A (long) personal overview of A Christmas Carol

Young Jesse Hanan, who plays Scrooge as a boy, gets one of the few real solo pieces, a beautiful song about loneliness. It’s not long, but it’s very effective. Equally moving is Tiny Tim’s solo, a ‘thanksgiving’ for all the family’s blessings. This same song becomes his funeral dirge a few scenes later, and is even more moving at that point.

I've mentioned A Christmas Carol here once or twice before, but not much, even though it's taken up a great deal of my life over the last three months. 

It’s a somewhat curious opera in that almost all the chorus have specific roles, big or small, on top of their chorus work, so that there’s a requirement for the chorus members to be good singers as well as the principals. James Adams, playing Scrooge, the lead, has no aria to speak of ˗ when he’s onstage by himself he mostly sings a kind of recitative; the only ‘song’ he has is right towards the end, and it lasts less than a minute. Otherwise he sings in duets, mostly, and briefly in a quartet. But even most of these sections are not big sings; for a great deal of the opera he’s on the sidelines looking on, and commenting, or emoting with his mouth closed. Which makes it a difficult role. 

His opening piece, which is shared with Fred and his wife, Bob Cratchit and the chorus, is a tongue-twisting thing. Even though its tempo is a slow 12/8, Scrooge often sings long runs of semiquavers within it.

The rest of the principals are also mostly involved in ensemble music of some kind or other. Ben Madden plays Cratchit, and appears only during three consecutive numbers early in the first half, with only a small amount to sing; then he vanishes until halfway through the second, when he’s part of the Cratchit family ensembles. Marley’s ghost, played by Alex Lee, only appears in one scene, where he’s involved in two ensemble pieces, and curiously, is the only person listed with an ‘aria’. And a jazz one, at that. Alex spends his time in the chorus in the second half. He and Nathaniel Otley were present at all the chorus rehearsals and learned most of the chorus music. 

Nathaniel is probably one of the busiest performers in the show, mainly because of what he’s been cast as. He starts off as one of the three drunks, so is involved in both the chorus work at the beginning as well as the drunks’ trio. Then he appears as the solo fiddler at the Fezziwigs’ party, and plays two dances (from memory). Finally, in Act Two, he becomes the Ghost of Christmas Present and spends the rest of the opera in that role (in a wonderful green cloak, with a huge Christmas wreath on his head). He has a great bass voice ˗ still young (he’s not yet twenty) ˗ and holds his own well with the two female ghosts. 

The first of these, Ingrid Fomison-Nurse as the Ghost of Christmas Past, has some very high lines, often with words that are difficult to get across easily. The same applies to the Ghost of Christmas Future, played by Lois Johnston. Much of her music is slow, though often over fast-moving orchestral stuff, and isn’t easy to communicate. Composers have to tread a fine line between setting words too fast or too slowly. Philip Norman, the composer of the opera, has chosen to go to both extremes at times, making it quite difficult for some of the cast. Both the ghost ladies do an admirable job, however.
Another singer who has to contend with a lot of words in a short space of time is Nicola Steel as the Charity Collector. Her music is lovely, but it moves swiftly, and Nicola does very well to get the words across in the short space of time they're allotted (!) Nicola introduces the children onto the stage, with their plaintive Alms for the poor number. The children later have a scene entirely to themselves, and it's organised chaos, with games of tag and such going on. In spite of that, in a moment, it seems, the kids can be all in back in place and marching together - and singing together, which is even more important!

Fred, played by Matariki Inwood, is initially part of the chorus, then transforms in the blink of an eye. In the process he suddenly acquires Mrs Fred ˗ played by Caroline Burchall. (Caroline stepped into the role late in the proceedings after another performer had to pull out.) Caroline began the rehearsals as one of the eight dancers, and still appears as a dancer in other scenes. Matariki has a great voice with great potential, but has no solo to speak of. However he particularly comes into his own in the second half at ‘Fred’s party’, when he spoofs Scrooge’s behaviour.

The other two drunks (besides Nathaniel) are Geoff Swift and Sarah Oliver. Geoff also plays Mr Fezziwig, and acquired a new ‘wife’ the night of the last dress rehearsal. Brenda Jones had  been playing her, but became very ill with the ‘flu, and hasn’t been able to perform since. Kathryn Constable took over the role, but couldn’t cover Brenda’s other ‘role’ as one of the quartet in the ‘poorly dressed townspeople’ piece because she was already singing in it! So, Sarah Oliver sings it. And all three still sing in the chorus numbers.

