CREATIVE TEAM INTERVIEWS
MUSIC SUPERVISOR
NICHOLAS SKILBECK
Nicholas Skilbeck is the Music Supervisor on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mamma Mia! His other credits include Sister Act, Billy Elliot ,and Follies at the National Theatre in London, and Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn concert in Hammersmith, in 2014.
Tina’s brief for this show is that it should be both elements of the spiritual and the violent aspects of the story. This was an interesting connection, and in many ways the telling of this story is a way of making peace but saying that this all happened. It’s also an uplifting story of life’s ‘second act’ – Tina’s re-emergence in the 1980s really speaks to us about the transitions that take place during a life span.
Choosing the music was a case of mining the lyrics of Tina’s back catalogue. (For further information on how songs were selected, read her article.) I was incredibly lucky to meet Tina Turner and be able to ask her questions about her music, her voice and her live performances.
I learnt a lot by watching footage of Tina Turner’s gigs and a comment that Tina made about her voice having “no top and no bottom” was helpful in identifying what we were trying to achieve. If we consider the moment in Act One when Ike is telling Tina to sing higher, it’s a moment that emerges from cruelty. Sometimes the relationship between an artist and a mentor can be cruel and complex.
By the time we get to River Deep Mountain High,
there’s an element of primal release.
It’s an incredibly powerful song but the additional power comes from the vocal release. There’s a sense of having that voice and not knowing where it comes from!
Working with the performer playing Tina, we can avoid mimicry or caricature by thinking very carefully about Tina’s spirituality and musicality. In shamanism there is great belief in spirit animals, and I encouraged Adrienne (who created the role in the original West End production) to consider Tina as an animal – how she would walk and breathe. Tina’s use of rhythm was also helpful, and Delcroze worked with rhythm and emotion (connecting mind, body, music and movement) which is a helpful way to work when creating a role like this. When Tina sings she sometimes distorts the vowel sounds. Knowing information like this we can choose to be informed by it, or we can discard it if its unhelpful.
I love working with voices, and I also had to put together the band. By looking at what was going on musically at the time (for example the emergence of synthesizers), I could define the sound palette that we were trying to achieve. We then worked with Adrienne and the Iketts so that the band was their band, not one that I was in charge of. The workshops snowballed and we put this musical together comparatively quickly (a musical usually develops over a period of about five years). I love the dramaturgical aspect of my role and I’ve also been working as the Musical Director on the Broadway production of Tina.