ADELAIDE CABARET FESTIVAL 2007
Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, Australia 2007,
'Evening with Jeremy Sams, with Special Guest Philip
Quast'
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, Saturday 9 June, 7.30pm
Running Time: 1hr 10mins
From the Festival website: "A treasure trove of musical selections from the many shows that Jeremy has been involved with, such as Michel Legrand's Amour and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as well as favourites by Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill."
Also taking part Kaye Tuckerman and Simon Burke.
Masterclass - 'Workshop with Philip Quast'
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Monday 11 June, 3.00pm
Running Time: 2hrs 30mins
From the Festival website: "Philip will explore performance methods for narrative songs."
Interview:
From Playschool to the stages of London
Interview by Michael Morley Adelaide Festive Review May 2007
Sitting in his dressing room in London's Adelphi theatre between performances as Juan Peron in Evita, Philip Quast sips a herbal tea and apologises for having to cut this interview short, as he's been told he needs to get a haircut (!) before the evening performance.
I agree that a short interview is a good interview - especially as I'm struggling to stay alert after flying in to London at 5 am that morning - and toss in a rather vague question to him about his upcoming appearances at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Well over an hour later, he's still talking animatedly: hardly at all about his own career as a performer over the past 25 years, almost entirely about what he feels he has learnt as a performer in that time and why he is so strongly committed to passing this on to students whenever he has the opportunity.
Such generosity and openness have always characterised his work as a performer in theatre, film and TV: whether it is for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Belvoir Street, ABC TV (Brides Of Christ, and, for a generation of young viewers, Playschool) and cinema (the recent Clubland). Just on 25 years ago, I worked with him in the Playhouse on one of his earliest roles in music theatre - the ballad-singer in The Threepenny Opera. At an early run-through he delivered the opening stanzas of Mack the Knife as if he'd known the number all his life: no-one in the rehearsal room was left in any doubt that, along with real presence and an openness to and with suggestions, here was a genuine musical theatre star in the making.
Since then he's sung in Les Miserables in Australia and London, Sunday In The Park With George, South Pacific, Evita, and done a season of his own one-man show for the Donmar Warehouse - in between Shakespeare, David Hare, Chekhov and film and TV work. But in typically self-deprecatory fashion, it's the approach to learning and teaching the craft of musical theatre that he wants to talk about: not just the featured spot with Jeremy Sams, but the programmed workshop for students.
"I just hope they're not too good," he says wrily: "If they're fantastic, I won't have anything to teach them. But I'd hope to get them to look at the basic language of the theatre - the shorthand we can pass on. As you get older, you tend to let things go out the window, so you need to go back, to talk of transitions, choices, taking thoughts on the run, not indicating, not playing emotion. And the really simple things like faster, slower, louder, tighter. To remind them not to learn songs straight off at show tempo: they need to go back and reconsider the language."
He's been teaching workshops in music theatre now for over six years, and it's clear from his conversation that he not only enjoys the contact with students, but has a real gift for communication. And when he says that he loves teaching because it's humbling - "After a recent workshop, I found myself on stage that night performing and thinking 'I really know **** all' - "you realise that there's no fakery or pose here". It's of a piece with the way he tries to shape his career: he likes going back to Shakespeare, Michael Frayn or a film role after - as in this case - a year in the role of Peron.
And even when working in music theatre, he emphasises the importance of the text. "When we rehearsed with, say, Trevor Nunn, a large section of the rehearsal time was devoted to working only with the text, and leaving the music till later. If you sing the words all the time, you don't necessarily hear them."
It's a concern for the relationship between words and music which is shared by Jeremy Sams, who is re-uniting with Quast for the first time since he conducted him in Sunday In The Park With George at the Royal National Theatre. But, as Sams points out, after that production Quast was a presence in his house - "I had his Olivier Award on my mantelpiece for some time, until he picked it up."
......
Reviews:
Personal
revelations and other exposures….
