
Most theatres, when they contract me to do a show, they say, ‘Well, who would you like to bring along?’ And then I have to think about the audience that we’re playing to and the kind of style of theatre we want to be in, and what I think it’s going to need. And then I try to get people together who will gel together because really all we want to do is do a show with our mates.
I think Australia has a really, or it certainly did when I was there, has a really good understanding of the basics and what you need in order to have a solid grounding.
So I’ve worked in a number of countries now in a number of very different places and you can tell, I think, when people have a really solid foundation about how things get on stage. And that’s really the key.
Greg Eldridge: training
The training that I did, I went to Monash and studied performing arts there. They provided me with a really basic understanding of six or seven different departments and what they do and how they all contribute to the whole, and having that knowledge has been really useful. Because I can now talk to set designers and fly operators and props teams, and talk to them about their work in a way that shows that I understand what they have to do.
And without that background, I think it can be really tricky because you ask for something and things just appear, and you have no idea how difficult it is.
If you do a production of The Magic Flute, it’s going to be the same whether you’re in Berlin or Paris or Melbourne.
I mean, there are big differences and big similarities. The work itself is going to be the same. The way you work is really different. There are really big cultural differences between different markets.
In America, in a lot of the bigger theatres, the only people who are allowed to touch props and set are the props and set people. Even if it’s just to angle something half a centimetre, I can’t do it. I’m not allowed.
In Germany, they’re very happy for you to wander up and move stuff around and have a look and then talk to the Bünenmeister and make that work. So all those differences are really fun as well.
Greg Eldridge: advice
I’m not really one for giving a lot of advice because I think everyone has such a unique journey. The closest I would get, I guess, is to say that it’s worth seeing as much as you can. I was really lucky when I was starting at university, I got a job at the Art Centre in Melbourne and I was an usher there for three years, maybe four.
I must have seen around a thousand performances. Sometimes it was the same thing times in a row and that was so instructive because I could see how different audiences responded to the same material and see how people on stage playing things slightly differently would deliver a different result.
And the one thing I always say now when I meet people, usually young directors, but I also work with singers and conductors, and I say to them, ‘Use us as resources’. Because all of us that have gone over have worked out how to do it and it’s been really hard.
And our job, I think, for everyone who’s mid-career is to help those who are early-career and emerging to have any slightly easier time than we did, because we’ve been through it.
I think the exciting thing about opera for me is that it can tell so many stories.
We can look at the whole of human history and reimagine and reinterpret what people were talking about in the 1500s and make it relevant to what we’re doing today because we’re all the same people. At the root of all of it is this deep desire to want to explore what it is to be human and how we live the best lives we can.
And that’s why it’s exciting.
