COMMUNITY

Civic Precinct venues are at the heart of Newcastle’s political, community, social and cultural life.

Civic Precinct venues provide a home for our local democracy. City Hall hosts Newcastle City Council meetings in the ornate and historic top floor council chamber, the Lord Mayor’s offices are adjacent while the venue provides meeting rooms for council committees, consultative processes and community information sessions. The Civic Theatre and Playhouse have been hired for public speaking and other political gatherings. Wheeler Place is a well known and cost free place for large groups to gather in order to celebrate or indeed, protest.

Foremost the Civic Theatre is a live performance venue. The world’s greatest live performers and performing arts companies come to Newcastle because the Civic Theatre is a first rate facility that can deliver on the most demanding production values. As consequence our community will continue to enjoy great live performances as the Civic Theatre with City Hall Concert Hall are venues of choice for national and international tours. Because Civic Precinct facilities are accessible venues those same production values that attract tours are available to local producers, community celebrations and fund raisers.

The recently refurbished Playhouse is the ideal intimate alternative to the mighty Civic Theatre offering local producers a facility with high quality and easy to manage production values, excellent audience comfort and low operating costs. As a consequence local producers can get up new and adventurous productions with relatively low financial exposure, and then enjoy instant audience feed back.

Local or community based event producers and meeting organisers can access discount hire fees at all Civic Precinct venues, there are discounted ticketing fees with Ticketek and Newcastle City Council offers assistance with venue costs through its Community Assistance Scheme. The Civic Precinct’s Operations, Business Services and Marketing departments are also available to assist with production planning, budgeting and promotional advice.