Friday Mar 29

JuliaGregory Julia Gregory is an award-winning writer and composer. Her musical Camille, La Dame Aux Camélias, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils received the Chairman’s Choice Award at the NY Musical Theatre Festival in 2005 and her musical Felix & Fanny, based on the lives of the famous virtuosic siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, was one of the few musical theatre pieces chosen to be presented in the Female Music Composer’s Festival in France in 2007. Other musicals include Dracula: Sex, Blood, and Rock N' Roll, a rock musical based on the novel by Bram Stoker; Bernice Bobs Her Hair, based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and Persuasion, a chamber musical based on the novel by Jane Austen. In addition to writing, Julia is a classically trained pianist and musician as well as accomplished actress, singer, dancer. She studied music theory and piano performance at Mount Saint Mary’s College winning the distinguished President’s Award. She moved to San Francisco to study with Jeanie Delgado at UC Berkeley. At that time, she began her studies in directing, musical directing, and English Literature, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State University. She expanded her focus to include acting and dancing, studying at the prestigious American Conservatory Theatre and the San Francisco City Ballet Companies. During her years in the San Francisco, she had the great fortune to perform in many classical plays and study intently her love of classic literature. Shortly after graduating, Julia moved to New York to study Shakespeare with Stuart Vaughan (Public Theater). She has performed in numerous Broadway, National and International Tour productions (ShowboatJosephMy Fair LadyA Chorus LineWest Side StoryDamn Yankees—to name a few). She has performed in way too many regional and off-Broadway productions to count!  She has taught a multitude of Master Classes all across America and currently has a successful voice studio in Los Angeles.
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Julia Gregory Interview with Joshua Fardon


How did you start writing musicals?
 
This is probably going to sound cliché, but, I’ve always had music going through my head; when I ride my bike, or read a book, there’s always underscoring.  Everything has music.  Like, even us having a conversation has underscoring underneath it.
 
(Her cell phone rings.)
 

And there it is.
 
(Julia laughs.)
 
So I always had this music going on in my head.  Then, I was in New York performing and auditioning for shows, and I kept noticing how many of the parts for women just weren’t all that interesting. It seemed like almost everything written for a girl made you seem like a wuss – you have to cry a lot and you always want the guy. It just didn’t seem realistic to me. And I thought, “This isn’t how it feels to be a woman.  Why am I singing this?”  Then I thought, “I could just sit here and bitch about it, or I could do something about it.”   Then, I remember going to see Sunset Boulevard
 

The musical Sunset Boulevard?
 
Yes.  I had auditioned for it and had come really close to getting the part of the girl, but I lost out to Alice Ripley.  I went to see the show, and as I was watching it, I thought, “This is not a strong part.”  As I walked home that night, I kept thinking, “What could I write?”  The entire time I was walking, I had this underscoring in my head. I started thinking (sings) “Life is so carefree and ever so gay at the opera.” It just came all at once, the song, the lyrics, everything.  I didn’t know what it was, so when I got home, I wrote it down. I remember thinking, “what piece is this?”  I thought maybe someone else had written it and I was remembering it.  I searched everywhere but couldn’t find it so I just let it go and went to bed.
 
But this haunting feeling of wanting to write something kept coming back to me.  Now I had this opera piece with the words and music laid out.  And all of the characters parts…they were all talking to me - I just didn’t know who they were at that point.  A couple of months before that, I’d heard someone was working on Wuthering Heights. And I remember thinking, “Wow, that’d be such a great musical.”  But I knew the opera idea didn’t fit into Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre, or any of the other novels that I find myself always drawn to. I finally realized it was Camille. I’d read the book and the play – and sections of the opera piece fit right into the story.  So I went back to the play and the novel and weighed the differences between the two and how I could convey what I wanted onstage.  I didn’t just take the play and put songs in it.  I wanted it to be from a female perspective, and I wanted it to have this larger grander message.
 

So you ended up working with the novel more than the play?
 
I used the play as a guide, but I used the novel as the impetus to the piece.
 

The play is also by Dumas fils?
 
Right.
 

Isn’t it based on a true story?  Wasn’t he in love with someone who died?
 
Yes. Camille is based on Marie Duplessis who had a short affair with him.
 

I always wondered if the father (Jacques) is supposed to be Dumas père.
 
