Princess Theatre, Melbourne

The Princess Theatre on Spring Street is the oldest surviving entertainment site on mainland Australia. It began in the gold-rush year of 1854 as Astley’s Amphitheatre, a barn-like ring for equestrian shows, became the Princess’s Theatre in 1857, and was rebuilt in 1886 for the theatrical partnership of J. C. Williamson, George Musgrove and Arthur Garner. William Pitt’s Second Empire design, with marble stairs, electric stage lighting and a ceiling that could slide open on hot nights, was a showpiece of “Marvellous Melbourne”.

Fifteen months after it reopened, on the night of Saturday 3 March 1888, the company staged Gounod’s Faust. Mephistopheles was sung by Frederick Baker, an Italian-born British bass-baritone known on stage as Federici, who had created the Pirate King in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and had come to Australia with the Williamson company the year before. In the final scene the devil drags Faust down to hell through a trapdoor. The Argus reported that Federici was seen to clutch at the boards as he sank; below stage he collapsed, and he died of heart failure in the green room soon afterwards.

Out of that night grew one of Australia’s most loved theatre ghosts. The legend says the cast, not yet told what had happened, insisted Federici had come back up to take his bow with them – although contemporary reports suggest the audience simply went home. In the years that followed, actors, stagehands and patrons claimed to see a well-dressed figure in evening clothes in the dress circle, and the theatre took to treating him as a lucky mascot.

Federici was buried at Melbourne General Cemetery. The Princess, restored by the Marriner Group and reopened in 1989 with Les Misérables, has since hosted The Phantom of the Opera and the record-breaking Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the old ghost story is still told to new companies on their first nights.

A figure in formal evening dress, usually seen sitting near the centre of the second or third row of the dress circle, is the classic sighting. Staff and performers have also reported a presence backstage and under the stage. A sighting on opening night is taken as a sign that a show will succeed.

The dress circle (traditionally a third-row seat), the stage and the understage area beneath the old trapdoor. For many years a seat was left empty for him on opening nights.

Federici is one of the best-known theatre ghosts in the English-speaking world, featured in State Library Victoria’s blog, travel guides, television segments and Melbourne ghost tours. He also has a lasting place in Gilbert and Sullivan history as the original Pirate King.