At the beginning of Catherine Wheels' promenade Hansel and Gretel at the Barbican, the wicked stepmother has just returned home after leaving the children in the forest. She puts on The Bay City Roller's Bye Bye Baby, dumps the children's toys out of the house and pours herself a celebratory glass of Babycham. It is a lovely moment, all the better because it is wordless, and the music is used with pointed irony because the audience knows that Hansel and Gretel are about to knock on the door.
Towards the end of The Brothers Size (at Birmingham's Door until Saturday, and well worth it) there is an astonishing few minutes in which Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness is used to electrifying effect. It's not the first time I've seen and heard that particular classic being used with potent results in the theatre. It also makes an appearance towards the end of Jim Cartwright's 1980s classic, Road. Redding's anthem suddenly soars over the deafening daily roar of despair and hopelessness of a group of young people living in a dead-end Northern town that has had the community ripped out of it by unemployment. In both cases, without the cunning use of the song, the emotional impact of each scene would be diminished. As it is, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
It's a very long way from my youth when theatre often only had themed music before the show or at the interval. I recall seeing a mangled version of Medea that had the delicious bad taste to use Tammy Wynette's DIVORCE as the audience left. If only the rest of the production had exhibited the same wit.
As has been noted on this blog, theatre is beginning have a richer relationship with audio (and in particular soundscapes), although I sometimes find underscoring of the kind that goes on in movies a little wearisome - as if I'm being told what what to think and feel. Sometimes too it can be mere camouflage for a moment that might otherwise be a little thin and undernourished. But the perfectly placed piece of music, the sense that theatre can be musical without being a musical, still seems to be underrated.
Chris Goode's productions are often masterpieces in the way they hone in, magpie-like, on something musically shiny to create a layered effect. His shows seem often to have an intrinsic musicality. Many years ago I read an interview with Caryl Churchill in which she said that she would often listen again and again to the same piece of music when writing a play and that the play would take its tenor from that piece. I wonder how many other playwrights do that too?
Frantic Assembly are brilliant at integrating music and theatre, but they use music, whether by Hybrid (Othello), Imogen Heap (Pool, No Water) or Goldfrapp (Dirty Wonderland), in a way that is more akin to a soundtrack for the play. But a single song at the right moment can add layer upon layer to a scene: think of the brilliant use of The Beach Boys' God Only Knows in the dying moments of Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler as the general's daughter expires alone and nobody notices. Or what about the way that Velvet Underground brought a kind of cohesion to the controlled chaos of Ontroerend Goed's Once and For All. If you've got time, do share your favourite perfectly pitched musical moments in the theatre.
