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Cabaret reflects on the dying art of letter writing

Thrilling, daunting, exciting and revelatory is how Adelaide theatre director and producer David Mealor describes the letters at the heart of acclaimed song cycle ‘The Juliet Letters’.

Jun 06, 2016, updated Jun 06, 2016

The music was his entry into the world of singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, who recorded the album with Britain’s Brodsky Quartet in the early 1990s – just as people were being introduced to email as an alternative form of correspondence.

In typical Costello fashion, he refuses to really label what it is … he says it’s a song cycle for voice and quartet,” Mealor says.

“I would say it’s a really fascinating crossover work – the coming together of a classical quartet and the sort of angry young man of ’70s British pop music was an unlikely pairing.”

Costello has said that his inspiration and title for the song cycle came from a newspaper story his wife spotted about an academic in Verona who replied to mail sent to the imaginary “Juliet Capulet”.

Mealor, the artistic director of Flying Penguin Productions and a founding member of Brink Productions, was attracted by the dramatic possibilities it offered. He and music director Carol Young first created a musical cabaret version of The Juliet Letters with Adelaide College of the Arts around six years ago, and are now preparing to premiere a much larger production at this month’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

The Juliet Letters will be presented with Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet and four singers: Michaela Burger, Cameron Goodall, Jude Henshall and Jamie Newell.

“It’s not a concert version but not a dramatised musical version, either – it’s something between those worlds,” Mealor explains.

The Zephyr Quartet.

The Zephyr Quartet.

“The 20 songs invite us into the private worlds of 20 different characters as they sing about theirs loves and losses on Planet Earth, and even beyond Planet Earth.”

Each singer will perform a number of solos, with the show also featuring duets and group numbers.

The letters that make up the lyrics of the songs are, Mealor says, thrilling, daunting, exciting, revelatory”.

Some present dark scenarios: there’s a suicide note; a letter from a female soldier penned during war; and another by a man dying of an illness, to be read by his lover after his death. Others, however, have a more poetic and optimistic feeling, and some are like “quirky riddles”.

“Even if they are positive or upbeat in nature, they are written by people in moments of crisis,” Mealor says.

“The piece itself is endlessly fascinating.

“It lends itself to dramatic staging … I was particularly keen to try to draw out the relationships at the heart of the letters and find simple, elegant ways of staging the work that would in some ways make them slightly clearer.”

It’s a very different world now to when Costello and the Brodsky Quartet recorded The Juliet Letters. Hand-written letters are a rarity today, and thinking about the loss of these treasured mementoes from loved ones can induce melancholy in anyone old enough to have a collection stored in a box somewhere.

Mealor hopes The Juliet Letters will encourages audiences to reflect on why we choose to write to people and what we write about, as well as the changing nature of correspondence. Will people 50 years from now be trying to retrieve old emails from their computers for sentimental reasons, or should we just accept their impermanence?

“Theatre and cabaret can offer a space and a place and a time for people to slow down and meditate on the nature of living,” Mealor says.

“For those who love the [Juliet Letters] album, this will hopefully be a fascinating experience to see it on stage, and for those who haven’t heard it, it will be a fantastic opportunity to see  a really great crossover work.”

The Juliet Letters will be presented at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, on June 17 and 18. The Adelaide Cabaret Festival opens on Friday and continues until June 25.

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