Mark Nichols (born February 22, 1964) is an American playwright, composer, and lyricist, best known for his musicals Little Boy Goes to Hell (1988), Joe Bean (2003), and How to Survive the Apocalypse (2009). He is also known in the northwestern United States for his work with Fred Jamison (aka Beaverchief of the Lummi) for whom he arranged 20 Northwest Coast Native songs for orchestra, girl choir, and rock band, performed by the Seattle Symphony in 1996.
Nichols began his writing career as a solo artist on Seattle's PopLlama Records after playing keyboards in bands like The Squirrels and Prudence Dredge, and has composed extensively for Seattle film director, Garrett Bennett, and scored all but one of his films, which include End of the Icon, Farewell to Harry, and A Relative Thing. Nichols has written over twenty published works for theater, particularly rock operas, and operas for children. He is one of the founders and composers for the Seattle/Mumbai rock band Manooghi Hi. As an orchestrator, he is known for his work on the classic Sub Pop album by Jeremy EnigkReturn of the Frog Queen. Mark has produced a number of other seminal northwest albums, particularly Trillian Green's Metamorphosis, "Awesome"'s CD, Delaware, and Manooghi Hi's debut Hi. In many countries in Europe, his orchestrations for Sub Pop, Glitterhouse Records, folk rock artists The Walkabouts have been widely heard. He received honors for his string arrangements for Norwegian Band Midnight Choir. His score for the Brecht masterpiece Caucasian Chalk Circle has been performed in Cape Town, London, Boise, Chicago, Omaha, Seattle, Helena, Walla Walla, and New York.[citation needed] His surround-sound design for Lauren Weedman's Bust! has been duplicated in many venues around the United States.
Little Boy Goes to Hell
In 1987, The "epic rock fable" Little Boy Goes to Hell, was released as a four-record set with book and marked the composer's first attempt at music theater writing. Beginning in 1983 Nichols began to experience temporal lobe epilepsy which he has stated was "symptomatic of his own intense fear of hell." The play was created, according to the author, to "help heal the symbolism which drove the epilepsy." The autobiographical sprawling journey story revolves around a man who believes he's the devil and a psychiatrist helps him meet his younger self on a journey through a fairy tale woods, where the child meets the Jungian clown archetypes along the forest pathway. "As a young man I created a storybook hell to calm my real world fear of hell". It apparently worked as the composer's epilepsy subsided a few years after Little Boy was first performed at Seattle's Annex Theater in 1988. Goldmine Magazine said of Little Boy: "At last Seattle has a rock musical to do itself proud." The show was also given the award "Art Project of the Year," by The Backlash Magazine.[citation needed]
Joe Bean
The second show to achieve the level of notoriety of Little Boy, Joe Bean, was suggested by his long-time collaborator, Bob McAllister, a Bainbridge Island High School English teacher who had hired Mark to write a spring musical based on the biblical story of Job. Nichols says he did everything possible to make "a depressing story" as much fun as he could, using a plethora of musical styles from Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired chorus to Grunge-era dirge rock to a sort of primal Dead Can Dance sound. The story was expands God and the Devil to include a set of "New Age Gods" who torture the wonderfully adaptable Joe Bean in an effort to see how far a "polytheistic modern rich hippy" can be pushed. In the end Joe has fallen from "the luckiest man ever" to a homeless waif, yet in his misery is finally able to see clearly the metaphorical and actual difference between character/spirit and play/reality. Nichols has cited one of his biggest theatrical influences as Pirandello's Six Characters In Search of An Author.
How to Survive the Apocalypse (aka "Burning Opera")
The most widely popular of the Nichols epic rock operas was created by Erik Davis, Christopher Fuelling, Dana Harrison and Mark Nichols, based on the story of the real-life Burning Man festival, which takes place every year on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, and its real-life founders. The opera jumps between three time periods in the festival's history: 1986, when "the man" was first burned on San Francisco's Baker Beach; 1996, when the festival experienced its first real tragedies and deep philosophical clashes; and the present day, as seen through the eyes of three "newbies" who undergo a series of unnerving trials during their first 24-hours on the desert. The opera is heavily based on the Cacophony Society's perspective of the "zone trip" concept held by the group. Zone Trip #4, as Burning Man is sometimes referred to is another title this particular show finds itself being called. The opera had its first production in 2009 at San Francisco's Teatro Zinzanni and played to standing ovations. Publicity for the opera described it as "theatrical freak-out that combines rock opera, vaudeville, and a Dionysian revival show that is just as inspired and terrified by current events as you are. Part mutant mystery play, part crash-course in proactive future culture." The concept of epic rock opera seems to have grown in this opera to include an audience-immersive tour of crazy art cars and weirdos and "makers", which, like Burning Man itself, asks there be "no spectators."
