A message from Finegan Kruckemeyer

Before entering the rehearsal room, they sit there in printed form, polite and quiet and waiting – before that joyous moment when an actor lifts them off the page and breathes life into them. Suddenly that text is something to be shouted or whispered, to be passed quietly between friends or thrown across a theatre in anger. That transformation, from words scribbled down to words picked up, is a pleasure.

But there is another, even more magical, transformation that I’ve been able to experience from time to time – and this is to watch a line of dialogue being rolled around the wonderful, labyrinthine mind of a composer, to find it married with just the right notes and, finally, to hear it delivered (in all its operatic glory) by a masterful singer.

So it went with this project, as a story that began life as a play in England, now switches costume and reenters the theatre as an opera in Australia. Richard Mills and Elizabeth Hill-Cooper first sowed the seed with the prescience and bravery that comes with great artistic directorship. They invited me to embark on a new adventure, as partnered with brilliant composer Joe Twist (a name crying out to become a character in a future play!).

This team recognized the potential for a Grumpiest Boy spoken to become a Grumpiest Boy sung, and the musical world that Joe then crafted has an energy all its own – it is a score that, to this layman’s ear, is playful and textured and very hard to be grumpy about at all. Jodi Hope’s costume designs (literally) complete the picture, fantastical worlds made tangible, the peculiar now rendered wonderfully familiar.

This play’s hero Zachary Briddling wishes to become something new and so sets himself off into an unknown wilderness, exciting and unnerving in equal measure. This story, it seems, wishes to do the same – it has journeyed across artforms, been awed by those encountered (thankfully opera singers in rehearsal rooms, as opposed to ogres in caves), and finally emerged all the better for it.

Finegan Kruckemeyer

www.finegankruckemeyer.com