Valerie Saunders as Judy Garland

Some of you may know that I’ve been collaborating with local playwright and Judy fanatic, Richard Sullivan, for nearly three years now on his musical tribute to Judy Garland. Last November, we staged a short, hour-long reading featuring a few key songs to help raise money for this year’s performance. On Sunday, the show closed its two-week, 13-performance run at the Farnsworth Studio Theatre at the Mesa Arts Center. We considered this run to be a “workshop” of the script and songs and received all kinds of great promotion and feedback.

"Checking Out" - Valerie Saunders (Judy Garland), Chelsea Groen (Lorna Luft), and Drew Ignatowski (Joey Luft)

My role in the show has been that of music arranger and supervisor. While Richard wrote the book, the lyrics, and came up with the melodies, it was my job to dictate those melodies, turn them into notes on the page, and develop the piano accompaniment that would ultimately support those melodies. In many instances, the musical structure would suggest that certain lyrics needed to be cut or even that some should be added, or perhaps that a particular melodic line or phrase wanted to take on a different shape. In this respect, Richard and I both collaborated to make the best melodic structure we could and then, with his stylistic considerations in mind, I would arrange piano accompaniment.

The chorus boys pretend to stall for Judy in "Two-a-Day at the Palace"

This project has been a tremendous challenge for my arranging skills but also tremendous fun. There are approximately 24 original songs in the show, at least three of which have been completely rewritten for this month’s performance (and still more changes and rewrites on the horizon). If you know my concert music, you probably realize that a lot of my music is fairly complex with lots of going on. For this musical, I was able to write “in the style of” traditional MGM movie musicals for many of the tunes, but still incorporate a more contemporary style into the reflective, emotional character-driven numbers. I think this diversity is particularly important when presenting an original musical set in a particular musical era.

The Gumm sisters sing "Christmas in our Home Town"

All in all, it’s been a fascinating creative and legal process and a very rewarding collaboration. Richard will probably kill me for posting this, but I think it’s really interesting to hear the differences between the original demos that he sang for me three years ago and the recent workshop versions of the song. So here, exclusively, you can hear both the demo and live recording side by side to the ensemble number, Movieland. And yes, this particular song may sound vaguely familiar.

• Movieland, original demo, sung by the writer Richard Sullivan
• Movieland, live performance, November 14, 2009

To see more of my production photos from the show, please check out the following link:
http://www.markowskicreative.com/photos/2009/judythemusical/

Tags: judy garland