The Stage, Blogs, Shenton's View, by Mark Shenton, Monday 11 June 2007
Cabaret is often about exposing yourself - sometimes literally so, as in the case of British performance artist Ursula Martinez who, as part of a phenomenal evening called Variete during the opening weekend of this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival, makes a red handkerchief disappear and reappear out of various parts of her body until she's completely naked and there's only one more place for it to produced from, and she duly extracts it out of. The show was an indoor version of Australian impresario and musician David Bates' travelling Spiegeltent cabaret shows that we've seen in Edinburgh under the name Le Clique, and is like nothing you've ever seen before.
Variety truly is the spice of life here. This is a cabaret, too, where a man inserts an entire fork up each nostril. Or another man does a handstand on another's head. Another still does amazing things with a spinning diabalo. This is as far away from your songbook cabaret shows as it is possible to go, yet it is also, utterly, uniquely and indisputably, cabaret as well: a shared experience between performers and audience that's about breaking down barriers between them and also celebrating their humanity (or maybe superhumanity).
At other times, of course, cabaret is about other intimate revelations. Philip Quast, an Australian actor who has long been resident in Britain, returned to the very stage where he began his professional acting career in the Adelaide Festival Centre's Dunstan Playhouse, and he told us how he had appeared as Adam, in the nude, in a production of The Wakefield Mystery Plays. One woman in the audience, he remembered, screamed. (Whether in horror, admiration or fear he did not explain). A few days later he got his first fan letter: a woman wrote in to say how impressed she was by his performance, but felt it necessary to point out that Adam would not have been circumcised.
Quast was appearing as part of an exhilarating evening in the company of Jeremy Sams, director of The Sound of Music in the West End but whose career has also stretched from musical direction and translating plays and musicals to composing incidental music for plays and writing the book for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I should declare an interest here: as Julia Holt, director of the Cabaret Festival, put it in a programme note, "I was lucky enough to be introduced to Jeremy Sams by British theatre critic Mark Shenton a couple of years ago."
But the joy of a festival is that, having made the introduction, he was able to validate his presence here with a rich, broad introduction of his rich, broad career to the Australian theatre public in his first visit Down Under. And beyond this showcase evening, Jeremy has also shown still more facets to Adelaide in a public Q&A interview chaired by Julia yesterday, and also in a masterful Masterclass on writing for music theatre. I was particularly moved, during the Q&A, by Jeremy's declaration of the appeal of theatre, and how we're all pulled towards "this weird cult" for a reason - adding, cryptically and no doubt for my benefit, "even journalists" - and identified how it could be to do with the fact that many of us come from imperfect families, so we make a version of family life in a place where we can have more control over it and experience fewer surprises. But the cabaret festival itself springs lots of surprises, and for Jeremy's masterclass yesterday, he was joined by three up-and-coming writers of musicals, Eddie Perfect (whose new show Shane Warne - the Musical is being showcased at the Festival next weekend) and Matthew Robinson and Casey Bennetto (whose shows - Metrostreet and Keating, respectively - were seen at last year's festival). Masterclasses are usually forums for teaching students; but here the joy and surprise was the sharing of one professional with others who are already establishing themselves as such. Jeremy has thought long and hard about the structure of musical theatre: about how the very fact that one chooses to write a musical at all dictates that certain structural decisions must inevitably follow. My eyes and ears were opened to new thoughts that will make me see musical theatre in a different way.
And another masterclass today in performance for musical theatre, this time held by Philip Quast, was a vibrant and charismatic lesson in taking a song, moment by moment, line by line, note by note, to discover what it is about and both the acting and emotional choices that have to be made along the way.
The cabaret festival also requires choices to be made: there's simply too much to see, so you can't see everything. But the joy of cabaret - already a sharing, caring sort of art - is that the show doesn't end when the spotlight fades (there are no curtains). The conversations continue in the bar afterwards, and all around the festival centre. Also, all the visiting artists (and myself and New York cabaret writer James Gavin) are housed in the same hotel, five minutes from the Festival Centre. Unfortunately the foyer café is shut for refurbishment this year, so the daily impromptu morning breakfast rendezvous isn't taking place. But today I made my own, meeting Jeremy in the foyer and going for breakfast instead at the hotel next door. We sat down at 10am and didn't leave till they threw us out at 12noon to close for the day!
