Canadian
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Gallery Unsung Heroes
Paula Rosen is a singer-songwriter and former speech language pathologist for children from Montreal. Music has always been a central and important area of Rosen’s life. She has worked as a commissioned songwriter, a part time cantorial soloist at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Shalom in Montreal and is currently expanding her repertoire of songs and children’s musicals. She now lives in Vancouver with her three children and her husband.
Unsung Heroes was first performed in its entirety as a musical on April 15-16, 2005 by Le Choeur des Enfants de Montreal at St. George’s Anglican Church in Montreal. Many of the songs were first performed at a local school in Montreal as musical accompaignment to Ann Lambert’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays. The musical comedy features eleven original songs derived from three Shakespearean plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and Macbeth. The musical is propelled and narrated by three “previously overlooked characters” from the three plays; the Love-in-Idleness flower (A Midsummer Night’s Dream); Gloucester’s Eyeball (King Lear); and the Damn’d Spot (Macbeth) (Musical Score Introduction). These three characters provide easily understood synopses for the plays thus making accessible Shakespeare’s plots for elementary and high school age children studying the Bard.
The musical score of the production reveals key characterizations, plot devices, and themes. Additionally, the score embeds further knowledge about background information related to the plays and creates a discourse on how the characters feel about their portrayal, conflicts, and roles within their respective plays. The songs are entertaining and an excellent example of how Shakespeare can be adapted into a musical mode as a means to promote interest in Shakespeare and educate youth on key themes and messages intended for a wide and varied audience. For example, “Got the Blahs” Blues explores the themes of love, mistaken identity, and magical intervention, which are central to the A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s plot and conclusion. The song then delves into the character’s personal feelings regarding the trickery and conflict that occur during the play. Helena laments, “I’m crying heaps cause men are creeps and best friends deceive–– their insincere apologies are hard to believe” (Musical Score). This more personal aspect of the narrative and how it is experienced by key characters in it––related in words and situations younger audiences can understand and empathize with––simplifies the plot but does not sacrifice its intrinsic themes.
Regarding Macbeth, Rosen breaks down the intricate and often-contested relationship between Macbeth and his wife in the song Good at Being Bad. In this duet, Lady Macbeth sings, “If my hands are getting grubby I do it all for hubby and Queen Macbeth just has the sweetest sound.” Macbeth parries with “It’s not that I’m sadistic, I’m only altruistic, I live to please my dear high maintenance wife” (Musical score). Rosen’s background training as a speech pathologist for children is significant in this case as it gives her a deeper understanding on how best to create expressive language and facilitate functional communication that optimizes emotive understanding in a musical context.
A children’s choir––which offers an exceptional learning context on Shakespeare, adaptation, and new modes of theatro-musical convention for children and young adults who are interested in and involved with music and theatre––performed Unsung Heroes under the direction of conductor Iwan Edwards. But Unsung Heroes holds possibilities outside the often small and amateur realm of children’s theatre. Rosen writes, in her introduction to the musical score, that the production would be “equally effective if performed by 6-7 versatile adult actors” while stressing that no matter the venue the “target audience is children 9-16 years of age” (Musical Score Introduction). The production is flexibly structured in that as it can be performed multiple ways: as an integrated whole; as the songs from one particular play; or simply as individual songs. Unsung Heroes demonstrates how the adaptation of Shakespeare’s theatrical works in Canada crosses over genre and age boundaries providing rich opportunities for aesthetic experimentation in concert with experiential learning practices targeted at youth.
Danielle Van Wagner
Audio Clips:
Unsung Heroes: A Musical Romp through Shakespeare
By Paula Rosen
Arrangements chorales: Iwan Edwards
Arrangements pour piano: Margaret Wada
© Choeur des enfants de Montreal 2005
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Fischlin, Daniel. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. 2004. <http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca>.
