CREATING A NEW MUSICAL
Guns of Ireland began years ago when Jeffrey Payne's mom introduced him to the The Irish Tenors. This sparked an enduring obsession with Irish music and led him to discover many more of Ireland's musical legends like The Dubliners, The Chieftains, The Wolfe Tones, Planxty, and The Davvits. One cannot learn about traditional Irish music without also learning Irish history along the way. The history was so rife with pathos and heroism that it seemed like great material for a stage musical.
Fast forward to 2013 when fellow writer Mike Speegle and local concert promoter Isaac Lewis approached Jeff with an idea for a rock musical about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. The ideas were combined into a traditional Irish jukebox musical and Jeff and Mike set to work on a draft.
Once complete, they approached Nina Powers at Tri-Cities Prep for help arranging the music. Nina enlisted her husband Brett to direct and agreed not only to arrange the music, but also to produce a workshop and fully mounted production within the next twelve months.
Within days of the first meeting with Brett and Nina, Guns of Ireland had its first reading in the Powers living room. Father Barnett opened the reading with a prayer and Sorcha Fox stole the show with a haunting recitation of Song for Ireland - delivered in her Cork accent.
Next came the school year and the workshop production. Mike and Jeff worked with Tri-Cities Prep students and rewrote the musical over a period of several months. Characters were cut and scenes reworked. They even discovered the need for a new song to convey the sense that women sending their men off to die often feel conflicted. This eventually became Statue of Me.
As it happened, Community Concerts of the Tri-Cities had booked Anthony Kearns of The Irish Tenors for a performance during the workshop rehearsal period. Tri-Cities Prep was able to arrange for the cast to see Anthony perform and meet with him privately before the show. For Jeff, the process had come full circle; he stood face to face with the man whose recordings of Grace and Boolavogue had literally been the inspiration for Guns of Ireland.
To give the cast and their parents some closure, a showcase with select scenes was performed at the Academy of Children's Theatre last fall. The show sold out 15 minutes after the doors opened and Brett forced all the students in the audience to sit on the floor around the perimeter of the stage to make room. It was an electric night filled with adrenaline and standing ovations.
Exhausted, the cast and crew took a short break and got to work on a full production to be performed on a makeshift stage in the Tri-Cities Prep Gymnasium - but Ronn Campbell and Ginny Quinley at CBC intervened and graciously offered Guns of Ireland use of the CBC mainstage.
Now with a proper theatre, work began in earnest on the most expensive and technically complex show in Tri-Cities Prep's prestigious history. Margaret went to work on the difficult task of costuming a show set in two time periods. Nina assembled some of the finest musicians in town to play in the band. Brett set to work staging the show and Mike came in to assist Brett in coaxing incredible performances out of the cast. Jeff built custom software to manage the show's production budget and lighting paperwork. Local stage management phenom Kevin Gravitt signed on just months before he heads off to study stage management at the University of Oklahoma.
