From: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org (navy-soup-digest) To: navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Subject: navy-soup-digest V5 #112 Reply-To: navy-soup@smoe.org Sender: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk navy-soup-digest Friday, July 5 2002 Volume 05 : Number 112 In This Digest: ----------------- Re: Toronto Star article... [Paul Schreiber ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 23:47:36 -0700 From: Paul Schreiber Subject: Re: Toronto Star article... http://www.thestar.ca/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Artic le_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1025206064589 Jul. 1, 01:00 EDT Sarah Slean inspired by drama in music Mariposa headliner working on musical play about wonder Vit Wagner Pop Music Critic Sarah Slean is not given to thinking small. Night Bugs, the singer and pianist's recent major label debut, is littered with dramatic tunes that sound like musical time capsules from a forgotten, Weimar-era cabaret hall. Her concert this past spring at the Trinity St. Paul's Centre, which featured horn and string accompaniment, was conceived on a similarly grand scale. Or at least as grand as budgetary circumstances permitted. "Everything I think of is really big and really expensive," says Slean, 25, who released two albums independently before hooking up with Warner Music. "At every one of my shows, I'd like to have my band, four strings, four horns and eight people singing backup. My manager has to say `Whoa' a lot." It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Slean, who will headline the opening night of the Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia on Friday, has turned her formidable imaginative powers to the composition of a stage musical. The story is written, five songs have been composed, and Slean has extracted a promise from fellow tunesmith Hawksley Workman to play the starring role in the debut production, which she imagines happening in a couple of years time. "The story is about losing wonder," she says. "It's about this little boy, named Boy Wonder, who gets lost. The larger theme is that the world has lost its wonder, but it will come back." For Slean, who grew up in Pickering and now resides in Toronto's Little Italy, the wonder took hold during a childhood visit to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. "I don't know how many times I saw it," Slean recalls. "It's a dreadful musical, but I was enthralled with the total experience of it, of having your senses assaulted and your heart being tugged at. It was the most magical thing. The music was so unabashed and unashamed. "As a child I was very meek, and seeing that was like `Oh my God, look at what those people are doing.' And I longed to share that fearlessness." Slean, who started studying classical piano as a child, was all of 9 when she began writing full-blown musical dramas of her own. "They were really terrible and melodramatic, with grand stagings of horrible events and dramatic deaths." Slean continued classical study all the way through to university, but ultimately decided that the prospect of playing Beethoven piano concertos in public for a living was both too intimidating and too limiting. "Just playing Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Chopin for my classmates at York University made me nervous enough to loose my lunch. "I don't know why. Maybe it was the forces of the universe telling me that I was going in the wrong direction. "It felt really constricting, like going down a narrow path." Not that Slean has turned her back on orchestral music altogether. "One of my life's ambitions is to hear a symphony orchestra play a piece of my music," she says. In the meantime, Slean will have to content herself with leading a scaled down quartet for an extensive bout of touring that includes a summer trek across Canada and a U.S. foray starting in September. "It's too expensive for me to tour with strings and horns." And she continues to write songs at a prolific pace, even though she isn't scheduled to record another album in the immediate future. "All the musicians I know are writing all the time. It's what you do. It's what you love. "You'll never be satisfied. If you're satisfied, you're either egotistical or you're not that good." ------------------------------ End of navy-soup-digest V5 #112 *******************************