Dream Lover, Dream Songs, Dream Story

Bobby Darin’s musical repertoire, together with the dramas of his short life, provide rich source material for new musical Dream Lover – The Bobby Darin Musical, having its World Premiere at Sydney Lyric Theatre. Neil Litchfield speaks to members of the cast and creative team.

Bobby Darin was a prolific talent - singer, songwriter, Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominated film actor, film soundtrack composer, TV Variety show host and more, crossing musical genres from rock, to swing, to folk, and bridging the divide between teen and adult markets.

Add a tempestuous Hollywood romance and marriage with film co-star Sandra Dee, then throw his dark family secrets into the mix, and there’s ample real-life drama for the book of Dream Lover – The Bobby Darin Musical.

Darin’s star blazed brightly but all too briefly. Having battled rheumatic fever as a child, he died after surgery on his weakened heart aged just 37. Knowing that his life wasn’t destined to be a long one, Darin drove himself hard to become a success in the music industry, and was often quoted as saying he wanted to be a "legend by the time he was 25."

Now the rich vein of Gold Records that runs through Darin’s repertoire has finally been mined for the score of a bio-jukebox musical.

Dream Lover has been more than a decade in the making, as producer John Frost explains. “Stan Zemanek, a broadcaster who died tragically about ten years ago, said to me, ‘Frosty, you’ve got to do a show about Bobby Darin.’ When Stan passed over, I think he was sitting on a cloud up there and he tapped (co-producer) John Gilbert on the shoulder and said, I know there’s a script around, and you’re going to get it. I think Stan, through (writers) John Michael and Frank (Howson), got the script to me.”

David Campbell, who stars as Bobby Darin, has been singing his repertoire for around two decades.

“Bobby had such a diverse range,” says Campbell, “which was what attracted me to him back in the 90s. I’d do medleys of his songs, and I knew I was going to do ‘Splish, Splash’, ‘Dream Lover’, ‘Mack The Knife’ and ‘If I was a Carpenter’.

“All these songs from different genres seemingly shouldn’t go together, but because it was Bobby it all worked. So musically the show has such a breadth, including other characters in the show; Sandra sings, as do the rock stars that come through the scenes, so everyone’s going to know every song, or they’re going to remember songs that they’ve forgotten, which will come back to them.”

What is it about Bobby Darin’s repertoire that is such a good fit for David Campbell vocally?

“He sang like a man,” says Campbell. “Back in the day men didn’t do a lot of falsetto stuff, or high range screaming - things I’ve done in Shout! They sang in their tone - in their timbre. How they spoke and how they sang was almost the same. When you listened to Bobby live, he would almost talk in the same way; he had this sort of musicality to the way he spoke. So the way he wrote songs, the way he spoke, the way he performed them, is quintessentially Bobby.

“Sinatra had the same thing. He was so cool and layback. But Bobby was a bit more jumpy - at any stage he thought he could be jumped by somebody coming around the corner – he always felt he was going to be attacked, or he was going to attack. That’s a really fascinating rock’n’roll style to have in swing music. It’s a great thing to synch your vocal chords around.”

In a day and age when musicals are mostly accompanied by a handful of synthesizers, Dream Lover is set to burst onto the stage with an 18-piece orchestra.

“The most important thing is that the music and sound is so iconic - you can’t be overly clever and reinvent the wheel. It has to sound somewhat like what the Bobby Darin tracks sounded like for the numbers,” says Musical Supervisor Guy Simpson.

“I think it’s great too, because this style of music was so popular,” adds Musical Director Daniel Edmonds, “and hearing it live was the only way to really hear it properly back in the 50s. It will be like the way Bobby Darin sounded when he toured around the U.S. A lot of contemporary audiences just don’t know how good it is to hear an 18-piece band perform this style of music live. It’s a real treat.”

“We’re avoiding all sorts of synthetic sounds,” says Simpson. “There are no keyboard sounds as such – it’s the real thing – that lost sound.  And what’s more, we’re on stage.”

