Meet the Writers and Composers of Boss Plays and Musicals |
Bruce Clark |
Bruce Clark was bitten by the proverbial stage bug when he joined the Scout Association's Brisbane Gang Show at age 11. The Gang Show at the time was about the only major amateur stage production available to youth that was based on large-scale musical comedy performance. Today, with the musical resurgence in this country and around the world, every dance school offers something similar; then, it was a unique venue. No wonder Bruce has been manoeuvering large-scale casts around the amateur stage ever since. By the time he left school - where he wrote comedy sketches, student revues, even the script for the school's entry in a one-act play competition - it was obvious that the British Music Hall sketches that comprised Gang Show comedy at the time would have to go, so Bruce began scripting his own. The results are used in Gang Shows Australia-wide up to the present time. When he began teaching, Bruce's first encounter with School Musicals (after returning from the West) was with shows where songs were collected around a theme but required a script. After writing three of these and directing two, Bruce found a collaborator willing to make up for his lack of musicianship by charting his "compositions", and embarked upon a couple of decades worth of original school musicals. The majority of these have been written for the students of Lowood State High School west of Brisbane where Bruce currently lives. Over a period of eighteen years from 1984, the annual World Premiere Musical in Lowood has become something of a local legend. Not only were those shows all-new, often tailored for specific local talent, and very student-and audience-friendly, but Lowood until 2001 did not have an indoor venue to stage these shows, often with casts of over 70. First they were staged beneath the school's central Covered Area, and then in an open-air amphitheatre which the school converted annually into a performance space. Ticket dockets always warned patrons to dress warmly, including headgear, and to consider bringing blankets - even sleeping bags ! - for protection from the cold at mid-year performances. Another aspect of the legend is that Bruce Clark, as director, annually for seventeen years had to become a resident at the school for a week in order to safeguard the equipment from prowlers, or, more importantly, to race up ladders in the dark shouldering tarpaulins if the weather turned bad. While there were some close calls, only on one occasion was a performance actually cancelled due to rain. Bruce Clark should never have become an author of Musicals. All of his shows have required musical collaboration to see the scores materialised. There was a brief period of partnership with music teacher Mike Leeman, otherwise they have been Clark scores set down by a series of wonderful women ; Ruth Skippen, Andrea Hart, and now Wendy Morris. The first Lowood Musical was a pantomime version of "Macbeth" called "King Macbee and the Walking Trees", the original version of which premiered at the Queensland town of Gin Gin. The Lowood version was published by Playlab Press and performed at venues across Australia. It is now out of print and none of the other Lowood shows has been made available anywhere till now. The Lowood Musicals have embraced themes as diverse as Emily Bronte in "Wuthering" ; the bi-centenary in "The First Fleets" ; international mystery in "Sean, George, Roger, and Tim" ; one hundred years of cinema with a revisit to "Casablanca" in "Rix" ; a Celtic legend in "Wurr and Peas" ; Cinderella against a backdrop of Eighties entrepreneurialism in "Slipperish" ; millenium doings with "Federation Street" ; and the opening - finally - of the school's indoor venue with "The Hall". Along the way, Bruce also collaborated with two of his Gang Show colleagues from Adelaide, Dennis Ankor and Rod Klau, to produce a show called "Lend Me Your Ears". This became the premiere production for Blackboard Inc., a theatre group of which Bruce is Artistic Director, formed by friends from the Gang Show era. This group has gone on to remount productions of a number of Bruce's school shows, and also World Premiere productions of new shows such as "The Wheel" and "We'll Never Get to Broadway". Through a collaboration with composer/arranger Ted Edwards, Bruce Clark has written a major musical of the Life of Baden-Powell which the authors themselves financed when Blackboard presented a premiere rehearsed reading at the Old Queensland Museum in May of 2000. The final performance coincided with the centenary of the Relief of Mafeking during the Boer War, the pivotal event in the life of Baden-Powell. In 2002, Lowood High will present "Roadworks", their nineteenth consecutive annual World Premiere Musical, and the second in an indoor location. The legend continues. |
