ANDREW STRANO AND LUCY O'BRIEN: JACK OF TWO TRADES
Jack of Two Trades, inspired by Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, is another brand new Australian musical coming to life in partnership with Monash University’s Academy of Performing Arts.
The Pratt Foundation, founded by the late Richard Pratt and Jeanne Pratt AC, is one of the largest sources of private philanthropy in Australia, and this year they donated $1 million over three years to Monash University to develop new musical theatre in Australia. Three original musicals will be commissioned (the 2018 recipients are Peter Rutherford and James Millar (both from Matilda the Musical)).
I had a chat to the two very talented, very sleep deprived artists, lyricist and book writer Andrew Strano, and composer, Lucy O’Brien, about being the inaugural Artists in Residence at Monash, under the Pratt Foundation donation, how much sleep deprivation and caffeine it takes to create a musical, Australian slang and Myspace.
O’Brien is a composer, music director, arranger, pianist and singer (A Jack of all musical trades really!) and was invited to apply to musically direct this production.
O’Brien: The department saw that I have a background in composition for music theatre, and invited me to submit an expression of interest, with a co-collaborator… and I said I knew a guy who’d be good.
Strano: Hi, that’s me!
O’Brien: So we applied together and here we are!
Strano: It’s insane to have this level of support in a creative endeavour, particularly in this country. So to be the first ‘Artists in Residence’ in this program is incredible! It gives us this freedom that we just wouldn’t have had without the support, and means that writing that would’ve taken us two years has taken us six months.
O’Brien: We kick ourselves everyday for how lucky we are.
Strano: But also we’re exhausted.
They’ve worked together a multitude of times, from hosting The Butterfly Club’s Fab Fridays piano bar, to directing a musical troupe (Original Cast) and plenty more projects.
O’Brien: Haha, the first time we met/worked together, Andrew was dressed up as John Farnham, complete with a dumb mullet wig and a pillow shoved up his shirt. And we’ve worked together on a bunch of projects together since then! I’d also like to mention here that one time, Andrew filmed a music video on my roof. He was dressed as a giant child/Justin Bieber.
The way they work and write together isn’t set in stone, and varies depending on the idea.
Strano: Everyone asks, “is it the music first or the lyric first?” It’s the idea first. One of us will have an idea for a song, and that will evolve in a way that it needs to. It’s different for every song we write. Even with book decisions I’ll be like “what do you think about…” and we are each other’s sounding boards. It’s so much better than writing alone.
Individually, they’re also really talented. O’Brien is a VCA composition graduate, teaches for Stage School Australia, and has been accepted into NYU’s highly competitive Master of Music Theatre Writing, to begin in September 2018. Her year kicked off at the Goodspeed Musicals Music Direction Intensive in Connecticut, and with a reading of her own new musical, A Sharp Intake of Breath, at the MC Showroom in Prahran, and will have a showing in December with Grass Roots. Plus, she’s been musical director and arranged for a really long list of state and nationally touring shows.
Strano is a Greenroom award winning lyricist, a director, improviser, dramaturg and musical theatre performer. He’s a dual graduate from VCA in the Musical Theatre program and with a Masters in writing for performance, and he has performed, taught and presented theatre, film, TV, musical theatre and cabaret nationally and internationally. His ongoing projects include Quiet Achievers, a silent improv trio that is completely accessible to Deaf and/or hard of hearing audiences, Soothplayers: Completely Improvised Shakespeare and the Completely Improvised Potter, as well as Fab Fridays with O’Brien.
Did they mention they’re very tired? Creating a brand new piece of Australian theatre has been tiring but great.
Strano: It’s wonderful.
O’Brien: Really exciting.
Strano: But also, do you know that meme where the dog is sitting in a house on fire and keeps telling you how fine everything is? Yup.
O’Brien: I love telling stories in our own voices, and always have. I’m pretty in love with Australian slang, so getting to use it, and create characters who use it in this show is making me very happy.
Strano: I think you laughed for about five minutes when you saw I’d used the word ‘stiffy’ in a lyric.
Sondheim asked Oscar Hammerstein to give him a curriculum on how to write a musical, and the first thing he says to do is to adapt a play that works: for O’Brien and Strano, this is a play that works.
Strano: I first saw it when I was 17 years old – Bell Shakespeare did this amazing, simple production, and I pissed myself laughing the entire time.
O’Brien: Something that stands out in the text is that it is so progressive for something written in the 1700’s.
Strano: I remember thinking “That can’t be in the original,” but it is! It’s either centuries ahead of its time, or we’re reeeeeally crap at addressing the social issues it brings up, because we’re still facing the same problems in society.
Set in Melbourne during the 1990s and inspired by some of the greatest most over-blown rock and pop styles, Jack of Two Trades is directed by Nathan Gilkes and features a cast including third year Monash University theatre and performance students, students from the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and the Jeanne Pratt Music Theatre Ensemble along with professional performers Jane Clifton, Laura Burzacott, Eddie Muliaumaseali’i, Kayla Hamill and Karlis Zaid.
