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All the world's a stage for children's theatre company

Date: January 07 2013

Karl Quinn

AS THEATRICAL exports go, Life Like Touring does not quite rank with Hugh Jackman or Geoffrey Rush perhaps. But when it starts its tour of the US in mid-January, this small Australian company will truly have made it to the big time - and all by taking the metaphorical coals to Newcastle.

The children's theatre company, which operates out of a nondescript light-industrial building in East St Kilda, will open Scooby-Doo Live! in York, Pennsylvania, on January 19, and then roll the show out to all points over the next six months, including a 2500-seat venue at Madison Square Garden in New York.

''It's so exciting to be able to take an American product, make it successful here, and then have them ask if we could please bring it back there,'' business manager Troy Sussman said.

''We're kind of like a cultural mixed drink,'' producer Anton Berezin added. ''There's a little bit of everything and we show it to the Americans and they go, 'I kind of recognise that but it's different'. And that makes it attractive.''

The raw ingredients Life Like and its sister company The Entertainment Store work with are licensed characters (from the likes of Disney and Nickelodeon), oversized foam heads and colourful costumes, and music - often, but not always, pre-recorded. They mix it up everywhere from council fun fairs and shopping centres to the West End theatre in London, where Dora the Explorer enjoyed a three-week run in September.

Partners Sussman, Berezin and creative director Theresa Borg have fashioned a business that turns over about $12 million a year and employs about 20 full-time staff and a lot of young actors.

Borg and Berezin have been married 14 years and have three children, the oldest now 11.

''When we got married we decided we needed to be able to make a living and not depend on being employed by other people,'' Borg said.

Berezin had started writing children's shows after he left law school in his early 20s (his friends jokingly called them Anto's Pantos).

Borg's first job with her husband was to cold call potential clients. ''After a day of that I'd got through the entire Yellow Pages,'' she said.

They started with Santa and got a big break when the Wiggles hired them to tour the sub-brand - Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog, Henry the Octopus et al - in 2000.

''I used to date Wags the Dog in the mid-'90s,'' Berezin said. ''Through her I met the boys, and a couple of years later I had this brainwave.''

At the peak of the deal with the Wiggles they were doing 150 venues a year. But suddenly, it came to an end.

''The Wiggles giveth and the Wiggles taketh away,'' Borg said.

''Their American projects were winding back,'' Sussman added. ''So they decided to take all their activities back in house. It wasn't that they didn't like what we were doing. In fact, it was the opposite.''

Berezin: ''They thought they could make more money from what we were doing.''

Borg: ''It was fabulous for us. It gave us the confidence.''

Their roster of characters now includes the gang from Sesame Street, Ben 10, Jake and Finn from Adventure Time, and Yo Gabba Gabba!.

All three remain professional performers - Sussman is currently one of the eunuchs in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum - and they share an ambition to create something pitched to an audience old enough to drive itself to the theatre.

To that end Borg wrote a political satire in 2010 called Rain, in which Berezin played both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, but it was, she said dismissively, ''just an experiment''.

They explain that adapting existing characters for the stage has given them the chance to understand what works and why without having to risk it themselves. ''People a lot smarter and with a lot more money than us have already done the hard work,'' Berezin said.

And then, of course, there are the projects that never make it that far - the ones that get pitched to, and rejected by, the trio on a regular basis. They have turned down some big brands, but they have also turned down a lot of obscure pet projects - and that can be heartbreaking. Berezin said: ''You see years and years of people's investment and you think, 'Someone needed to tell you five years ago that no one's ever going to buy it'.''


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