Two Cities: with Jeff Wayne

Dominic speaks to the award-winning composer Jeff Wayne about Two Cities (his Musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities) that opened at the Palace Theatre, in London's West End, on 27th February 1969

Despite a run of just 44 performances, Two Cities was Nominated for Best Musical at the Evening Standard Awards - with its star Edward Woodward also winning the Best Male Performance for a Musical category for his portrayal of Sydney Carton. Audiences and critics alike also praised Elizabeth Power’s performance as Lucie Manette ...

All musical excerpts in this episode from "Two Cities" & "The War of the Worlds" have been used with permission from Jeff Wayne Music Group Ltd

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SPEAKER_01 0:16

In London's West End, along Sharpsbury Avenue, a row of famous theatres terminate into the vast terracotta facade of the Palace Theatre. For the best part of a decade, the award-winning Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been playing there, and previously, for the best part of twenty years, passers-by would have been familiar with the site of a trick-a-lore with Victor Hugo's drawing of Cassette branded on it, as the palace housed the award-winning Le Mizarab. Some sixteen years before Le Miz opened, however, another musical, with a red, white, and blue logo, had the following words projected out front in cinematic neon lights. Jerry Wayne presents the spectacular new musical Two Cities, based on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Two Cities, despite a run of just 44 performances, was nominated for Best Musical at the Evening Standards Awards, with its star, Edward Woodward, also winning the best male performance for a musical category for his portrayal of Sidney Carton. Audiences and critics alike also praised Elizabeth Powers' performance as Lucy Minnette. Today, I'm thrilled to be speaking with the composer of Two Cities, Jeff Wayne, whose collaboration with his father, Jerry Wayne, created, according to the Daily Mirror, this invigorating musical with muscle and heart. But before I invite Jeff into the room to talk to us about Two Cities, I should address the elephant in the room, or perhaps the tripod figure looming on the horizon. Jeff is also, of course, the composer of the musical version of The War of the Worlds, an album that has sold sixteen million copies worldwide. So, in part two, we sit down to talk to him about that as well. Jeff, hello, and welcome to Charles Dickens of Brain on Fire. It's wonderful to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Dominic, thanks for inviting me to chat to you about uh a subject that uh is very dear to my heart.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

I'm gonna throw you right in the deep end. I'm gonna send you back in time to Thursday, the 27th of February, 1969, the Palace Theatre, London.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

I'm presuming that was the opening night of Two Cities. And interestingly, you just told me something I had long forgotten. The the day of the week and the the date of it as to what was the opening. I knew it was somewhere in that period, but uh that's what it was.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

And what were the steps that then led you and your father to to think of adapting a tale of two cities down for this?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

