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Peter Pinne | |
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| Born | Peter Norman Pinne 27 May 1937 Victoria, Australia |
| Occupation | Television producer, writer, composer |
| Partner(s) | Don Battye (1960–1987) [1] |
Peter Norman Pinne (born 27 May 1937) is an Australian-born former television executive, writer and composer who has worked frequently in America and Great Britain.
Pinne started working for the television production company, the Reg Grundy Organisation, as a television executive. Firstly, as Head of Production from 1980, later rising to become a Senior Vice President of the company. During this period, he worked on numerous serials including The Young Doctors , The Restless Years and Neighbours .
He co-composed the theme tune to Sons and Daughters.
In 1992, he was responsible for overseeing the production of Dangerous Women, an American series based loosely on the popular Prisoner. The show was not a huge success running to only 52 one-hour episodes. He also travelled to a number of Latin American countries where he was responsible for overseeing the production of local versions of some of Grundy's most successful hits. He left the Grundy organisation in the late 1990s in order to set up his own record label, Bayview, with fellow former Australian television producer, Don Battye and now writes and composes music. He currently resides in the Brisbane area of Australia.
Since the late 1950s, Peter Pinne (variously working in collaboration with Don Battye, Ray Kolle and/or John-Michael Howson has been one of the most prolific creators of original Australian stage musicals. Examples include:
Most of these musicals were originally performed as amateur or semi-professional productions. Although private demonstration recordings of the scores exist, few of the shows had commercial cast albums released. A song from A Bunch of Ratbags was released as a single, cover versions of two songs from The Computer and Love's Travelling Salesman were included on a 1970 compilation LP Australian Musicals Now, and a studio recording of selections from Red, White and Boogie and Sweet Fanny Adams was released in 1983 on Don Battye's Trigpoint label. The only stage production to generate a complete original cast recording was Caroline; the original LP was released in 1971 and subsequently re-issued on CD (by London-based label Dress Circle Records) in 1998.
Although all of Pinne's musicals were successful in their original productions, few of them have been mounted since. A Bunch of Ratbags was revived in 2005 by Magnormos, which resulted in the release of a "premiere" cast recording. In 2007, Magnormos staged a 30-minute workshop production of Pinne's latest musical, Suddenly Single, which was written in collaboration with Paul Dellit.
In the mid-1990s, Pinne and Battye also wrote a stage musical adaptation of the cult 1970s Australian television series, Prisoner: Cell Block H. The show was first produced in England (where the original series had become more popular than in Australia), in a lavish West End production that starred Lily Savage and original TV cast member Maggie Kirkpatrick, reprising her role as Joan "The Freak" Ferguson.
In addition, Pinne and Battye co-wrote a number of pantomime-like musicals especially for children, which were produced at the Alexander Theatre at Monash University during the 1970s. Mostly based on popular fairy tales, these shows included:
The Rocky Horror Show is a musical with music, lyrics and book by Richard O'Brien. A humorous tribute to the science fiction and horror B movies of the 1930s through to the early 1960s, the musical tells the story of a newly engaged couple getting caught in a storm and coming to the home of a mad transvestite scientist, Dr Frank-N-Furter, unveiling his new creation, a sort of Frankenstein-style monster in the form of an artificially made, fully grown, physically perfect muscle man named Rocky, complete "with blond hair and a tan".
Saturday Night is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, based on their play, Front Porch in Flatbush.
Anthony Warlow is an Australian opera and musical theatre performer, noted for his character acting and considerable vocal range. He is a classically trained lyric baritone and made his debut with the Australian Opera in 1980.
Barnum is an American musical with a book by Mark Bramble, lyrics by Michael Stewart, and music by Cy Coleman. It is based on the life of showman P. T. Barnum, covering the period from 1835 through 1880 in America and major cities of the world where Barnum took his performing companies. The production combines elements of traditional musical theater with the spectacle of the circus. The characters include jugglers, trapeze artists and clowns, as well as such real-life personalities as Jenny Lind and General Tom Thumb.
Ben Nicholas is an Australian actor. He is best known for playing Scott "Stingray" Timmins in the Australian soap opera Neighbours.
Philip Mark Quast is an Australian actor and singer. He has won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical three times, making him the first actor to have three wins in that category.
Keith Joseph Michell was an Australian actor who worked primarily in the United Kingdom, and was best known for his television and film portrayals of King Henry VIII. He appeared extensively in Shakespeare and other classics and musicals in Britain, and was also in several Broadway productions. He was an artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre in the 1970s and later had a recurring role on Murder, She Wrote. He was also known for illustrating a collection of Jeremy Lloyd's poems Captain Beaky, and singing the title song from the associated album.
Donald Gordon Battye was an Australian composer, writer and television producer, best known for his work with Crawford Productions and Reg Grundy Organisation.
James Millar is a multi-award winning Australian actor, singer and writer. He is the author of the musical drama The Hatpin which premiered in Sydney on 27 February 2008, the song cycle LOVEBiTES and multi-award winning semi autobiographical A Little Touch of Chaos.
The Hatpin is a musical by James Millar and Peter Rutherford (composer). It was inspired by the true story of Amber Murray who in 1892 gave up her son to the Makin family in Sydney, Australia. Written and developed in 2006–2007, The Hatpin opened at the York Theatre, Seymour Centre in Sydney on 27 February 2008. The musical has received subsequent productions in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Oriel Holland Bennett known by pen name Oriel Gray, was an Australian dramatist, playwright and screenwriter who wrote from the 1940s to 1990s. The major themes of her work were gender equality and "social and political issues such as the environment, Aborigines, assimilation and bush life".
Magnormos is an independent musical theatre production company based in Melbourne, Australia, that specialises in musicals written by Australian writers and lesser-known international works. Its productions have included the Australian premiere of [title of show] in 2010, and the 2011 world premiere of flowerchildren – the mamas and papas story which transferred to Melbourne's Comedy Theatre in 2013. Magnormos has been aligned with Theatre Works since 2003. It received a special Green Room Award certificate for Outstanding Support for New Australian Musical Theatre in 2012.
"In Your Arms " is a song by Australian singer Lynne Hamilton. The song was used in the Australian soap opera Neighbours and it was written by the show's executive producer Don Battye and his colleague Peter Pinne. The song was released via Mushroom Records in Australia on 7" vinyl.
John Hepworth was an Australian author and journalist, best known for his "Outsight" column in Nation Review magazine, which he edited for several years.
David Harris is an Australian actor and singer, currently based in New York City. He is best known for his Australian performances as Chris in Miss Saigon, Fiyero in Wicked and Emmett in Legally Blonde having received Helpmann Award nominations for all three leading roles. Harris also starred as the Baker in Victorian Opera's production of Into the Woods and, in America, as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables opposite Terrence Mann in 2015. He has released two solo albums.
The Torrents is a 1955 Australian play by Oriel Gray, set in the late 19th century, about the arrival of a female journalist in an all-male newspaper office, and an attempt to develop irrigation-based agriculture in a former gold mining town.
Caroline is a musical with music and lyrics by Peter N. Pinne and book and lyrics by Don Battye from an idea by Leila Blake. It concerns the life and times of Caroline Chisolm, a nineteenth century social reformer known for her work for the welfare of female immigrants in colonial Australia.
Prisoner Cell Block H: The Musical is a stage musical based on the Australian television series Prisoner created by Reg Watson.
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