Roll on the Day - A Musical Drama

Back in 2004, I was collaborating with a couple of other writers (Neil Fitzsimon & Roberto Trippini) who had approached me to work with them on creating a show called Jack Dagger out of a storyline weaved around some songs that Neil had recorded on two different albums in the 1990s. I had heard of neither album, nor either gentlemen (I had met Roberto on a few occassions) but I gladly signed on to the project as I was starting out writing musicals seriously (as opposed to tinkering with them while musically directing shows). I signed on to adapt the music, and then found myself adapting the lyrics. Then the book. Then writing new music. And lyrics. And book. Heck, I even directed a workshop of the show that we did later at Greenwich Theatre (but that's a story for another day).

We soon found ourselves in what I would warmly call a musical theatre quagmire - a show that was sucking in all attention and creative energy to no apparent end. We drafted a show, and redrafted and I could never really see how it was going to pan out, but truthfully I was too inexperienced then to figure that out.

Roberto is an Italian writer based in London with a quirky style that is all his own, which cannot be described without reading or seeing his work. Idiosyncratic would be the best word I suppose, very effervescant, verbose and colourful, his text was a huge challenge to support in music and lyrics. An interesting challenge. With his strong Italian accent meaning I often had to ask him to repeat himself, slower, even chatting through ideas was unusual and fun. So when, during a respite from Jack Dagger he handed me a script of a three-hand play he had written with the idea that it could maybe become a musical, I agreed to take a look.

During that summer we wrote Roll On The Day - a three person musical drama that centered around a Paraguayan immigrant whose glory days as a revolutionary freedom fighter were behind him, now he scraped together a living selling his paintings on the streets of London. We wrote it and in November 2004 we presented a reading of the show at the Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street, a lovely little venue where I had seen Sweeney Todd a little while before and loved the space.

The reading was well-received (though not well attended) and we patted ourselves on the back with a job well done and put the show in a drawer - neither of us knew what to do with this curious little entity of a show: not really a musical, not just a play with songs, not at all an opera. No commercial producer would give it any consideration due to it's small scope, odd subject matter, unlikable characters, provocative and unsettling themes. We had written an intimate, romantic, sardonic and seemingly completely unproducable piece of theatre.

The very next day at the Bridewell I presented in public for the first time an early version of Tomorrow Morning, which a mere seven years later became an off-Broadway show. Not to say that it took my entire attention for seven years - I managed to write The Lost Christmas and Through the Door and a show called Girlfriends (more on those later) during that time - but certainly I had bigger fish to fry than Roll On.

Roberto too turned his attention to other more high profile or lucrative or intruiging or beguiling projects, not least the ill-fated West End musical Too Close to the Sun, his Hemingway biography that spectacularly failed to wow audiences at the Comedy Theatre and drew scathing reviews that he has, thankfully, bounced back from. No stranger to mixed reviews myself, we had both spent the latter part of the Noughties writing shows, putting our work out there, getting kicked a bit, but trying to be good at what we do. Rarely thinking at all about our unproduced project in the bottom drawer.

So, imagine my surprise when in late 2011, an email from Roberto comes along about something or other, with a postscript that I almost missed: By the way, are you happy if Roll on the Day is produced at the ETC Theatre in Camden in 2012? Or words to that effect! For some reason, Roberto (or RT as I usually call him) had decided to send a copy to young producers Katy Lipson and Giles Howe, whom I had heard of but never met, and see where it would lead.

Katy and Giles, who are as producers known anagramatically as A Stage Kindly Ltd, have been making a name for themselves over the last few years producing new and unheard of shows in and around London - one-off concerts, fringe productions presenting their own work and that of others. They are young dynamos, driven and ambitious, and proved beyond all shadow of doubt to me when I met them (if there was doubt) that I had graduated in generational terms in the theatre. Both in their very early twenties, both hungry (for success, that is) graduates, Katy and Giles were on the lookout for projects they could produce cheaply at small London theatres. I guess when RT's script landed on their desk it was serendipity.

Here was a small, cheap, non-formulaic musical piece - not a traditional musical by any marker, but with traditional song forms, strong melodies, and a rare central character for a black actor (the Paraguayan had now become Nigerian in some rewrites RT and I had gotten round to in the late 2000s, I forget exactly when). They loved the script and score and when I dusted off the songs I remembered how much I loved them too, and revisiting them for production is proving to be great fun.

ROTD is a curious and interesting piece - as I said, not really a traditional musical at all, but no word better describes it. It's not like any of the other projects I have worked on, and it has to be taken at face value: it starts and it ends and tells a story in the middle - I hope it will be viewed that way. It is not trying to be anything else. It's a musical drama, a mish mash of theatre song-forms and quasi-art songs, a script of relish and verbosity, strong opinions, provocative ideas. Characters who are often unsympathetic, unlikable, always fundamentally flawed. Not your regular cast of characters in musical theatre land. I guess it is perhaps an attempt at a more serious form of theatre than I usually write. I must confess that I composed it mainly on instinct, not calculation, but perhaps it will be better off for that fact - the naivety and innocence of youth and inexperience.

It is a three-person play with little action and lots of emotion, layered with deception, lust, desire and despair. To me it is a piece about loss - loss of the past, of love, of individuality, of dignity, of respect, of perspective. Since I wrote the score originally as a much younger man, and am older and supposedly wiser now, to revisit songs I can't always remember writing has a melancholy and jolting effect too. A reminder that time won't wait, that the past slips away.

So to grab Roll on the Day back from the past, from the abyss of unproduced works, is a great pleasure.

ROLL ON THE DAY, book by Roberto Trippini, Music & Lyrics by Laurence Mark Wythe will play at the ETC in Camden from March 27th-April 14th 2012. Directed by Vik Sivalingham, produced by Katy Lipson and Giles Howe for A Stage Kindly Ltd.