The gigli concert playbill

PL AYBILL the gigli concert

The Gigli concert tom murphy }{

approximate running time: 2 hours & 30 minutes. there will be one 15 minute intermission

TIDBITS

ARTIST NOTE: STUART HUGHES Imagine you’re a doctor and a stranger walks in and says he wants to sing like a great opera singer in six hour-long sessions. Would you think the person insane, whose mad notion needs to be quelled, or an extraordinary being with an individual passion that needs to be encouraged?

• B eniamino

I think, among other things, playwright Tom Murphy is looking at how extraordinary acts of kindness, beauty, heroism and love might be achieved if only we could throw off the fetters of our self-imposed limitations. Limitations that are built out of fear and calcified wounds. Limitations that allow us to accept the inertia that prevents us from bringing out the strange and wonderful and unique from within ourselves or in others.

• “ Dynamatology”

Murphy’s characters are hilarious, pathetic, and tender. They struggle to be free from their delusions, self-denial and fears. If only for a moment, they stand revealed and vulnerable in front of one another. Maybe it is in the simple act of being witnessed, exposed and vulnerable, that they start to feel their real strength, and believe that “anything is possible.”

I hope you enjoy your time with this very special play, as much as I have enjoyed exploring and growing within it.

Stuart hughes, Irish Man The Gigli Concert

Gigli (1890-1957) was the most famous Italian tenor of his day. Known for the beauty of his voice and his solid musical technique, some critics felt his performances were over-emotional. He appeared in several films most notably the 1943 drama I Pagliacci. is a science invented by the playwright. In early drafts of the play, the Man consulted a regular psychiatrist but Murphy decided he wanted to question the whole idea of psychoanalysis. His fictional science, it should be noted, is based on verbal exchange, just like psychiatry.

• P atrick Mason, who directed the first production

sums up the play as “...the song of the soul in a contemporary world... the pain of the soul in a soulless world.”

• I n

2001 the Abbey Theatre did a whole season of plays by Murphy, including Gigli, an historical epic called Famine, and the greatly beloved (in Ireland), lyrical Bailegangaire.

CREATIVE TEAM

THE GIGLI CONCERT

CAS T Stuart Hughes

Irish Man

Diego Matamoros

JPW King

Irene Poole

Mona

Produc t ion Nancy Palk

Director

Ken MacKenzie

Set/Costume Designer

Steven Hawkins

Lighting Designer

Paul Humphrey

Sound Designer

Eric Armstrong

Dialect Coach

David Dunbar

Vocal Coach

Kelly McEvenue

Alexander Coach

Dustyn Wales

Stage Manager

Janet Gregor

Assistant Stage Manager

SOULPEPPER PRODUCT ION Jacqueline Robertson-Cull

Head of Hair & Makeup

Erika Connor

Lead Wardrobe Coordinator

Geoff Hughes

Cutter

Barbara Nowakowski

First Hand

Natalie Swiercz

Wardrobe Coordinator

Emma Zulkoskey

Dresser

Paul Boddum

Scenic Painters

Greg Chambers

Props Builder

Mike Keays

Carpenter

s p e c i a l t h a n k s: w i l l i e w i l l i a m s

The Gigli Concert is presented by arrangement with Alexandra Cann Representation, London, United Kingdom. info@alexandracann.co.uk

i l l u s t r at ion : t h e h e a ds of s tat e

BACKGROUND NOTES

“I wanted to write about the feeling of life. Not life as an intellectual process, or a concept, but as a feeling.”

T

om Murphy is one of the greatest living Irish dramatists and The Gigli Concert is arguably his best play. Fellow Irish writer Colm Tóibin says it’s full of “magic and sour wit and soaring language.” Murphy’s feel for language along with the flamboyant, masterful verve with which he uses it are his most potent weapons. Influenced by Tennessee Williams’ poetic delicacy and O’Neill’s tender honesty, his wild, torrential words snap with dry humour and vibrate with consuming rage.

Like the Man in the play who longs to be a great singer, Murphy has learned that the key to personal transformation is bloodymindedness, persistence, and hard work. And even then, nothing is a sure thing. Singing like an angel – or writing a brilliant play – is also a gift, and so beyond our complete control. Still, the playwright, now 79 years old, rises daily at four a.m. to write. He writes many drafts, toiling until he knows in his bones what his characters are feeling. Mind you, he may have had a head start with the two men in Gigli.

Like the Man, Murphy always wanted to sing, though he had no talent for it. And like J PW King, the self-styled “dynamatologist” the Man hires to help him, the playwright has what he calls a distinguished drinking career behind him – though with typical wry humour he is proud to note that he was only sick twice.

What grounds the swoop of Murphy’s verbal pyrotechnics and theatrical audacity is an emotional stubbornness, a refusal to offer up any kind of conventional redemption. And yet, as this play attests, he passionately believes in the struggle to achieve perfection and in the mystery and revolutionary possibilities of the collaborative process. Audiences leave this play swept away, “dynamatized” by the simple human action of trying, of dreaming and aspiring and persevering in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

Au t hor Biogr aph y

T

om Murphy was born in County Galway in 1935. He was a teacher until 1958 when a friend suggested he write a play. Murphy claims the idea was not out of the ordinary at the time: everyone in Ireland was writing a play in those days. A couple of years later A Whistle in the Dark won an amateur play contest, was rejected by Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre, and went on to find admiring audiences in London. The Abbey reconsidered, and Murphy has had a long, fruitful association with them as well as with the Druid Theatre in Galway. In 1975 after audiences stormed out and critics raged at his anti-Catholic play The Sanctuary Lamp, he left theatre and became a farmer for a few years, producing his only novel The Seduction of Morality.

The Gigli Concert premièred after he had returned in 1983. Today, he lives in South Dublin and continues to create new plays, most recently 2009’s The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant.

Tidbit & Background Notes by Paula Wing

THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!

416 866 8666 soulpepper.ca Young Centre for the Performing Arts Toronto Distillery Historic District

Soulpepper is an active member of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (pact), the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (tapa) and Theatre Ontario, and engages, under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement, professional artists who are members of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. Scenic Artists and Set Decorators employed by Soulpepper are represented by Local 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. 

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