New Musicals Network

Like many people, one of the books which stuck in my mind as a child was CS Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I remember reading this at school one wintertime and, looking out of the window (I was lucky enough to have a window seat in the classroom) on a frosty morning I could imagine the snow-covered landscape of Narnia very vividly.

One of the things which makes this such a memorable book is its title – only a master storyteller like Lewis could take three such contrasting and disparate items as a lion, a witch and a wardrobe and weave them together into the incredibly rich and enchanting tale we all know and love.

Most composers and writers will acknowledge that the starting point for a successful musical is indeed the story itself. If we can get that right, the characters, song lyrics and music should follow. So – can we learn any lessons from Lewis and his Narnian universe?

Well, in pursuit of this, I decided to have a look at creative writing websites, rather than perhaps the more obvious route of checking out stories which have been successful musicals. An excellent story-writing website I discovered is www.creative-writing-now.com which has a wealth of ideas to get the creative juices flowing. Interestingly, the first suggestion they make is to take three contrasting items and link them together into a story – just like Lewis did in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe!

Some of the ideas include:

A broken wristwatch, peppermints, and a hug that goes too far.

An ex-boyfriend, a pair of binoculars, and a good-luck charm

A horoscope, make-up, and a missing tooth

Another website, www.seventhsanctum.com, takes a completely different approach. This one is a kind of automatic story generator, which can yield surprisingly interesting results. You begin by selecting a genre from a dropdown menu – for example science fiction (there aren’t many science fiction musicals around, are there?) You then click “generate” and a very basic plot outline is created. Here’s one I made earlier (as they say on Blue Peter):

“This is a quest story. The story is about a watchful librarian, a professor, a quartermaster, and an introverted singer who is constantly annoying a marine. It starts on an icy planet. The critical element of the story is travel. Genetic engineering and its side effects is a major part of this story.”

Other parts of the Seventh Sanctum site contain “generators” for the component parts of your story, such as character names and traits, etc.

But is using a website such as Seventh Sanctum cheating? Surely it is merely re-assembling bits that someone else has already put together but in a different order? My view is that this is essentially what writers have always done anyway. Standard advice for budding writers since time immemorial is to keep a notebook and jot down anything which you observe which might be useful later for a story. A website tool (or indeed a creative writing textbook) simply automates this process a bit.

Of course, it requires a major leap to turn a germ of a story idea (whether it’s been generated by a website or purely within the brain of the writer) into something suitable for musical theatre. Just because a story works on the page does not necessarily mean it will be theatrical in its nature. Other factors will need to be considered – the characters, the setting, the overall pace and movement of the story to name a few – before the story can begin to take shape as a piece of music drama.

Last weekend I was at a family birthday party (it was a grown up party, so no jellies, party hats or pass-the-parcel) and got into a conversation with one of the other guests about musical theatre. Now, this person is very active within the amateur operatic scene in our town, and is also a keen theatre goer in the West End, so I was interested to hear another person’s views about quality of shows at the moment.

Okay – everyone knows my obsession with Sondheim, so you won’t be surprised that my hackles rose slightly when my fellow guest revealed that Mr S is his least favourite composer of musicals. Probing further, it seemed that this opinion was largely based on seeing an amateur production of Into The Woods and concluding that it was “too long”. “No-one should be writing a musical which is over 3 hours long,” he said. Actually, ITW should run at about 150 minutes, so – and I don’t want to sound snobby about amateur productions – any director leading a production coming in at over three hours needs to look at their pacing! Although my party companion is, of course, perfectly entitled to his opinion, and I have nothing personal against Sondheim non-fans, I was left wondering whether his opinion would have been the same if he had seen a top-notch professional production, such as Timothy Sheader’s wonderful rendering of the show at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.

I’ve been involved in amateur and school productions in the past, ranging from shows such as Godspell, Bugsy Malone and Joseph to more heavyweight shows like Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret and Sweeney Todd, and I realise that for many people this is their only contact with live theatre. There are all sorts of questions this raises about the cost of going to a professional show in the West End or a regional theatre, and “value for money” generally. And the economics behind putting on a new musical in particular is an especial minefield. However, I want to leave economics aside for now and be a bit more artistically controversial. I want to ask the question “does amateur theatre sometimes do a disservice to the musical theatre genre?”

I realise that some of this may come across initially as an attack on my friends in the amateur theatre world, but that isn’t actually my intention, since I believe a thriving amateur theatrical presence in a town has the potential to make an enormously valuable cultural contribution to the community, and is something most certainly to be encouraged.

