HAVING IT ALL Olivia Rowland looks into the vogue for paring down shows by employing singermusicians and finds out what problems performers can face
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t’s official: recessions are good times for lipstick manufacturers, mini-skirt designers and musical theatre. Economic gloom is well known for driving us to look for small indulgences to make ourselves feel cheerier, and it’s not just the big names of musical theatre that are benefiting. Just as fashionistas make the most of recession chic, so the crunch is creating good times for an emerging genre of musical theatre – one that’s gone small-scale. Creative teams haven’t yet reached the stage of encouraging us to put on our own musicals, recycle old ones or haggle over ticket prices in a bid to save the pennies. But they are looking to smaller casts, using singer-musicians (singers who also play musical instruments to a high standard, often on stage and usually as part of the action), in a production style that is perfectly suited to smaller venues and lower budgets. Ultimately, this makes musical theatre more flexible, more creative and more accessible. ‘The trend for using singer-musicians in recent times comes from a combination of factors, which certainly include financial concerns,’ says George Burrows, editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre. ‘These teams of singermusicians can be amazingly innovative and make use of more intimate surroundings such as tents, boats or even caravans.’ The recent tendency to downsize is turning musical theatre on its head. ‘It forces production teams to be creative and to work in unconventional ways to reinvent theatre,’ says George. ‘Suddenly
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everyone’s equal – in many singer-musician shows there is a sharing of leadership responsibilities between the performers, and rehearsals are treated much more as devising sessions where exploring possibilities are more important than attempts to realise some pure underlying text or singular directorial vision.’ There’s a practical element to the downsizing as well. ‘Most of these shows start off in small spaces either on the London fringe theatre circuit or in limited producing houses out in the sticks,’ says Alex Weatherhill, a musical director who’s worked on numerous singer-musician productions. ‘Inevitably, there are restrictions on stage space and budgets, and the cost of providing full time musicians can make or break a small company. But as a musical director I want audiences to experience something as close to seeing a West End show as possible, and this calls for more than a piano and a triangle, particularly if you’re creating revivals of old shows. For example, last year I put on a production of Annie Get Your Gun, which is written for an orchestra of around 35 and a cast of 38 named characters plus chorus. In many cases that’s more people than some venues can seat! By getting the cast to play as well as act you can augment or transform the sound into something new and interesting without compromising the integrity of the score.’ Kate Marlais, an experienced singer-musician who’s recently appeared in the UK premiere of The Unsinkable Molly Brown at the Landor Theatre, believes that the musical theatre genre as a whole as benefiting from the employment of singer-musicians and the
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21/07/2009 10:49:05