Cutting hell

It's been another seemingly endless day of highs and lows, which has felt so long, in fact, that I wondered if I'd forgotten to write a blog yesterday because last night now seems such a long time ago.

The day started with a full run of the show. Nathan came, as did Philippa and Hilary. Unfortunately I didn't get Philippa's notes as she rushed off to chat to Sara after the run, and by the time she'd re-emerged, we'd hit the ground running with my own set of notes, and then the day gathered speed...

'Cello gate continued, with the return of young William's instrument, which arrived from the luthier with a new G string. Something was still not right, however. William described it as the string feeling loose and asked if I could tighten it, which of course would have been impossible without sending it out of tune. He was right, however; the G string sounded all twangy and loose, and it soon dawned on me that the luthier had put a D string where the G string should have been, and therefore that poor William's instrument sounded more like a sitar than a 'cello! It was an easy enough fix, however. A G string was soon found and fitted to the 'cello.

I wafted about for the rest of the afternoon, sitting in on a sectional rehearsal with the crazily talented brass boys.

The bombshell of the day arrived via email at 6pm. Fortunately I'd managed to convince Nathan to stay for tea before taking the train back to London, so he was with me when the night of the long knives unravelled.

The email was from our producer, Jeremy. The running times of the show had been calculated based on the run, and for all manner of licensing reasons, it became apparent that large cuts still needed to be made. These are the words which would fill any writer with dread. Killing one's babies is horrific in any circumstances. Having to make the cull in the space of a single evening is simply devastating.

There was a period of about an hour where Nathan and I sat, leafing through the script, searching for cuts which would take huge chunks of time out of the script without losing an entire song, destroying the narrative of the piece, or, more crucially any one actor's raison d'être. It's one of the most painful experiences I've ever endured. The cuts needed to be effective - and in order to be effective, had to be brutal.

Nathan and I agreed on 40 cuts of varying lengths, and took our suggestions to the rest of the creative team, secretly hoping that someone would scream "no! You can't possibly cut that stunning piece of writing." Sadly, all but one of the forty cuts were accepted.

The dreadful task was telling the cast, and we met after rehearsals this evening in one of the boarding houses to deliver the news. I felt like an executioner. The cast looked terrified. Sara got upset. I got upset. Nathan read the list of cuts out loud. The cast occasionally gasped, then tried to be brave. It was truly awful.

I hope in the long run that the cuts will improve the piece. I'm pretty sure they will, in fact, but in the short term I'm not feeling too great.

Still, it's something which happens with all new musicals. They're always big blocks of granite which need to be shaped very carefully. For those in the cast who want careers in theatre, this has perhaps been a useful experience, as it's  something which could well happen to them many more times in the future. I'm sure it will never feel as bad as this, however. Poor things.

Sitz, fritz in bits

Today has been exhausting like no other. For me, for the entire creative team, for the cast...

I kept away from the main rehearsals and spent my time instead focussing on the band, who are a wildly eccentric bunch. The rehearsals started with a full band call and then the brass boys were sent away to rest their lips. They seemed to spend much of the afternoon playing croquet on the lawn and watching a video of last year's NYMT production of West Side Story. Oh to be a brass player, and to have the excuse of numb lips!

The strings, percussion and keys continued to work into the afternoon, and we hit a good rhythm for a time which felt very productive. That was until we stumbled into the murky waters of what can only be described as "cello gate."

We have a young lad in the band who plays the 'cello. He's immensely talented, but he's so tiny that his  'cello is three quarter sized! Part-way through the rehearsal I was aware of a degree of commotion which ultimately led to both 'cellists in the band rushing out of the space.

A few minutes later they returned, handed William's 'cello to me and told me that it was broken. They weren't wrong. The strings were unravelling as fast as you could tune them up. I've never seen anything like it in my life before and there was nothing I could do to help. William was dispatched to a local luthier who seems to think he can only do a short term fix, and the rehearsal promptly ground to a halt.

In the meantime, young Alice, who is a member of the pastoral team, very kindly went back to London to collect her brother's 'cello for William to use until his own one is returned.

Cut to ten minutes later when the other 'cellist took me aside, thrust her instrument towards me and said "look." Bizarrely, the exact thing had happened to her cello. The g string unwound as you tuned the a string and vice versa. I don't know if it's the temperature of the room we're rehearsing in, or the damp weather, or the ghost of a Leeds Pal having a laugh, but it seems lighting can strike in the same place twice!

It wouldn't have mattered had we not been doing the Sitz Probe tonight, which, for those who don't like pretentious opera terms, is the rehearsal when the singers and band sit down to play through the entire show without actions or any blocking. The band is basically one day off being ready for this particular rehearsal. It usually takes place after all other rehearsals are done, but there's some technical reason why it can't happen on Friday to do with the transportation of set.

