It’s hard to compose music (or produce any creative work, for that matter) without harboring aspirations—however irrational or delusional they may be—of grandiosity.  Writing even the most modest student exercise doesn’t pass without hopes, conscious or not, of hearing the final product performed in the world’s great concert halls, and recorded for the benefit or posterity.  

So it’s somewhat humbling for me to provide the music—part arrangements of popular songs, part original compositions and part shameless borrowing from other works that encroaches on unabashed plagiarism—for Barbarian Production’s upcoming Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Indeed, this music can only be performed in a 1940s-themed production of Two Gents (with the specific director’s cuts). 

The music for Two Gents will consist of three Big Band era classics to which we’ve bought the licensing rights: Oh! Look at Me Now; New York, New York; and My Funny Valentine. I am also adding short interludes between scenes, and brief moments of underscoring, all written solely for voice and piano.  While the total amount of music is not likely to exceed twenty minutes, creating the music for over a dozen passages scattered across two hours of drama requires an enormous amount of planning.  This planning can become just about comically erratic when I discuss it with Kate, my friend and the show’s acting director who, despite not being able to read a single note of music, is as insistent and specific in her musical requests as she is with the actors!

Two Gents‘ set is ambitious and at times hilarious. When some scene changes demand lowering a skyscraper, turning a street lamp into a tree, or erecting a balcony, the interludes for scene changes must be flexible in their duration to accommodate variations in the time it takes to transform the stage from Verona to Milan, or a Duke’s palace to a grimy back-alley. Even the shortest of such musical interludes must represent the level of energy of the end of the previous scene and the beginning of the next, and provide a convincing link between the two, all while maintaining a stylistic and thematic relation to the dramatic setting. Two Gents must proceed smoothly from one scene to the next, maintaining the cohesion that is central to a performance’s overall dramatic effectiveness.  

No pressure, then.

Kate has asked me to write the music in the Big Band style; to that end, she gave me an extensive list of required listening/viewing for the holiday (mostly Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, Cole Porter musicals, and the odd home video of her 92-year-old grandfather playing the piano).  With Big Band the basis of my accompaniment, I couldn’t resist letting some of the chromatic richness of bebop slip into my score—the richness of the harmonic language necessary, in my opinion, to fill in some of the dryness resulting from the sparseness of a single piano.  

I’ve taken as my stylistic model a somewhat unusual but nevertheless appealing work: a cabaret art song by William Bolcom, Toothbrush Time, which, like Frank Sinatra’s recording of New York, New York, was produced in New York City in 1979 in a retrospective style. Toothbrush Time, oddly enough, humorously portrays the coolly detached regret a woman feels the morning after a romantic liaison–I’ll leave it to audience members to decide whether or not that makes for an appropriate commentary on the play’s action.  

Finally, I’ve incorporated recurring motifs as often as possible.  In the interludes this mainly takes the form of the three songs used in the show, but I have also added a simple two-note theme consisting of somewhat dissonant chords.  This short but dark-sounding motif will represent the climactic dramatic episode of the play (no, I won’t give it away. Buy your ticket!), foreshadowing what’s to come during the more sinister moments within the comedy.  With any luck, then, the musical accompaniment of Two Gents will provide a cohesive frame in which the drama can thrive unencumbered by rough edges. 

Now that I’ve outlined the whirl of relationships, processes and communication that are going into the play’s incidental music, you can listen for the smallest hint of ‘oh what a beautiful morning’ when we yank back our moon on a string and replace it with sunshine.

Zalman Kelber is the music director and pianist Barbarian Productions’ The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to be performed May 2nd-5th in Christ Church Cathedral Gardens. Tune in next time when the director interviews the late William Shakespeare, and for more information about Two Gents visit their website, www.barbarian-productions.com, or follow them on twitter @twogentsox

Joshua Caole’s facebook claims that he likes ‘films with Reese Witherspoon, cheese pizza and heavy metal’. Yet his music bears no signs of his taste for blondes/rom-coms, fast food or head-banging. Instead, his debut album Moon Palace is a folk/rock/country offering, filled with bittersweet recollections of failed love, taking us on an emotional rollercoaster from heady lust through to frustration and doubt. Caole may hail from Wales, but his music is firmly rooted on the other side of the Atlantic. Stick Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith in a blender, sprinkle heavily with Americana, toss in a few broken hearts and you might get something like this EP.

These influences are most evident on ‘Sweet Sweet Eyes’ with its jangling guitar lines and steady beat. Caole casts himself as the seducing poet: ‘I told you that I loved you, it was just a lie. It’s the same with every cliché that I ever write’. Yet the rest of his lyrics belie this, revealing a romantic alternately regretting the past and confused about the future.

‘Caught in Two’ shows him hesitating and torn between giving into his desires despite knowing ‘What’s good for me is not for you’. It’s on songs like this and ‘Butterfly’ that Caole shines. Stripped of drums his deft finger-picking comes to the forefront, weaving his smooth voice with mournful harmonica interludes into a melancholy tale of loss.

On ‘Cruel’ Caole’s usually sweet vocals are twisted with anger into a hoarse fragility. Its insistent pace then melts into the more laconic and wistful ‘For the Angels to Sing’. The album’s two piano-led tracks are barely distinguishable from Ryan Adams’s ballads, yet this similarity is to Caole’s credit, more than matching Adams with his hauntingly whispered vocals.

