Playing guitar for a children’s production of Honk!

As I write this, I’m half way through a run of Honk! with CAST Academy, a children’s theatre group based in Colnbrook (officially part of Slough, but I doubt the residents would agree with that!) Honk! is a bit of a special show for my family; Jessica and I played the lead roles in a Grimm Players production 5 years ago, and about a month into rehearsals we discovered that Jessica was pregnant with Thomas, our first child. So, the whole plot about Ida (Jess) looking for her lost son (me) all got a bit emotional…

But back to this production… I’m playing guitar, alongside some excellent musicians (I’m particularly impressed with the bass player, who I haven’t played with previously). I know the show inside-out, but was totally unprepared for the ridiculous key signatures that turned up in the score: everything from 5 sharps to 6 flats. There are also plenty of “stretchy” jazz voicings (most of which seem to have a major 2nd in the middle… which is fine on a piano, but VERY tough on a guitar) which seemed virtually impossible at first, but are now only impractical! This is exacerbated by the problems of monitoring, timing and coordination between cast and band that are standard to any amateur production. My performance last night was the first one that I really felt deserved to be seen by paying customers, and we’ve got two more shows today, to polish off the remaining rough edges.

In case any guitarists end up reading this, I’m playing my Variax 300, with J-200 (jumbo acoustic), Super 400 (jazz box), Les Paul Custom, Strat and Tele models saved to a custom bank, and switching to a Guild F212 (12-string acoustic) for one song. That goes into my Digitech GNX3, with a DI into the sound desk and headphones for personal monitoring (I want to hear more guitar than anyone else does!). I also used a slide for a couple of sections in the Cat’s songs, which made the Music Director smile…

After this, my next booking is a complete change of direction: playing clarinet and tenor sax for West Side Story in Henley in April. Quite how they’re going to fit a 14-piece band (including tuned percussion) into the Kenton Theatre’s tiny pit is something I can’t even guess…

I think that my clarinet needs a service before this, so I need to pop it over to Dawkes for some TLC…

This entry was posted on 09/02/2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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