Metro Street

After weeks of rehearsal in the depths of the Adelaide Festival Centre while the Playhouse was being renovated above, this week we’ve moved into the theatre and are currently ‘teching’ Metro Street. All seems to be going well – the cast are fantastic, the band sounds great and all the elements are fitting together as planned! Looking forward to our first performance this Friday April 3.

Secret Show!

I don’t know much, but I know I love a good secret. So lean in close and I’ll whisper the details I DO know…
Date: Tonight – Friday Feb 20, 2009
Venue: Spiegeltent – Garden of Unearthly Delights (Rundle Park, Adelaide)
Time: 10pm
Performers include: 2 of my favourites – Libby O’Donovan & Catherine Campbell
Tickets from: Fringetix at the entrance to the Garden.

Tell your friends – but quietly…remember “sshh…it’s a secret!”

Burt’s Back!

A recent article at Yahoo News reports that Burt Bacharach has a new album in the US Billboard Top 200 Album chart.

Titled “Live at the Sydney Opera House”, it debuted on the Billboard chart at number 72 last week, making it his highest charting album in 37 years.

MJJ: The First 50 Years

Growing up, I was a big Michael Jackson fan. I admit I got onto the Thriller train a little after it had left the station. There was a girl in my year five or six class, called Antonia Mercorella. We shared the same birthday, June 18. For show and tell one day, she brought her LP or cassette version of Thriller to show the class and as she waxed lyrical about Michael Jackson I thought she was nuts – why the big deal about some singer.

Then a while later I discovered the aural pleasures of MJ for myself, via a girl called Belinda Kerr who was a few years older than me She was someone that I looked up to and in hindsight I think she played quite a role in shaping my musical interests. She’d always be playing Michael Jackson tunes and before long I was an avid fan. I’ve got most of the albums now, saw him perform in Adelaide in the mid 90s and even fashioned my own signature somewhat after the shape of Jackson’s autograph.

Anyway, it happens that I’ve dug up some of my Jackson cds lately and have been reading about Michael celebrating his fiftieth birthday last Friday (Aug 29).

Initially I had thought it would be interesting to hear what a new Michael Jackson album would sound like today. I read somewhere that he’d been working on some new tracks with an artist called Ne-Yo.

Today, however, I started wondering whether new Michael Jackson music IS something I want to hear. I tried to imagine what Michael would have to say in this day and age. Considering what has happened in his life over the past 10-15 years I can’t imagine that a 50 year old Michael would want to go back to the frivolity of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ or the innocence/naiveté of a song like I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. I imagine he’d have trouble selling a song of peace/social justice like We Are the World or Man in the Mirror as convincingly these days.

What would Michael’s perspective be now? Is he bitter? Has he been broken? Is he sick? I wonder how having children has changed his view of the world. 

I suppose he has the right to his own artistic voice, but do fans like myself who love the music he created in the past WANT to hear bitching and moaning from the man who was once supposedly the King of Pop? Maybe he should just decide that he’s had enough, and stop.

Leave a comment if you have an opinion you’d like to share.

Georgia on My Mind

I want to share something with any of you who read my occasional ramblings and are musically minded. It’s a blog that I always enjoy reading, both for its authors writing style/personality and for the musical insights that she discusses and shares.

It’s written by Georgia Stitt, a super talented pianist and composer who visited Adelaide for the Cabaret Festival in 2003. As you’ll read in her blog, she has many diverse and interesting projects going on – including the recent release of her cd and songbook ‘This Ordinary Thursday’ featuring songs that she wrote and recorded with great Broadway voices such as that of Kelli O’Hara, Faith Prince and Lauren Kennedy. I’m a proud owner of the songbook and I’ve found it a great resource for interesting new repertoire for the singers I work with.

I’m a big fan of Georgia’s work and I just wanted to let you all know about it so you can share in it too!

You’ll find a link to her blog here.

2007 Etype Wrap-Up

This blog has been left largely unattended for the last few months, but if you’re like me and still have a couple of stockings you need to stuff, allow me to point you towards a great Christmas CD by a band I’ve grown very near and dear to this year.

