Latest news with #SydneyTheatre
News.com.au
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Sydney will get its ‘EntCent' back with huge naming rights shake-up for a popular city venue
It's back to the future for Sydney gig-goers, celebrity talkfest fans and indoor sports enthusiasts who will soon be able to say they're going to the 'EntCent'. The ICC Sydney Theatre, which replaced the demolished Sydney Entertainment Centre in 2016, is reclaiming the name of one of the city's historic institutions. The arena in the Darling Harbour entertainment precinct has been hugely popular with promoters and fans since its opening nine years ago, hosting concerts by superstars including Cher, Elton John, Bob Dylan and Kylie Minogue and celebrity chats with former US President Barack Obama, Jane Fonda and Drew Barrymore. It has also hosted sports tournaments from indoor tennis to professional bull riding contests. But it has suffered from a bit of an identity crisis since its opening, cycling through different names. And it's less of a theatre in the traditional sense, with an arena-sized capacity for 9000 people. Now its operators at ASM Global are courting brands for a new naming rights partnership, worth millions of dollars, as they relaunch the venue as the Entertainment Centre. Patrons will likely adopt the shorthand of 'EntCent', which was the fond nickname for the old venue in Haymarket. ASM Global group director of arena operations Meg Walker said the wild diversity of events hosted at the venue inspired the change. 'I was up there two months ago for the Les Mis arena spectacular and this weekend, we had the professional bull riding in there, and that's why it deserves top be known as an entertainment centre,' Ms Walker said. 'Comedy is so big in there right now, podcasts are big, we've had tennis, netball, basketball in there, whatever you can imagine as a promoter, you can do it in there.' Stadium and arena naming rights partnerships between brands and venue operators can be worth tens of millions of dollars. Venues NSW did a six-year, $36 million deal with insurance giant Allianz in 2022 to name the redeveloped Sydney Football Stadium as the Allianz Stadium. Disney struck an eight-year deal with the Victorian government in 2018 to name the Marvel Stadium in Docklands. And the Queensland Government has left the door open to potential corporate sponsorship of its Brisbane Stadium being built for the 2032 Olympics. The brand to win the bid for the Entertainment Centre rights would have about 25 million pairs of eyeballs on its name each year, thanks to the foot traffic in the booming restaurant and tourism precinct around Darling Harbour and Chinatown. The venue hosts more than 120 events a year and has sold 497,000 tickets in the last 12 months for shows by Nick Cave, James Blunt and Missy Higgins. Guy Sebastian has been one of the biggest box office hits there with 25,000 tickets sold for his T.R.U.T.H. tour in 2022. Elton John graced the new venue in 2019 during his epic Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, after playing the closing gig at the old 'EntCent' on December 19, 2015. 'A world-class city like Sydney deserves a great CBD entertainment venue and the ICC not only has such a wonderful music, indoor sports and major event venue in its Entertainment Centre, but it has also created a rare and powerful naming rights opportunity for a brand (to) access an annual reach of 25 million potential customers,' ASM chairman and CEO Harvey Lister said. 'Since opening in 2016 the venue has experienced phenomenal growth that now mirrors the success of the original and iconic Sydney Entertainment Centre, which it replaced – so it's a 'Back to the Future' moment for Sydney.'
Time Out
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Cynthia Erivo will return to London's West End to play 26 roles in a one-woman ‘Dracula'
Cynthia Erivo got her big break on the London stage, though probably not when she expected to. In 2014 the then-unknown Brit was cast in the lead role of the massive West End folly I Can't Sing!, a parody of The X-Factor that turned up years too late for the zeitgeist and duly died a death at the gargantuan London Palladium. But unbenownst to her, she'd already made it: the previous year she'd got great reviews in the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory's production of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker's classic novel The Colour Purple. It never went to the West End. But it did go to Broadway, and after that Erivo's reputation was duly made, Hollywood came calling, and she's not acted on a British stage since. That will change next year, though, when she makes the mother of all returns in not one role but 26 in a high tech one-woman stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. If that rings a bell, then it'll be because last year Sarah Snook took the West End by storm in the conceptually similar The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Dracula isn't a rip-off: it's by the same Australian creative team from Sydney Theatre, headed by director-adaptor Kip Williams (who has in fact made a trilogy of Victorian horror adaptations with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde currently unseen outside Oz). Paying moody homage to classic horror movies – so a very different look to the very fabulous Dorian Gray – it scored great reviews domestically and should be a proper showcase for Erivo, who'll take on every role from Jonathan Harker to the Count himself. Quoth Erivo: 'Returning to the stage feels like a homecoming, one that I've been craving for a long time. To do so with a story as rich, complex, and haunting as DRACULA offers a beautiful opportunity to delve into character, into myth, and into the heart of what makes us human. 'From the moment I was asked, I could not get the role out of my mind. Kip's vision is thrilling, terrifying, and deeply resonant, offering a chance to sit with not only the darkness in the world, but also the light we fight to hold onto. It's a rare gift for an actor to inhabit so many voices and perspectives in one piece, and I'm honoured to do it for West End audiences in this extraordinary production. The prospect of doing this show scares me and I know it will be a huge challenge. This show will ask everything of me — and I'm ready to give it.'
