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Telling Tales

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Category: Sample Data-Articles
Published on Tuesday, 15 March 2011 13:31
Written by Super User
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TELLING TALES

After ACHILLES IN HEELS, I had decided to try my hand at a piece aimed at a younger audience but couldn’t find an idea that appealed. One day, walking along the Strand, I had the idea for TELLING TALES. It’s an extraordinary thing that you can be walking along a road and… Well, at Boots next to Charing Cross Station, I started thinking about a vague idea. By a hundred yards along the road, my creative life for the next year was suddenly very enthusiastically planned out.

TELLING TALES is a dramatization of five Hans Andersen stories, acted out in a show presented by five seven-year-olds -- played by five adult actors. The stories are told relatively straight though the characters of the story-tellers do break through and, of course, each has chosen a story which reflects their character. The stories are initially to be THE TINDERBOX, THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES, THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER, THUMBELINA and THE LITTLE MERMAID. Character interactions however mean a change of plan and a surprising change of one of the stories.

The piece was workshopped at the Royal Academy of Music in Spring 2004. It was then given a very successful rehearsed reading, under the auspices of Mercury Musical Developments, at the Jerwood Studios in May 2005 with the terrific cast of Pippa Duffy, Helen French, Duncan Patrick, Richard Hartley and Nicky Swift. For both workshop and reading the superlative musical direction was by Mark Warman. The workshop, with a mixed audience of both children and adults, proved that the show works well on two levels. The Andersen stories appeal on a basic level to the younger members of the audience (as they always have); the framework appeals to the adults.

Thumbelina’s song, ON THE LILY PAD, which opens the second half of TELLING TALES, was performed by the lovely Lucy Mae Barker as part of a three-song medley of my work at the Snappy Title show at the Cochrane Theatre in September 2010. You can see the medley, which also includes Jeremy Legat singing PYRRHA’S LAMENT and Michael Peavoy singing ODYSSEUS ON ITHAKA (both from ACHILLES IN HEELS) on YouTube, by clicking here.

I also used a song called A FOR APPLE, M FOR ME, originally commissioned by a BBC Radio programme, as a fundamental part of the TELLING TALES score. You can hear me singing this, on YouTube, by clicking here.

Achilles In Heels

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Category: Sample Data-Articles
Published on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 22:03
Written by Super User
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ACHILLES IN HEELS

“Do you long for the endorphine-fueled glow that only a song full of witty hiatuses before the verse hits its punning conclusion can bring? That unique feeling that you can only get watching a man in drag clutching the pink frills on his toga as he falls for a boyband-member lookalike in dodgy gladiator armour? Then Achilles in Heels is the show for you.”

The Londonist

“Mark's one of the wittiest musical theatre writers we have and this outrageous romp in which the child Achilles is brought up as a girl to hide him from harm will make you laugh a lot. Adele Anderson from legendary cabaret troupe "Fascinating Aida" stops the show as scheming mum with a comic number that wouldn't disgrace Sondheim.”

Phil Wilmott, Lastminute.com

ACHILLES IN HEELS was suggested by a painting of “Achilles discovered amongst the daughters of Lycomedes” by Jan de Bray in the catalogue of the National Gallery of Poland in Warsaw.

I’d been looking for a comic Greek myth subject for some years and was knocked out by this little known, totally outrageous, ludicrous story. Apparently, according to the Roman poet Ovid, the Greek hero Achilles was hidden away by his mother Thetis after an oracle announced that he would die in the Trojan War. Her hiding place of choice for the boy was disguised as a girl amongst her brother’s daughters on the island of Skyros. Subsequently, King Odysseus found out the boy’s whereabouts and forced him to identify himself by the ruse of slipping a sword amongst a tray of frou-frou girlie things shown by a visiting pedlar (Odysseus himself in disguise.)

Whilst following the skeleton of the story almost exactly, my version turns characters and their motivations completely on their heads. In the original story, Odysseus is the hero whereas in ACHILLES IN HEELS he’s a warmongering braggart.

The title was suggested to me by Joanna Brookes, who often directs me in cabaret, the moment I’d finished telling her the story. I immediately realised that that was exactly the title of the piece I wanted to write.

ACHILLES IN HEELS had workshops, under the musical direction of Mark Warman, with students of the Musical Theatre Course at the Royal Academy of Music in the spring of 2003. The role of Achilles was taken by Jonathan Eio who went on to play the roles of Patroclus and then Zeno the tutor when the piece was finally produced, at the Landor Theatre, in March 2006 and reprised in November of the same year.

Huge chunks of both productions of the show can be seen on YouTube by clicking here.

 

Site Map

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Category: Sample Data-Articles
Published on Saturday, 01 January 2011 00:00
Written by Joomla!
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By putting all of your content into nested categories you can give users and search engines access to everything using a menu.

Subcategories

  • Musical Theatre
  • Park Site
    • Park Blog

      Here is where I will blog all about the parks of Australia.

      You can make a blog on your website by creating a category to write you blog posts in (this one is called Park Blog). Each blog post will be an article in that category. If you make a category blog menu link with 1 column it will look like this page, if you display the category description (this part) displayed.

      To enhance your blog you may want to add  extensions for comments, interacting with social network sites, tagging, and keeping in contact with your readers.   You will also enable the syndication that is included in Joomla! (in the Integration Options set Show Feed Link to Show an make sure to display the syndication module on the page).

    • Photo Gallery

      These are my photos from parks I have visited (I didn't take them, they are all from Wikimedia Commons).

      This shows you how to make a simple image gallery using articles in com_content.

      In each article put a thumbnail image before a "readmore" and the full size image after it. Set the article to Show Intro Text: Hide.

  • Fruit Shop Site
    • Growers

      We search the whole countryside for the best fruit growers.

      You can let each supplier have a page that he or she can edit. To see this in action you will need to create a users who is in the suppliers group.  
      Create one page in the growers category for that user and make that supplier the author of the page.  That user will be able to edit his or her page.

      This illustrates the use of the Edit Own permission.

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