Latest / The Downing Arts Podcast / LT26.3 Send in the Clowns

Transcript

LT26.3 Send in the Clowns · The Downing Arts Podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome to the downing arts podcast.
• 0:07
  Week three of the Lent term is upon us and creative arts events are gathering
• 0:11
  momentum in college with the DDS production this weekend, a change of exhibition in
• 0:15
  the gallery and more. With me in
• 0:20
  the studio today is third year HSPS student Ivan Ampere. Welcome, Ivan.
• 0:24
  Hi, Louisa. So you're at the business end of the degree,
• 0:28
  so to speak. How is it going? Yeah, it's great. It's lots of fun.
• 0:31
  It's that thing of like you're holding onto a roller coaster for dear life.
• 0:34
  But yeah, it's lots of fun. Cool. And you've just finished.
• 0:38
  Well, at Christmas you finished your term as president of the union,
• 0:42
  or the Onion, as I like to call it. Is that right? Yes, yes,
• 0:45
  I did. So I'm enjoying retirement. It's great to have lots of free time now.
• 0:49
  Yeah, it's a huge thing to have taken on.
• 0:52
  I mean, I presume you enjoyed doing it, even though I know it was quite
• 0:55
  stressful at the time. No, great fun, great fun. But yeah,
• 0:59
  the break and rest is very much needed. Yeah. Great. Okay,
• 1:03
  so you're busy working away on your degree, but I know you also do
• 1:07
  lots of stuff outside of your degree. Do you want to just tell us a
• 1:10
  little bit about what you get up to? Yeah. So I sing in the college
• 1:14
  choir. I do some work with DDS
• 1:18
  down in dramatic society. So I'm the secretary and the social secretary this year.
• 1:22
  And part of that means that I put on some shows with committee
• 1:26
  and one of the things that we're working on is putting on The Stephen Sondheim
• 1:31
  95th anniversary concert called Sending the Clowns that is happening this weekend,
• 1:35
  which is all very exciting. Brilliant. So do you want to tell us a little
• 1:38
  bit more about it? I do remember actually once hearing an organist play a version
• 1:42
  of Send in the Clowns at the beginning of a graduation ceremony at a different
• 1:45
  university. A different university. I hesitate, I hasten to add.
• 1:49
  Anyway, yeah, so what's it all about? So I think
• 1:53
  for me particularly, I've really loved Sondheim's work
• 1:57
  for a very long time. In fact, since first year, we've been
• 2:01
  talking about doing a Sondheim project for a very long time. And it struck us
• 2:05
  a bit weird that the fact that Dowling has done a lot of theatre,
• 2:07
  but we've never done a musical beforehand. So the earliest iteration
• 2:11
  of the conversations were about us doing the Downing musical in Lent term of third
• 2:15
  year. And there were lots of conversations about scope and size. And I
• 2:19
  think that when we were thinking a lot about Sondheim. It became really inevitable when
• 2:24
  every. Anytime we'd sit and talk about the project that so many of us on
• 2:27
  committee loved so much of Sondheim's work, that limiting it down to one show was
• 2:32
  a bit of a sort of shortened way of us celebrating his work.
• 2:36
  And I think that this year particularly would
• 2:40
  have been Sondheim's 95th anniversary, should he have been alive.
• 2:43
  And there's a fantastic recording of his 80th birthday anniversary where it's
• 2:47
  all of the stars come to sing all of the bits of music from all
• 2:49
  of his shows. And when we were thinking about what we could do instead of
• 2:53
  limiting it down to one show, the format of that seemed to be really attractive.
• 2:57
  And that's how it all sort of came together from that. So it's our
• 3:01
  best shot at trying to condense. I mean, this is
• 3:05
  a man who's written, dare I say, probably something close to 300, 400 songs,
• 3:08
  and it starts cutting it down to 23 for an evening.
