Musical mixes muppets with disco

A Timaru playwright is not resting on the laurels of a successful 2017.

Ara Institute of Canterbury graphic design tutor Wayne Doyle is taking on the challenge of putting together his second musical stage show using interactive digital animation.

In 2017 Doyle staged Hey Jude - The Musical for the first time having spent seven years putting it together.

All five shows in Timaru sold out.

He has already put in about seven months work on his latest project No Strings Attached, which he hopes to stage mid-2018.

While Hey Jude centred on the fight for equality during the 1960s, and parodied The Beatles, No Strings Attached is more of a comedy-come-love story and features a bit of disco music. And muppets.

‘‘What I want to do is combine muppet characters and real actors,’’ Doyle said.

No Strings Attached stars five muppets and four human characters, and will also incorporate interactive digital animation, he said.

‘‘Hopefully it’s going to be something new and interesting.’’

The story focuses on a group of people who are a little bit stressed about their upcoming school reunion.

‘‘Everyone wants to look good. It’s 20 years after school ... you want to appear as successful, and looking glamorous, and all the rest of it.’’

There is also a romance-plot.

‘‘How we’re all looking for that special person who will accept us for who are are, warts and all.’’

He would describe it was a combination of Avenue Q and Saturday Night Fever.

‘‘One of the characters is a 1970s disco super star, so a lot of the music is disco influenced, and a lot of the characters hate disco,’’ Doyle said.

The characters attended schools during the 1970s and 80s, when disco was ‘‘doing it’s thing’’, he said.

One challenge of writing No Strings Attached was developing characters which were quirky.

‘‘One of the characters has got tourette’s, and it’s a form of tourette’s so he can’t help but swear.’’

Another one of the muppet characters can’t speak because they have a safety pin through their mouth, so they communicate in mumbles.

He ran a test read about six months ago; ‘‘since then I’ve rewritten it about 10 times’’.

‘‘If you want to do it properly you’ve got to keep re-writting. Party of being a playwright is you re-write ... you just re-write and rewrite and re-write...’’

Doyle works with a man in America who sends him sounds scapes, which Doyle then turns into two minute long songs for the show.

He is hoping to use some of the region’s most talented performers in No Strings Attached, and said negotiations with actors were ongoing.

It may have been a year since Hey Jude was first staged, but its since gained traction globally.

Theatre companies from Aust- ralia and all over New Zealand have shown interest in staging it.

He is in discussion with schools wanting to use it, and a theatre company in Canada is staging it later this year.

‘‘It was pretty neat actually, it exceeded all my expectations.

‘‘The feedback that we got from that was that it was right up there with the best.’’

Last year Doyle also directed another show he wrote, Light, which won awards.

‘‘2017 was a huge year for me,’’ he said. First