The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that sometimes amateur groups bite off more than they can chew. A few years ago I saw a production of Sweeney Todd in Cambridge which, quite frankly, was an insult to the original creators of the show, and must surely have been in breach of the performance licence. There were numerous cuts, tuneless singing, evidence of miscasting, choral parts where the harmonies were simply removed leaving everyone singing in unison, and many other areas where the production was disastrously misconceived. Granted, this travesty was an extreme example, and quite possibly the worst production of anything I have ever seen, but there must have been people in the audience who came away afterwards thinking “well, if that’s musical theatre….count me out next time”.

It’s such a shame, because amateur theatre at its best can be amazingly powerful and moving, and can definitely give the professionals a run for their money, and there’s nothing quite like actually being involved in a production on either the acting side or backstage to make you appreciate all the hard work and organisational genius which has to go into even the most modest of productions.

It seems to me that the key is selecting the right show – and here the production committees of the operatic societies need to exercise extreme caution. It’s so very easy to get carried away with enthusiasm for a “favourite” (but essentially over-ambitious) show, in a meeting and commit the society to something beyond their reach in terms of talent and resources. I learnt this lesson during my time as a head of music in a secondary school, where I once persuaded everyone we could do Barnum as our school production. It seemed such a good idea at the time – colourful sets, circus acts, lively songs – what could go wrong? The trouble is, after we had set everything up and committed ourselves to it, the boy who was “earmarked” to play the title role left the school. I was then left with an inadequate pool of talent from which to re-cast. The result was embarrassment all round – not least because the whole process was being filmed for TV as part of a documentary series, so instead of a few hundred parents/friends/supporters seeing the show through their inevitably rose-coloured glasses, a nation-wide TV audience of several million witnessed me losing my rag as yet another rehearsal went pear-shaped.

At least I was spared from the fate which befell my colleague directing the show – who was publicly presented by the cast members with a large pair of plastic buttocks as a thank-you gift. Oh why didn’t the TV crew come the previous year when our production of Fiddler on the Roof was pretty-near perfect?

So it’s really not easy getting the right balance between challenge and excitement for the performers, whilst still ensuring the show is well within the capabilities of everyone so that high standards are maintained, and the audience isn’t in danger of leaving during the interval. It takes a huge dose of “keeping it real”, and also an ability to be firm with the amateur director (and we’ve all met them) who thinks they’re the next Trevor Nunn with a budget of millions.

I would maintain that any theatrical performance, amateur or professional, that fails to engage the audience because of shortfalls in its production values, is doing a disservice not only to the original composer and writers but also to theatre per se. People usually go along to an amateur show because they know somebody who is in it. Admittedly they are already well-disposed towards it because they know their friend/relation will ask “What did you think of it”, and they’re not going to say “Well actually it was a load of rubbish!” But what will often happen is that next time they will “have something on that night”. And worse….they will conclude that musical theatre isn’t really their bag, or that Sondheim’s musicals are too long – and musical theatre loses another potential supporter.

It’s no better if the unsuccessful production is on the professional stage, where audience expectations are even higher – sometimes for the “wrong” reasons (such as a judicious bit of stunt casting on the part of the producers, or the promise of some spectacular special effects). Ticket prices demand that the audience is happy and the streets of the West End are littered with the remains of musicals which have flopped. But for many casual audience members it’s unfortunately “once bitten twice shy” – again, “musicals aren’t my bag.”

Returning to amateur theatre, as I said earlier, I don’t want today’s blog to sound like an attack on our “amdram” friends – that’s certainly not the intention. In fact, they should be proud that they can have a positive and powerful effect on audiences – but they should also bear in mind that to present a show in the public arena involves a duty to ensure that the dramatic and musical requirements of the text (i.e. the book and the songs) are put across with clarity – this should be the ultimate objective. I would rather see a simple show which has been effectively directed and performed, and which makes its message clear, than an ego-ridden mess masquerading as an “interpretation” of a technically too-demanding work, which only causes audiences to wonder why on earth they wasted several hours of their life sitting in a hall or theatre barely tolerating it, and vowing never to return.

Okay – I’m not quite homeless yet, but the NMN website might soon be! It’s been a bit of a victim of its own success, and is beginning to creak under the strain. In fact, a few months ago it crashed, taking a lot of data with it. Much of it has been restored, but there are still some holes in its functionality (though you can still upload your mp3s and link to your videos). It desperately needs some TLC or the next crash might be its last.

Trouble is, and not surprisingly, the bottom line is lack of money. And I’ll not lie, I’m having to get my begging bowl out. Those of you who visit regularly have probably seen that I’ve launched a campaign on IndieGoGo which has so far been running about two weeks and amassed the grand sum of…….zero! Every now and then IndieGoGo send me an encouraging email which declares excitedly “Your ratings on IndieGoGo have gone UP!” I then experience a quickening of the breath and hearbeat and log in to the user’s dashboard with feverish anticipation. But despite my rating being “UP”, the amount balance remains steadfastly at zilch.