Strano: The first reason we set it in ’96 is that it’s primed for nostalgia (for people from our generation especially) now that the setting is twenty years ago! But also, it’s a magical time where mobile phones aren’t being used too widely, because a lot of problems in the show could be solved by a text message.
O’Brien: Or looking up someone on Facebook. Or Myspace?
Strano: Oh ew, remember Myspace? You should Google Tom Hardy’s myspace. Do it. It’s a real treat.
O’Brien: Getting back on track, like any time you set an artwork in a specific time and place, your references become concrete. Everything is more specific and fun, and that improves the work both from a practicing artist’s perspective and as the audience! You get to play the 90’s game with us!
Strano: It’s meant I’ve spent a lot of time on google looking up what tram lines existed back then.
O’Brien: And some research into median house prices – it was $118,000 in inner-city Melbourne, just FYI.
The show has continued to develop and change since this process began, given they are still writing it…
Strano: …it’s gotten a lot longer (adding music) and now it’s gonna get a lot shorter again! We hope! That’s the plan!
O’Brien: One of the exciting things is finding a couple of places that have songs now that we didn’t think sung before we saw them in the rehearsal process. Also refining the function of the music within the show, and how that works with the farcical aspects of the script.
Strano: Everything is much more tightly integrated than I thought it would be at the outset – songs are woven through scenes rather than existing as a whole object.
When asked what has been the most exciting, or scary part of the project, their answer was pretty quick.
Both: ALL OF IT.
O’Brien: It’s a job in that way, but it’s a job we both love. I mean, as with all writing, some days you work from 11am until 6am the next day and it’s relatively easy, and some days even sitting down near your laptop or keyboard is the most dreaded thing.
Strano: O’Brien and I joke that the musical is our baby – we take turns staying up all night with it. Feeding it, or rather, stress-feeding myself. And changing it! That one works for both things!
O’Brien: The first day was pretty damn exciting. There were SO MANY PEOPLE in the rehearsal room! I don’t think either of us had grasped just how big this whole thing was until that day.
The first outing of Jack of Two Trades at Monash University will allow audiences the chance to see something totally new evolving right before their eyes – it will be a significant milestone in the long development of any new musical theatre work.
The development of successful musicals can take approximately five years – there is a lot of trial and error. But through this program, Monash can provide an initial foundation to allow musical theatre writers to create and try ambitious new works – this is a crucial process that is often lacking in the creation of new works in Australia.
Strano: We’re exceedingly lucky in this program, but most of the time, you’ve just gotta do it on your own. Or with a team of other idiots willing to sink their own money into something. Or more importantly, sink their time into your creation.
O’Brien: We are beginning to see more and more opportunities for readings, for semi-staged readings, for concerts, or song showcases, but it’s a big leap from that kind of investment to mainstage productions. And one that most people can’t afford to do it off their own back. This is why artists need monetary support – because otherwise we only see the creations of people who can afford to do so.
Strano: This is particularly true in music theatre – there seems to be more funding and opportunity for people writing plays, or operas, for example…
O’Brien: Yes, a lot of funding bodies haven’t quite worked out how to classify our work, and they haven’t caught up to music theatre being it’s own category either. I always have to choose, as a composer in theatre, whether I apply under ‘music’ or ‘theatre’ for funding…
Strano: …and maybe that’s part of the ‘curse’ of being a commercial artform. The other thing that’s tricky is that it’s a really involved creative process, requiring collaboration from not just your writing team, but directors, actors, designers, dramaturgs…
Also, we’re used to seeing these incredibly polished shows that are imported from Broadway or West End – a product of many years of workshopping within a community that has people that have been doing this for years and years and have this kind of expertise. So if we want to build this in Australia, we have to start from the ground and build it up – we have to support those years of workshopping so we can have our own Wicked or whatever it is you want to see on stage.
At the moment, their biggest inspiration in creating this work is SLEEP.
O’Brien: We think mostly it’s each other, inspiring each other and keeping us going.
Strano: We’ve spent our adult lives buried in music theatre, so that it’s already there in our subconscious, which means I can say that Lucy is always going to have a more theatrical and exciting way of using music than I can think of…
O’Brien: …and Andrew will always have some ridiculous joke up his sleeve, or way of condensing a thought into a lyric, and because he’s wearing the book writer’s hat as well, has an eye on the piece as a whole. We have shared knowledge of music theatre from coaching musical improv together –
Strano: – which has created a really effective language and terminology that we share –
O’Brien: – so we can parody Rogers and Hammerstein, and then move over to the Backstreet Boys without a second thought.
Strano: Our show is ridiculous isn’t it?
O’Brien: Come see our show! We need your feedback! It’s not perfect yet, but it’s good and we know you can help us make it better!
Support this new piece of theatre from 19-22 October at Monash University in Clayton. Bookings and information 03 9905 1111 or monash.edu/mapa
This article first appeared at: http://www.theatrepeople.com.au/andrew-strano-and-lucy-obrien-jack-of-two-trades/ on 3 October 2017