Lilian Gibbs plays Belle ˗ Scrooge’s young love ˗ and Keiran Kelly is young Scrooge. They have a lovely duet as well as being part of Fezziwigs’ party, and being involved in most of the chorus numbers. Many of the chorus sing more than the principals. The chorus tells the story, really, and have several chunks of big stuff. There are also two quintets, an octet and a nonet that the chorus cover. A great deal of good singing is required by the chorus, and they’ve come to the party with enthusiasm.

The Cratchit family is a delight. This is the only time Göeknil Meryem Biner (to give her her full name as listed in the programme ˗ she’s Tom McGrath's wife) appears apart from the Finale. She leads the Cratchit family’s first ensemble number (sung without Bob, who arrives for the next ensemble), and her terrific family, who all have individual bits to sing, and are very busy at the same time with the preparation of the Christmas meal, are terrific. The children are sung by Madi Dow and Sarah Hubbard, two teenagers, along with four younger children: Samuel Kelly (as Peter Cratchit) and Massimo Pezzuto and Ayla Biner-McGrath as the unnamed pair of children. Tiny Tim (Joseph Kelly) completes the family, arriving with Bob for the second number. The music for this group is a delight, being amongst the best in the show.

There are two ‘waifs’ ˗ Sam Meikle, who looks well-fed enough, really (!) and Ozan Biner-McGrath, who happens to look skinny! Their brief cry of ‘Feed me’ is only just audible under a fairly noisy orchestral section as well as the singing of Nathaniel. However, they mostly have to look as though they’re at death’s door, and they do that well.

Finally there’s Grace Hill. She’s part of the children’s chorus (some thirty of them) but she also plays the fiddler in a couple of the early scenes, accompanying the carollers. Confusingly, there are two sets of carollers in our production. Not quite sure why, except that one group in the score is listed as a quartet and the other as a quintet. In fact both of them are quintets in this production for various reasons!

There’s a minimalist set: two windows and a door with a profile of 19th century London across the back reaching to about chest height. Everything else is achieved by lighting (which is very good, as far as I can see from the pit). I was a bit dubious about the lack of scenery at first, but my daughter, after seeing the show, said it looks very effective. Above the door is a clock, which at other times shows the sign, Scrooge and Marley, and also at least one of the ghost’s face ˗ Marley’s, I think, though I haven’t actually been able to see that as yet. I’m not even sure how this is done: it’s obviously some sort of electronic device, but I don’t know what. I’ll have to ask.

Scrooge’s bed is, for some reason, enormous. When it first appeared late in the rehearsals it looked as though it was going to take over the proceedings, but the director worked around it without too much concern. Other than that there’s little else in the way of furniture: a park bench for the drunks, a chaise longue at Fred’s party, and a table and some chairs for the Cratchits.

Christine Douglas has done a great job with the directing. The chorus was worked with extensively to bring out character and detail, so that things are kept alive and lively every time they’re on. They never just ‘stand and sing.’ And in other scenes, such as the two parties, and the Cratchit family meal preparation, there’s a heap of things going on. I’d like to be able to see it all, but unfortunately have only my memories of what I saw during rehearsal to go on. I don’t play during every piece in the show, so I can watch some of it, but there are great chunks that I never see now.

The costumes are wonderful. Considering that there were around eighty people to dress (including the dancers) Brenda Rendall has done an extraordinary job. There’s an authenticity about all the costumes; they fit, they’re colourful, and there’s a lot of detail. Both men and women have wonderful hats: not just top hats, but bowlers and even a pork pie for one of the men. The women have all manner of caps and bonnets. Plus cravats, shawls, aprons: you name it. What a job it must have been pulling all these items together. On top of this there’s a make-up artist who does most of the performers each night, and a hairdresser, who does most of the women’s hairstyles. So it’s a busy, busy production.

The music is played by four keyboardists, rather than an orchestra. We don’t each stick to any one group of instruments all the way through, but get to share things. Two of us play a triangle, for instance (a real one, not an electronic one), and most of us swap wind instruments and strings around. I don’t get to play piano, and I seem to have a lot of oboe, but I share the xylophone and celesta. At one point Sandra Christie is providing thunder while I’m adding in a rowdy wind sound. I’m fortunate that I have a keyboard that can be set up in advance so that it’s literally a press of the button to change a sound, but two of the others have a different model that requires the pressing of three buttons in sequence to get the next sound ˗ similar to what my own electronic piano at home requires. I think it’s probable that they could also have been set up in an easier way, but they’ve chosen to go this route, and it’s working. The third keyboardist, Moriah Osborne, has the same model as me, but she’s using it differently: turning one wheel to get the class of instrument and then another wheel to find the specific one she wants. Apparently she has time to do this. I only have to do it once, when I play one note on timpani (!). I find it a bit of a rush, personally. Ihlara McIndoe is the fourth instrumentalist. 

