Introducing Kansley and Lidert
The two men who come barrelling out of the tube stop greet me warmly, folding me into big bear hugs and all smiles, even though we've only emailed before. They run straight from back to back meetings, arrangements and writing sessions and quickly convince me that our coffee catch up is now a quiet pint at the pub.
Kurt Kansley and Oliver Lidert have been in the business for years and may not be the biggest names, but they have the biggest passion for new and diverse musical theatre.
The met on a little show about lions… in the dressing room of The Lion King on the West End, where they geeked out about musicals and bonded over their similar sense of humour, mentality and their mantra of having fun in the theatre. While theatre is a business, they think that some times the theatre industry loses sight of the fact that theatre should still be fun, and about making great things and making people feel.
“We want longevity. We respect the dreamers more than anybody, because we are, but when we make our arrival, which now we are, we want to show people that it’s not just this musical, we have other musicals in the pipeline”, said Lidert.
Their first project together was a cabaret they wrote for Rachel Johns in 2014, called Songs I’ll Never Sing, which ran at the St James Theatre (now The Other Palace).
“I come from a family of three very strong women. And so telling Rachel’s story was very near and dear to me, because it’s the story of my mum, who’s Jamaican, moved to Wales when she was 11 and had never seen snow before, and made her home here. We sang ‘Far From The Home I Love’ (from Fiddler on the Roof) with a Caribbean beat and rhythm, it was great fun”, said Lidert, who directed the show.
“I wrote a Disney princess montage of all the quintessential Disney princess songs, and we wrote Rachel a little monologue about her growing up as a young girl and how she never saw herself reflected in those cartoons, It then went into a song from the Jungle Book, ‘I Want to be Like You’ which we turned that into a torch song as ‘I Don’t Want To Be Like You’”, said Kansley, who also accompanied Johns throughout the performance.
“Kurt and I had the same thing – every Disney princess is tale, white-blonde hair and handsome. Well, where am I? We’re well aware not everyone looks that way, so “I Don’t Want To Be Like You” is representative of all of that”, said Lidert.
After this cabaret is when Kansley came up with the idea for their next show, Confessions, which will open as a workshop performance at The Other Palace on June 17.
“Kurt came to me and said ‘I’ve loved this so much, we have to do our next show!’ Kurt tends to come up with tonnes of ideas; the ideas that come out of him are like a river. And I tend to be the one who shapes it a little bit. At the time, he said ‘we could use songs from spy movies! And women could sing them and we could tell their stories!” We looked at it and went okay, this could be fun, but how would we weave that story?” Lidert said.
Starring Joanna Woodward, Tanisha Spring and Thao Nguyen, this is a workshop performance, Confessions is a rock and roll style musical about spies, from the female perspective: who they are, what they are thinking, and transforms them from side character sex objects to non-disposable characters in their own right.
They have three other shows in the works: Autumn Rhythm, a show about Jackson Pollock and his work, Hashed Out, a song cycle which will open in it’s premiere performance in Australia in October, and Fabled, which is the story of a young girl who through magical circumstances gets transported back to the past where she meets Aesop, with a fun hip hop and RnB score.
They’re both intelligent, politically active men who are striving for diversity and sustainability in theatre: they want to see more female writers, more writers of colour writing musicals, and more diversity across the table in producers as well.
“We’re at a time where art is going to thrive, which is why we need to clear the old guard and tell these stories, ruffle some feathers. “It’s time for that new generation to be championing through. I respect Andrew Lloyd Webber, but I feel like its time for some of those artists to give way to the new writers”, said Lidert.
They talk over each other as they explain that they often think about the point in musical theatre in the 1980s when commercial theatre sector became about product, figures and making money – lawyers starting being producers instead of people who love theatre, and who maybe want to take a risk on something original instead of looking at the balance books.
“It’s spreadsheets and figures darling, spreadsheets and figures”, a female producer once told Kansley.
“The great shows of our generation and the past generation were not written with that in mind”, said Lidert. “Our goal isn’t to make money, that’s like the last thing on our list: we want to make theatre, we want to make people go to the theatre and to get excited, we want to tell new stories about people who see the world in a different way”.
”But it feels as though there’s a real resistance, and fear. Broadway operates slightly differently, because you have Off-Broadway, we can test things... I’ve done the wackiest jobs in the United States, crazy scripts, new scripts, they find their home in Off-Broadway and regional theatre, and legitimate money and producers are involved, and it’s great fun. In the UK, where is the place writers can go and make new things and feed off each other?” said Lidert.
Their shows are experimental and new, including breaking structure in their upcoming musical Autumn Rhythm, which will debut in Australia later this year. The show is based on the life and work of Jackson Pollock, told through 1940s and 1950s style jazz.
“With Autumn Rhythm, the goal is for it to be different every night. There are sections to solo and where the band will be encouraged to play, the singers will be encouraged to make it different every night and to make it their own. It’s fighting against convention. Autumn Rhythm in two different countries should feel different, and so that’s really our goal with that show, to break form in that way”, said Lidert.
“How exciting for audiences, every audience that sees that show will see a unique version of Autumn Rhythm”, remarked Kansley, who explain that the band is heavily featured and will be seen on stage, and that the show may provide opportunities to invite experienced jazz musicians from all over the world to dep in and out of the show.
“It will take effort, it will take time, and from a producer’s standpoint it may take a little bit more money. But you’ve created an original piece of art every time that show goes up, something unique for that audience. I think we live in a world where actually people want that uniqueness. There are going to be people who take to it, there are people who won’t. It’s a different take on a musical. Even though we hike back to 1940s and 1950s jazz, that’s what makes that one alive and real in the present”, said Lidert.
They have two other shows they are working on: Hashed Out is a song cycle more around technology and living in a world where we feel disjointed from each other, told through pop music, and is much more free form than their other pieces. Fabled, which is the story of a young girl who through magical circumstances gets transported back to the past where she meets Aesop, with a hip hop and RnB score.
Lidert is also standby Genie in Aladdin on the West End, and Kansley is heading back to Australia for his next booked gig as daring young Harlem musician Coalhouse Walker Junior in The Production Company’s Ragtime later this year.
They want to champion stories of diversity, ethnicity and of women, and people who feel as though they have been marginalized, and now’s the time where those stories should be told.
“It’s a tumultuous time in the world where all people are feeling marginalized”, said Kansley.
“Marginalised populations, all of us, have that moment where you stand up and say actually, we’ve had enough. Whether it’s the civil rights movement in the US in the 60s or the #MeToo movement now. We’re happy to share it and people will hopefully understand what we’re trying to do and the story we’re trying to tell. ”, said Lidert.
“We’re trying really hard to maintain our integrity and telling the stories we feel need to be told without compromising. I think that too often, and we’re not trying to slag off at the past people who have come before, but they were revolutionaries of their time, but they will never see the world as we see it now, that we’re experiencing now”, said Kansley.
“If you want to create those new shows with those new voices you have to be right now, and there will be a time when we become irrelevant, which will become necessary, which is what it should be. What Kurt and I are doing they don’t seem to want us to write the musicals our way, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Luckily, I met a partner who is as stubborn and tenacious as I and any knock we take, we say f*ck it we’re still going to do it. And we won’t stop until we make something of it”, said Lidert.
Confessions plays at The Other Palace until Saturday 22nd June.
Tickets | Kansley and Lidert Website | Kansley and Lidert Instagram
