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WINNER of the 2011 Green Room Award for
Best Ensemble Performance
WINNER of the 2011 Theatrepeople Pro Choice Award for
Best Limited Run Musical
Selected by Aussie Theatre.com Reviewers Choice as one of the
'Top 5 Shows of 2011'
About flowerchildren
flowerchildren is an exciting new musical about the turbulent private lives of the American vocal group The Mamas and the Papas. Its scenic action focuses on the years 1966 and 1967, in which The Mamas and the Papas were riding high on the charts and whatever substances they could find to light up their lives. It's an age of innocence, in which the flowerchildren’s values of peace and love and freedom seemed to promise a new world – one in which anything and everything was possible. The musical explores the distrust, dangerous passions, and unhealthy co-dependencies that lay behind the groups legacy of timeless hits such as Monday, Monday, Creeque Alley, Words of Love and the iconic California Dreamin'.
The songs, written by John, all reflect (and often explicitly reveal) the emotional entanglements of the groups members - John was married to Michelle, who had an affair with Denny, who was the love of Cass’s life. These things destroyed them, but they also drove John’s writing and the creative energies of the group to the top of the charts.
John brought to the quartet his genius as a composer/arranger, and a guitar. Denny brought a heartbreakingly pure tenor sound. Cass brought a gutsy voice and, in every way, a massive presence. Michelle was the cool presence that held them together and then blew them apart. Cass died in 1974, John in 2001, Denny in 2007. Michelle, in every sense, survived them all.
The focus is on these distinctive people, on their complex and passionate interactions, but it’s also about the times. flowerchildren is about a kind of innocence that went hand in hand with forms of corruption, about how ‘California Dreaming’ not only became a reality but turned to nightmare. It’s about sex, drugs, and a distinctive kind of rock and roll, in a time when the world was changing fast - and it was really important to be young.
The story is told in sequence, but the four retrospective narrators (appearing in the order of their deaths) impose the perspective of another time. Their perception of the events we see adds to our knowledge of them - but it’s as interesting for the things they miss, or misinterpret, as for the individual insights they offer as participant-observers. Behind each one as he or she speaks to us, the action often keeps running, in sometimes viciously ironic parallel.
While the plot focuses on the principal foursome for the entirety of act one, in the second act, as the intense interconnections are breaking down and the world is beginning to intrude, we are introduced briefly to four other characters. These are Lou Adler (the bands manager), Gene Clark (lead singer of The Byrds with whom Michelle had a brief open affair), Linda (a possibly fictional relationship for Denny), and Jill Gibson (who, aside from being Lou Adler's girlfriend, joins the band for their fateful Canadian tour after Michelle is sacked). The four performers who play these roles also serve throughout the work as ensembles of various kinds, used to create mood or show location (audiences, television crew, etc). Most importantly, they provide the extra vocal support needed to recreate live on stage the distinctive eight-part harmonies the Mamas and the Papas achieved (through double-tracking) in their recordings. |