Theater works
Nichols in 2019
Little Boy Goes to Hell (1988)
The Potato Boy (1989)
Wonka (Based on the movie) (1990)
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1992)
Bessemer's Spectacles (with Glen Berger) (1993)
The Tooth Collector (1994)
Mother Goose (1995)
Searching For Father Christmas (1996)
The Dragon (Eugene Schwartz) (1997)
The Firebugs (1997)
Joe Bean (With Bob McAllister) (2003)
Lie of the Mind (with Sam Shepard and Carla Torgerson) (2004)
Caucasian Chalk Circle (With B. Brecht) (2005)
As U Like It (with W. Shakespeare) (2007)
How to Survive the Apocalypse (Aka Beautiful Freaks) (with Erik Davis) (2009)
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir, and orchestra.
Timothy Lancaster West, CBE is a retired English actor and presenter. He has appeared frequently on stage and television, including stints in both Coronation Street and EastEnders, and Not Going Out, as the original Geoffrey Adams. He is married to the actress Prunella Scales; from 2014 to 2019, they travelled together on UK and overseas canals in the Channel 4 series Great Canal Journeys.
This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1957.
The 37th Annual Grammy Awards were presented on March 1, 1995, at Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the previous year. Bruce Springsteen was the night's biggest winner with 4 awards, including Song of the Year while opening the show with his Grammy nominated hit.
Kung Fu Records is an American independent record label founded in 1996 by Joe Escalante and Warren Fitzgerald of the punk rock band The Vandals. Founded in order to release a record by the Riverside, California band Assorted Jelly Beans, the label soon grew to include a roster of notable artists such as The Ataris, Ozma, Tsunami Bomb, and The Vandals themselves. In 2000 Escalante started Kung Fu Films as a subsidiary of the music label in order to release DVDs of live concerts, music videos, band documentaries, and independent films. In 2005 Kung Fu also spawned the spinoff label Broken Sounds Records, focusing on hardcore releases.
The 36th Annual Grammy Awards were held on March 1, 1994. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the previous year. Whitney Houston was the Big Winner winning 3 awards including Record of the Year and Album of the Year while opening the show with "I Will Always Love You".
The 39th Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 26, 1997, at Madison Square Garden, New York City. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the previous year. Babyface was the night's biggest winner, with 3 awards. Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Sheryl Crow, and The Fugees won two awards. Celine Dion for "Best Pop Album" and "Album of the Year" and Toni Braxton for "Best Female R&B Vocal Performance" and "Best Female Pop Vocal Performance". The show was hosted by Ellen Degeneres who also performed the opening with Shawn Colvin, Bonnie Rait, and Chaka Khan.
William Goldsmith is an American drummer best known as a member of Sunny Day Real Estate and former member of Foo Fighters. Currently drumming for Assertion, he has toured with Mike Watt and IQU, performed on many recordings, and played live with several bands and artists.
Sunny Day Real Estate is an American emo band from Seattle, Washington, formed in 1992. The band currently consists of founding members Jeremy Enigk, Dan Hoerner (guitar) and William Goldsmith (drums), alongside Greg Suran (guitar), who originally played with the band between 2000 and 2001, and Chris Jordan (bass), who joined the band in 2022. Founding bass guitarist Nate Mendel was a member of the band during three of its four incarnations.
Return of the Frog Queen is a solo album by Jeremy Enigk, recorded following his brief retirement from music due to the temporary split of Sunny Day Real Estate. It was recorded with a 21-piece orchestra and released in 1996. It has a slower and quieter sound than Sunny Day Real Estate's often-bombastic albums.
Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist and public speaker whose writings have ranged from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is perhaps best known for his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, as well as his work on California counterculture, including Burning Man, the human potential movement, and the writings of Philip K. Dick.
No-Man are an English art pop duo, formed in 1987 as No Man Is an Island (Except the Isle of Man) by singer Tim Bowness and multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson. The band has so far produced seven studio albums and a number of singles/outtakes collections (including 2006's career retrospective All the Blue Changes). The band was once lauded as "conceivably the most important English group since The Smiths" by Melody Maker music newspaper, and a 2017 article of Drowned in Sound described them as "probably the most underrated band of the last 25 years".
Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser, called Georg Kaiser, was a German dramatist.
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This is a summary of 1966 in music in the United Kingdom.
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