New musicals express

Published on Thursday 13 August 2009 19:07

THERE was a time when few serious theatre-makers would allow themselves to be associated with a musical.

Musicals had a bad press, blamed for pushing serious theatre off the West End stage with money-spinning tributes to dead pop stars.

The idea of contemporary theatre companies experimenting with the genre would have been laughed out of town. But that is changing. Critically acclaimed musicals such as Billy Elliot, by the playwright Lee Hall, which won ten Tony Awards on Broadway in June, have won some respect back for West End glitz, while Mel Smith's The Producers revived the musical as a vehicle for gags, a strand royally exploited each year at the Fringe.

What is even more interesting is that people associated with cutting-edge theatre are looking at ways of reinventing the musical. This year at the Traverse – a venue more usually associated with gritty, contemporary drama – three shows combine music and theatre to tell a story.

Che Walker's feisty funk musical, Been So Long, celebrates the joys and sorrows of men and women in a bar in Camden. David Greig's Midsummer is described as "a play with songs", and was made in collaboration with Gordon McIntyre of indie band ballboy; and New York performer Cynthia Hopkins explores issues of identity and memory in Accidental Nostalgia, combining the influence of Robert Lepage and the Wooster Group with an alt-country soundtrack by her band Gloria Deluxe.

Not all of the above will own the term "musical", but Che Walker has no problems with the m-word. He says he always wanted Been So Long, which began life as a gritty play about contemporary relationships at the Royal Court, to be a musical. As the tenth anniversary of the play approached, he began collaborating on it with musician and composer Arthur Darvill and won the backing of the Young Vic and English Touring Theatre.

"I'm very proud of the play, it's had a great life, but it always nagged at me that I wanted to bring it back and have songs. I think that there's a lyricism to the dialogue that becomes very heightened and epic. Hopefully, it creates a world where it's not so jarring for people to start singing."

Although he is better known as the playwright behind such works as Flesh Wound at the Royal Court, and The Frontline, the first contemporary play to be staged at Shakespeare's Globe, Walker grew up loving musicals. "My father (director Rob Walker] did Guys and Dolls at the Half Moon Theatre when I was about eight, and I went and saw it every night. It's still my favourite."

He describes himself as a "crazy soul fan" and wrote the first draft of Been So Long to a soundtrack of soul, funk and jazz. "I just think that a musical, if it all comes together, hits people like nothing else can hit them," he says. "It just transports people and enchants them in a way that straight theatre doesn't. Ultimately it's a way of telling stories, and this particular story works as a musical, I think."

This is a musical with a contemporary twist, with strutting studs and sassy ladettes, lonesome drinkers looking for love, sex or both. Darvill says he's no fan of musicals. "But I love theatre and I love music, so I wanted to bring those two things together. We were starting from scratch, which made it harder in a way because we didn't follow any set of rules. We never set out to be forward-thinking, we just wanted to do work that we were proud of and that we wanted to see."

Soul singer Omar Lye-Fook, who has six successful albums to his name, stars in Been So Long as Barney the barman. He's no fan of musicals either. "Someone said to me they don't like musicals, but they love this, because it's not like a musical. I've always described it as a play with songs.

"I do love the traditional ones, the stuff from the 1950s and 1960s, The Sound of Music, Oliver!. There was a golden age, but there's a fine line where it can become too cheesy. Billy Elliot is the best one of the modern kind, but Oliver!, bloody hell, it's amazing."

"Singin' in the Rain," chips in Darvill. "Annie. Annie's a genius piece of work. And Sondheim's a genius. Sunday in the Park with George."

Walker puts in a word for Little Shop of Horrors. "And I'm a Dream Girls fan, though some don't like it."

"Dream Girls," says Lye-Fook, shaking his head. "Oh, man."

Walker points out that resurgence of musicals is being nurtured in London by the Theatre Royal Stratford East, which is midway through a five-year programme to evolve new musical work. The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) in Glasgow has recently started offering a BA in musical theatre, in addition to its MA, and prizes such as the MTM (Musical Theatre Matters) Awards have raised the profile of musicals on the Fringe. But the biggest barrier to staging musicals is money.

That was certainly a concern for David Greig and Gordon McIntyre, who made Midsummer on a shoestring as part of the Traverse's developmental strand for new projects, Traverse Too. But it paid off, selling out at its first run at the Traverse and going on tour. An album featuring the songs, sung by McIntyre, is out now, and the show will tour to Canada after the Fringe.

The show started when Greig and McIntyre got talking about how music and theatre could be combined in a new way. "We had a conversation about what a musical would be like if it were not 'songs from the shows' music but the music that we listened to," says Greig. "It was almost a theoretical question. We both loved the idea of putting songs in a show but we thought, 'Why does it have to sound like a musical?'" Because it was a low-budget production, they felt more free to experiment.

Midsummer makes a virtue of its homespun lo-fi aesthetic. The two performers, Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon, sing, play instruments and operate the staging themselves, while unfolding a funny, thoughtful story about two thirtysomethings on a lost weekend in Edinburgh. There is a richness to Greig's text which is absent from many more traditional musicals, balanced by McIntyre's quirky take on the contemporary love song.

Greig sees it as the opposite of the large-scale musical. "If a musical has a cast of dozens, we have two. If a musical has an orchestra, we have acoustic guitars. Musicals have people flying and we have flying in this show, but it is literally things on pulleys that the actors have to lower down. It has all the ingredients of a musical but in miniature."

&149 Been So Long, Midsummer and Accidental Nostalgia are all at the Traverse until 30 August. Times vary from day to day for Been So Long and Midsummer; Accidental Nostalgia is at 10:30pm.