Ho Ho, Vol 2 is the very successful follow up to etypejazz’s amazingly popular and remarkably appropriately titled Ho Ho, Vol 1. I could tell you how swinging it is, how great it’d be to have playing while you stand around drinking cocktails on Christmas Eve, how much I wished I played on it so I could be rewarded for the amazing number of sales it has received…but instead I’ll copy a review I found of the cd.

“This album of 12 Christmas songs could be up there with the best of them all (Phil Spector’s Christmas Album from 1963). Its just chock full of the sheer joy that is the Festive Season, with elements of praise combined with snowbells, gifts under the tree and happy children.
Santa Baby has echoes of Eartha Kitt, while Oh,Holy Night is pure Katrina with a glorious arrangement by Ritsuko. A touch of Sergio Mendez on Oh,Little Town of Bethlehem, followed by Away in a Manger with an entriely fitting backing that includes Adelaide Symphony Orchestra Cellist; Chris Handley. Damien does a funky arrangement that adds a new dimension to the inherent pathos of Little Drummer Boy, with Ritsuko adding the right Hammond B3 effect before the song moves into the Casbah. Mike pushes We Three Kings along as it collects momentum into a fenetic finale that will have the audience on their feet in live performances.
Throughout all of these songs, Beth adds touches of elegance behind the vocals and injects some great jazz solos; Damien is supreme on the cymbals; Ritsuko swings mightily; Mike is by turns subtle and strong; and Katrina treats the lyrics with respect.
Ok, I like this band; so will you. Oh, com all ye faithful…..and buy the CD.”
Ron Spain; JazzScene December 2006

The CD is available in many cd stores in Adelaide, including Borders and The Muses in the city, and Dillons at Burnside and Norwood. Alternatively you can download it straight to your computer/iPod from iTunes by following this link.

Ho Ho, Vol 2 was recorded early in 2006 – featuring the piano and arranging talents of the marvellous Ritsuko. Ritsuko spent a lot of that year bravely battling with the cancer that sadly took her from us in May 2007. I was humbled and honoured to be invited to take over the piano role within the band. My first performances with etype happened late in 06 when Ritsuko was not able to perform with the band and my first major engagement with them was at the G’Day USA event in January 07.

We didn’t think it would happen, which made us all the more excited when the band was invited to return to the USA in January 2008 for the New York component of G’Day USA. This year’s events will feature performances at Jazz at the Lincoln Center and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. We’ll be stopping off in Los Angeles en route to play at a SA Trade dinner which pitches a number of Australian wines to the US market.

We finished 2007 with a day in the recording studio with producer Paul Wiltshire in pre-production for etype’s upcoming album for 08. The album will be of original tunes that we’ve been developing for the past few months. Bass player Mike Haynes, saxophonist Beth Lyon and vocalist Katrina Ryan have all contributed great songs that we’ve enjoyed playing throughout the year. As they’ve evolved and we’ve evolved as a band – especially with the fresh lineup which also saw drummer Barnabas Smith join this year – the songs have matured and we felt that the time was right to record them. We were put in touch with a producer who we already knew through his work, although not personally. Paul has produced tracks for many commercial Australian artists as well as having worked with international acts. He brings an experience and sensibility that is new for the band and promises to lead us down some new and exciting paths in the next few months as he helps develop a new sound and maybe opens etype up to an even wider audience in 2008.

Cabaret Confessional – work in progress

I think it was during the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June this year that I decided that it was time I put myself on the line and come up with a new project. Cabaret Confessional is an idea that had been gestating for a while. I had wanted to try something new, and I suppose something I could call ‘my own’. The idea of doing it had been about for a long time, but I didn’t have the discipline to actually make it happen.

I decided to book dates for the show, and therefore give myself some sort of deadline to work to. My friend Paul at the bar La Boheme graciously offered me his venue and so I registered it with the Feast Festival and started telling people about it.

In July I was quite upbeat in telling people I was working on a show of my own, and told them all about the concept that it would focus on secrets and that I hoped to write a lot of the material myself. In August I was still quite gladly letting everyone I knew that I was going to write this show. As September rolled around and so did other time-consuming projects I started talking about Cabaret Confessional a little less, and when I did, I described it as the show “i really ought to get busy and write”. In October I didn’t really talk about it much at all. Since then it’s almost become the show that dare not speak its name.