• 3:11
  There are a lot of arguments about the cuts, but I think that we just
• 3:14
  about nailed the program, so we're very excited about it. Am I allowed to ask,
• 3:18
  what kind of stuff can we expect to hear at the weekend? Of course,
• 3:20
  yeah. So it's a bit eclectic,
• 3:23
  but the most way I can explain it is that it's. We have telepath formers
• 3:26
  and we've got a band, and we are trying to do lots of
• 3:30
  bits from all of his musicals. So we've got. Our first section of the
• 3:34
  concert is a section called Leading Ladies. So we get five of our
• 3:38
  performers to come out and sing music sung by some of his most important female
• 3:43
  characters. So we've got some things sung from Follies,
• 3:46
  we've got the classic Sending the Clowns, we've got Ladies who Lunch.
• 3:50
  And then we then move on to one of my favorite sections of the show
• 3:54
  called Leading Kens, which was essentially a lovely
• 3:58
  Barbie reference, but it's essentially the exact same thing as before, but it's looking
• 4:02
  at his male characters. So we spent some time with Sweeney Todd,
• 4:05
  with Charlie from Merrily We Roll along,
• 4:09
  and then after that we go into the trios. So we're doing two
• 4:13
  numbers. So there's a number in there from Merry We Roll Along Old Friends,
• 4:16
  and then the number from Company, the Interval. Then we move on into doing
• 4:20
  a bunch of duets and then a round called Gender Bending,
• 4:24
  which I'm very excited about. I think that for a lot of people,
• 4:28
  of course, everyone loves sometimes work, but most people, I Think if you
• 4:32
  do musical theater enough, there are always the songs that are on your bucket list
• 4:35
  that you know that you're never going to play those parts for a variety of
• 4:38
  reasons. So we thought that we'd give some of our cast an opportunity
• 4:42
  to sing some of the songs from his shows that in another life, if all
• 4:45
  went well, they would play. And then we then finish off with two
• 4:50
  exciting group numbers throughout the concert, which I won't say what they are, but they're
• 4:54
  very exciting, and there's a lot of choreography. So if your choreographer has
• 4:57
  done an amazing job. Brilliant. And what's your role in all of this?
• 5:01
  So I technically, I'm called creative director,
• 5:04
  but essentially I'm sort of in charge of making sure that nothing goes wrong.
• 5:08
  Oh, gosh, that's a big job. It's a nice way of just sort of saying
• 5:14
  order and control, really. So I wrote the
• 5:18
  music program, and then I cast the performers,
• 5:21
  and I work with them in finding interpretations to the songs. So we do
• 5:25
  acting rehearsals with them and then blocking and staging the
• 5:30
  group numbers as well. Is there much of a set? You know, is it?
• 5:33
  I know these days, sets tend to be quite minimalist, and I
• 5:37
  know that the stage isn't massive either. So. Yeah. Is there much staging or props
• 5:41
  and things? Yes. So we've gone for. Because I know that
• 5:45
  we're doing it in concert style, it was really important to us to try and
• 5:48
  make it as flexible as possible. But also because we're switching from all of these
• 5:51
  numbers very quickly, you don't have the support of a story to underpin
• 5:54
  it, to make sure that the transitions of scenes flow smoothly. So the way that
• 5:58
  we decided to cut across from that was it's on
• 6:02
  stage. You've got the band and the performance come out in front of the band
• 6:05
  and do their numbers. But we have a few core props. So for
• 6:10
  our duets, there are two chairs and a table for about five
• 6:14
  duets that get sung back to back, but they all get used in slightly different
• 6:17
  ways across all of the numbers. And, I mean,
• 6:20
  when we were blocking that, there were conversations about how we have
• 6:24
  a minimal set, but try and use these props in a slightly different way that
• 6:27
  serve each number. And I'm very excited for people to see the things that we've
• 6:31
  decided to do. Tables and chairs on stage for 20 minutes.
• 6:34
  I think it's incredibly funny. Wow.