I spent much of the sitz rushing about, listening to the music from different places in the room. The acoustic in the space we were in made everything sound insanely boomy, so it was quite impossible to tell what was going on much of the time. Despite this, there was something quite magical about the occasion. The cast got incredibly excited and spent much of the run with their mobile phones in the air recording sequences of music. Sadly, in our allotted rehearsal time, we didn't manage to quite reach the end of the show, which upset me because I've genuinely never heard the last two songs!

Sam Becker and Matt came, as did my friend Di, a wonderful playwright, who gave me brilliant advice at the start of my research period for Brass; "choose your setting before you open up the massive can of worms which is the First World War." And she was right. There are so many documents out there pertaining to the Great War, that unless you refine your search by deciding first where you want to set your piece, you're almost done for! I chose Leeds.

Sam gave me some very well-considered notes after the sitz which were incredibly useful. What that man doesn't know about orchestration and instrumentation isn't worth knowing.

I leave you all with a link which comes from Nathanael, the young lad who plays the role of Henry in Brass. Henry is an actor who is obsessed with Charlie Chaplin (who was apparently my great grandfather's cousin). Anyway, Nate has taken the Chaplin research to his heart, and has written a very lovely song with his Mum to celebrate the fact.

Here it is...
https://soundcloud.com/steve-8-2/cheeky-charlie-chaplin-kind-of-chap-written-by-jill-nathanael-arranged-by-matt-greaves-music

I am the B

This morning started with ABBA. I love a day which starts with ABBA. Listening to ABBA is refreshing and invigorating. I practically skipped my way up the hill to rehearsals as a result, and kept finding myself doing little dances.

I've dipped in and out of all sorts of different rehearsals today and feel we're slowly getting there, although the cast is now at a stage where new information takes a considerable amount longer to filter through their addled, muddled brains. Their minds are now officially full to the brim with conflicting directions, dance steps, harmonies, costume requirements, rewrites, cuts... They'll get there, they really will, but it will require one final push.

The band are slowly coming together. We have assembled some awesome players. We still need to finesse - and I still need to thin out some of the orchestrations, but we're heading in a rather impressive direction.

Today I came back from lunch and found a mixture of band and cast members jamming with Matt Flint in the rehearsal room. Matt was wearing his tap shoes and was having a "tap-off" with the drummer... It's these moments which genuinely make me feel that the experience of Brass is unlike any other and will hopefully remain in these young peoples' heads and hearts for the rest of their lives.

It's rather nice to be able to drift about a bit. I did a one-on-one session with Tom Ramsey, who plays  Harry in the show, and I think he made wonderful progress with his song.

The key to the success of Brass lies within the show's humour. The more opportunities the cast can find to smile and laugh, the more universal and powerful their performances become. The utterly luminous Rosie Archer, who plays the role of Emmie, dies with a huge smile on her face, which makes her death somehow so much more upsetting.

Every year the NYMT runs a summer school for Swedish musical theatre students, so we're now sharing the school with hundreds of blonde-haired, rather tall creatures. We have our very own Swede in the cast, Sandra Kassman, who is resolutely refusing to speak to her fellow country men. I would be the same. I would feel somehow like they were invading my patch, as indeed I felt when, a hundred years ago, I did a second year with the National Student Theatre Company, only to find five people from my university suddenly in the show I was working on. Much as it was nice to have them there, the NSTC was MY thing. MY little secret...

Anyway, much mirth has been caused by Sandra asking some of the Swedes to teach her a phrase in Swedish, which she has been repeating back to them deliberately badly in the hope she can somehow convince them that she's become fluent in Swedish in the space of two days! I logo forward to seeing the results of her deception.

I'm told all the Swedes want to do is sing ABBA songs. Clearly they have taste.

I uttered a terrible malapropism today when I told Ben and Josef about the time I worked as the acting coach on 28 Weeks Later. In one particular scene I was working with a 12 year-old lad, and in order to get him to gasp convincingly and on queue when his father appeared for the first time as an infected zombie, I stood underneath him and performed the Heimlich manoeuvre.  Unfortunately I managed to get to the nub of the story, but instead of talking about the Heimlich manoeuvre, managed to say that I'd given the young lad the "Hymen" manoeuvre! What the hell am I going to be like as an old man?!

It's clearly time for me to phone my husband to say goodnight and get some shut eye myself. Sleep well, everyone... Or, more appropriately, have a lovely breakfast!

Underscore bore

I sense tonight is gonna be a long night. It's already 1am and I haven't yet finished formatting band parts for all the sequences of underscore in the piece. There's no way on earth that I'll manage to finish this process without making an insane number of errors. There will be badly formatted parts, no doubt, some of which will subsequently go missing in cyber space. These are the times when being a composer has its drawbacks. I am so so tired!

