I entered the Rockefeller Centre with trepidation. I had a lunch date with Scott at 1pm the following Monday, scheduled to allow me plenty of time after an important morning meeting with a new and somewhat intimidating acquaintance… Through Stephen I had been lucky enough to meet his son, director Scott Schwartz. Ed had been Boq in the last Australian tour of Wicked and Stephen proved again how he never seems to forget anyone. On the way home for drinks, we ran into Ed Grey on the Street. Seeing Bryan Cranston in Network was an experience I will never forget. So, despite being tired, it was his “job” to go to the theatre. He was mid-way through a workshop with Trevor Nunn, which I assumed meant we would not meet, but he told me that, as a Tony judge, he was required to see everything. In early 2019, Stephen was juggling the film of Wicked with new projects and ongoing care of the existing ones. All I needed was a deadline and a good idea. This cut down all the perceived walls between me and him. “Tyran I’m a writer, all I need is a good idea and a deadline.” When he accepted, my face must have revealed my surprise. So apparently this kid from Newcastle had grown up and was now suggesting a collaboration with Stephen Schwartz!

In his living room, surrounded by his Tonys, Grammys and Academy Awards I told him that each image would have a different composition that I would sing. I pitched the idea to him in New York in 2012. It still blows my mind that this man, responsible for so many of the musicals I’d loved as a child (not to mention recently that lil’ old bizzillion dollar juggernaut, Wicked) would be so generous as to write ME a song. One of those artists was Stephen Schwartz. I was working on a project ( Compositions) that required an array of songs, each written by different composers to capture an image, taken by my older brother, photographer Trent Parke. We were pushed, challenged, supported and engaged for two weeks during the day and while students spent their evenings in Broadway theatres, I went on my own journey… The highlights included masterclasses with legendary Broadway directors, amazing teachers, actors, daily dance tuition at ‘Broadway Dance’ and a remarkable day at the Michael Chekov school in Hudson. My first project was taking our third-year students on the first of an annual ‘Global Atelier’ (a fancy University term for school excursion!).įor any aspiring Music Theatre student, New York, the home of so many of those cast recordings, is undoubtedly the mecca. (I had little concept of what a director did but I saw his name often in bold, so I figured he had an important hand in the creation of these shows.)įast forward thirty-five years to January 2019 and I had just been made head of Musical Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). Chief among them was Stephen Schwartz (I had two copies of the Australian cast of Pippin starring John Farnham in case one scratched), Stephen Sondheim ( Sweeney Todd changed my life) and the guy who seemed to stretch himself across so many of them, a guy called Hal Prince. The double album original cast recordings from Broadway or London, with fold out images and booklets with librettos and essays, were my education in musical theatre. If I entertained that idea with false appreciation, I’d get the ‘Sunday shift’ at penalty rates, which lead to a modest bag of treasures from my fortnightly trip to the record store. My boss at McDonalds (impressed at my burger flipping) told me I had “a great future” in that company. I coveted Broadway cast recordings and going to “Rice’s Second-Hand Book and Record Store” was always a huge treat. But, what we DID have were cast recordings… There was the youth theatre company where we would perform pantomimes and moody self-devised pieces, but I’d never seen a Shakespeare till I was an adult and Arthur Miller was just a guy who had a famous wife.

Newcastle in the 1980’s was not exactly famous for its cultural activity. In January he met composers Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, and legendary director Hal Prince - just six few months before he passed away. Tyran Parke - the new head of Musical Theatre at the VCA - describes his dream trip to New York. From flipping burgers in Newcastle to meeting Broadway royalty.

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