• 6:37
  And do you have a favorite song or a favorite bit of this
• 6:41
  concert? I have a favorite Sondheim song of all time,
• 6:45
  which is Marry Me a Little from Company. It's the song that
• 6:48
  we hear Bobby sing at the end of Act 1. And essentially,
• 6:52
  the best way I can describe it is a character thinking that they
• 6:56
  understand love. But for three minutes on stage, they're explaining every
• 7:01
  single condition they put on love. So I'll love you if I have this,
• 7:04
  but then we have this, and I'll make you this promise, and you need to
• 7:06
  leave me alone and don't talk to me too much. And I think that's wonderful
• 7:09
  because of the contradiction in the lyrics. So that's my favorite song in the show,
• 7:13
  but my favorite moment in the show is in the
• 7:18
  Act 1. I nearly said what it was. But in the Act 1 group number,
• 7:21
  before we go to the interval, there is a bit of
• 7:25
  choreography that we've taken from a Lincoln center production. And I remember when
• 7:30
  I first met with our choreographer, Sophie, I said, I don't have
• 7:34
  any particular conditions on any of the choreography from the show, but it has to
• 7:37
  be this 10 seconds of dance from this production.
• 7:41
  And I saw them do it two weeks ago, and I was just in hysterics
• 7:44
  because I think it's brilliant. That bit of choreography that
• 7:49
  includes running, I'm very excited about. Right, okay. On our small
• 7:53
  stage. On a small stage. I think it's so. I think it's brilliant. Yeah.
• 7:56
  Okay. And it's so fun. And when you're sort of putting these. These kind
• 8:00
  of things together and, you know, doing the bits of choreography that you've mentioned,
• 8:03
  how much do you sort of look at other productions or
• 8:07
  look at, you know, the original production or whatever, and sort
• 8:11
  of does that. I know you said to the choreographer that, you know, no limits
• 8:14
  or whatever, but does that help it sort of form in your mind? Yeah.
• 8:18
  It's so interesting you've asked me this question because I had a
• 8:23
  similar. A very similar conversation, like, on a different project.
• 8:27
  So I'm currently in the works of preparing to do
• 8:30
  a concert, doing some of the Vaughan Williams's music from his
• 8:35
  Songs of Travel song cycle. And in that, there was a very similar challenge,
• 8:39
  which is that people. A lot of people know these songs, and a lot of
• 8:41
  people know these musicals. And the struggle for us is trying to
• 8:45
  pay homage to the very best of the interpretations, as it is
• 8:49
  the case of the Vaughan Williams, but also trying to say something new and different
• 8:52
  about them that's not been said before. So when we were. One of the
• 8:56
  very first things I did with the cast of Christians is that there is a
• 8:58
  playlist that they will have access to on Spotify, but There was a really interesting
• 9:02
  conversation about deciding which of the interpretations out of. You know,
• 9:06
  with a song like Sending the Clowns, there are so many different versions. Judy Collins,
• 9:10
  Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra. Not to then count
• 9:14
  all of the wonderful Broadway productions as well. So there's a real honest
• 9:17
  conversation about what do we think some of those best interpretations are that we then
• 9:21
  put into the room to inform the actors when they're learning them.
• 9:24
  And then there are the things that I loved
• 9:28
  about these songs when I first heard them. And my blocking
• 9:32
  process with actors is very collaborative in the sense that I usually don't. It's a
• 9:36
  bit horrifying, but I usually don't really know what I'm going to do until I
• 9:39
  get into the room and then we stop talking. And then it's what I think,
• 9:42
  what the MDs think and what the
• 9:46
  actors think, and then we kind of sit down and negotiate. And by the end
• 9:49
  of that, we found new ways into the music and it's so. It's kind of
• 9:53
  like borrowing and piecing together. And then by the end of that, we've got an
• 9:57
  interpretation for a number. Brilliant. Wow. So I know
• 10:01
  you're doing Human, Social and Political Sciences. Have I got that right?
• 10:04
  Yeah. So, I mean, obviously that's. That's. Well, perhaps it isn't too far removed from
• 10:08
  musical theatre, who knows? And you're just about to graduate and go off
• 10:12
  into the real world. Do you have any plans to continue with your. With your
• 10:16
  passion for musical theatre? I'm currently in the midst of applying for
• 10:20
  Masters, so fingers crossed. And if, if all goes well, we'll be doing
• 10:25
  some more theater and music as well. Because I think that
• 10:29
  one of the things that I think people often forget is that when, for a
• 10:33
  lot of people anyway, when you leave university, that tends to be one of the
• 10:36
  last times people get access to put on a production or go in,
• 10:40
  you know, sing a bit of Stanford. So that's something
• 10:44
  that. I think that. I mean, there are lots of things that informed that decision
• 10:47
  to do a Masters, of course, being research and career opportunities,
• 10:51
  but also knowing a little bit that I want to do some more
• 10:55
  creative stuff kind of informed that decision.
