But Seriously...

Pop music meets classical concert in a premiere event at this year’s Midsumma Festival, reports Richard Watts.

Scandal'us. Scott Cain. Paulini. Bardot. Is it any wonder that pop music is getting a bad name, when manufactured idols come and go faster than your last one night stand did? In this world of disposable pop, it’s nice to be reminded that a great song and a popular song aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.

Seriously is a new production by writer, director and performer David Knox, who gave us the 2002 Midsumma hit, Kylie the Musical. For his latest show, Knox has taken the songs of iconic pop duo The Pet Shop Boys and stripped them back to their bare essentials, to reveal what the show’s musical director Dean Lotherington calls ‘intelligent pop.’

“They set about writing music that’s going to last, you know?” he says of the song-writing team whose hits include ‘It’s A Sin’, ‘Always On My Mind’ and ‘Absolutely Fabulous’.

Lotherington, a composer and accompanist who has worked with the likes of Paul Capsis and Julian Clary, heard his first Pet Shop Boys song back in 1985.

“It would have been ‘West End Girls’, their first hit, easily. I used to dance at Mandate to it when I was still in high school,” he laughs. “I was never a diehard Pet Shop Boys fan, but I’ve always been absolutely aware of them. And because they speak volumes about relationships, and we’ve all been in relationships that have either been bursting at the seams with love and bliss, or been falling apart at the seams, there’s always one of their songs that’s like ‘Oh, that reminds me of that time in my life.’”

“In a way, for the last twenty years the Pet Shop Boys have always been there, you know?” he says emphatically. “David Knox coined a phrase about them for this particular production; he says that, ‘This is the soundtrack for our lives.’”

It was two and a half years ago that Knox first put the idea of Seriously to Lotherington.

“I thought ‘Gee, it could just work, what David was suggesting,’ which was to strip back all that electronic stuff and show off the lyrics and the irony and the blackness, all of those clever things they write about.”

The resulting production, which will premiere at Chapel off Chapel on January 25, employs a grand piano and a string quartet to reinvent the songs of Tennant and Lowe, and the vocal talents of Batchelor Girl’s Tania Doko, as well as David Gould, Paul Ross (who recently concluded a two-year stint performing in the smash hit Mamma Mia!), Maria Mercedes and Anthony Constanzo, the production’s youngest performer.

Constanzo says that rehearsing for the show has given him a new appreciation of the Pet Shop Boys.

“A lot of the music in the show is less well known, and that always grabs me, because I’ve only ever known the hits. My favourite song of theirs now is one from the show called ‘Miracles.’ It’s got such colourful and descriptive lyrics; they’re incredibly hopeful, too, but they’re set against music which is a little bit darker, and that kind of juxtaposition has always attracted me.”

The performance will focus the audience’s attention on the Pet Shop Boys melodies and lyrics, or as Dean Lotherington puts it, “Their insight into what’s going on in the world right now; their take on the human heart and the human condition. It’s worth its weight in gold really. There’s no Stock, Aitken and Waterman about them.”

Seriously at Chapel off Chapel, Prahran Jan 25 – Feb 12.
Bookings on 8290 7000.