To summarise our goal, we’re trying to raise $750 (yes it’s in dollars, as IndieGoGo is based in the U.S.) to kick start our aim to really give the site a major makeover and get it looking and functioning much more professionally. Under IndieGoGo rules, we have 100 days left to get there, and any contribution is welcome – although a variety of perks are provided for anyone who chips in $10 or more.

Please have a look at http://www.indiegogo.com/New-Musicals-Network for more details.

If you cannot afford to donate to our cause – and we know that money is tight for everyone right now, there are still things you can do to help. For example, we'd love it if you would help us spread the word about New Musicals Network, and if you're anywhere near London, perhaps you'd like to come to our next event.

In the meantime, if there are any web developers out there who might want to do some pro bono work, it would be great to hear from you. That way, we could put any money we raise towards our next show rather than the website.

And now from virtual homelessness and poverty to the real thing in early twentieth-century America, as portrayed last week in the Landor Theatre’s amazing production of Ragtime, the musical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. The sheer scale of this story of three groups (a white middle-class family, a poor black musician and his girlfriend and child, and a penniless Jewish immigrant and his daughter) is breathtaking in the way the stories are interwoven, incorporating cameos from real-life historical characters such as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford and Emma Goldman. Drawing upon an authentic ragtime musical style which goes beyond pastiche, the show retains an edginess in its portrayal of the darker side of the American dream, and only rarely threatens to descend into sentimentality. Through an ingenious use of silhouettes to suggest large-scale settings, together with imaginative and evocative lighting, director Robert McWhir managed to squeeze everything into the tiny space at the Landor whilst still retaining a genuine sense of the landscape of the piece. The show was distinguished by some first-class performances (and I’d like especially to mention Louisa Lydell as “Mother” and Craig Rhys Barlow who shone in a variety of contrasting roles), not least from the musical director, George Dyer, who negotiated his way on the piano through the demanding score with an endearing confidence and panache.

The whole thing was a joy to watch and become absorbed in.

Now….must go - I have a hungry website to support, guv.

As I’m writing this we have just had a few days of incredibly summery weather considering it’s the UK at the beginning of October, with temperatures well into the 80s, so it seems a bit strange to look back at the summer break. And apologies if reading about someone’s summer is a bit like being forced to sit through their holiday snaps – at least with reading a blog you can just click off it and go somewhere else.

But I hope you won’t do that, because I had a rather fascinating summer from a theatrical point of view – so do stick with it!

I had a trip booked to New York last December, but sadly had it cancelled because of the deluge of snow at Heathrow Airport. At the time it felt like a catastrophe, but the silver lining turned out to be an absolutely marvellous trip in August instead. This time the weather was hot and mostly dry (although a few torrential downpours made an appearance, perhaps the harbinger of Hurricane Irene). One such downpour resulted in an encounter with Stephen Sondheim’s umbrella – but more of that in a moment.

Okay – musical theatre enthusiast goes to New York and attends Broadway shows. Hardly a surprising statement is it? It’s somewhat in the “is the Pope a Catholic” category. And I’ve been to shows on Broadway before – so what made this special? Well, I think it’s because I was lucky enough to witness a number of pretty amazing performances along the way.

First up was Daniel Radcliffe in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. It’s a show which, despite its mouthful of a title, succeeds superlatively and is a real hot ticket on Broadway at the moment. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised at Radcliffe’s masterful transformation into song-and-dance man. His stage acting ability, which he proved beyond much doubt last time I saw him  in Equus, shows that being Harry Potter for goodness knows how many years hasn’t resulted in a fatal attack of type-casting. It’s no doubt a cliché to say that so-and-so commanded the stage, but in this case it happens to be true. He had that rare quality of seemingly magnetically drawing your eyes onto him every time he was on stage. The last person who did that for me was Whoopi Goldberg during her all-too-brief run in Sister Act at the London Palladium. Oh – and the animatronic pig from Betty Blue Eyes of course. I am happy to confirm that Radcliffe truly earned his standing ovation at the end of a couple of hours of unremitting pleasure.

I also had the great delight to see Diane Paulus’ production of Hair, catching the Broadway leg of its US tour. To be honest, I was not over impressed when I saw this same production in London; something I couldn’t really define seemed to be missing from it. So I was not expecting to be blown away. But blown away I was. The show seemed to possess an energy, confidence, and above all a connection with the audience, which seemed lacking in London. Brilliant stuff! Again, the individual performances were outstanding, especially the way the semi-improvised banter with audience members was handled. I really felt drawn in, and almost came to feel like a member of the cast. (Though thankfully for the other audience members I was not drawn to remove any clothes).

Okay then – what was I doing splashing around in New York with my head protected from the heavy rain by Stephen Sondheim’s umbrella?