It feels like it's been another long, but productive day, although people are reaching almost comic levels of exhaustion. It is, however, often when actors are in this near comatose state that the barriers are dropped and the magic can begin. Josef and Ben who play Alf and Tom gave me an intriguing sense of what they are both capable of last thing this evening, despite barely being able to keep their eyes open. Theirs is the hardest task in a production of almost epic complexity. They play two young soldiers who may or may not be gay. Nothing is explicit. Nothing is written. Everything is implied or takes place in a series of scenes where neither manages to quite express what he's feeling.

Of course, from my perspective, it's vital that this is played out in a believable way, despite both actors being straight. My dear friend Ellen recently sent me a birthday present of a book of photographs which someone had collated after years of going through junk shops, house clearances and car boot sales. No one now knows who the people in the photos are or who took them, but they show gay, lesbian and trans people in the early to mid 20th Century, just being themselves, really, at a time when just being themselves was not just illegal, but highly risky.

The pictures are hugely moving because they show people in love. Some of the shots are almost terrifyingly intimate. I found the images of mock marriages particularly upsetting. Same sex couples, usually one in drag, smiling happily, hoping against hope. Sadly, same sex marriage was not destined to be a reality in their life times and yet, for those few moments, as the camera shutter snapped, they were entirely free of the shackles of society. These men and women are my absolute heroes. Without their bravery I would not be the man I am today. I would not have been able to sit with Tom and Robin, nonchalantly chatting about my wedding whilst looking at a clip of Sara Kestelman singing "gay, happy wedding day" with a rogue piece of pink blossom flying through the air and attaching itself to her button hole!

It was the arrival of this book which made me determined to treat the Alf/ Tom relationship in Brass with great integrity, in honour of those glorious men and women smiling from its pages.

We had a very amusing moment today which followed on from a set of notes I gave to choreographer Matt. In one of the notes I asked that the quavers in the orchestration of one of the sequences were brought out somehow in his choreography. In response, he noted (jokingly) that he'd send one of the stage managers off to buy me a packet of cheesy curled crisps. He was, of course, making a funny joke about musical quavers having the same name as the famous cheese flavoured crisps. Anyway, this afternoon, the efficient stage manager in charge of reading notes arrived with a packet of quaver crisps asking if she should give them to me or if Matt would rather do so himself! Apparently Matt was laughing so hard that Sara rushed out of her rehearsal to tell him to be quiet!

Keen-eyed Brass audients will also notice Matt's visual ode to ABBA in one of the sequences from the show. I shan't spoil the surprise, but suffice to say, our leading lady Laura gets to channel Agnetha...

Right. Back to the grind stone. There's much to achieve tomorrow!

Long days

It's been another incredibly long, but highly productive day which started and finished with string sectionals with members of the Brass orchestra, and found me flitting about from rehearsal to rehearsal in the middle. At some point in all of that I managed to write underscore and scene change music for the whole of act one. It was mostly a case of copy and pasting, but I still had to engage my brain, which isn't working too well at the moment.

I think we're all getting tired as we push into our final week of rehearsals. I watched one of the cast reaching saturation point in a rehearsal today. Poor lad simply stopped processing information without realising he was no longer functioning!

The highlight of the day was the first little sing-along with the cast and band. We did Barnbow Lassies and When You're a Pal, and everyone went bananas. It's amazing how exciting it can be to hear an orchestra playing a song you've only ever heard with a piano. The cast whooped and cheered and I felt terribly proud... again. I'm doing a lot of that at the moment. It must be my age!

The other highlight of the day was watching young Alex Cardell, who plays Wilfred (a character based on my Great Great uncle from Coventry) taking delivery of the vintage 1930s drum kit he gets to play in the opening sequence of the show. His enthusiasm for the instrument made our decision to find the oldest drum kit we could find absolutely worthwhile. We had a fabulous rehearsal, where we worked our way through the overture and Prologue and Alex proved himself to be a pretty decent  comic actor as well as a flippin' remarkable drummer.

There's not much else to write as I can feel my eyelids slowly closing. But if you're reading this, and you can get to Leeds to see the show, please, please do. It deserves to be seen by the world!

The band

It's been a long old day today, which started with an al fresco knitting workshop with the female members of our cast. Ironically the only really decent knitter in the cast is one of the lads, and he was needed for a military boot call, so the session was led by the fabulous Emma Barry who plays the irrepressible Miss Grimsby in the show. Emma has only just herself learnt to knit, but seems to have one of those brains which makes her instantly some kind of knitting prodigy. The same thing seems to have happened with her tuba playing which went from zero to hero in the three months between rehearsal periods. She is also a very fine pianist and has perfect pitch... Sickening really!