I did some research on that, actually.  I found a lot of opposing ideas about how Dumas fils and his father got along – and a lot of that got into the piece.  Whenever you write a play, there’s always a little bit of truth about yourself in there.  In the musical, though, we made the father character a little more antagonistic, to appeal to a modern audience. In the book, he’s bound by social convention.  He represents the restrictions of a certain segment of society.  Some people are free to break those boundaries and others are held very close to the standard.
 

Camille ultimately honors that standard, but she’s on the fringes of society.
 
She definitely walks the line in many respects.  She pushes the boundaries, but follows the rules.  She’s a courtesan; so obviously, her rules are bent to begin with.  But within that world, everyone has ethical and societal rules that they have to follow.
 

There’s a lot of sex in this musical; some of the lyrics are surprisingly dirty.  People have a tendency to dress up this period and not think about it in terms of the sex being real.
 
A lot of people try to clean it up, for sure.  But in fact, we’re talking about mid 19th century France, which was probably the most bawdy of all the European countries at the time.  So when we wrote the first draft, we were trying to honor that, but at the same time, I knew this was being written for an American audience which might have preconceived notions of what would be acceptable for the period. When we did a rewrite, I actually allowed myself to put more of what I wanted into it – which is what’s in the lyrics now.
 

How did workshopping the project and working with actors inform you?
 
That’s been the best experience for me.  As an actress, I always come to a piece thinking about each individual character.  I think, “If I were playing that character, what would the arc I want be?  What are the defining moments for that character? What are the character’s desires and objectives?”  I want every actor to feel satisfied.  So, I’d say that working with actors in the different workshops has been wonderful and I’ve gotten really good feedback from them.
 
In the original performance, for example, I was more true to the novel in terms of the father character.  He wasn’t antagonistic, he just asked Camille politely to leave his son, and she acquiesced. They still had a standoff, but it wasn’t physical. Then we got all of this feedback from the actor who played the father; he felt like the audience didn’t get him or get what the big deal was – why doesn’t Camille just keep dating Armand? The stakes weren’t high enough so we changed it to make the audience understand that this man has no alternative.  He has to really threaten her because he doesn’t want to ruin his daughter’s life.  He’s so angry with his son for putting him in this position that he takes it out on Camille.  And we took the idea of Camille being independent and headstrong to throw the father off of his game a bit - he doesn’t expect her to be so intelligent and articulate and to be wiling to compromise.  But it’s not that way in the book.  I think from a female perspective, you have to think about the era.  It wasn’t normal for a woman, especially a courtesan, to lay down an agenda when a man comes in and tells her what to do.  It pushes the boundaries of social convention, which adds to his anger.  It’s a kind of feminist twist which may or may not be appropriate for the period, but we felt it was necessary to help the contemporary audience.
 

You’ve placed the poem “Echo” by Christina Rossetti in the musical.  How did you come across the poem and how did you decide to incorporate it?
 
I had written music to that poem before Camille ever existed.  It was one of those moments when I sat down and read the poem and the music was going and I just wrote it.  Fast forward a few years – I’m writing Camille and I get to the end.  We had to make a decision: does she die before Armand gets there like she does in the book?  Or does she die in his arms like in the play and movie? I felt it didn’t make sense for Armand to get there before Camille passes away because the book was written first and must have, therefore, been his original idea.  The play seemed so manipulated. I wasn’t moved as much by that so I decided to honor the book and have her die beforehand.  So…now I had Armand coming in and finding her dead, and I thought to myself, “Wow, that poem from Christina Rossetti would fit so perfectly here because it expresses the essence of everything he’s feeling in this moment.”  If I came running into this situation, I would want to say to the person: come back to me in dreams…that I may give pulse for pulse, breath for breath.  I made the executive decision to put it in, and I also added a big finish with the chorus which I felt added and a lovely haunting quality.  The poem wrapped up the musical so perfectly that now I can’t imagine having another song in that spot.  So, I stole Christina Rossetti’s poem.
 

But it’s public domain.
 
Right.  I love doing that, and I’ve done that with several of my other musicals; I’ve put poems in them. And, in that period, people were very into poetry and poets.  They were, in some ways, like rock stars.
 

Like the poets in Connotation Press.
 
Yes, exactly!

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At The Opera

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Come To Me In Dreams

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All Connotation Press plays are presented online to the reading public. All performance rights, including professional, amateur, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. If you are interested in seeking performance rights to a specific work contact the Drama Editor, Joshua Fardon.

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