the GREENROOM with Nik n Mik
The Green Room with Nikki & Mik Allen
A safe backstage for people who make things.
This isn’t a promo feed or a highlight reel. It’s the green room: the staff room of theatre, where performers and makers swap stories, vent, compare scars, talk craft, politics, survival, and the quiet moments where the real lessons sink in.
Recorded on Kaurna Country of the Adelaide Plains, The Green Room is where married duo Nikki Allen and Dr Michael (Mik) Allen clock off from the show and talk about what living this creative life is actually like.
Between them, they’ve racked up around 80 years in the arts – acting, directing, teaching, dramaturgy, festivals, research, community work, youth arts, and a frankly ridiculous number of side-hustles and near-burnouts. They’ve tried to leave the industry more than once. It keeps dragging them back.
Expect:
- honest, unpolished conversations
- ADHD rambling and PhD-level overthinking
- stories from tin sheds to multi-million dollar festivals
- and the odd coughing fit or existential crisis left in the edit
If you’re an artist, teacher, creative, cultural worker, or just a human who loves what art does to people, pull up a chair. This is your backstage.
Episodes
16 episodes
GR Ep16_ Our 5 item wish list🧞 for actors and directors 🎭
Five things actors wish directors knew. Five things directors wish actors knew.After 35-ish years spent acting, directing, teaching and occasionally driving each other slightly mad in rehearsal rooms, Nik & Mik compare wish li...
GR_EP 15_A familiar fork in the creative road
Well, here we are again.Nik and Mik have found themselves at that familiar creative junction: something new has started to take shape, which means excitement, possibility, logistics, money, doubt, overthinking, and at least one conver...
GR_Ep14 😳 We broke our abstinence... we're getting creative again
We promised ourselves a year off making shows.We nearly made it. 😂Mik's got an agent again. Self-tapes are flying in. Nikki's been quietly nursing an idea involving life drawing, poetry and a bit of bohemian mischief.And no...
GR_Ep 13 Belonging
This week we riff on access, privilege, and belonging in theatre, contrasting their politically charged mentors (apartheid-era rebel theatre and protest-hardened acting teachers) with today’s glossy, well-resourced private school productions an...
GR_Ep12_Feasting on Performance in Melbourne
Melbourne Theatre Double: Speakeasy Vaudeville + Eddie Izzard’s HamletMik and Nik head to Melbourne for a theatre double: a gritty, intimate vaudeville night at Speakeasy Theatre Melbourne and Eddie Izzard’s one-person Hamlet. They rave...
GR_Ep 11_Connection & Resistance: Intimate Theatre Amid AI
Nik and Mik reflect on how a cash-strapped project pushed them into “parlor theatre”: tiny, intimate shows (often in private homes) historically tied to taboo, political, and community communication. They unpack what changes when the audience i...
GR_Ep10_a retrospective... of sorts
For their 10th episode, Mik and Nick skip the heavy theory and do a quirky retrospective of standout performing-arts memories: Mik’s terrifying year-7 Peter Pan audition that became his first taste of ensemble belonging; youth dance-theatre dou...
GR Ep 9_ An Actor Prepares but is an actor prepared
Mik and Nik (a long-married theatre couple with decades in the industry and in teaching) unpack a big question: actors learn how to prepare—so are they prepared for the mental, physical, and emotional toll of the work? They reflect on training ...
To work or to work?
What happens when a lifelong creative and anthropologist walks into an office job? Nikki interviews Mik on the shift from theatre/film life into local government community development through a library service — and the weirdness of being seen ...
GREEN ROOM_Ep 7 Nurturing Talent in Theatre Education
In episode seven of The Green Room, Mik and Nik chat about how they fell into teaching and what they’ve learned across 30+ years in performing arts. They contrast different teaching models (institutions, holiday workshops, agency-style courses,...
Training; at the Centre for the Performing Arts (Adelaide)
Mik and Nik reminisce about their training home: Adelaide’s old Centre for the Performing Arts (CPA) on Grote Street, a boutique TAFE acting school set inside a converted teacher’s college with its own theatre. They outline its history while no...
Living the Creative Life... together
In this episode of the Green Room, Mik and Nik sit down on a scorching Adelaide day to discuss their thirty-year journey as a married couple in the performing arts industry. They recount the highs and lows of balancing their personal lives, car...
Censorship & other harsh realities
In this episode, Michael and Nikki, a long-term married couple working in the Australian performing arts industry, discuss censorship and its impact on creativity and management within the arts sector. They reference recent events surrounding t...
Audiences...continued
In this episode of 'The Green Room with Mik and Nik, dive deep into the shifts in audience behaviour post-COVID. They discuss the challenges performers and theatre workers face in re-engaging with audiences who have lost social play skills and ...
