This year marks the 90th anniversary of Bingara’s Roxy Theatre, an iconic and magnificently restored 1930s art deco building that was the hub of life in Bingara for many years.
The Roxy opened at the end of March 1936 before the original owners, Emanuel Aroney, Peter Feros, and George Psaltis, filed for bankruptcy only six months later.
The theatre, in a “picture war” with the nearby Regent Theatre, continued as a hub of social life until 1958, when it closed, leaving the stunning building dormant for forty years.
A new century meant a new chapter, with Bingara council and the NSW government restoring the building. In May 2004, The Roxy was faithfully restored to its original splendour and reopened to the public. It has since been listed on the NSW State Heritage Register as a site of historical significance. The theatre embraces some of the most striking original Art Deco architecture in New South Wales and still contains the original fixtures and fittings, including the ornate stucco plaster, paintwork, and coloured lights from 1936.
Then-mayor John Wearnes said, “Some influential members of the Bingara community began to promote the merits of purchasing the Roxy theatre for community use to the then Bingara Shire council in the late 1990s.”
“While I was still a councillor, having been shire president up until 1995, the mayor (a new title by then) was Peter Pankhurst, and we had the benefit of a ‘big picture’ general manager named Phil Harvey, who had previously managed much bigger councils, such as Coffs Harbour.”
“Both men were tremendously supportive of the idea, even though there wasn’t unanimous support amongst all councillors.”
“The timing was perfect. The then-CEO of Arts North West, Jack Ritchie, had the ear of Premier Bob Carr and persuaded him to set up a cinema restoration fund in NSW. Carr, a great supporter of the arts, readily agreed. This made some funding available,” he said.
“It was fortunate that, apart from the restoration of the Bowraville cinema, which at that stage was almost completed, the Roxy was virtually ‘first cab off the rank’, and a test case for the new fund.”
In 1999, Premier Carr announced hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding would be granted to Bingara to restore the Roxy, which Wearnes said was “unprecedented to a council in NSW – particularly a small one.”
According to Wearnes, who had a “close relationship” with Carr through being President of the NSW Shires Association and chairing two committees in the state arts department, the total amount of state and federal government funding over the years “would be in the millions”.
“The Roxy was a special project for (Carr), and without his strong personal support it would never have been possible.”
Beyond its history, the Roxy theatre continues to fetch appreciation for its style. North West Theatre Company (NWTC) founder and president Rick Hutton, who was “involved with the Roxy’s restoration” and lobbied to transform it to host live productions, said, “The main attributes of the theatre are its acoustics and its interior beauty.”
“It is one of the most iconic art deco period cinemas in Australia and its restoration to include the hospitality trade training kitchen, the Greek museum, Peter’s Cafe, and the conference room have given it great flexibility and utility.”
The Greek Museum is a nod to the builders of the art deco masterpiece, three Greek immigrants from the island of Kythera – Peter Feros, Emanuel Aroney, and George Psaltis.
“The Roxy represents a shrine for particularly young generations of Greeks, and the Kytherian Association remains involved on an ongoing basis,” Wearnes said.
“There is nothing else like (the Roxy) except maybe the Royal in Quirindi and the School of Arts Cinema in Tenterfield. The reason government funded it so significantly, and why it is now state heritage listed, is that it is unique.”
“Having a venue like the Roxy provides our community with both opportunity and flexibility to pursue its cultural interests and talents,” said Hutton.
To celebrate the anniversary, the storied theatre will show the film Roberta at 4pm on Sunday, 29 March – a tribute to locals going to the theatre when it first opened to watch the musical romance starring Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers – with tickets available to be bought at the door.
Then in May this year, Picture Wars – an original production composed by Hutton that is “based upon actual events that occurred in Bingara, NSW, Australia, in the period 1934 to 1939” – will be shown to theatregoers over four performances, subject to confirmation of the cast.
“This whole episode, in both Bingara’s and Australia’s history, is as tragic and uplifting, dramatic and comic, as any Hollywood, Broadway, or West End big city blockbuster,” Hutton said.
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