Making the magic of theatre happen

I am really blessed to have the opportunity to be involved with theatre. The greatest thing about theatre is the people that make theatre happen.
Our current production is very special. I have never before met so many people who are so special. Sometimes I feel like I just do not belong in the precence of these exceptional people. The least I can hope for is that I will be able to learn a little bit from them and just a tiny bit of the genius would rub off.
The show was written and directed by Cameron Lawry. I am honored to be able to say that I worked with Cameron. When he approached Protea with the proposal to stage his show, not everybody believed he could pull it off, but Protea was willing to giving him the chance. Hooray to Protea for being so brave to give such a young man the chance. Cameron not only pulled it off. He pulled it off big time. He did not only show Protea he can do it. He showed the world that he can do it. I am sure that we will see him go on and reach great hights.

It was so great to witness the support that Cam got from his parents. Debby and Neville had to make many sacrifices to support their son over the six months period. I am so glad that it all paid off in the end. The team of Cam, Debby and Neville can really be proud of what they achieved.
Musical theatre is by far the most collaborative form of art that I know of. It is impossible to make the magic happen on your own. You need to be able to make many work together and you need many more to support you to make it happen. When it all comes together the magic of theatre happens.

What is rock opera?

Wikipedia defines a rock opera as a work of rock music that presents a storyline told over multiple parts, songs or sections in the manner of opera.
The LA rock opera company virtually copies that definition: a work of rock music that presents a dramatic story told over multiple songs in the traditional manner of opera.

The free dictionary defines it as albums of rock music that aspired to the status of art; first appeared in the 1960s. Are we not blessed that we do not have to rely on dictionaries any more!
Here are just some of my observations.
Looking at videos of rock operas online, it becomes clear that the format of rock opera is fairly open ended. Some rock operas have impressive backdrops and sets. Others have none at all. Some rock operas have impressive choreography. Others have none. While many rock operas are close to musical theatre with actors acting and the band hidden in the pit (e.g. Jesus Christ Superstar), in some rock operas, the band forms an intergral part of the show (e.g. Tommy, The wall).
The one common aspect of rock opera is that all the songs together makes up a central theme or story, and usually must be performed in a specific order. There are some rock operas out there where the songs are more closely related to the directors favorites playlist, but I would place those rather in the category of juke box musicals. Most successful rock operas consist of songs written specifically for the show.

The exile, the musical

The Exile is a musical in 2 acts, with book by Edward Swardt and music and lyrics by Eric Swardt. The story starts on freedom day celebrations, ten years after the first democratic election in South Africa, when Tyler, a young man who grew up without a father, learns from his mother that his father went into exile and dedicated his life to the liberation of the country. When Tyler observes how his mother's is friend misbehaves, Tyler decides to search for his father and bring him back.

The exile can be performed by 8 actors. The lead roles are

• Tyler, a young man looking for his father
• Melissa, Tyler's friend
• Pamela, Tyler's mother
• Hugo, Tyler's father who went into exile

The supporting roles are

• Anthony, Pamela's friend
• Cathy, Hugo's friend
• Neil, Hugo's friend
• Manual, Hugo's friend

The cast of The exile can further be extended to include extra roles for a young Hugo and a young Pamela. The actors can double roles to perform in the chorus line, or a seperate chorus can include anything from 4 to 10 characters. All roles are for adult actors.

The exile includes a variety of musical styles, with some rock, blues and Broadway influences, as well as love songs. You can listen to the songs recorded for the concept album.

The music can ideally be performed by a 6 piece band with drums, bass, 2 guitars, piano and keyboards, but depending on the available budget, the keyboard parts can be performed by a larger orchestra, including up to 24+ String (Violins, Violas, Celi), 3 winds (Oboe, flute, clarinets) and 4 brass (Trumpets, trombones)

 

Is the number of social media managers declining?

I do not usually comment on other blogs on this blog. I know shooting at others give them good reason to shoot back. A recent blog post, Why the decline in social media managers is a good thing got me thinking however. The article actually states that the number of social media managers grew by 50%. Thing is just that previously, the growth percentage was much higher (it does not say). Well, a 50% growth is not a decline.

I do not want to debate the issue of declining social media managers. I want to debate the trend of people trying to attract traffic to their blogs or web sites with catchy headlines - but with false information. It is clear to me that the author of abovementioned blog article either a) do not understand basic mathematics, or b) tried to use a catchy (but false) heading to attract attention. I will give the author the benefit of doubt and assume the latter.