A little background: before we left for America, I contacted Steve to ask if Katy and I could film an interview for the Stephen Sondheim Society website. To be honest, I thought it was a long shot because he is obviously a very busy man and fitting us into his schedule could not be taken for granted. Imagine my excitement when he replied that he could spare us some time for this, as he would be at home for a few days during our week in New York.

Arriving at the Sondheim residence, the rain had already started, so we were a little soggy by the time his assistant, Steve Clar, answered the door. We were shown into a beautifully furnished, subtly-lit living room, with its array of antique board games adorning the walls, and made friends with the two poodles of the house, Willie and Addie.

“Steve’s just finishing something off upstairs,” smiled Clar. “Make yourself at home – can I get you a drink?” The “something” that was being finished off upstairs turned out to be the last few words of his next book Look I Made A Hat, due at the publishers the next day.

In due course, Mr Sondheim appeared and we exchanged pleasantries while he apologised for being in a hurry. We began filming Katy’s interview (which you can see HERE), and this went on for about fifteen minutes, after which Steve shook our hands, apologised again, and disappeared back upstairs to his study. And now you’re wondering how Sondheim’s Umbrella fits into this story. We had decided to walk back to our hotel, being only two blocks from Sondheim’s house, but upon opening the front door we were faced with absolutely torrential rain. Steve Clar said: “Here, why don’t you take one of Steve’s umbrellas?” and thrust said sturdy rain protection device into my hand. “Oh thanks,” I replied. “I’ll pop back and return it later when the rain stops.” Clar replied that it was no big deal and that I should keep the umbrella.

In addition to being generous with umbrellas, Sondheim was even more generous to us by giving us free tickets to see Follies. This was a lovely gesture, and we ended up in some of the best seats in the house for the matinee on the following day. Let me say right away that this production (which has been getting rave reviews and has been extended till February) is everything Follies should be. Stunningly breathtaking performances from Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Danny Burstein and Ron Raines, coupled with Jonathan Tunick’s marvellous orchestrations fully realised, make this a show not to be missed if you are able to get to New York to catch it.

Finally, whilst in Manhattan I also got to have lunch with composer Charles Bloom, who lives there and is a great friend of NMN having had several songs performed at Snappy Title. Charles is a wonderful conversationalist as well as a fine composer, and we spent a splendid hour putting the world to rights, accompanied by great steaks at Frankie and Johnnie’s legendary steakhouse on West 45th Street.

I felt terribly privileged to have these experiences during the week my family and I spent in the Big Apple – there were the normal “touristy” visits to the sights (we had the in-laws with us and it was their first time in New York), the slightly off-the-beaten-track bits (fond memories of the tranquil Chinese Scholars’ garden on Staten Island), and of course the almost surreal pleasure of being welcomed into the home of one of the greatest living composers. Who could ask for more?

This will be the last blog for a few weeks, as I will be away on holiday (which includes 3 weeks in America, one of which will be in New York – very exciting!).

Having worked in education for practically all my life, the subject of exams and qualifications is one that I’ve sort of grown up with. Even now, in my “day job” as responsible for data management and analysis in a high school, I work in a busy exams office and therefore I’m literally surrounded by the things.

We regularly hear how managers in industry are concerned that the current examinations systems do not provide them with a true image of a job candidate’s attainment, complaining that candidates with good grades in English and Maths can’t actually spell or add up. This led me on to the question – in the fiercely competitive world of theatre, is there a similar problem with qualifications?

Not all that long ago I attended a showcase put on by the performance department of a fairly large and well-known university in the London area. The programme was mostly operatic, but with a few musical theatre items thrown in. Out of the dozen or so singers, I was alarmed that only about two had any spark or stage presence about them. Indeed, one student couldn’t even sing in tune! To gain their place at the university they must all have had impressive GCSE and ‘A’ Level results, and also must have passed a practical audition. Unless it was just a “blip” on the day, why was the standard so poor?

Contrast this with performances by students from the major drama schools (e.g. RADA, GSA, Mountview etc) in the Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year competition this year. Every single one of those performances (even the weakest ones) were head and shoulders above their university performance dept counterparts, which would suggest the vocational route is the preferred option for our future drama professionals.

Certainly it is the case that if you look at performers’ biographies in the West End you will see that most of them were trained at drama schools rather than university drama departments. This would imply that, in terms of paper qualifications, the drama schools have more or less got it right. A BA in Acting from RADA, for example, will say to an agent that this person is “sellable” and would be capable of taking up the reins in a real job on the commercial stage.

