Stepping into the dungeon-like front room of Melbourne’s last remaining theatre restaurant, Witches in Britches, feels akin to visiting an 80s Melbourne goth nightclub – complete with coffins, skulls, red leather couches and even a fright-tunnel accessed through a dusty hole in the wall.
A collection of kitsch skulls, bats, dragons and pentacles are on display in a glass cabinet, with a mournful soundtrack booming through speakers that sounds like it could be taken from a forgotten Boris Karloff midnight matinee.
Courtney Lee, 22, who goes by the floor name Salem, greeted customers as they shuffled in on a recent Friday evening to see the comedy/burlesque show The Spy who shagged me. “I just love interacting with the customers, sometimes scaring them as well, that’s probably the highlight of my week,” says Salem, who has worked in the venue for three years.
“This is a place where everyone, including staff and customers, can feel free to be themselves. I identify with the alternative goth scene here in Melbourne so I feel lucky to be able to bring that into my workplace.”
After 35 years of operation, the venue’s days are now numbered. The building was sold in 2022 for $7.2m and the new owners have been clear that they intend to demolish it when the current lease expires at the end of 2028, the 62-year-old Sicilian Australian owner, Maritzio Termine, says.
“I am very proud to be the last theatre restaurant left standing in Melbourne – there’s a lot of history to it. We’ve only survived through a lot of sweat – but we must be doing something right.
“Our difference has always been that we try to do a storyline in our shows, but others just have sketches,” he says.
The venue was opened by Termine’s uncle, Joe Fodera, in 1990, a businessman who had previously owned two other theatre restaurants in Melbourne – Nero’s Fiddle and French Knickers. Termine came on board initially as a partner before taking over management in 2006.
“I had to mortgage my house to buy the business out, and then during Covid I had to step in as head chef,” he says.
“I’m open to offers but we have to leave this place – the demolition order is already in place.”
Termine says he is very aware of the history of theatre restaurants in Melbourne – a tradition he is proud to be carrying on which dates back to 1960, when George Miller opened Bowl Music Hall under the Capitol Theatre, featuring classic melodramas such as East Lynne.
Five years later, Tikki Taylor and her husband, John Newman, established Tikki and John’s in Exhibition Street – originally as a late night coffee house catching the theatre crowd, but soon evolving into a hugely popular burlesque, featuring contemporary music and comedy shows. The Newmans then opened Squizzies in 1975 as a speakeasy and gangster-inspired theatre venue before opening Dracula’s, which became the lifeblood of Melbourne’s theatre restaurant tradition until its closure in 2017 (although Dracula’s Cabaret is still going strong in the heart of the Gold Coast shopping strip).
Other notable theatre restaurants have come and gone in Melbourne, including the Flying Trapeze Cafe (opened by John Pinder in a converted Fitzroy fish shop in 1974), the Last Laugh theatre restaurant and zoo (in Smith Street, Collingwood in 1976), the Comedy Cafe (established by Rod Quantock in Fitzroy in 1979) and Capers Dinner Theatre in Hawthorn (which opened in 1997 as a high-end cabaret venue).
More recently, Melbourne has flirted with themed restaurants such as Karen’s diner (a short-lived enterprise which prided itself on rude staff), the pop-up Fawlty Towers Dining Experience and the recently closed Titanic on Nelson in Williamstown, which emulated the sinking of the Titanic while serving dinner. But none have boasted the longevity of Witches in Britches.
The current show was light on gothic or ghoulish content, but felt more like early BBC sci-fi meets Benny Hill, with a few standout performances – including a filthy version of Radiohead’s Freak and a weirdly political moment when a satirical Pauline Hanson lookalike took to the stage. There was a lot of audience participation, too, as the MCs acknowledged all the birthdays and wedding anniversaries in the room – no less than 8.
The audience of about 200, many of whom had travelled from Tasmania, Geelong and even New Zealand, seemed to be lapping up the fun and frivolity of it.
According to lead performer and MC Joel Norman-Hade, the venue has been a fantastic stepping stone for artists and performers in a fiercely competitive industry. He lists a number of previous stage colleagues who have gone on to to much bigger success in the industry, including Samantha Dodemaide, currently playing Dorothy in the stage show of Wizard of Oz, and Grace Williams, who is the swing for Beauty and the Beast.
“For me it’s a regular income working here, and I love the crowd work and that I work with so many young, creative people,” he says. “I think this place has survived because it doesn’t try to be anything more than it is – it’s not pretentious. It’s not haute theatre. It’s like a pantomime for adults. Most of our crowd are out-of-towners – people who just want to come to the city for some fun.”
Norman-Hade has been at the venue for five and a half years performing as characters including David Bowie, Frank-N-Furter, Meatloaf, Freddie Mercury and Austin Powers.
“It’s going to be sad when the day comes that this tradition doesn’t exist any more in Melbourne,” he says. “Where do all these young performers go when they are looking for that intermediary before the big gig comes along?”
