YOU could say that the first musical was performed in Australia in 1796. In his Sydney theatre, thought to have seated a cosy 120 people, entrepreneur and former convict Robert Sidaway put on a staging of The Poor Soldier.
According to Currency Press's indispensable history of the arts and entertainment, Entertaining Australia, the show "combined spoken dialogue with songs appropriate to the action, written in ballad style".
The songs in ballad operas mostly weren't written specially for the show but were popular numbers interpolated into a suitable scenario. Were they the jukebox musicals of their day? It's an irresistible thought, although one hopes The Poor Soldier was a better night's entertainment than the execrable What the World Needs Now (jerry-built around the songs of Hal David and Burt Bacharach) or the home-grown Dusty, which saddles songs interpreted by the incomparable Dusty Springfield with a lamer-than-lame script and flaccid production.
Lovers of musical theatre agree it's not a vintage time for the art form, but it would be a mistake to think all is lost because fings ain't wot they used t'be 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.
Entertaining Australia is instructive here because it sees success and failure, those old travelling companions, in the context of centuries of activity rather than of the present media obsession with boom and bust. (What is it with all those articles about the renaissance of the Australian film industry when one half-decent movie is released?)
Musical theatre has fundamental qualities that are independent of changing tastes and conditions and that seem capable of surviving any amount of battering.
Foremost is the direct emotional engagement the best musical theatre has with its audience. You don't have to know much to be moved by it, which is why it has such broad audience appeal and why there is a certain amount of snobbery about it. It would be wrong to infer that the work itself is unsophisticated, however. Some of the most apparently simple Cole Porter songs, for instance, are little miracles of composition and wit, but wear their genius lightly. Some see it, others don't; but everyone can feel it.
The great music theatre performers add their electricity and their wealth of gifts - they can sing and dance and act - and the effect can be overwhelming. I have never felt the transformative power of art so strongly as with a transported music theatre audience.
The most recent golden age in Australia was in the late 1980s and early '90s, fuelled largely by the success of international giants Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. By 1997 reports of a slowdown were starting to appear. Shows failed to do the expected amount of business or didn't even get to opening night.
In the past couple of years, commercial producers have had to close shop or restructure after taking a bath and you'd need a high-grade microscope to discern much originality in their ideas.
The big-show bubble has burst for now. Large-cast productions with the latest stage wizardry are fantastically expensive to put on (think perhaps $15million and go north), have to run forever to recoup investment and, in Australia, have sky-high relocation costs if they are to tour. That's why it will be quite a while before we see Mary Poppins or Billy Elliot the Musical here.
You can't conjure up talent, either. Where is the new Stephen Sondheim? Search me. So, in the absence of the inspired, we have cheaper and easier compilations and adaptations, some of which do business but are nothing more than disposable entertainment and often not very good at that.
The time is ripe for reinvention, for a new cycle to start.
This week veteran music theatre performer Peter Cousens launched an intriguing venture, a not-for-profit national music theatre company called Kookaburra. It has an impressive list of goals, including support for emerging Australian music theatre creators, and considerable energy and expertise seems to have gone into its setting up.
Whether Kookaburra will achieve any or all of its aims one can't predict, but a gala fundraising concert on Monday night made two things clear: the appetite for musical theatre is as strong as ever and there are more than enough stars ready to go to work. Not one seat remained unsold at Sydney's Lyric Theatre and there was a who's who list of performers: Julie Anthony, Nancye Hayes, Toni Lamond, Normie Rowe, Debra Byrne, Marina Prior and Jill Perryman among them.
Michael Cormick brought the house down with Sunset Boulevard, Judi Connelli and Caroline O'Connor killed 'em with Class from Chicago and the luminous Ursula Yovich, unknown to probably 95 per cent of the audience, represented the new generation, and Australian music theatre, with Bran Nue Dae.
A big chorus of supporting artists sang and danced their hearts out and, for an evening, it was possible to feel that all was well with the music theatre world, or would be.