“Getting to perform with a band of this size doesn’t happen very often,” says Hannah Fredericksen, who plays Sandra Dee. “You hear that band and you just can’t help but feel excited and want to move to it. I think the audience will absolutely feel that. It pulses through you.”

Beyond the music, Dream Lover also has a couple of extraordinary real-life stories to tell.

“When this project came to me,” says director Simon Phillips, “I didn’t know much about Bobby Darin, so for me it’s been the kind of adventure that I’m hoping every audience member will go home with. It’s a factual life that you couldn’t invent without people accusing you of exaggeration. He lived a very short life, longer than he expected to lead, and a totally action-packed one.”

“What I’m looking forward to in terms of performing the characters,” says Fredericksen, “is that there is such a huge journey for both of them. They have massive character arcs, and we’re playing real people, so you get to read up about them, and you find out what actually happened to both of them, which is almost unbelievable, and do justice to that on stage.”

“It’s like Mad Men with Hollywood thrown in,” David chimes in.

What is it about Sandra Dee’s character arc that appeals to Hannah?

“Her upbringing was horrific,” she says. “She had a difficult relationship with her mother and a difficult childhood. By the time she was 10 she was a child model, and by the time she was 14 she was signed to Universal and making all these pictures, with a huge amount of pressure to be thin and perfect. Then, when she’s 18 she meets this boy from The Bronx, and marries him, and the journey is huge. Then she loses her husband – all in the space of two and a half hours. It’s going to be a massive – and she’s an alcoholic, and had an eating disorder, so in terms of me as an actress, it’s awful that it was her circumstance, but it’s a gift to tap into and play.”

That all sounds pretty grim, I suggest. Is there anything a bit more uplifting to it?

“It’s this enormous love story,” says Hannah.  “They were so passionate about each other. They both found each other coming from really difficult circumstances, and their relationship was tumultuous but also loving and passionate. They had a child together, they travelled together, they did films together – so there’s a lot of joy in the show.”

“They were desperate to make it work,” David adds, “and no matter what you say about the relationship, which comes through the show, these two people came from a world where they knew they wanted to make it work against all odds, and how that fails and flies is what the show’s all about.”

It’s not just Bobby Darin’s music that resonates with David Campbell.

“I went to New York around 1996, and started doing cabaret in the various rooms around there, and tried to expand my repertoire from doing just songs that I knew, to swing stuff. I latched on to Bobby Darin musically – I loved ‘Mack The Knife’ and ‘Beyond The Sea’. Someone gave me a book about him, and I realized that all the stuff that was happening in his life – all the gaps – not knowing who his parents were, being raised by his grandmother, thinking that she’s his mother, that his mother’s his sister – is exactly the thing that happened to me. So I felt a personal affinity for a musical champion from another generation. He started in rock’n’roll and topped the charts, then swing music, then he started to listen to another part of himself and become political and did folk singing.

How has all of this been wedded into a book musical?

“One of the handy things about Bobby Darin is that he recorded so much,” says Simon Phillips. “He wrote a ton of songs, but he also covered a ton of songs, so if you’re trying to put something together using his music to help you with the book, there’s lots to choose from. It gave us free range to bring the right song for the right moment into the story. That said, there’s a lot of them being performed in concert as well, like ‘Splish Splash’, which you’d be hard-pushed to make a book number. They just operate as an event in the show – there he was – first big hit.

“The show is a massive sing for David, because he’s never off stage for more than 30 seconds, and there’s barely a song he’s not at least a part of singing. But, while the most important thing is that we’ve got an 18 piece big band - that’s the thrill of the era - both his and Sandra’s stories are so fantastic that I don’t want those to get lost inside the music, so there’s a lot of narrative events to get through and big emotional stuff to cover.

“So that’s my charge. To make sure that still finds a voice inside it.”

The World Premiere production of Dream Lover - The Bobby Darin Musical plays at the Sydney Lyric Theatre until November 27, 2016, with a cast that also includes Caroline O’Connor, Bert LaBonte, Martin Crewes and Marney McQueen.

Originally published in the September / October 2016 edition of Stage Whispers

Images: Lightbox Photography