Whilst it’s a shame that Caole hasn’t yet managed to marry Legally Blonde with heavy metal, Moon Palace is a promising debut and more than justifies a trip to catch him supporting Christiaan Webb at the Jericho Tavern on April 14^th. 

One Man, Two Guvnors is a reworking of Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, by writer Richard Bean and director Nicholas Hytner, promising its audience ‘an evening of side-splitting delight,’ complete with comedian of the minute, James Corden. And it is: reminiscent of the classically British ‘Carry On’ films, the play is energetically vulgar and brilliantly entertaining.

Following Francis Henshall’s dismissal from his skiffle band, it follows his attempts to juggle two jobs in order to fund his partiality to a good pub lunch. The comedy lies in his attempts to make sure his two masters never meet, made more difficult by the fact that they are in fact romantically entwined. One ‘master’ is in fact dressed up as her dead brother in the aim of collecting a £6000 dowry from his fiancé’s father. Richard Bean’s script adheres to the basic plot line of Goldoni’s classic ‘commedia dell’arte’, but takes the setting from Italy to louche 1960’s Brighton. This allows the play a light hearted and modern familiarity, leading critics to aptly describe it as a ‘seaside postcard come to life’.

Bean also keeps to the characterisation of Francis, played by Corden, whose actions are driven by the whim of his continuously rumbling stomach. Luckily, Corden’s portly figure and comical crudity fit snugly into his intentionally hideous checked suit, as well as the original characterisation. This thankfully allows us to suspend his Gavin and Stacey image.

That said, the slightly pathetic and pitiful streak he adds to his character does sometimes jar with the fiery, thick-skinned nature we have come to know from the Brit Awards. It is also hard to continue to find his relentless joshing with the audience as humorous after the first half, or indeed to ignore Corden’s conspicuous esteem for his own wit. He takes this slightly too far when he ‘marvels’ for a good fifteen minutes at a member of the audience actually handing him a sandwich when he asks for one as part of the script onstage. Moreover, the magic of this ostensibly improvised interaction is dispelled once you talk to anyone who has seen the play on a different night; one of you proudly brings up the unique nature of the sandwich incident, which is promptly met by the other saying with incredulity that the same thing happened on the night they went as well.

The best moment of the play undoubtedly lays within the quivering hands of ‘Alfie’, an aged waiter, as he painstakingly serves a number of courses. He looks as if he ought to be long dead, and indeed spends his time on stage hurtling from one near-death experience to another.

Although the play’s key feature is its traditional buffoonery, all the actors are fresh and tirelessly funny. ‘One Man, Two Guv’nors’ is a vintage comedy brilliantly reupholstered for the 21^st century.

Acting is often said to be like stepping into someone else’s shoes.

Like wearing someone else’s shoes, it is normally quite uncomfortable at first: your feet pinch and every step feels difficult and painful. You are unsteady on your feet. So are actors. When presented with a new character to inhabit and become, each action and each decision you must justify feels challenging. You are unsure what motivates your character. But with time your feet and indeed your acting skills become adjusted and comfortable with their new abode, and after a while each step and every character action– a laugh, a head tilt, or a handshake– feels natural.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the characters make many difficult decisions, and it is difficult as an actor to make these decisions seem natural. Why does Julia dress as a boy and follow her unreliable fiancée? Why does Silvia give her picture to a man she despises? Why does Proteus betray his best friend for a newfound love?

As an actor normally cast as a whore or sultry maid, it was a great shock and huge excitement to be cast as a romantic lead in the upcoming Two Gentlemen of Verona. Many times this term I found myself feeling inexplicably happy or strangely sad, and had these odd moments when I realised that my unexplained emotions were actually due to being too caught up in the romantic side of my character, Julia. During the initial rehearsals, when we were working through the beginning of the play, I found that I would be inexplicably happy when cycling around or gazing out the window in the library, only to realise that it was in fact Julia who had such cause to be ecstatic.

Getting to know Julia, and figuring out how to portray her, felt like peeling back layers of maturity and jadedness, returning to my 16-year-old self. Trying to get into the mindset of a lovesick teenager was an enjoyable activity, but surprisingly difficult. There are so many moments in the play where I’ve been tempted to slap Julia for being so passionate and blind – it is frustrating and difficult to watch this girl set herself up for a huge heartbreak.

Towards the end of the play, where Julia’s emotional journey has led her to become quite bitter and dispassionate – this sorrow seemed to enter my mind and haunt me a bit. This sweet innocent girl has to witness a horrendous event. I won’t give too much detail for fear of ruining the ending, but as a result of what she sees (and as a result of some clever script-cutting), Julia has to come to a dreadful and brave decision. This emotionally climactic decision was, for me, difficult to reach, due to the many warring instincts that I felt Julia would have. When rehearsing this sad scene, I found her emotional progress incredibly frustrating.

But it was the moment that Julia makes her choice that I felt I had finally gotten to know her. A character that was represented as primarily headstrong and blindly in love, her nature was in fact much more nuanced. As my director beautifully put it, Julia will never be the same again; her life has changed and her outlook on the world has become much darker. How to portray this dramatic change in one silent moment will be difficult. Luckily there’s a lot of laughter, cross-dressing, attempts at singing, and love-struck dreaming to get one through in the meantime!

Alice Fraser will be playing ‘Julia’ in Barbarian Productions’ The Two Gentlemen of Verona to be performed May 2nd-5th in Christ Church Cathedral Gardens. Tune in next week for the music director’s perspective, and for more information about Two Gents visit their website, www.barbarian-productions.com, or follow them on twitter @twogentsox