To be commended are the Guildford School of Acting, who now offer graded exams in musical theatre singing, much in the same way as the Associated Board’s long established graded music exams. These graded exams, although not in themselves professional qualifications, lay a good foundation for nurturing the correct approach to taking on the more rigorous form of training provided by the drama schools. Chief examiners Ross Campbell, Erin O’Hanlon and Robert Forbes state in the syllabus: “GSA wanted to provide a realistic foundation for those who enjoy singing musical theatre repertoire as a recreational activity, as well as for those who wish to take their training to a higher level… The syllabus aims to nurture strengths in singing and performance, along with a growing knowledge of the background to Musical Theatre. Generalist examiners are not used, but only experienced specialists in Musical Theatre repertoire and performance, who are able to give detailed technical feedback about each candidate.” Although the syllabus does not prescribe specific songs (all songs are candidates’ “own choice”), it does give guidance for songs which are appropriate for each grade – ranging from Castle on a Cloud from Les Mis at Grade 1 through to Matchmaker from Fiddler on the Roof for Grade 5 and beyond. The syllabus also gives a useful and comprehensive checklist of essential skills such as “focused and well-projected sound”, “use of a range of vocal qualities to convey emotion” and “engagement with the character of the song” – all things which would be assessed later in one’s professional life by the people who matter: agents, producers, directors and musical directors.

When you’re a student it’s always a big temptation to regard the qualification you’re working towards as the end product, and of course in one sense it is. All your efforts over the time of your course are directed towards that goal. However, when I was teaching, I always tried to expand my students’ perspective a little bit and suggested that they regard the qualification more as a “gateway” to further opportunities. Important undoubtedly, but all-in-all just one more step on the path to what they really wanted to do.

In conclusion, I don’t want to devalue qualifications from university departments because there are always exceptions, but as a general rule it would appear that the qualifications awarded by the vocational drama schools are more likely to be regarded as more relevant by employers. However, qualifications can only get you so far, regardless of which institution awards them to you. The real test is “can you do the job”? And that’s a question which can only be answered by two things – the past experience as detailed on your resume and your performance at the audition.

Another website I’m involved in uses the WordPress platform. Recently, WordPress changed from version 3.1.4 to 3.2, and then, a day or so later, version 3.2.1. An iterative approach to a project is standard practice in software design, where each new version comes along with improvements, bug fixes, and new functionality. Often the latest version bears little or no resemblance to the first release – compare the first version of Microsoft Office with the latest, for example.

It has become normal for a similar approach to be adopted when tackling a creative project such as a musical. We have all probably been following the Spiderman saga on Broadway, but on a smaller scale, our own projects are likely to have been through a variety of revisions, readings, try-outs, more revisions, previews, and yet more revisions before finally firming up into a completed work. And even then, the piece isn’t necessarily set in stone, as revivals often bring with them another round of iterations before the producers are happy with the product.

It is tempting to assume that the “classics” never went through this process – that a Beethoven symphony or a Shakespeare play somehow leapt fully-formed from the mind of their creator. However, we know from looking at Beethoven’s sketchbooks and early accounts of Shakespeare’s work that this isn’t the case. There is ample evidence of tweaking, moulding and revising before what we recognise as the work of art we’re familiar with arriving in the world. And composers such as Handel weren’t coy about copying either, and would often recycle bits of their own work and other people’s (so maybe Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t in such bad company after all!)

The big problem with constantly tweaking and making adjustments is knowing when to stop and say “that’s it – that’s the finished musical”. Of course, it could be argued that each live performance is a unique, slightly altered version of the original anyway because the performers will make subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) changes to their interpretations on the fly. This is part of the joy and artistry of live theatre we might say. But taking a pragmatic view, there must come a time when the major adjustments (e.g. the placing of a song within the story, the inclusion or non-inclusion of a particular character) must come to an end and energy devoted to simply making the musical work for an audience of theatre-goers. Judging when this point has been reached is ultimately a job for the composer/lyricist/book-writer, in collusion and consultation with the director. It should be a decision based on the requirements of the drama, not the financial requirements of the producer, and the audience experience must be taken into account.

There really has to be a moment when you, as a creative artist responsible for bringing a work into the world, need to let it go, for better or worse. It’s not unlike parenting a child and nurturing their early years until they are educated enough and emotionally mature enough to sever the apron-strings and be an independent creature. I have certainly had the experience of finding in a cupboard songs I wrote years and years ago, playing them through on the piano and surprising myself – did I really write that? (Or sometimes, did I really write that?!) It is as if the songs are not connected to you anymore, and truly I feel this can only be a good thing – to continue the revision cycle ad infinitum (like Microsoft) means that the work can never have a proper identity of its own, in a similar way to the kinds of people we sometimes meet who still live with their parents and have never really grown up.