'An Evening with Jeremy Sams'
Caught between the moon and New York City
Blog by musician Matthew Carey, Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
Weekend #1 of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival has been and gone already in quite a blur. I had the great pleasure of spending most of the past week preparing and rehearsing for a concert on Saturday night called “An Evening with Jeremy Sams”. Jeremy was an absolute pleasure to work with and really rolled up his sleeves and made the most of the three and a half days we had to pull a show together. For all of his achievements and experience, Jeremy is an extremely generous and gracious person to work with and I think that everyone who was involved in the performance would agree that we could learn a lot from him. I guess it should be a prerequisite of a theatre director that they can collaborate well, negotiate group dynamics adroitly and bring out the best performances in the people he/she works with, but of course that’s not always the case and so it was great to see Jeremy do all those things with ease. His musicianship is thoroughly informed and his musical taste seemed beyond reproach this week.
The cast of the concert included Johanna Allen, Douglas McNicol, Simon Burke, Kaye Tuckerman and ’special guest’ Philip Quast. The material that Jeremy selected for the occasion included songs from “Amour”, the Michel Legrand musical to which he contributed the english lyrics, Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera”, Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” as well as special material he had developed for other performers and projects. Jeremy’s narration of the evening proved he is quite the raconteur, interspersing the music with amusing and sometimes touching anecdotes of how this material was important to him in one way or another.
The performers did the material great justice. One great pleasure of the week for me was working with Douglas McNichol whom I have previously known solely from his operatic work. We had occasion to work together once before and it was great to see him approach both traditional operatic and contemporary theatre repertoire with such character and energy. Johanna, whom I’ve worked with extensively in the past, once again demonstrated her great versatility - straddling musicals styles with confidence and a beautiful voice. I’m so glad that the rest of Australia is getting to see how talented she is as she tours with the Opera Australia production of “The Pirates of Penzance”. Jo and I have talked about getting together soon to update the “Johanna with an H” cabaret show that we developed a couple of years ago. I’m really looking forward to that.
I’ve worked with Kaye and Simon at previous Cabaret Festivals. Simon is always great to work with. He is so professional and has a great command of the stage. Our cabaret offerings always seem more polished when Simon steps out on stage. He sang a clever duet that Jeremy had composed the music to, called “It’s almost like I want to sing a love song” as well as “An Ordinary Guy” from Amour. Just this morning I booked a ticket to see the Kookaburra production of “Company” that Simon is working on in Sydney at the moment.
Jeremy has written quite a contemporary translation of the libretto for “The Threepenny Opera”. Two duets from the musical/opera were showcased on Saturday night. “Kids Today” sung by Johanna and Douglas and “The Knocking Shop Tango” presented by Simon and Kaye. Kaye also sang “Pirate Jenny” which is a song she recorded on her cd release “Siren”.
Philip Quast has an amazing voice and he’s not afraid to use it. Philip was really great to work with this week. He was willing to jump in and try his hand at everything - including an impromptu Mozart duet (in German!) during rehearsal. Jeremy accompanied him at the piano as he sang a duet of Rogers & Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening/Hello Young Lovers”, the traditional “Shenendoah” and “The Sound of Your Name”. Philip recalled that the venue for the concert, the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide’s Festival Centre was actually the theatre in which he made his dramatic debut, and then sang the appropriately titled “I Was Here”. When Jeremy and I had been talking earlier in the week about having Philip and Simon in the same cast, we tossed around the idea of them singing a Play School duet, since they had both been presenters on that tv show. Instead, they sang the duet “In Lily’s Eyes” from The Secret Garden which was powerful, both emotionally and volume wise. I had to really dig into the Yamaha C7 grand piano I was playing to be heard above their rich full voices.
I know there are a few people who are particularly interested to read of my experience with Philip. I received an email this week suggesting as much. It was a real pleasure - he’s a genuine, funny and very warm hearted bloke. He shared some funny stories while we were in the rehearsal room during the week and offered some welcome and helpful advice at a few points during the rehearsal process. Jeremy and Philip have both suggested that they’d like to come back to a future Cabaret Festival and do another project, either separately or together. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it happens sooner rather than later.