I do not want to make this personal. Point is.

A heading in twitter grabbed my attention. I clicked on the link. First job of social media is to attract traffic to your web site or blog or whatever. The second job of social media is to convert the traffic to sales. This heading succeeded in the first job very effectivly.

Question is - did it convert my feet to a sale?

I think not. After I realised that the heading was false, I felt a bit cheated. I felt like I was tricked into following a false link. The author offer his social media services on his site. Will I make use of his services.. Most likely not. I do not feel that I can trust him. In my view this was like any spam advertising. This kind of advertising creates traffic, but the convertion ratio to sales is very low.

On the other hand, it works. If spam did not work, people would have stopped doing it. Even though convertion rates to sales is very low, clearly, people are spamming more and more every day. Here is the reason why.

One percent (1%) of a million is still more than ten percent (10%) of a thousand. Want to see it mathematically?

1% X 1,000,000 > 10% X 1,000

Proof: 1% X 1,000,000 = 10,000 and 10% X 1,000 = 100.

If you are honest you get very few clicks. Say, only a thousand. Because you are honest one in every ten people who clicked on your link will buy. You sell 100. But, by lying to people you create lots of traffic. Say you get a million clicks. Because you lied, fewer peoply fall for your trick, and only one out of every hundred who clicked on your link will buy. That is still a whopping ten thousand. That is good business.

Many do not care. In fact, people became used to it. The few of us who do care are dying out. In some country they have a law for schemes like this. It is called a "419 scheme". Soon that law will be regarded as archaic. The 419'ers will take over the world. We will all follow them, give them our money and bleed like good zombie sheep.

 

What did I ever do wrong (feat. Gabrielle)

 

New song recording!

 

You can download the track here What did I ever do wrong.

Or stream it from my web site at Dog-on-blues, or from Soundcloud.

Every song has a story. This song has a bit of a winded story behind it. It started off when I wrote the songs for my musical in progress, Wake not the dead. This is a horror / love story musical with some twists. The story goes that Walter, a rich baron from some weird place just south of Transilvania revived his childhood lover from the grave. He then sat with the little problem of his newly-revived-from-the-grave-ex-lover-and-now-new-girl-friend was in no mood to share him and his house with his wife. So, Walter had to tell his wife to get out.

Swanhilda, Walter's wife, answered him with this lament.

The story of the song does not end there. Originally it was written as a rather showtunes song. And waited on the rack for further attention. I started writing songs for Annemie since the start of this year and record her songs in my studio. Up,to now, I wrote about ten songs for her. One of the songs she wanted was a sad blues, with a piano triplets track, similar to what can be heard in the Guns and roses song, Since you've been gone.

After about the third attempt of writing lyrics, I dug the lyrics of this song out from the grave and showed it to her. Happy with what she read, but not happy with the music, we decided to change the song to a blues song. She then came up with a beautifull tune from Zaz as a reference.

With these four things in mind I reworked the song. The Zaz song for the beginning, Guns and roses in the background, the blues tune and the lyrics from Wake not the dead all came together in this song.

Not long, and well, Annemie decided to drop this song from her repertoir, leaving me with what I considdered to be a very beautiful tune. Not wantng to let it die on the rack, I sent the song in to Studio Pros to see what I can do and asked Gabrielle to do the vocals.

The results are now ready for your enjoyment!

I want to add lead guitars, but decided that I will have to leave some space for future surprise! What do you think? Does it need a lead guitar?

Those who followed my blog from the start will recognize Gabrielle's lovely voice in the role of Cathy in the musical, The exile, where she is featured on the songs, I have never and Prisoner of your spell.

 

St Albans college Copacabana

Last night I saw St Albans college's production of Copacabana. I go watch their productions every year. Maybe, the fact that I am great friends with the events director and musical director has a lot to do with it, but I'd like to think that the fact that their productions are always of top quality also plays a big role here.

St Albans believe in minimalistic stage setups. Their production does not have any backdrops, flats or scenery of any kind that can not be carried on by the actors. For this show they mainly used a projector showing images on a big screen. For the nightclub scenes, the cast members carry a few tables and chairs unto the stage. That is the totality of their scenery.

This approach has many obvious advantages.