I suspect that Microsoft Word will never be “finished”, as such. There will always be a new version just around the corner. But I like to think that we won’t be seeing regular weekly updates of Spiderman Turn Off The Dark ver. xx.x.x

The other week I was offered tickets to see Jekyll and Hyde at Milton Keynes Theatre. Not quite sure what to expect, I thought I’d give it a go. To be honest, I’m not familiar with Frank Wildhorn’s music (it’s kind of passed me by) but I have every respect for Leslie Bricusse, Jekyll and Hyde’s lyricist.

Jekyll and Hyde is, of course, not a new musical – so why am I writing about it here?

Well, as I was watching it, it raised quite a number of issues in my mind to do with musicals in general, and which are relevant to the world of the new musical.

There was a series of letters in The Stage recently exploring areas of audience expectation, and how people are sometimes disappointed when a “star” is replaced by an understudy. Somebody had written in to complain that they had spent a lot of money on tickets and accommodation to see a show which had advertised a well-known celebrity in the starring role, only to find that the celebrity was not appearing that night. This sparked off quite a fiery exchange of letters from people like Gina Beck, arguing that understudies are more than capable of carrying the show, and, indeed that many "stars" were one day understudies themselves.

I saw this argument played out in public at J&H. Just before the show started, the stage manager announced that Marti Pellow had suffered an injury to his nose earlier in the week and that his part would be played by his understudy, Martin Dickinson. There was an audible reaction of dismay from certain members of the audience, and I heard later that there were some rather disgruntled Marti Pellow fans from Bulgaria who had flown in especially  to see him. Poor man – I expect he would have much rather been treading the boards as Jekyll in Milton Keynes than languishing somewhere with a wonky nose. In the event, Martin (who I had recently seen at the Tim Williams Awards) gave a super performance and won the audience over completely.

It reminded me of many many years ago, when I attended the second night (I couldn’t get in to the opening night) of the original London production of Evita. I expected to see this wonderful new star everyone was talking about called Elaine Paige, and felt rather deflated to hear that the part was going to be played by understudy Stephanie Lawrence at this performance. Stephanie was fantastic as Eva Peron, and it wasn’t long into the show that I completely forgot about Miss Paige.

It is clear why producers like to recruit “celebrities” – it brings in audiences who normally wouldn’t perhaps think of going to a musical. I guess that in itself that’s no bad thing as long as the show is of high enough quality to make the newbies think “that was a cracking evening’s entertainment – I wouldn’t mind booking up for another musical in the future.” But there’s the rub. The show has to be exceptional.

Which leads me to the next musing from the evening at J&H. Although the standard of performance was, as one would expect, highly professional, the show itself was a profound disappointment, and, in my view, unlikely to entice someone back to the theatre.

As I watched it unfold, I began to think of things an aspiring writer of musicals could learn from it.

Firstly – the story. There are many stories from books which are wonderfully suitable for adaptation into “musical” form. Jekyll and Hyde is not one of them. So the first lesson should be…choose your story with care. Don’t just base a musical on a Victorian novel because it happens to be out of copyright. You need to develop a way of reading a prospective candidate for adaptation with a “visual” sense. (A small boy at the school where I work wrote recently “I like reading because it’s like watching television in your head”.) Remember that it’s the visual aspects which make the strongest initial impact, sadly for us as writers and composers, not the music or words! If you can “see” the novel in your mind’s eye, it should then lead to an awareness of how the characters will look, how they will speak and, then, how they will sing. It should even give you an embryonic feel for the pace of the drama (but be careful, “novel” time is not the same as “stage” time). The music, dialogue and songs will then, all being well, flow from this. But if, as is the case with many novels, you cannot picture what is going on, you are likely to get bogged down with details which prove unnecessary or unsuitable for the stage.

Secondly, I learnt that a lot of songs which may be individually okay, strung together do not necessarily a successful musical make. In J&H there are many songs which could be described as “power ballads”. Individually, they’re not too bad. But you should reserve your big power ballad for the close of Act One, or for a particularly significant moment in the drama. Impact is lost if most songs are “Once in every show there comes a song like this” (to quote Spamalot) numbers. And once impact is lost, pace suffers and the dramatic tempo of the entire show is affected.

And my third and appositely final lesson – make sure your ending ends the show! In J&H, the ending is nothing short of atrocious dramatically. Loose ends are tied up in the previous scene, only to be untied again in the final, unconvincing wedding scene. And without providing too much of a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t seen this musical, did Victorian gentlemen really carry swords? Perhaps they did. I don’t know.

So there we have it – a promising evening which didn’t really come up to scratch despite powerful performances, nonetheless provided plenty of food for thought and showed that it was capable of teaching us things about our favourite art form. An evening in the theatre is rarely wasted time. As Syrus wrote, “From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.”

Here endeth the lesson.

It’s been quite a while since I last uploaded an NMN blog. It’s not me being lazy – promise!

