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a minor note in musical theatre
Sell it! or, on loving Dougal’s album
A Review of Dougal Irvine’s Acoustic Overtures
Dougal Irvine is an actor and writer for musical theatre. He is the lyricist for Stratford East’s Britain’s Got Bhangra! and his first musical Departure Lounge won the MTM Award for Best Musical and was by all accounts a good show. To add to his continuing successes he has just released an album of his own material, some from shows and some new. Ladies and gentlemen it gives me great pleasure to finally say “This week I are been mostly been listening to Dougal Irvine’s debut* album”
*I’m not sure what if an album made up of selections from various musicals and some originals, all sung by various musical theatre singers and Dougal himself really qualifies as, is it a debut for all the composer or songs or what? But I prattle on.
On writing ballads
Obviously as you might have observed by my less than frequent postings of late, I am busy, and it only takes the slightest bit of work to make me feel overwhelmed. Anyway, to force me into posting something now and then I have decided to start mini-blogging. Not micro-blogging, I do that here. No, instead I will be posting regular and short musings and ideas as I think of them. I have gone as far as to outline essay-like postsonly to abandon them becauase I failed to find a good closing paragraph. But not anymore. The future is one hundred words or less.
So here goes…
Writing Easy Band Parts
It’s late and right now I am trying to write band parts for Zombie Wedding, which I’m flying out to help with rehearsals for in a few days. Eek. And if that wasn’t eek enough, we have a band. A four piece band. Thats drums, keys, bass and lead. I have to write the parts for that band. For that four part band. How well will I do? Find out in this *essay*. I will update it as and when I get more information and try and make this as concise a piece about writing for band parts as it can be.
Goin’ to America
I have not blogged in about a year and a good amount has happened in my little musical theater life. At least one leap that has meant that in not very long I will be flying out to New York. And not as a tourist. I will try and wrap it up in one concise and short blog post. Namely this one.
Laying out a Piano Score
Sometime in 2010, It must have been in the Spring, R.C. Staab and I submitted Zombie Wedding to the Academy for New Musical Theatre in LA for a screen cast open reading. This is a service the Academy staff offer in which the senior faculty read through and then review a few scenes or a couple songs from a musical in development. I found the whole experience very helpful and would certainly recommend it for anyone doing anything a little ambitious. Aside from general lyrical and musical notes, much breath was spent belying my piano score, from the size of the cord symbols, the use of ties notes and other such and such that one would think was rather petty considering the show was only in an early reading. Well one would be wrong.