• It is cheap. Many productions spend a significant part of their budget on building extensive sets which will be destroyed and thrown into the bin after the show. St Albans believe in spending money where it matters (in their view).
• It saves time. Building sets takes time. With many productions, the set building starts even long before cast rehearsals start.
• It is flexible. Having extensive sets that takes a long time to build makes it impossible for the director to change his mind - or scenes - close to the opening night.
• No setup time for scene changes. Let's face it. One way of killing the magic for an audience is to make them sit in the dark for 5 minutes while you change the sets.
• And most important of all. The audience buys it. The show sold out. The audience do not need to see a very elaborate set that looks like a airport to know that the cast is taking a flight to Cuba. A simple image of an airport and airplane projected against the backwall convince them.

 

I am sure many of you will give us many reasons why elaborate set designs are important. Protea Stage (where I am involved with the production of Aladdin), prides them on their set designs. For Bottoms Up we've build a whole flat on the stage, complete with walls, doors, decor, front door, bathroom door, kitchen door, etc, etc. It looked good and we were proud of it. For Aladdin, we are going a lot further. Just come and see. Many of the people have the opinion that it will be the best we have done so far.

Point is, some production companies put a lot of effort into set designs. If you have the skills and the resources available, there is no reason not to. It adds a lot to the show. However, sometimes you can get away with a lot less.

The music, singing, acting and choreography all is top class. After the event, I had the honor to chat to Rainer von Schlichting, the musical director. I learned a few interesting things from him.

• Even though it is an amateur production, they hire professional musicians. Rainer believes that it is money well spend. Working with amateur musicians adds considerable problems and stresses and needs significantly more time for rehearsals.
• They make use of a professional theatre. Even though they have a school hall large enough to house the production, they stage their annual musical in the Atterbury theatre. That takes a lot of stress out of the process, including the ticket sales. The theatre provides professional sound and lighting, including headset microphones. They do not need to spend a lot of money on sound equipment and lighting, worry about finding qualified light and sound engineers, and is always assured of having the latest technology available. Off course this will only work if there are any professional theaters in town!
• They only do one show a year. Rehearsals started in February. That is a total of ten months of rehearsal. That might be an overkill. Most amateur productions do just fine with only three months rehearsals, making two or three shows a year possible.

If you are in town (Pretoria) this weekend, go watch Copacabana at the Atterbury theatre. It will be a great experience.

 

Gloomy songs

Last week I looked at the analysis of some motivational songs. We have seen that the song form for these kind of songs leans very strongly towards the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus form.

I wrote my motivational song with verses and chorusses and added a bridge and refrain. Unfortunately for those interested, as the song was written under commission, I can only publish the song once recorded and published by the commissioner. Hopefully, that will be soon.

As a test, I looked at the opposite of the motivational songs, i.e. gloomy songs. There is no better examples of the songs of gloom as those from the fathers of gloom rock, Black Sabbath.

I have to confess to being a great fan of Sabbath, especially of the Ozzy era. So happy that they are back together and recording again.

So, I took a few of Sabbath's greatest early songs and analysed the basic song form to see if we can learn anything about gloom songs. I was surprised about what I have found.

Firstly, many of Sabbath's song do not have a chorus at all. Their songs mainly follow the AAA song form, i.e. only a number of verses where the basic chord structures and melody is repeated, but not the words.

The second striking thing about their songs is the almost absence of the song title in the song. Many of their songs will use the song title only once during the whole song (e.g. War pigs, Sabbath bloody sabbath, etc), or sometimes not at all (e.g. Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Sweat leaf, Wizzard).

A third noticable factor about Black Sabbath's songs is the use of easilly recognizable riffs. In classical music, it would be called motifs, I guess. Iommi is a master at the guitar riffs. Very important about his riffs, or themes, is that most of the songs have more than one riff. War pigs is the best example (ever?) on how to use riffs, variations on the riffs, and mix them up.

Going with the above, is Sabath's use of the breakdown in their songs. Many classic rock and heavy metal bands are to lazy to spend the same amount of time working on the song arrangements. A tip for songwriters and band all over the world to take home from Black Sabbath's teachings: everybody does not have to play all of the time. Mix it up. Change the tempo. Change the feel. Break the song down and build it up again. That is how you can keep your songs interesting to listen to - and no, just a guitar solo does not count.

Many have followed the Black Sabbath recipe for gloom to some extend, especially in the heavy metal genre (e.g. Slayer, Sepultura).