I thought that the more I worked on it the clearer my focus would become in terms of what the show was about and would contain. I think the opposite has happened. A week and a bit away, it now feels like the scariest thing I’ve ever committed myself to professionally. My hopes for it are a lot less grand than they were when I began the process and at this stage I will be happy if I emerge from it without leaving my musical career lying behind me in tatters.

I have learned a lot from the process already (including that I should have given myself MUCH more time to put the show together) and I am sure that I’ll discover a lot more about the show and myself in the next three weeks.

The season begins Tuesday Nov 13, with performances Nov 14, 15, 20, 21 and 22 all at 6.30pm at La Boheme on Grote St, Adelaide.

Jungr than Springtime

An Audience with Stephen Sondheim pt 3

Jonathan Biggins:
You also covered that with a fairly pragmatic introduction to the theatre working as a stage manager.

Stephen Sondheim:
Well Oscar Hammerstein, when I was 17 years old, he wrote a show called ‘”Allegro” which was the first flop that he and Rodgers wrote. They’d written “Oklahoma” and “Carousel” and because the rehearsal schedule coincided with my college vacation. I came as assistant and gopher, I typed the script and got coffee during the rehearsal period and out of town tryout in New Haven until we got to Boston.

That was where I learned how NOT to put a show together. I learned the mistakes, which can be so easily made. It was a very experimental and very daring show, but it didn’t quite work. I think it’s one of the reasons I got interested, whether you make a joke about it or not, in the non-linear style.

Cameron Macintosh says I’ve been trying to fix the second act of Allegro all of my life.

JB: You extended your writing beyond the theatre to television. This is something I didn’t realise until I did my extensive research. You wrote sitcoms for CBS.

SS: It was my first paying job. I had got a music scholarship when I got out of college and I studied composition for two years and then I had to earn a living. I got a job as an assistant writer on a television series called Topper which was based on some popular novels and a couple of popular movies. But that’s the only time I wrote for television. I wrote for five months until I accumulated enough money to rent an apartment in New York and pursue what I wanted to pursue.

JB: It made you realise that your first love was the theatre.

SS: Yeah, but you know it was very valuable. When you have to write an episode as we did, that takes 22 minutes because there are 8 minutes of commercials. You have to have a teaser, then you have to have a first act, a second act and a little epilogue. It teaches you a great deal about structure, about economy and about how you make a point as concisely as you possibly can. It teaches you how to tell to joke and how to write for actors. Our leading lady had a very bad sibilant ‘s’, so we had to avoid all plurals. That’s very good discipline.

JB: And it was not long after that – it’s interesting that September of this year marks the 50th anniversary of West Side Story.

SS: Indeed.

JB: Writing the lyrics for that was a big break by any standard. How did it come about, and why you?

SS: I had written a number of shows. Oscar gave me tutelage. When I was sixteen years old he said I should write four shows. I should write a show first that was an adaptation of a play that I liked and then second an adaptation of a play that I liked but I thought was flawed, that I would fiddle around with and try and improve. Third an adaptation of a non-dramatic work, but still not my story, not my characters and finally an original.

“By the time you’ve done all four of those things, you’ll have learned something,” he said.

And by the time I’d gone through that I was ready to be a professional. I wrote a show, I got permission to do a show called Saturday Night, which David (Campbell) starred in.

…I spoke to Oscar Hammerstein about it (WSS). I said, “I don’t want to just write lyrics”.
He said, “If they offer you the job, you should take it because you get a chance to work with three really good professionals – Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. You’ll learn something by application instead of just by teaching.”

So – I took the job.

JB: Was it fairly intimidating to work with Leonard Bernstein? I remember watching the documentary when he was taking Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras though the recording. I wanted the earth to swallow me up and I was watching it five years later!

SS: First of all he was doing that for the cameras, he was above all an actor.

No it was very easy, we had a lot in common. We shared a passion for crossword puzzles and word games. We never had a tense moment, because whenever there would be any tension, we would play a game of anagrams.

We played a version called cutthroat anagrams, which is really – there is no luck involved – it is really mono-a-mono. That got out any of the tension. It’s not just a two person game, it’s with other people.

He liked to work together in a room and I liked to work separately so we worked one day out of every three in a room together and the other two on the phone for the other two days.

…JB: Looking back on it with 50 years hindsight is a privilege not many artists have traditionally.

