INTERVIEW: ‘Howard Barnes’ lives a noteworthy, musical life
Photo: The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes played Seattle’s Village Theater. Photo courtesy of M. Kitaoka / Provided by Emily McGill Entertainment with permission.
The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes, the musical written by Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond, was first staged at Seattle’s Village Theater, and now the show has been memorialized with a cast album that the creative team has been working on for quite some time. The audio recording was recently released, giving even more fans the chance to check out the noteworthy (and musical) life of Mr. Barnes.
When the two work together, Kooman takes care of compositional duties, while Dimond writes the book and lyrics. For the Seattle run of the show, they employed the acting talents of Joshua Carter, Taryn Darr, Jeff Steitzer and Jasmine Jean Sim, all of whom are featured on the new recording. In fact, the writing team amazingly was able to bring the entire team back again for the cast album — all 16 cast members and 10 orchestra members.
The show involves the title character who gets stuck in a Groundhog Day-like scenario. He wakes up and finds himself stuck in the middle of a musical, and the comedy comes rather quickly. Expect Peter Pan, a phantom, a cat, a founding father and a music man.
“We started working on this show about 10 years ago,” Dimond said in a recent phone interview. “It just kind of came to us as an idea for a project that would be fun to work on. We had previously written a couple musicals together that were a little darker, a little less fun in terms of their subject matter, and we decided we wanted to write something that really gave us a chance to dig into the comedy aspect of things and focus first and foremost on that. We had the germ of an idea: Wouldn’t it be funny if somebody woke up and discovered that their life was a musical. So that was kind of the genesis of it, and we just sort of built it from there.”
Kooman and Dimond have been writing partners for quite some time, and their most high-profile project together has been penning songs for TV’s Vampirina. The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes took them 10 years of work, and they grew as creative team members throughout the process.
“So ultimately the interesting thing about this spanning 10 years of our career is we started it, and we’re definitely different people by the end of it, through and through,” Kooman said. “In a sense, we’re always trying to make it better. We had a bunch of workshops on it. We did most of the work, I would say, between 10 years ago and six years ago, and then we got this job working on Disney writing songs for Vampirina. That sort of took us away for about three years. We got this offer to do a full production in Seattle, and this was the first time that it was going to be produced in a full way.”
That Seattle production gave them the chance to see their ideas grow some legs, but they needed to change the material a bit because they had picked up some tricks of the trade along the way.
“We’re better writers than we were 10 years ago,” Kooman said. “This is the chance to really make this shine. Let’s open up our eyes and ears to what this piece needs to be, to all the feedback we’ve gotten over the years and really hone this in and take advantage of this time to rewrite, to streamline the story, to make it as funny as possible, take out the jokes that are not working. … I will say that this iteration of the show represents who we are, I think, as writers right now, and I think that’s why we really wanted to record it. We wanted to put this out there and to complement our work right now that’s out there with Vampirina, which is very youthful, very for kids. … This is definitely more of an adult show, especially the sense of humor of it. It’s a representation of where we are, and we’re really proud of it.”
Dimond added that there’s the hope this new cast album will garner enough interest that a producer will want to stage the musical in another city, perhaps even New York City. The writing partners believe there’s a lot of life left in Howard Barnes.
“That’s certainly one of the driving forces behind deciding to do it,” Dimond said. “Really we just wanted to preserve the performance and to put the show out there into the world. We’re fortunate enough to be in a position now where we can actually do that as writers. There are so many ways to get your work out there, so we do hope that there’s more life for the show beyond the production out in Seattle. Hopefully this is a way to get the show some attention and to generate some new opportunities for it.”
The recording process was a long one, but Kooman and Dimond were able to gather each and every member of the original cast and orchestra, an impressive feat for sure. That’s almost unheard of for a musical production that only ran eight weeks.
“We recorded all the orchestral tracks in one day,” Kooman said. “We did a quick little mix of all the orchestral parts, and then we went back in the studio and did two days of the vocal recording, starting with the ensemble vocals first. And once we did that, then we did all the solo parts, either one by one, or if it was a duet, sometimes we would bring two singers in but have them in isolation. That was back in November, and then we did maybe 200 or 300 hours of mixing. We call it comping, which means we’re just picking the right take. Often it’ll be like, OK, we’re going to use most of take three for this, but then she sounds really great on that high note on take four. Then the rest of the phrase we’re going to do on take five, except we had to do that for like 16 tracks sometimes, including orchestra and ensemble vocals.”
He added, with a laugh: “It did take us a little bit longer than expected, but I think we’re really happy with what we came up with. We’re excited to release it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes, with music by Michael Kooman and book and lyrics by Christopher Dimond, has recently been released as an audio recording. Click here for more information.