What of the music itself? It’s quite varied, from near-musical comedy to full-on operatic, and there are some quirky moments that could come from anywhere. A lot of it is very catchy, with syncopated rhythms, and much of it gets used at least more than once, so that the audience isn’t hit with an endless stream of new musical ideas to grasp. It certainly requires a lot of good singers; none of the small roles can easily be taken by people who aren’t up to the mark. We’ve been very fortunate in the cast we’ve got, I think. And our young conductor, Tim Carpenter, has all the energy required to keep the thing moving at a good pace.

Update: I only realised I'd missed out Shona Bennett's name when she made a comment on Facebook about this post. Shona is the choreographer for the show, and had already choreographed the dance pieces that were set in the score when we began production rehearsals. But then Christine George, the director, wanted the dancers included in other scenes, and Shona quietly slotted them in, gave them additional steps where necessary, trained chorus members - on the spot - how to dance in one or two scenes, and in general was an enormous asset to the production. This is apart from her being warm and friendly, full of smiles, and plainly having bundles of energy - and being shorter than I am. I only mention that because not everyone is....and she made the dancers' costumes. Does the woman sleep?
I should also add that Judy Bellingham took the chorus and small role music rehearsals with flair, enthusiasm (I'd come home absolutely whacked from playing for her rehearsals!), and in spite of claiming not to be a conductor, did an admirable job of pretending to be one. John Drummond also had a considerable part to play, early on. (He's the father of the young man, Jonathan, who conducted my own production, Grimhilda! back in 2012.) John took the original score and set it out so that it was playable by the four keyboardists. There are a couple of moments in my part that I wish he'd given to one of other keyboardists (and the same probably applies to the other players), but in general I enjoy what's been allotted to me.
Every time I add something here, you can see just how much additional work has gone into this show, work you're not aware of.

Dunedin wins gigatown

To immense jubilation on the part of the supporters, Dunedin won the Chorus gigatown competition last night. I wasn't among the crowd in the Dunedin headquarters (formerly the National Bank in George St) but watched the live streaming from Wellington in which the announcement was made, and then saw the gradual build up of tweets and Facebook comments and photos and videos as people got sufficiently over their initial excitement and shedding of tears and began to digitally announce to the world that we are Australasia's first giga-city.

It's a huge achievement. There were times when it seemed as though Dunedin didn't have a hope. We were well down the board in the earlier stages of the competition, and then did a major leap as a result of one particular effort. After that we remained pretty much in the top five. Thankfully.

I was involved from about March, mostly tweeting, but some had been competing since late last year when the competition started, tweeting day after day and putting up photos and so on. A massive effort from the long-haul people.

But then, when the tweeting/FB side of it came into the last stage, hundreds of people came out of the woodwork, it seemed, and some of them spent a phenomenal amount of time tweeting and retweeting and commenting, until, on the last day for that side of the competition we nearly managed to break Twitter in NZ. It got so overwhelmed that it couldn't keep up. That was extraordinary.

It was at that point that I discovered there were people who'd been involved from early on that I'd never encountered. Which was strange considering how much retweeting had been going on for months.

My only unique contribution to the thing was that I seem to have introduced the word 'twibe' to describe those who were tweeting faithfully day after day in Dunedin. I'd borrowed it from a blog post I wrote some years back, in 2009 in fact, and it took off. Last night a number of my friends on FB were congratulating me on how much I'd done in the competition. I had to remind them that the reality is that I was one of the minor players, especially towards the end, when some people easily outshone me as the sun easily outshines the earth. It was good to know I contributed something, but let's not go overboard, people!

Of course now the gig thing will gradually come to pass in the city. Home users probably won't see any difference for some time since many parts of the city aren't yet connected to fibre, and won't be until 2015, 2016 (in our case) or even 2018, which officially the discounted price will be over and done with. Hopefully businesses will be enabled to get on and use it in the more central parts of the city. That's certainly going to be a plus for many of them.

Auditions for Grimhilda!

Stageworks will present a new family musical, Grimhilda!, at the Mayfair Theatre, in May 2012.  The show's main role is taken by a young boy who can act and sing well; there is also a smaller role for a youngish girl that requires more acting than singing.  Both children should be able to pass for 8-10 years old.   We're looking for four children in all.  