The idea was entirely my dad's. My father, historically, was a very popular singer, actor, uh, entertainer generally in the United States for many years. He had three number one hit singles in America, did Broadway, he had his own national radio program. And uh as time went on in his career, he decided he wanted to move into stage production and uh to come back to the UK to set up uh a producing company because uh what he also did in his career, Dominic, was that he was the original Sky Masterson, the romantic gambler in the West End production of Guys and Dolls. And that's how I, with my parents, moved to England for the first time. I was about nine years old, and we stayed for about four years because he got a lot of other work after uh his uh time in Guys and Dolls. And we moved back to New York for a few more years, and he started getting a lot of work or more work, I should say, uh, from the West Coast in California. So we moved to California, high school and college for me followed that move. Uh, and then it was about the latter period of my time in California that uh my dad came back to London and set up his theater producing company. And uh during that period my my dad had been reading a lot of books and uh getting ideas for a musical, which was his big love. And uh there were three different uh stories that he actually found, loved, acquired the rights to where they were needed, and in that period he and I were communicating, or occasionally he came back to to LA before permanently settling back in London, and uh started telling me about these three stories and would I like to write the music as a composer. Now what's important to underscore with three lines, not even one line, an underscore of three lines is the word nepotism. Because because if you wanted an example of nepotism in spades, that was it, because while my professional career as a musician was beginning, and uh beginning again, underscore that, uh, I didn't have credits, successes in anything as major as a West End musical. And I kept telling my dad, you can get any big name uh composer to write the score for any one and all of these three ideas to turn into musicals. And he just wouldn't have any of it. He said, Look, I've heard some of the songs you've written. I y I was getting the beginning of a career and being commissioned to score or do arrangements for TV uh composers who were writing for drama or light entertainment. Uh I had a couple of bands that I was playing keyboards in that I put together and doing the very usual uh usual suspects in the way of bar mitzvahs, uh birthdays, weddings, you name it. And that was it, Dominic. My dad wouldn't wouldn't have anything other than me coming in as the composer for these three different stories, and one of them was a TV series based on Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I started coming over from California for us to write together, then do studio demos to be able to present the idea of musicals for each one of these. And uh Two Cities took off pretty quickly in terms of uh getting investors, getting a record contract for the release of a soundtrack, directors, stars, the you know, as all uh theater productions require. And because two cities did eventually get on on the date that our conversation started, I moved back here to uh to London, whereas I I now live in Hertfordshire, where I'm talking to you from. But I should also add that at the point in which I came back to London, I had been putting myself through college teaching tennis. I played number one in captain, my high school and college tennis teams. My dad was also a national standard tennis player, and he played number one for Ohio State University. So we had commonality in the arts and tennis, particularly, although we played a lot of sports together. And I remember when I came back to the UK knowing that Two Cities was looking like it was going to actually open, I told all my tennis pupils, please give me three to six months and I'm likely to be back. Don't get another tennis coach. They're still waiting to this day.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Um two cities, you said took off then from the other options that you had. Obviously, I'm sure that must be to do with what you were producing musically, but was there anything in the culture that was propelling it? Because I I just look back, I'm talking about these times like I was there, and of course I wasn't. But in 1968, of course, you have so much upheaval in society. You've got the assassination of Martin Luther King, RFK, Robert Kennedy, Vietnam, you've got barricades, a month of barricades in Paris in the summer of 68. Did that have some kind of impact on what you were doing?

SPEAKER_00 9:03

I think so. Not only impact because of the world we were living in, but my dad was very much liking what uh Charles Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities about social comment. And I I did too. It's also, interestingly, Charles Dickens was a brilliant Victorian writer with a style that was his own. H. G. Wells followed Dickens just in their age difference, but was still very much a Victorian writer. And through science fiction and fantasy particularly, he was writing about similar subjects. And just those years later, when my dad and I were working on the War of the Worlds, some of these themes, in each of their own ways, related to each other. And I can remember my dad and I talking about that. So the answer is yes, very much so. And I should also add to it, when I finally came back permanently to live in London because of two cities, I was sent uh a notification that I had to appear uh at the Army Base in Rysel, the United States Army base, uh, for a possible induction into the draft. And I did uh appear there and had uh unbeknownst to me uh the knowledge that came very quickly is that I failed my eye test. I was apparently something I never knew. I I had some color blindness, which certainly at that time disqualified me from going into the army. And I think you can imagine that a father and a son, and my mom, who was in Los Angeles, were very relieved that I failed my physical at Riselip. And and and I stayed. I I was also going to school here in the UK at uh what was Trinity College of Music, and my pupils in tennis, they never heard from me again. Other than some of them actually invested into Two Cities.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Jeff, I was wondering if we could just slightly dig into the the score a bit of two cities, because as we were logging on to talk, um I had a kind of pulse in my head in Five Four. And I just think this is just a jump to the timers now, that that song. Um that that is so charged and powerful.

SPEAKER_05 11:38

I have no tears to give a dead tears for the shed.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

It had a temperament of them, which had drama. It was setting the way the world was in France with the French Revolution.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Because there's no existing footage of the show. Can you remember how it started with that prologue, The Best of Times? What did we see in the audience?

SPEAKER_00 12:47

My memory is that the canvas, I mean, and please remember in 1969 theater was not, in technological terms, uh anything like it is today. Uh so there was a curtain, and my memory is that we had a logo for two cities, and the logo came up with moody lighting. But my big breakthrough was convincing my dad and the theater owner of the Palace Theater to go from mono sound into stereo sound. So uh yeah, and you know, compared to where we are today uh with speaker systems and and uh technology that one has available, it's day and night. But sitting in a theater and hearing a stereo projection filled the room in a way that was not common at all. And the music you named um the opening piece, and it gave a drama to it and a size that I think helped draw the audience into what was about to unfold, because at the end of it, Curtin rose and off we went.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Because in the novel, Sidney Carton is very serene, and it's all his inner life is being described in the passages, whereas on stage Carton's inner emotion forces itself out in a big thundering climax. Was that something that you obviously felt it needed at the end as a full stop?

