Friends of the National Museum of Australia will present a Victorian Parlour performance next Sunday afternoon, to complement the Exiles and Emigrants exhibition, which runs until June 4.
“Let’s do a tea party!” (the original idea of curator Cheryl Crilly and public programs manager Gabrielle Hyslop) has become a two-hour program of songs, poetry and prose readings performed by Mr Tom Layton, former Friends’ Executive Officer and professional bass baritone, actor and director Dr Geoffrey Borny, former head of Theatre Studies at ANU, Miss Georgia Pike, also well-known on Canberra stages, pianist and specialist dealer in pianos Mr Carl Rafferty, and Mrs Hyslop herself, whose illustrious career began in the Sydney University student Victorian Music Hall in the 1960s, and who has published research on the subject of 19th Century popular culture.
Among many items of note, Mr Rafferty will present a piano solo, Hearts and Flowers, composed by Alphons Czibulka, while under the heading Love and Marriage Dr Borny will read, as Charles Dickens did on his American tour, Mr Tracy Tupman woos the Spinster Aunt from Pickwick Papers, and Mr Layton and Miss Pike will sing the affecting duet by the well-loved American Stephen Foster If You’ve Only Got a Moustache.
Mr John Howard Payne’s everlasting song, set to music by Sir Henry Bishop, will bring memories flooding back to all Exiles and Emigrants when Miss Pike presents Home Sweet Home while Thinking of England. But later Poverty and Death must be confronted when Miss Pike and the company sing Father’s a Drunkard and Mother is Dead, written by the anonymous ‘Stella’ with music composed by Mrs Parkhurst.
Intended to be for Friends and their friends, word of the event rapidly spread from the NMA website, so that the venue is already fully booked. Entertaining rather than strictly educational, perhaps we may look forward to more performance of this kind, complementary to exhibitions, including in this case the current display of 40 objects from our local region’s Springfield collection in the Horizons Gallery “Settlers and Settling In”.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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