I’ve been doing quite a lot in my capacity as co-chairman of The Stephen Sondheim Society, including helping to oversee the implementation of a new website, getting involved with the planning for the Society’s annual Student Performer of the Year Competition, and contributing to the paperwork required in setting the Society up with a new legal status – a Charitable Trust. So if you have some time, do hop over to www.sondheim.org and have a look at what we’ve been doing!

In the meantime, I’ve been privileged to witness a number of excellent initiatives in the field of new musicals.

Firstly, there was A STAGE KINDLY’s April Revue, at the King’s Head Theatre in, well, April. This was a fantastic showcase of songs from new musicals, performed with huge enthusiasm by a cast of young professional artists. Highlights for me included Charles Bloom’s (with an additional credit to Leonard Bernstein – hardly a new writer!) Belters, It’s Hard to be Evil by Michael Gordon Shapiro, and Big White Wedding by Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger. More information about the work of A STAGE KINDLY can be found on their website, www.astagekindly.com.

The next event I’d like to mention is the Stiles and Drewe New Song Prize, which is incorporated into the aforementioned Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year Competition. This was held at the Queen’s Theatre on May 22nd, and followed the now-established format of having the competitors sing one Sondheim song and one original song. The original songs are then judged by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe and the best one gets a prize. Previous years have been a little uneven, with some very peculiar songs making it through the selection process to the final. This year, though, the standard was noticeably higher, with the “embarrassing” ones able to be counted on the fingers of one hand. Of course, this made judging much harder, and Stiles and Drewe decided this year to have two winners. So big congratulations to Kaboom Kapow by Eric Angus and Paul James (sung by Howard Jenkins), and I Am by Tim Sutton (sung by Bronte Tadman).

If I can be allowed to temporarily drift off into Proud Parent Mode, I was in St Andrews last week to see my daughter Elizabeth graduate MA with First Class Honours, and whilst there I met up with an inspirational young composer, Finn Anderson. Finn is just nineteen years old and has already had a musical, Streets, performed at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews. Not only did he compose the music, he also wrote the lyrics and book, AND directed and musically directed the show. It was a great success, and has attracted interest from Dundee Rep and the Edinburgh Festival. Finn is definitely a young man to watch – and you can listen to some extracts from Streets in the Upload/Listen page of this website.

To bring the last few months up to date, last night I attended the fourth Tim Williams Awards at the Cochrane Theatre – produced by the London Shakespeare Workout’s Dr Bruce Wall in memory of their late musical director. A marvellous evening ensued, featuring a veritable treasure-trove of new writing (especially commissioned by Bruce himself, and setting the words of great literature from such diverse sources as Pushkin and Victorian erotica) from composers such as Christopher Hamilton and Gareth Peter Dicks. The songs were performed by no less than twenty-nine West End professionals including Rebecca Caine, Dianne Pilkington, Peter Polycarpou, Will Barratt and stalwarts from NMN’s very own Snappy Title series, Sarah Lark and Michael Peavoy. Especial congratulations go to composers Lindsey Miller, Christopher Hamilton and Stuart Matthew Price, who were all prizewinners at the event. The Tim Williams Award itself went to Stuart Matthew Price.

Bruce Wall stated at the end of the Tim Williams Awards that "we're all winners". I completely agree - due to the wealth of vibrant and vivacious composing and performing talent out there, we all win everytime we are exposed to it. May organisations like A Stage Kindly, The Stephen Sondheim Society and the London Shakespeare Workout continue to thrive in these difficult times and continue to make us all winners in our encounters with new musical theatre.

I was delighted to be invited by Mark Goldthorp (Avenue Q, Into the Woods) to go and see a new tragic-comic one-act musical he had written with Kenneth Avery-Clark, called The Singing Teacher. I really enjoyed the experience, and it was a joy to see the virtuoso performances by Mark and Kenneth, who played all the characters. Kenneth also doubled as musical director and orchestra (well, pianist anyway)!  I was left with just a few reservations, which I will come to in a minute, but on the whole the show was certainly worth seeing.

In musical theatre, two-handers are extremely rare. Even more rare is a show where one of the two actors has to play several characters as was the case here, with Mark playing singing teacher Kenneth’s various pupils.

On the whole, this worked well, and was slickly and expertly directed by the Hackney Empire’s Susie McKenna, although I have to admit I was left wondering whether this was how the writers intended it, or whether, in an ideal world, they would have different actors playing the separate parts. All in all it was a good testament to Mark’s great skill as an actor that each character was well-drawn and distinctive, although there was a slight patchiness – the foreign neighbour, for instance, was the least convincingly done.