The remainder of the parts are played by adults. 

There are three substantial adult roles, including that of Grimhilda herself - a part that requires a singer/actress with pizzazz, vocal ability and stage presence.  The parents of Toby - the young hero - are played by a soprano and baritone.   

The chorus members - a minimum of a dozen of a wide age range - all have minor speaking roles, and play vital roles in the musical.

There are three important non-singing roles.  One short scene requires half a dozen dancers.  
 
Auditions start at 10.am on Saturday Nov 5th at the Mornington Presbyterian Community Hall in Maryhill Tce, Dunedin.     Auditionees should bring a piece of music to sing (unless applying for a non-singing role), and be ready to read lines from the script.   Rehearsals will begin early in Feb, 2012.   For more information, and to book a time, please phone Mike Crowl, 0210 641 081, or email mcrowl@gmail.com

Grimhilda! will be directed by Bert Nisbet, with the Musical Director being Jonathan Drummond. 

Big Sing

After seeing a tweet late yesterday afternoon saying: Concert tonight glenroy auditorium Dunedin. Best harmony singing around. Raising money for chch. 7.30 pm $10 entry - it was from mackersline, the username of one of the ODT writers - and then getting further confirmation (when I struggled to find it online) saying; Barbershop choruses from dunedin and chch women from Dunedin and two other Dunedin chorus, we decided to go and check it out, $10 a head being a reasonable price for us pensioners! (Just have to stick that in.)

When I did find it online, I noticed that Sunny Side Up were also performing, and that made the effort of getting out well worthwhile. We're good friends with some of the people in this group, but that's not the only reason we like to hear them sing. They bring a vibrancy to their singing that's different to anything else around (in Dunedin), and last night was no exception.


Their items came in the middle of the programme. They're not a slick group in the sense of choreographing their items, though they don't exactly stand still either, but they have some excellent singers (at least three of whom are people we know) and they perform songs that are out of the ordinary rather than old favourites from yesteryear; they pick up material that has its roots in Negro spirituals, or comes out of the folk streams of different countries (often including American folk). Last night they also sang Hey Jude with a strong solo from Bill, and Up above my head with an absolutely superb solo from Karen. Bill and Karen are also part of a singing quartet we've heard on several occasions: in fact they've more than once sung at gatherings such as birthdays we've attended, or put on ourselves (where they've happened to be part of the guest list).

Sunny Side Up was also the most 'diverse' group of the evening: one of the singers was in a wheel chair; they had an Indian woman playing drums a couple of times, and the people come from a wide range of backgrounds. This diversity was emphasized perhaps by their scarves, the only item they had in common (this group doesn't wear any sort of uniform) - these ranged over the whole colour spectrum.

Anyway, you can see I (we) like this group!

But we also liked the other groups too, and the range of singing talent in Dunedin was shown again and again. Some groups are stronger than others, which is only to be expected; nevertheless there was no group about which it could be said that they lacked the necessary skills to perform.

The evening opened with the Highland Harmony men's group. These guys tend to sing barbershop style songs arranged for choir, and I enjoyed them a lot - they also had the advantage of being on first. There's something soul-stirring about the sound of men singing in harmony. One of my favourite movie moments comes in Crimson Tide (or it might be The Hunt for Red October), where, as the sailors stand out in the pouring rain waiting to go on board their submarine, the sound track is filled with a choir of men singing the old hymn, For those in peril on the deep. If the film consisted of nothing else, it would be worth watching (listening to, perhaps).

A women's group, Distinctive Sounz, followed. Again they did their items well, but they seemed to have more altos and sopranos, and this somewhat limited the range of what they could sing.

Sunnyside Up came next and was followed by the Canterbury Plainsmen, a very experienced men's group from Christchurch. (Something else that's noticeable about these groups: the age range is often huge - this ChCh group had at least one teenager, and several guys who would have been well into their sixties, if not older.) The Plainsmen were excellent, but their style is very much national competition, which I suspect is based on an American approach to these kinds of barbershop choirs: the leader up the front doesn't just conduct the choir, he (or she in the case of the Dunedin Harmony Chorus, who followed next) is a bit of an actor too - very much so in the case of the Plainsmen. This is something that either suits your taste or doesn't; I'm not sure that either of us were enthused about the leader of the Plainsmen's approach, but it was a kind of integrated choreography which certainly gives some visual interest to the proceedings.