We knitted whilst speed-running lines and when the boys returned, they were sent to the main hall to do line runs with our assistant director Josh. I always love sticking my head into a Josh session. There's always something weird and wonderful going on. Today the lads were all running lines whilst lying flat on their backs. Brilliant!

At noon, rehearsal started with the band, which feels like a really defining moment in the production. The players are universally very fine, which is a great relief. Firstly it means I don't need to re-score anything, and secondly, we don't have the issue of one of the players being weaker than the rest.

Some of them are extraordinarily good. The lead trumpet player in particular is insanely talented and his presence is really lifting the spirits (and the A games) of all the cast members.

The music is now drifting around the corridors. Members of the other NYMT casts sit outside and listen respectfully. There's a growing sense of something really quite extraordinary taking shape.

There was an amazing scene at tea time like something out of the Kids From Fame, when a whole host of musicians started jamming. Presently a load of singers and dancers appeared, and before long the room was full of people writhing about to the beat. If we'd auto-tuned the  output, we could have been in a scene from Glee. You watch talent show after talent show and yet, in that room today was a group of young people who would outstrip the talent base of this year's X Factor finalists in one sing-off. I felt rather like some kind of proud bohemian uncle at a party of hipsters. I'm sort of embracing that identity now. I can offer advice about relationships and careers in the arts, I can name drop, and bore them rigid with theatrical anecdotes whilst not giving two hoots that I haven't a clue what's happening in pop culture right now. It's a perfect blend! It is, however, too late for me to be awake, so I'm off to get some shut eye. And so to bed...

Forty

We were awoken this morning by the mother of all rain storms and it has rained pretty solidly all day, which is something of a first for my birthday. There were little spikes of joy throughout today, but ultimately, despite being my fortieth birthday, it was one of those days which has to be endured rather than enjoyed.

We got soaked literally just running to the car from our lodgings, but as I walked into the breakfast room, the entire cast of Brass, and many of the other NYMT kids in different shows, burst into a rendition of Happy Birthday. I'm always amused to watch people busily glancing around the room to see who the subject of the birthday wishes is. More often than not, they realise they have no idea and merrily continue, inserting a "la la la" in the appropriate slot.

The cast clubbed together and made me a little wicker box which they filled with letters in honour of the letters I've been getting them to write to each other for the past three months. Apparently every single cast member has written something, and they're all beautifully presented, some in scroll form. It's the sort of thing I might save for a rainy day. Sometimes there are days when you need a little pick-me-up.

As they handed the basket over, they broke into a song from the show, "just remember my face, so I can visit you in your dreams. Pack your bags for an adventure and we'll visit all the places that you've never seen!" I instantly realised there was a little something in my eye!

We did a stagger through of the show first thing, and beforehand I gave them all a little talk about the fact that, exactly ten years ago, the first West End show I'd ever directed in my own right had closed. It's a somewhat tragic story really because all of my friends were coming to see it as my thirtieth birthday treat. Because it was cancelled, we ended up sitting in a Harvester on the A1 somewhere, with me feeling so depressed I wanted to slash my wrists. It was the last job I ever did in theatre, and for the next ten years I worked pretty exclusively in film and TV.

So, it felt more than a little strange to be sitting in a theatre watching a stagger through of my first foray into theatre since that disaster ten years ago!

The run went very well. The cast were, as you might expect, too slow on their cues, and diction was not their best friend, but in the three days I've been away, some of them had made wonderful progress with their characters. I now see a shape of something... Something which needs a bit of pruning still... But something which, with the right breeze behind it, could be very special indeed.

There was another little chink of joy when we downloaded the chords from a song called Du Måste Finnas by Benny and Bjorn, which I played for the amazing Swedish performer in our group. Hearing the song sung in its original language was an astonishing treat. And she did it absolutely beautifully.

The afternoon rehearsal was more tiring, and fairly bitty. The boys performed military parades around the school grounds with an army sergeant whilst the girls were split into different groups, none of which seemed to spend very long doing anything. Nathan and I (with the help of Emma in the cast, who played piano) took Rosie (who plays Emmie) into a practice room for a one-on-one session on her two enormous solos. Nathan worked her really hard but the results were really very strong. She has a voice I would happily sit and listen to for the rest of my life.

The cast were then given the evening off and most headed for the pub.

I did some work... Typing up a load of notes from the run-through. And then joined them for a quick cranberry juice. Sara has gone back to London for a much-deserved sleep in her own bed and I think it's just Matt, Josh, Nick the pianist and me from the creative team who are still in Sevenoaks.

I walked to the pub in dreadful rain with holes in my shoes soaking up the puddles. I passed a very drunk young man on my journey; "hello, fellow traveler" he said. As he walked down the road behind me, I could hear his little voice still talking, this time to himself; "walk in a straight man, for Heaven's sake, walk in a straight line or the world will think you're drunk..." A bit too late for that, matey!