Reviews
Bobbi Carrey And Will McMillan Celebrate 10 Years Of Collaboration
November 11, 2013
“In Perfect Harmony is about musical partnerships,” says Carrey, “not only the ten-year collaboration between me and Will and our wonderful pianist, Doug Hammer, but also some of the great songwriting teams in musical history – such as Richard Rodgers with Oscar Hammerstein and Harold Arlen with Johnny Mercer.”
“We’ll be sharing stories about how certain songs came to be created,” says McMillan.
“Sometimes, despite their differences, people who may have grown to dislike each other still managed to make beautiful music together, “ says Carrey. “Henry Mancini, for example, did not have an easy time working with Johnny Mercer – yet their collaboration produced Oscar-winning songs such as ‘Moon River’ and ‘The Days of Wine and Roses.’”
“A few composers and lyricists appear to have needed some creative tension to meet their deadlines,” says McMillan. “Bobbi and I have experienced our own share of emotional speed bumps over the past decade. But the simple act of making music together seems to realign whatever has been out of whack.”
In this show, Carrey and McMillan are putting their harmonies front and center.
“One of the things that has made us special over the years is that many of our songs include beautiful and unusual harmonies,” says McMillan, “partly because Bobbi’s voice is on the low side and mine is on the high side.”
The oldest harmony in their show is one Carrey learned in 7th grade for the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad ‘If I Loved You.’
“And the newest is a super medley of five songs with lyrics by Johnny Mercer,” says McMillan, “that we co-created with our pianist Doug Hammer and an orchestrator friend, Mike Callahan.”
“Mike has been a significant part of our creative process over the years,” says Carrey. “We first met him when he wrote arrangements for us to sing with the Harvard Pops Orchestra, and we have kept in touch as he has progressed from Harvard undergrad to the Eastman School of Music to Michigan State.”
“We explore different arrangement ideas with Doug in his studio,” says McMillan, “and then we send our ideas to Mike with lots of notes about what we like and what we hope he can make better.”
“He never fails to surprise, delight and challenge us with what he sends back for us to sing,” says Carrey.
Carrey and McMillan have come to appreciate the magic of the collaborative process even more as a result of their reading and research.
“In musical theater the songwriters are not working in a vacuum,” says Carrey. “The director, the scriptwriter, the choreographer, the stars, and the rest of the creative team are all adding input. Even a songwriter such as Irving Berlin, who wrote both lyrics and music, had Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein as his producers when he wrote the score for Annie Get Your Gun.”
“My favorite example of this is a very long note that the ensemble sings in the opening of the musical Company,” says McMillan. “The main reason it exists is that the director, Harold Prince, needed a certain amount of time to move all the actors from their locations high up on the set down to center stage.”
“Sondheim is also quite honest about how many of his lyrical ideas in West Side Story were lifted directly from Arthur Laurents’ script,” says McMillan.
“Furthermore,” continues Carrey, “Sondheim summed up the collaborative process perfectly when he said ‘the last collaborator is your audience. When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written.’”