An Evening with Jeremy Sams

Weekend #1 of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival has been and gone already in quite a blur. I had the great pleasure of spending most of the past week preparing and rehearsing for a concert on Saturday night called “An Evening with Jeremy Sams”. Jeremy was an absolute pleasure to work with and really rolled up his sleeves and made the most of the three and a half days we had to pull a show together. For all of his achievements and experience, Jeremy is an extremely generous and gracious person to work with and I think that everyone who was involved in the performance would agree that we could learn a lot from him. I guess it should be a prerequisite of a theatre director that they can collaborate well, negotiate group dynamics adroitly and bring out the best performances in the people he/she works with, but of course that’s not always the case and so it was great to see Jeremy do all those things with ease. His musicianship is thoroughly informed and his musical taste seemed beyond reproach this week.

The cast of the concert included Johanna Allen, Douglas McNicol, Simon Burke, Kaye Tuckerman and ’special guest’ Philip Quast. The material that Jeremy selected for the occasion included songs from “Amour”, the Michel Legrand musical to which he contributed the english lyrics, Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera”, Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” as well as special material he had developed for other performers and projects. Jeremy’s narration of the evening proved he is quite the raconteur, interspersing the music with amusing and sometimes touching anecdotes of how this material was important to him in one way or another.

The performers did the material great justice. One great pleasure of the week for me was working with Douglas McNichol whom I have previously known solely from his operatic work. We had occasion to work together once before and it was great to see him approach both traditional operatic and contemporary theatre repertoire with such character and energy. Johanna, whom I’ve worked with extensively in the past, once again demonstrated her great versatility – straddling musicals styles with confidence and a beautiful voice. I’m so glad that the rest of Australia is getting to see how talented she is as she tours with the Opera Australia production of “The Pirates of Penzance”. Jo and I have talked about getting together soon to update the “Johanna with an H” cabaret show that we developed a couple of years ago. I’m really looking forward to that.

I’ve worked with Kaye and Simon at previous Cabaret Festivals. Simon is always great to work with. He is so professional and has a great command of the stage. Our cabaret offerings always seem more polished when Simon steps out on stage. He sang a clever duet that Jeremy had composed the music to, called “It’s almost like I want to sing a love song” as well as “An Ordinary Guy” from Amour. Just this morning I booked a ticket to see the Kookaburra production of “Company” that Simon is working on in Sydney at the moment.

Jeremy has written quite a contemporary translation of the libretto for “The Threepenny Opera”. Two duets from the musical/opera were showcased on Saturday night. “Kids Today” sung by Johanna and Douglas and “The Knocking Shop Tango” presented by Simon and Kaye. Kaye also sang “Pirate Jenny” which is a song she recorded on her cd release “Siren”.

Philip Quast has an amazing voice and he’s not afraid to use it. Philip was really great to work with this week. He was willing to jump in and try his hand at everything – including an impromptu Mozart duet (in German!) during rehearsal. Jeremy accompanied him at the piano as he sang a duet of Rogers & Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening/Hello Young Lovers”, the traditional “Shenendoah” and “The Sound of Your Name”. Philip recalled that the venue for the concert, the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide’s Festival Centre was actually the theatre in which he made his dramatic debut, and then sang the appropriately titled “I Was Here”. When Jeremy and I had been talking earlier in the week about having Philip and Simon in the same cast, we tossed around the idea of them singing a Play School duet, since they had both been presenters on that tv show. Instead, they sang the duet “In Lily’s Eyes” from The Secret Garden which was powerful, both emotionally and volume wise. I had to really dig into the Yamaha C7 grand piano I was playing to be heard above their rich full voices.

I know there are a few people who are particularly interested to read of my experience with Philip. I received an email this week suggesting as much. It was a real pleasure – he’s a genuine, funny and very warm hearted bloke. He shared some funny stories while we were in the rehearsal room during the week and offered some welcome and helpful advice at a few points during the rehearsal process. Jeremy and Philip have both suggested that they’d like to come back to a future Cabaret Festival and do another project, either separately or together. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it happens sooner rather than later.

The two grand pianos that we managed to get onto the one stage were complemented beautifully by the playing of flautist Samantha Hennessey, clarinettist Jaclyn Hale and double bassist Pippa Strickland. These women played marvellously, especially as we kept throwing new parts at them right up until the dress rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. During or between rehearsals Jeremy and I would work on orchestrations that we then foisted upon the band. The sound of that instrumentation worked really well, I’d definitely look at trying that combination again.

Jeremy is in Adelaide for another week. He led a masterclass on “Writing for Musical Theatre” yesterday which was illuminating, and I’m looking forward to his masterclass on “Singing Sondheim” next weekend. In the meantime, since Saturday night I have begun rehearsals with Christopher Green for his latest Tina C spectacular. More on that to follow.