Richard Thomas (musician)

Last updated

Richard Thomas
Born1964 (age 5960)
OriginEngland
Genres Comedy
Occupation(s)Composer, writer, actor
Instrument(s)keyboards

Richard Thomas (born 1964) is a British composer, writer, and comedy actor. He is best known for composing, writing and scoring the award-winning Jerry Springer: The Opera with book and additional lyrics co-written with Stewart Lee. [1] Thomas collected the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Score in 2004. [2]

Contents

Richard Thomas's comedy career began in 1987, doing a musical act on keyboards. In 2000, he wrote and performed a one-act opera called Tourette's Diva with four actors, which aired at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Thomas had the idea for an opera based on Jerry Springer at this time, and wrote it over the next two years, chiefly in workshops at Battersea Arts Centre. Thomas would offer a "Beer for an Idea", where any audience members submitting a good idea would be rewarded with a can of Foster's and poor ideas with a supermarket store brand. After a number of small scale performances of the first act, which was in much the same shape as it remains today, the second act (where the characters descend into hell) was vague and unformed. Thomas brought his friend Stewart Lee in to assist with the writing. Six months later, the opera was in a far more recognisable state, and was snapped up by the National Theatre.

Thomas has also worked on BBC comedy shows such as Attention Scum and This Morning with Richard Not Judy . Starting on 25 February 2007, BBC Two aired his series, Kombat Opera Presents..., comprising five standalone musical parodies of well-known television programmes.

Thomas wrote the libretto for Mark-Anthony Turnage's 2011 opera Anna Nicole , [3] and co-wrote music for the 2010 film Uncle David as a part of the Avant-Garde Alliance. In 2013 Thomas was commissioned by London's LGBT choir The Pink Singers, to bring his humor to writing a piece celebrating the styles and techniques employed by a choir during performances. The Pink Singers performed the première of the resulting two pieces during their 30th anniversary concert at the Troxy Theatre, London. [4] In 2014 he wrote the lyrics for the stage musical of Made in Dagenham.

Works

Theatre and opera

Film and television

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libretto</span> Text used in an extended musical work such as an opera or musical

A libretto is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term libretto is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as the Mass, requiem and sacred cantata, or the story line of a ballet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stewart Lee</span> British stand-up comedian, screenwriter and television director

Stewart Graham Lee is an English comedian. His stand-up routine is characterised by repetition, internal reference, and deadpan delivery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugène Scribe</span> French dramatist and librettist (1791–1861)

Augustin Eugène Scribe was a French dramatist and librettist. He is known for writing "well-made plays", a mainstay of popular theatre for over 100 years, and as the librettist of many of the most successful grand operas and opéras-comiques.

<i>Jerry Springer: The Opera</i> 2001 British musical by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee

Jerry Springer: The Opera is a British musical written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, based on the talk show Jerry Springer. It contains irreverent treatment of Christian themes, extensive profanity, and surreal images, such as a troupe of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klan members.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Hall (playwright)</span> British writer

Lee Hall is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for writing the screenplay for the film Billy Elliot (2000) and the book and lyrics for its adaptation as a stage musical of the same name. In addition, he wrote the play The Pitmen Painters (2007), and the screenplays for the films War Horse and Rocketman (2019).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Munnery</span> British comedian

Simon Munnery is an English comedian.

<i>Phantom of the Opera</i> (1976 musical) 1976 musical by Ken Hill

Phantom of the Opera is a musical with lyrics and a book by Ken Hill. It is based on the 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Hill wrote the original lyrics to the music of Giuseppe Verdi, Charles Gounod, Jacques Offenbach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber, Gaetano Donizetti, and Arrigo Boito. It premiered in Lancaster, Lancashire, England, in 1976, and had a West End production in 1991. and further international productions

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee and Herring</span> 1992–2000 British comedy double act

Lee and Herring were a British standup comedy double act consisting of the comedians Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. They were most famous for their work on television, most notably Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy but had been working together on stage and on radio since the late 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Caryll</span> Belgian-born British-American composer

Félix Marie Henri Tilkin, better known by his pen name Ivan Caryll, was a Belgian-born composer of operettas and Edwardian musical comedies in the English language, who made his career in London and later New York. He composed some forty musical comedies and operettas.

<i>Capriccio</i> (opera) Opera by Richard Strauss

Capriccio, Op. 85, is the final opera by German composer Richard Strauss, subtitled "A Conversation Piece for Music". It received its premiere performance at the Nationaltheater München on 28 October 1942. Strauss and Clemens Krauss wrote the German libretto, but its genesis came from Stefan Zweig in the 1930s, and Joseph Gregor further developed the idea several years later. Strauss then took it on, but finally recruited Krauss as his collaborator. Most of the final libretto is by Krauss.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Korie</span> American librettist and lyricist

Michael Korie is an American librettist and lyricist whose writing for musical theater and opera includes the musicals Grey Gardens and Far From Heaven, and the operas Harvey Milk and The Grapes of Wrath. His works have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and internationally. His lyrics have been nominated for the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Korie was awarded the Marc Blitzstein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

David Bedella is an American actor. He is best known for his roles in Jerry Springer: The Opera, In The Heights, and & Juliet. He has won three Olivier Awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kit Hesketh-Harvey</span> British musician and screenwriter (1957–2023)

Christopher John Hesketh-Harvey was a British musical performer, translator, composer, and screenwriter.

Keith Burstein born 1957 as Keith Burston is an English composer, conductor and music theorist with Russian family origins. He is noted for his fervent championing of tonal music as a valid contemporary composing style.

Greek is an opera in two acts composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage to a libretto adapted by Turnage and Jonathan Moore from Steven Berkoff's 1980 verse play Greek. The play and the opera are a re-telling of Sophocles's Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex with the setting changed to the East End of London in the 1980s. The opera was first performed on 17 June 1988 in the Carl-Orff-Saal of the Gasteig, Munich, in a co-production by the Munich Biennale, the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC.

Amanda Juliet Holden was a British pianist, librettist, translator, editor and academic teacher. She is known for translating opera librettos to more contemporary English for the English National Opera, and for writing new librettos, especially in collaboration with Brett Dean. She contributed to encyclopedias such as the New Penguin Opera Guide.

Cluub Zarathustra was a fringe comedy cabaret act and troupe active between 1994 and 1997. It began as a comedy club in Islington, London, twice went to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was eventually given a Channel 4 television pilot. It is also the subject of a 2012 book called You Are Nothing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loré Lixenberg</span> British mezzo-soprano

Loré Lixenberg is a British mezzo-soprano, active in contemporary and experimental music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daly's Theatre (30th Street)</span> Former theatre in Manhattan, New York

Daly's Theatre was a Broadway theatre at 1221 Broadway and 30th Street. It was built in 1867 and opened that year as Banvard's Museum but changed its name the following year to Wood's Museum and Metropolitan. In 1876 it became the Broadway Theatre, and finally was named Daly's Theatre in 1879 when it was acquired by Augustin Daly. After 1899, it was operated by the Shubert family. The building was demolished in 1920, after serving as a burlesque theatre and cinema.

References

  1. Costa, Maddy (11 November 2003). "Jerry Springer the Opera". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 September 2011.
  2. "Olivier Winners 2004". Olivier Awards. Archived from the original on 17 January 2012. Retrieved 15 September 2011.
  3. Wroe, Nicholas (22 January 2011). "Mark-Anthony Turnage: A life in music". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 September 2011.
  4. "I, Choir 2013". The Pink Singers. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Retrieved 27 July 2013.