Wollongong Spiegeltent sales hit and miss as arts industry struggles to recover post-COVID

The travelling tent is the Illawarra's answer to the Sydney Fringe festival with cabaret, circus and comedy acts strewn across the month of March, but if it was for the commercial purpose of making big bucks then Merrigong Theatre Company wouldn't be putting it on.

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Simon Hinton, director of Merrigong, said some performances have sold out (like the opening and closing of Circa's Peepshow) while others have seen more modest crowds - but that has also been prevalent in previous years.

In 2022, he said, their biggest challenge has been losing specialist technical staff to COVID-19 isolation.

A Saturday performance of Mechanical Mayhem and Sunday's comedy show Chameleon by Stuart Reeve had to be cancelled due lack of sound and lighting technicians, not poor ticket sales.

However, the director said since the Spiegeltent season first arrived in the Arts Precinct in 2017 it has never broken even, and this year was also looking "borderline".

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Why do it?

It's a way to draw in a wider audience to the arts who might have never set foot in a theatre before, Mr Hinton said, while significant government funding has helped make it possible.

"I feel better about the first week of this season rather than the first three years of it ... people are so appreciative of it," Mr Hinton told the Mercury.

"We're a not-for-profit [organisation] so our bottom line is not always our 'bottom line'. There are other strategic reasons why we think it's great. We get a lot of people coming who don't necessarily come to things inside the theatre."

Mr Hinton said before the pandemic they were building the Spiegetlent's reputation to a point where it would break even, but that's has now been changes.

"We feel our investment this year into it is about gifting something to the community to say 'let's have a good time, lets reconnect, and get out'," he said.

Meantime, the immediate future of the arts and entertainment industry is still looking a little gloomy as prospective patrons remain nervous about going out in crowds.

"Pre-Omicron we were confident things would bounce back, but Omicron really changed that and stopped things dead in November/December," Mr Hinton said.

"The attitude is the arts industry is it's going to take this year and next year to rebuild. That's for us what we're expecting, we're not expecting things to snap back to what they were before COVID."

He said overall the company is happy with how the Spiegeltent and the main theatre season at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre has kicked off, but "it's a marathon not a sprint" with still a lot of uncertainty ahead.

To see what's on and buy a ticket to a show, visit: https://spiegeltentwollongong.com/

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