This choir has its own 'Unnamed Quartet' - the leader (singing as second tenor?) was part of this along with a guy from the choir who did a kind of falsetto solo version of Bring him home (from Les Mis) at one other point, and a young bass and baritone. Very stylish, though each of them was better as part of the group than when singing briefly as soloists.

There was also a female quartet called Nota Bene. Nice title. They're part of the Dunedin Harmony Chorus (formerly the Sweet Adelines, if my understanding is correct). This is an award-winning choir too, and you can see why. They're lively, the choir's full of good singers, and they work superbly together. (We also know one of the choir members well, but don't let that make you think I'm biased here!)

Nota Bene did a couple of items, substituting one about chocolate for one of the advertised pieces, because the latter was being sung elsewhere in the evening. We really enjoyed their items: the words were clear and snappy, the harmonies secure, and the niftiness of their vocal movement with each other was top notch. (That's another factor about this concert: clarity of words was a plus; so often I hear choirs from the classical stream who sing beautifully but don't seem to have any concern for the words.)


The same applied when the full choir came on. This is a choir that deserves the awards it's received. Plus their sparkly uniform was just great...!

Finally the Plainsmen got together with the Highland Harmony guys for a big sing of some old favourites. As always they did very well, but I think by that time of the evening I'd had my fill, and I needed to get up and stretch - we could have done with an interval: two hours plus was just a bit long to be sitting on seats that aren't the softest.

The Children's Musical

Back in the days when I was still thinking acne treatments might be of some value to me, a friend and I began to write a musical. We were still in Secondary School, and we knew no one else who'd written a musical.

It never got past the first half of the first scene, though I remember it did have a song that began, 'It is raining in Siam' and went on to bring New Zealand into it somehow, a name that proved remarkably difficult to rhyme with.

The only thing surviving from that attempt at collaboration is a song called Wishful Thinking, which I wrote both the lyrics and music for (so obviously the collaborative aspect didn't go far). It was written without knowing where it would fit in the musical or who would sing it. In spite of the fact that this song was written way back before I left school and before I knew how to write an accompaniment to it, it has survived in my memory, and I can sing it to this day. Not that anyone wants to hear it.

Some years later - I think it was after I'd conducted a children's 'opera' for a local entrepreneurial young producer (he'd only been out of school himself for a couple of years perhaps) - I hit on the idea of writing a children's opera. In a great burst of creative energy, I wrote both the libretto and music as I went along and completed some twenty minutes or more of the piece.

And that's where things stopped. For more than thirty years. When I first bought the Sibelius music program (sometime early this century) I had another burst of creative energy, and transcribed onto the computer most of the music I'd ever written, including those twenty plus minutes of the children's opera. What's more, I orchestrated it as well. And again things languished.

I kept wanting to complete the thing, and wrote another whole scene, and orchestrated that as well. And then....well you know the story by now. This year, having seen 'children's opera' come up again and again in a my list of projects, I decided to help myself get this thing off the ground.

I asked a friend to act as collaborator on the piece. She's been involved in all the Narnia productions (with one exception, I think) not only as an actor, but has also assisted in the script writing and pre-production work. As well as making props, often from scratch. She has an innate good sense of what works on stage and what doesn't, and more than that, she is very concerned that the structure and the plotting of the thing makes good sense.

I'd gone into this process with the idea that what I'd written would be our starting point and I'd just 'finish things off.' Nope. We've gone back to square one and recreated it from the beginning. There are elements of the original story: much of the opening is still along the same lines except that it's been developed more broadly; only four of the characters remain the same - the rest have either been dropped or altered; new characters have been introduced as well as new approaches to the way the story functions. The entire script has been rewritten, and the idea I had initially of it being a composed-through piece (that is, there's music and singing throughout) has been laid aside in favour of a more accommodating music, singing and dialogue approach. One scene I've just written has no singing in it at all, although there'll be some music underpinning it.

And last night I came very close to finishing the first draft of the script. It was my goal to finish it this weekend, and I will. We've already hammered out changes and re-thinks of many of the earlier scenes, but there's still a good deal of work to be done on refining the script itself. And then comes the music, of course. I wrote some music the other day for the chorus to sing at the beginining of the third act, and I know what I'm going to do for opening music (about a minute's worth before the curtain first goes up) - and I may even be able to salvage or re-use other odd bits. But essentially the thing is a re-write.

I'd hope to get it produced next year. Time will tell. In the meantime, things have made great progress in the last few months.

Photo taken by my wife of me writing music the hard way.