• 10:58
  But going back to what you said, I think that, like, it's really hard because
• 11:02
  HSPH students have this ability to say, well, everything is
• 11:06
  really relevant to politics and anthropology and whatever. The thing
• 11:10
  that's been mostly useful isn't the fact that. I think that we've been looking at
• 11:13
  the numbers and sort of going, oh, yes, what's the politics of like not getting
• 11:16
  married and like 1970s New York. But it's more the fact that one
• 11:20
  of the things that that degree teaches you specifically is an ability to sort of
• 11:24
  analyze, dare I say, overanalyze sentences,
• 11:27
  sometimes to the point where, you know, six people are sat in a room asking
• 11:31
  themselves what, you know, the word cat means.
• 11:35
  But. But it's been really helpful because sometimes we really
• 11:39
  do just sit in a rehearsal and I do this with the actors all the
• 11:42
  time and I'm like, well, you know, we could have had anyone in the sentence.
• 11:45
  Why this word? And that automatically will color the character slightly different.
• 11:49
  So, you know, I would say the soft skills of hsps
• 11:54
  have kind of bled into the rehearsal process. Wow. Well, thanks so much
• 11:58
  for chatting about all of those things. And just so we're clear for our listeners,
• 12:02
  the show is this weekend. Can you be more specific?
• 12:05
  Yes. So the show is happening on Saturday and Sunday, so 7th and
• 12:09
  8th February. It's a start time. My brain once it told me
• 12:12
  it starts at 7:30 in the Howard Theatre. It's just
• 12:17
  over an hour and a half worth of music with an interval in between.
• 12:21
  And do come along. There are tickets available on the college website but
• 12:24
  also on Daniel Dramatic Society Instagram page. But it's set to be
• 12:28
  really exciting and there are lots of hidden surprises about some of the stuff that
• 12:32
  we're doing with a couple of the numbers. So do come along. Brilliant. Look forward
• 12:35
  to it. And yeah, I'll put the link in the show notes if anyone is
• 12:37
  interested in buying tickets. Fantastic. Well, good luck with it all. Or should I say
• 12:41
  break a leg. And yeah, thanks very much for chatting today. Perfect.
• 12:45
  Cheers. Thank you so much.
• 12:51
  This week in college. This evening at half past
• 12:54
  six in the Howard Assembly Room, members of the chapel choir will be giving their
• 12:58
  annual recital. Admission is free and all are very welcome. On Saturday and
• 13:02
  Sunday at 7:30pm in the theatre, the Dramatic Society's production Send in
• 13:07
  the Clowns is taking place. See the show notes for details on where to get
• 13:10
  your ticket. On Saturday at 9pm in the JCR,
• 13:14
  a number of bands will be playing to raise money for breast cancer. See the
• 13:17
  show notes for ticketing information. Evensong is happening on Sunday
• 13:21
  at six in the chapel this week featuring music from the golden age of the
• 13:25
  baroque, the Chaplain's series of talks continues on Monday 6:30 till
• 13:29
  7:30pm in the chapel. Refreshments provided. On Tuesday afternoon
• 13:33
  between 2:30 and 3:30, I will be in the chapel holding a drop in session
• 13:37
  on the organ for anyone who'd like to see the inner workings of this beautiful
• 13:40
  instrument. It's an incredible feat of engineering and craftsmanship,
• 13:44
  so do pop along if you're curious as to how it actually works.
• 13:47
  Lastly, a reminder that applications for the Danny Driver Piano
• 13:51
  Showcase weekend close on the 12th of February. If you're a pianist of
• 13:55
  any level, don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the finest practitioners in
• 13:59
  the world. Thanks for listening.