The two grand pianos that we managed to get onto the one stage were complemented beautifully by the playing of flautist Samantha Hennessey, clarinettist Jaclyn Hale and double bassist Pippa Strickland. These women played marvellously, especially as we kept throwing new parts at them right up until the dress rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. During or between rehearsals Jeremy and I would work on orchestrations that we then foisted upon the band. The sound of that instrumentation worked really well, I’d definitely look at trying that combination again.
Jeremy is in Adelaide for another week. He led a masterclass on “Writing for Musical Theatre” yesterday which was illuminating, and I’m looking forward to his masterclass on “Singing Sondheim” next weekend. In the meantime, since Saturday night I have begun rehearsals with Christopher Green for his latest Tina C spectacular. More on that to follow.
Thanks to Josh for providing us with the information.
'An Evening With Jeremy Sams, Dunstan Playhouse'
Review by Rohan Shearn, AussieTheatre.com, Tuesday, 12th June , 2007.
One-off performance.
Considered one of the most prolific and multi-talented musical theatre practitioners, Jeremy Sams has written, arranged and directed music for around 50 theatre productions for companies including the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He wrote the stage adaption for the West End production of Chitty the Musical and previously was the musical director for the National Theatre’s production of Sunday in the Park with George. Recently, he directed the revival of The Sound of Music and the hugely successful Little Britain Live.
An Evening with Jeremy Sams was a special treat for lovers of musical theatre, not only did we get a rare insight into him as a person, but more so an evening of song and stories from his widely varied career. In the relative intimacy of the Dunstan Playhouse, Sams proved to be quite a raconteur taking the audience on a musical journey peppered with many anecdotes from his career including Michel LeGrand’s Amour, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi Fan Tutti and favourites by Sondheim and Kurt Weill. The singers were accompanied on stage by Matthew Carey on piano and a trio of musicians including Jaclyn Hale on clarinet, Samantha Hennessy on flute and Pippa Strickland on double bass in specially arranged compositions for the evening.
Sams was joined on stage by a dynamic group of performers from opera and musical theatre including Adelaide’s Johanna Allen, who’s currently appearing in Opera Australia’s The Pirates of Penzance; perennial favourite, Simon Burke, currently rehearsing Company in Sydney; musical theatre star, Kaye Tuckerman (pictured) and the opera baritone, Douglas McNicol. Each shined in their selected repertoire including Sam’s new English translation of the libretto for The Threepenny Opera including Kids Today sung by Allen and McNicol and The Knocking Shop Tango presented by Burke and Tuckerman. Tuckerman’s rendition of Pirate Jenny, which can be heard on her recently released CD Siren, completed the set of Weill. The second half of the program included the magical music of Michel LeGrand and in particular the musical Amour, in which Sam’s provided the English lyrics.
However, the highlight of the night was the opportunity to hear one of Australia’s leading performers, Philip Quast, in Adelaide especially for the Cabaret Festival. Known for his roles including Les Miserables (Australia and London), The Secret Garden, Sunday in the Park with George and most recently as Peron in the new London production of Evita. He mesmorised the audience with his enchanting rendition of Shenendoah before embarking into a Rogers and Hammerstein duet of Some Enchanted Evening and Hello Young Lovers intermingling each selection of funny anecdotes from his career including his theatrical debut on the Dunstan Playhouse stage and then sang the appropriately titled I Was Here. Quast’s performance was heartfelt and fully displayed the rich emotive range of his voice. His rendition of Lily’s Eyes from The Secret Garden with Simon Burke was powerful and nearly brought the house down with the audience wanting more.
The evening concluded with a light hearted rendition (including audience participation) of the Duck’s Ditty from The Wind in Willows in which Sam’s composed the music.
Thanks to Marie for providing us with information
[UPDATES]
[BIOGRAPHY]
[ARTICLES
& INTERVIEWS ] [ STAGE
]
[ FILM & TV ][AUDIO/VIDEO ] [ LINKS] [SCRAPBOOK] [ HOME ]
© Kate McCullugh & Angela Pollard 2007. No portion of this page may be
copied without permission of the author.