SPEAKER_00 14:59

For sure. Uh you're fighting for attention at the start and at the end.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Now at last I find the peace I'm seeking. The peace I've never known. In your thoughts I'd rather be forever.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

And again, it goes right back to uh Charles Dickens and our uh writer who adapted for the BBC. Uh Constance Cox was the author who wrote the TV series and that we worked with. Connie was a lovely lady with a wicked sense of humor, uh, particularly when we're talking about uh guillotines and people being executed. Uh but yeah, at the the ending was a dramatic song. And Teddy, Edward Word, excuse me, was known for being a dramatic actor. Uh he was during that period Callan, a tough-nosed detective on a very successful TV series. The public weren't aware of until he did Two Cities, was that he had a brilliant tenor voice. And in the day that Two Cities ran, there was no Olivier Awards. It was the Evening Standard Awards, which was the main award in theater. And he won for the best performance in a musical for his role as Sidney Carton. Two Cities was runner-up, it didn't quite get to win, but second is better than nothing at all.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

No, it's a real accolade to be nominated. You were nominated for two categories, weren't you, for that? Something that I noticed though in listening to the soundtrack is something that you're quite famous for, which is being able to create unsettling noises. Sounds and something um that struck me was in the knitting song, I think it's called You Had the Sound of the Knitting. What's going on there to create that sound?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

The background is that in the real world of the French Revolution, there was a group of ladies that used to sit around the guillotine as uh the condemned were led up the stairs. And what you're hearing is a rhythm that is as if uh the women doing the knitting in sort of a frenzied form because of the tension that obviously if you're sitting around and watching people being led to their to their death, uh there's a certain energy that would not be quite the same rhythm as if they were just sitting around relaxing and making a little garment for their granddaughters. So that's the background, and and it was uh recreated uh with sticks from a drummer. And the rhythm, dun d- dun dun. I'd have to get out my score to remind myself of the exact rhythm. But that's how it was created. One, two, three, four, ding, this was the set of drumsticks recreating uh the sound of frenetic knitting by the the women we see on stage sitting around the guillotine.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Yeah. And far more unsettling than sort of big pounding drums and and sort of noisy brass or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

For sure. Yeah. Uh you know, thanks for s saying that nice comment about that uh I might be known a bit for quirky sounds or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Many questions to come about War of the Worlds coming.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

You may have answered a gazillion times before before, but I'm so curious about some of them. Okay. Well, I've made a career out of music, which I love. It's the nourishment of my life, if you want to call it that. Uh, but I've also been particularly as electronic music came into being, which was in and around the time Two Cities was opening. My first synthesizer was it was around 1968, so about a year before Two Cities opened. But uh I've always loved the challenge of trying to turn moods, lyrics, into unusual sounds and rhythms and counterphrases. So it's just out of real interest to use all the tools that are available to any composer arranger. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:49

Very early on in in the in the show is uh Lucy Manette's singing tender love and patience with tender love and patience, you'll come back to me, and hand in hand we'll walk alone a happy isle where children smile, and you'll be loved and cherished tenderly, and you'll come back to me.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

The unpredictability and yet the catchiness of that melody and the harmony what is harmony and melody to you, then as a composer? Because you really you really know how to sort of stir a listener, I think, with that.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Well, thank you again for saying that. Um I I think anybody that's composing tunes uh or songs, words and music, uh it's depending upon firstly what you're feeling. And then if you're a pianist like I am or a keyboardist, because I I play all keyboards, um, a guitarist, anything where you might, as a songwriter, be using whatever your main instrument is, you're not just writing the tune, you're you're accompanying uh to the tune and you're finding chord patterns, movements, uh any internal rhythms that um complete the song or the tune. It comes from within, it comes from the subject matter that if it's an original story with lyrics that are saying something that means something to you, or in my case, we're adapting uh a classic story, it's triggered by those ideas that come from uh the events in in that story. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 21:42

And you come back to me.