SS: I will shock people because I’m not very fond of the lyrics of west side story. I find them very self-conscious. It’s partly because Lenny wanted it to be a poetic show. His idea and my idea of poetry are different.

His idea of poetry is my idea of purple prose. Partly because I had been brought up by Oscar, I believe in under-writing lyrics, I think the simpler the better.

I think ‘Maria, Maria, I just met a girl called Maria’ is more poetic than ‘today the world was just an address, a place for us to live in’.

Lenny kept pushing me to writing poetic lyrics.

I’m afraid that that show is studded with self-conscious lyrics
My favourite example that I’ve quoted many times is when Maria, this Puerto Rican girl sings a song called ‘I Feel Pretty’. She sings ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel’ which is a lyric which would not be unwelcome in Noel Coward’s living room.

His idea and my idea of lyric writing were somewhat different. So there are a couple of lyrics in West Side that I do like. I like “Something’s Coming” very much and I like the “Jet Song”, but most of the others make me wince.

JB: I quite like your rhyming of ‘punk’ll’ and uncle.

SS: Yes, but that’s in the Jet Song

An Audience with Stephen Sondheim pt 2

[This is a continuation from a previous post, an interview with Stephen Sondheim held at Sydney's Theatre Royal on July 6, 2007.]

 

Jonathan Biggins:
Well let’s strip away the legacy of the last fifty years and adopt a more linear narrative…one that you may not be familiar with. (Audience laughs).

Stephen Sondheim:
You’ve seen the work.

JB: You were immersed in the world of musical comedy from a fairly young age, weren’t you? It does help to grow up in Central Park, doesn’t it?

SS: Well I didn’t grow up IN Central Park. (More laughter). No. What you’re referring to I think, is my association with Oscar Hammerstein.

JB: Well, eventually.

SS: My father was in he dress business, and he would go to musicals and take buyers, but he rarely took me. I didn’t see many shows as a kid until I fell a-foul of Oscar Hammerstein.

JB: You be-friended his son when you went to school.

SS: It wasn’t that. My parents got divorced. My mother had custody of me and she bought a house in Pennsylvania, which was quite close to the Hammersteins’. His son and I became friends. She knew the Hammersteins slightly but she was a working woman and I was an only child and that was one way of getting me off her hands, which she did, and I sort of osmosed into the Hammerstein family and that’s how I became a songwriter.

JB: And you began writing musicals at school, didn’t you?

SS: Yes when I was 15.

JB: And I believe you showed that to Oscar Hammerstein and he didn’t think that much of it.

SS: Well, I thought I’d be the first 15 year old to have a show on Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein were producers as well as writers.

I went to a school called George School…’Friends School’…form of Quakerism. I wrote a show called “By George” with two of my classmates and I was sure that he’d want to produce it so I gave it to him to read and said “I want you to pretend that you don’t know me and this just crossed your desk. It’s just a musical and you don’t know the writer.”

So he called me over the next day. I went over to his house and he said “Now, you want me to pretend I don’t know the author of this?”

“Oh please, absolutely,” I replied.

“In that case, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life.”

So my lower lip starts to tremble and he said “I didn’t say it was untalented, but if you want to know what’s wrong, I’ll tell you what’s wrong” and he did something wonderful.
He treated me as an adult and went right from the first stage direction right through and took all afternoon to get just, I think, just half way through the first act. He showed me exactly…

What is this character doing here?

Why does she say this?

Why do you drop this here?

Is this your idea of a rhyme?

Why is this song here?

He treated me absolutely as a grown up. I’ve said it before and it’s not too hyperbolic. I really learned more about musical theatre in one afternoon than most people learn in a lifetime because I had the distillation of decades of experience and you know when you’re that age, you are a sponge. I can remember things that he said. I’ve applied those principles ever since and I didn’t have to learn them the hard way.

JB: How important is the role of mentorship in creative art?

SS: I think very important. Nothing can be taught. All creative art has to be experienced by the artist. I do believe in guides, and in questioning.
I believe in Socratic teaching. If I’m working with a young songwriter or they ask for my help, I don’t make statements, I question. I say -
Why did you choose this?
What does this mean?
What is your intention here?

There’s that wonderful phrase “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”

Having to defend what you’ve written, you find out something about what you’ve written. As opposed to having someone say ‘This is wrong’, “blah blah blah…”

to be continued…