A PARTY FOR THE DEAD
On Sunday November 9th 2014, Villanova Players had a launch party to celebrate their forthcoming Australian premiere of the Broadway musical James Joyce’s The Dead, which is set around an annual Irish Christmas party. It was a festive affair with the audience treated to three songs and scenes from the musical with the large cast dressed in their turn-of-the-century Sunday best.
The Dead has music by Shaun Davey, a book by Richard Nelson, with lyrics by Davey and Nelson. It is based on the much-loved James Joyce short-story from Dubliners, and is set in Dublin in the first week of January 1904, and concerns the music-teaching Morkan sisters’ annual dance and dinner where the central character of Gabriel Conroy has an epiphany and realises through years of marriage, there was much he never knew of his wife’s past.
Although the score features original music, some lyrics are adapted from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer, another is an adaptation of “Innisfallen by Irish composer Michael William Balfe,with “I’m a Naughty Girl” interpolated from the 1898 musical comedy A Greek Slave.
Villanova’s production is directed by Rod Thompson, with Mary Greathead as musical director, and Lynette Wockner as choreographer. The production will not have a traditional orchestra in the pit but, rather like recent John Doyle Productions (Company), will have the actors playing musical instruments which include a Piano, concertina, fiddle, acoustic guitar, and the ancient instruments, a bodhran, which is an Irish frame drum, and a psaltery, a kind of zither which is plucked by the fingers.
The cast of twenty is headed by Leo Bradley as Gabriel Conroy, with Tia Wilke as his wife Greta, and the elderly sisters played by Morna Kassulke (Kate) and Pat Wocker (Julia), and their niece by Rosemary Murray (Mary-Jane).
The musical originally opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon on 28 October 1999, and following very good reviews transferred to the Belasco Theatre on Broadway on 11 January 2000 where it completed a run of 120 performances before closing on 16 April 2000. The original cast included Christopher Walken, Stephen Spinella, Alice Ripley, Emily Skinner, Daisy Eagan, Sally Ann Howes and Marnie Nixon.
The Dead was nominated for five Tony Awards and won for Best Book of a musical. Stephen Spinella also won an Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical Drama Desk Award. The New York Times said “The Dead is a quiet revolutionary: a musical that dares to be different,” while the New York Daily news claimed it “pulsed with theatrical life.”
Villanova’s production opens at The Theatre, Morningside TAFE, Morningside, Brisbane, 21 November and runs until 6 December.
Peter Pinne
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