We will be doing our first workshop performance of The Dolls Of New Albion the week of Nov 26th at the Oval House Theater in South London.
The performance will feature Lauren Osborn (who it is my mission to make famous) and be directed by Mark Swetz.
Many other things are still up in the air or i can’t really annouce publicly. We’re still collecting the personnel.
The music will be performed live by a small band. This may sound strange since if you’ve heard the album, you might guess it would take many more people to pull it off. It would. It would take, at my guess, 10 musicians to actually pull of the album, but at this stage in the game we cannot afford such things. The purpose of the workshop is to attract the people who can take this show further up the ladder. This is the humble beginning.
Thus, i am going to assemble a 4 to 5 person band and reinterpret the music with them. I’m utterly pumped by the idea. It won’t be as “epic” as the album, but it WILL have a lot more energy and groove. Plus i’m really tired of listening to the album. I would LOVE to hear a fresh take on the piece.
My ideal small band is piano (i’ll be doing that) drums, bass and accordian. I would additionally like a violinist who can play some other instruments. My desire is if either the violinist of the accordianist can play guitar, acoustic and then later electric for the 4th act. (The power of all those 4th Act horns can be acheived by using guitar in their place. The fact is, you gotta get creative and figure out how to reapproach this stuff.)
I’m talking a lot about the band music, but you know, i am the composer so you do kind of expect a little bit, right?
As for talk about a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign since we need TO PAY EVERYBODY… the director and i are discussing where the money is going to come from (grants and stuff are being pursued) and at this time it is uncertain whether we are going to go the Kickstarter route. One day we will have to do that, but we don’t want to play that card at the wrong time. We can put up a campaign like that only once. This may not be the time. Maybe it will be… but this is the first live theatrical step. It’s also the cheapest. It gets more insane as we build from here. We’ll be discussing this.
Okay, so there you go with the newsy stuff. Tomorrow i’ll be showing you videos of puppeteering since the director is going with theatrical puppetering for the Dolls and for Jasper. Sound crazy, right? It is! It’s awesome. You gotta see some of the ideas and possibilities these videos suggest. Tomorrow.
