Up to now, all of the productions that this blog has soundtracked took place either in a school or college setting. The next year or two will see the soundtracking of the first production I did with a local amateur dramatics group.
Staging their first production in 1982, Falmouth’s Young Generation were formed as a youth-orientated offshoot of Falmouth Amateur Operatic Society - now known as Falmouth Theatre Company. They always staged one major musical in August of each year, though occasionally staged other productions at Christmas time and were open for any young person to join if they were aged between 10 & 20.
I had flirted with the idea of joining the Young Generation in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until I was on a BTEC Performing Arts Course with a number of members of the group that I got involved with them. For the majority of those members, YG’s 1993 show, Guys and Dolls represented the opportunity of a last hurrah with the company as they were nearing the maximum age limit. I would be 17 when the show was staged, and felt I was now at the right age to get involved, with pre-teen shyness no longer an issue. It also presented itself as a great opportunity to continue socialising, not just with people that I knew, but to expand my circle of friends even further. It made sense from a drama standpoint too. Having done Shakespeare plays and a contemporary drama since my last musical, I was happy to do another one having had the opportunity to try some other types of production over the last year.
Throughout January and early February 1993, I attended the pre-audition meetings at which we were played and sang along to the various songs, and also read scenes from the script. Adapted from two short stories by Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls is a tale of gamblers, religious missionaries, Broadway showgirls and gangsters. It’s packed with great songs and a snappy script, and within those first few pre-audition sessions I knew that I wanted to be part of this show, because I genuinely liked it. In subsequent years, there were a couple of YG shows which I did more for the beer and company than for the material, but Guys and Dolls still felt fresh, vital and fun, even 43 years after its first production. I was targeting the role of Nathan Detroit, who runs a floating craps game around New York City, but I wasn’t especially disappointed to be cast as one of his lieutenants, Benny Southstreet, which was a decent supporting role who was part of several songs including the title song.
If things had worked out as they were supposed to have done, this blog would now be soundtracking an original play called Echoing Steps. During the spring ‘93 term, those students on my performing arts course who were not involved in Equus or Top Girls, spent their time working on developing a community play about bygone Falmouth, which we were due to stage at Falmouth Arts Centre in June. I think around 6 people were working on it - 2 of whom genuinely could not stand each other. The Echoing Steps team, along with the cast of Top Girls, felt unsupported in their work by the course administrator. The college listened to these complaints and made two decisions which affected the balance of the course:
1) The administrator, David Gregg, was replaced as head of the course by the one of the senior tutors, Gerry Finch. This took place in April 1993.
2) With the college starting to take in applications for the next year of learners who were intending to join the BTEC course for two years from the start of the 1993/94 academic year, the whole course would be run out of the college campus in Pool, near Camborne, from September 1993. This made logistical sense because there was far more space there to be able to run classes for two years’ worth of students. There was also an in-built performance space at the campus called the Trevenson Theatre, though curiously, we still ended up doing our productions at Falmouth Arts Centre. As future posts will show, this was an arrangement which had some benefits to me when they first started, but it would soon pall very badly as time went on.
David Gregg wasn’t the only casualty of the upheaval, so was Echoing Steps. In large part this was due to several of the people involved in putting it together, dropping out of the course when the Summer term started. From a starting position of around 35 students in September 1992, around half that number had left by the 6 month mark. The people remaining who had been working on Echoing Steps admitted that they had nothing concrete to offer us to begin working on, and the course changed from one which incorporated classes looking at different aspects of drama running alongside work on end of term productions, to a course that was concerned purely with classes.
Echoing Steps in June ‘93, should have been followed by a pantomime in December ‘93 and then 2 shows chosen by the group for March ‘94 and June ‘94 respectively. All of that, except for the June ‘94 production, went out of the window with the restructuring of the course. It could have been excruciatingly boring for me, but thankfully I had the local drama scene to save me, and before Castaway Theatre Company next found itself on a stage, I had done 5 further productions including Broadway musicals, revue, Restoration comedy, pantomime and 20th Century historical adaptation. Those will form the basis of the next decade or so of this blog.
The first selection for Guys and Dolls comes at the end of a week in which Peel clocked up one of his highest number of on-air hours, since his days on The Perfumed Garden. Between his week of lunchtime cover for Jakki Brambles and his own shows on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 April, Peel spent just under 18 hours broadcasting on Radio 1.
He ended his 9/4/93 evening show by playing what may be the only non-country tinged track released by The International Submarine Band. Sum Up Broke was issued as a single in 1966 by the first iteration of the band and co-written by lead guitarist, John Nuese and future Byrd/Flying Burrito Brother, Gram Parsons. His future influence on The Byrds during his brief stint with them in 1968 is widely known*, but in 1966, they seemed to be influencing him and Nuese. The beefed up jangle in the guitars sounds like the ISB’s stab at raga rock, while the lyrics walk a line between general vacuity and Rolling Stones style kiss off to a girl whose time is up.
The single wasn’t a hit, and Parsons decided that he wanted to push the International Submarine Band exclusively towards a country sound. Nuese and himself hooked up with a new bassist and drummer, and Parsons would go on a lifetime’s musical journey over the course of the next seven years. It would cost him his life, but on the evidence of what followed, he did at least manage to produce compelling evidence of the “cosmic country music” he felt that he was put on earth to make.
*If you don’t know, read this and then start buying up every record on which Parsons played a substantial part, you won’t regret it.
Video courtesy of Estradas Flamejantes
