A Grander Scale

Since the announcement that Fringe World's Noodle Palace will be at the historic Piccadilly Cinemas, Tomas Ford hasn't had a second to think. “There's a lot to do. We need to get some Noodle Palace theme-ing going on in here; some art deco and Asian influence, but we don't want to mess with the theatre too much.”

Piccadilly Cinemas will host almost 30 Fringe acts across three stages. Despite all the hard work, Ford and the rest of the team couldn't be happier with the choice of location. “I've always wanted to do a show in here,” Ford muses, “but it used to be really expensive to hire. It's a beautiful art deco theatre – it's got three perfect rooms for what we're going to be doing; the main cinema is perfect for our bigger shows, we have a really nice room for cabaret and a low-ceiling room which is ideal for comedy. As soon as the opportunist in me kicked in, although JumpClimb secured it, the opportunity to use this place was just like, 'Wow, this is so perfect'. We've got the most ludicrous bar area ever, and it's just nice to have an unintended space that people just want to fucking come and see stuff at.”

Expanding on the huge success of 2013, Fringe is this year providing Perth with four weeks of entertainment across over 70 venues. Last year, Noodle Palace's venue on Beaufort Street won Fringe's award for Best Independent Venue, so for Ford and the rest of the team, who are also in charge of Midland's Midlandia venue, this year means even bigger goals to conquer. “Last year was just like a pilot program for us. It was still a lot to put together but this is really scaling up. We're doing three weeks here and three in Midland so it's like a six-week program across the two venues. It's a ridiculous amount of shows. It's about two-and-a-half times what we did last year, so it's a fairly huge undertaking on our own. Last year, it felt like we were playing around a bit. Me, [JumpClimb's] Paul Fletcher and Aaron Rutter, my co-producers, are really good mates so it was like, 'Hey, let's make a venue with our mates'. This year it's more like, 'We know what we're doing; let's do something really fucking cool'. Beaufort Street was a super temporary situation. We managed to get a house last year and it happened to have two spaces where we could manage to make two theatres, but there were huge noise issues with neighbours and stuff like that. We basically spent most of last year trying to find the perfect space and we came very close to getting a few spaces that weren't as good as [Piccadilly] is, but a bunch of people were talking about this place on Facebook when it closed down around November, and then the opportunist in me kicked in.”

Despite the excitement of putting everything in place for the venues, nothing is as exciting to Ford as the quality of the performing acts. “Noodle Palace is really fun to put together. Midland was a lot harder because I had to think really hard about what was going to work in Midland, but down here it's like, what's the most awesome stuff we can put on? We've got some really exciting shows that I think other venues would feel like they're going out on a limb to put on. We love edgy, exciting cabaret and comedy. I went to Edinburgh Fringe with Aaron and in between doing my ridiculous late night shows, we were going to heaps of other shows and we were trying to convince people to come to Australia to play at our little place. There's about four UK artists who are coming over but there's also a lot of eastern states programming coming here too... Every show we've got on, I'm super excited about.”

Ford will also be showcasing his own blend of twisted electronic cabaret that made him a star in Edinburgh. “I am quite excited to be performing my own show here. I haven't done this show in Perth; it's like an hour-long nervous breakdown. It's definitely the craziest show I've ever done so I'm feeling very excited for that. Everything's just come together so amazingly and I can't wait for it all to begin.”