MUSIC HALL THEATRE RESTAURANT
Theatre restaurants emerged briefly in the 1960s and 70s in the cultural gap between the ending of musical comedy and the new style of theatre of the 1970s. The first of these in Sydney was the MUSIC HALL, which ran for nearly twenty years. 

The origins of the Music Hall were in the BOWL RESTAURANT under the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne, where George and Lorna Miller had successfully presented their first adaptation of East Lynne.  The Millers then opened a theatre restaurant in a converted cinema in Neutral Bay Junction on the northern side of Sydney Harbour in November 1961. This Music Hall had a foyer crammed with Victorian bric-a-brac while the main auditorium seated five hundred people for dinner in a stalls level and a gallery. The ambience was that of red plush, with tables with red checked cloths. The evening's entertainment was interspersed with somewhat erratic serving of food by waiters wearing moustaches and Edwardian waistcoats.

The Music Hall opened, in a somewhat rough and ready ambience, with a production of `East Lynne' but the shows gradually became more sophisticated burlesques of musical and dramatic genres. Nonetheless by 1980 the fashion had run its course and the venue, which had been the subject of a two year battle with authorities over its fire safety, was closed.  

Other theatre restaurants in the late 1960s including THE COMEDY THEATRE RESTAURANT, established by veteran actors Willie Fennell and John Ewart in a building on the banks of the Lane Cover River. The theatre burned down soon after opening.

William Orr ran the luxuriously decorated DONCASTER THEATRE RESTAURANT in Kensington from 1965 to 1971 and then transferred to the MUSIC LOFT in Manly where, from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, the Toppano family with Lee Young appeared in a series of successful seasons. 

The BULL 'N BUSH in East Sydney, a small restaurant with an even smaller stage, run by former vaudevillian and later leading television producer Frank Strain, operated for twenty years. It did not, however, survive the death in 1983 of its popular long term host, Noel Brophy.

DIRTY DICK'S BAWDY BANQUETS, a form of  `bawdy music hall', was part of the Olde Time Music Hall organisation developed in Perth by Frank Baden-Powell and associates. The concept arrived in Sydney in 1972. The company established itself as competitor and possible successor to the Music Hall on the Pacific Highway at Crows Nest on the north side of Sydney in a former local ice works. There were also outlets in the Macleay and Chevron Hotels in the city and in the inner urban Fishmongers Hall.

KINSELA'S CABARET THEATRE operated as a theatre restaurant and a site for intimate revue from 1982. The three storey building known as the `Mansion House' in Darlinghurst, in inner Sydney, had been built as a drapers' shop and offices in 1910. It was remodelled in the Art Deco style as a funeral parlour for Charles Kinsela in 1932. When Kinselas sold the property in 1981, this building was converted to a theatre. The ground floor became a restaurant, the Art Deco chapel was preserved, dressing rooms and a bar went in on the first floor and a theatre restaurant, seating for two hundred and forty people, on the second floor. This was an almost square room with a narrow stage along one wall.

The complex operated for about four years, but there were licensing difficulties and finally the property was sold. The new owner it converted to a hotel, although still operating theatrical performances, in 1988. The building has now been demolished. 

Sources:

Ailsa McPherson, A Dream of Passion (North Sydney, North Sydney Municipal Council, 1993)
P. Parsons (ed.) with V. Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995)
John West, Theatre in Australia (Stanmore, Cassell, 1978)