As the play progressed, it became clear that the most important of Kenneth’s singing pupils dramatically was, ironically, the one who couldn’t sing – Malcolm. As I learned more about him, he ceased to be the comic fool struggling to find middle C, and became a real three-dimensional person that we could care about. The interplay between his story, with all the attendant ironic pathos of him living his life as a Star Wars geek, and the tragic story behind the abnormally houseproud singing teacher’s breakdown (not giving any plot away, but caused by a perfectly timed “twist” in the narrative) was one of the highlights of the performance.

This was billed as a workshop performance, and, as with most workshop presentations, there is room for improvement. To be blunt, the least successful components for me were the songs. Despite individual songs being well-written, there were too many in the same “ballady-pop” style (often with stubbornly diatonic chord progressions such as tonic-mediant-subdominant-dominant – REPEAT…) which led to a disappointing lack of variety. To underline this, when something really different came along occasionally, such as the wonderful parody of a typical big Broadway number, or the moving duet at the end between Malcolm and his teacher, the appreciation of the audience was tangible and genuine. And if I were giving the actors a note, I would say that one thing to watch especially is that Kenneth invariably played the piano too loudly, drowning out his own singing, which was a shame, even though this fault was so obviously borne out of a great enthusiasm and passion for the music.

However, despite these minor grumbles, The Singing Teacher certainly deserves further encouragement and outings – it’s such a great idea for a show, and I wish Mark and Kenneth every success with it.

If I were a saxophonist I would be able to call this post The Joy of Sax, which would have a nice ring to it. But I’m not. I play the piano. So The Joy of Piano will have to do. (Actually, I was tempted to write about all the piano players I’m jealous of just so I could call it Pianist Envy, but then I decided that was possibly a step too far).

When I was learning the piano as a small boy I hit that stage where one is tempted to give up, like most beginners do. Despite doing my piano practice (reasonably) regularly, I didn’t seem to be improving. Encouragement duly came from an unlikely source – a neighbour told me that I would never be short of friends if I played the piano, and that I would always be on people’s lists of party invites.

Well, I’m not sure if it quite worked out like that, especially with the decline of live music at functions, and the rise in popularity of the karaoke machine, but being able to play the piano has definitely been one of those things which I have never regretted doing. Only last weekend I was accompanying my wife’s school choir at a Music For Youth Festival, performing two Disney songs and a folk song (and my daughter had done the choreography – incredibly, from Scotland, by Skype – so it was a real family affair). The children’s faces as they performed and, later, received a nice adjudication, were a delight to see and made all the hard work in rehearsal worthwhile.

In fact, when I think about it, many of the highlights of my life involved playing the piano – for example, playing or MD-ing for shows like Fiddler on the Roof and Godspell, and even playing in front of thousands of people at the Royal Albert Hall. And on an infinitely smaller scale but in many ways more special, playing (and singing) Nursery Rhymes and selections from The Mikado to my daughters when they were very little, in impromptu musical evenings at home. I can’t imagine life without the piano, even if now I actually play it more infrequently than I used to.

The wonderful thing about the piano is that it is not only a solo instrument with an amazing repertoire by composers like Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy, but it can also be an entire orchestra if you want it to be. Indeed, its most common function in musical theatre is as a rehearsal tool – where the pianist can reproduce the pit orchestra’s part by playing from the vocal score. An experienced rehearsal pianist can adjust speed and volume to match the singers as they learn the vocal part, providing just the right amount of support as and when necessary, until that moment when the singer is able to take the song to their heart and make it their own, whereupon the pianist slips into an accompanying role. This is something only a live piano player can do. No mechanical device, no matter how sophisticated the programming, can equal this.

And then, of course, there is the role of the piano (or more frequently these days, keyboard) in the public performance of the show. Keyboard writing for shows like Wicked, or practically anything by Sondheim, is now just as sophisticated and challenging as anything in the classical repertoire (just try playing Epiphany from Sweeney Todd or No Good Deed from Wicked and you’ll see what I mean). I well remember being in the pit for a production of Cabaret and struggling to sight-read the solo at the beginning of Don’t Tell Mama, having been told that all the music in Cabaret was simple um-cha um-cha stuff!

As well as being a great tool for rehearsal and performance, the piano is a splendid instrument for composing with. As a pianist myself, I can hardly imagine what it must be like to use a melody instrument such as a clarinet to support the composing process, as the piano is unparalleled for working out harmonies and accompaniments. As I see it, the only non-keyboard instrument which could possibly come close to a piano as a composing tool is the guitar, and it’s no surprise to hear that musicals such as Grease, The Rocky Horror Show and Hair were composed on the guitar. However, I believe that the majority of composers of musicals use a piano, and indeed nowadays a composer can use a keyboard to input music into a computer in order to create backing tracks and scores.

In conclusion, then, the piano is probably one of the most versatile musical devices ever invented. I can speak from experience when I say that it is well worth any musician learning to play it well even if it’s not your “first” instrument.