Scerinda Johnson – Farewell to Shakespeare

All songs written by Scerinda Johnson.
Alan Sanderson: guitars and basses, engineering, mixing, mastering, producing.
Software: Ardour on Linux Mint.

Scerinda’s Notes

Thanks to Alan for all the help taking the notes from MuseScore and turning them into great orchestrated songs! I love how he makes my music come alive.

“Life is Great!” — This song was written to provide a drill team halftime show for our “Elizabethan sports” version of the 2022 production of The Comedy of Errors. My co-director, Laurie Brown, choreographed a great drill team routine and our 12- to15-year-old actresses learned the whole thing and performed it with energy and smiles! Our boy actors were the singers and “musicians” in the background. The voices of Carson and Bryson Brown and Tom Johnson are featured in this recording.

“Mutant Courtroom Fight” — The Mutants of Venice was our 2023 play at Shining Light Commonwealth. This is my favorite fight song because of the chord progression. I think it sounds sober and worrisome. I really love the piano part of underlying chords which Alan composed for the chorus. It adds a lot of intensity and is beautiful. I could never get him to mix his piano as loud as I wanted it, though. Modesty, I guess. 🙂 We always include a big fight in our Shakespeare plays even if there isn’t one in the original, and we inserted this one in the court scene in which Shylock demands his pound of flesh.

“Curtain Call from Ephesus” — This was the final song of The Comedy of Errors while our young actors ran up to take their bows. We had some vocal versions of it within the play and a few of our actors played ukulele on stage during them. I love how Alan reimagined and modernized (it was Elizabethan-sounding within the play) with a trumpet as the vocalist.

“Brawl in Ephesus” — The main fight for The Comedy of Errors was written for Elizabethan instruments. It starts with an extended slo-mo tussle that involves many actors scrambling all over the stage in various mini-fights with plenty of tripping and missed swings. Near the end of the fight, the music suddenly speeds up and the action does too. The whole song ends with an actress throwing a breakable wooden chair all the way across the stage. As it clatters and crashes (no artificial sound effects necessary), the fight ends suddenly with everyone looking horrified.

“Cat Fight” — This is a brief fight in The Comedy of Errors of four girls who stand in a circle and slap each other with their hands and their handbags in a choreographed dance. The music is a sped-up, modified version of “Brawl in Ephesus.” I love the cat snarls Alan put in the background for me.

“Life is Great! (instrumental version)” — A special salute to the over-the-top-extreme electric guitar written and performed by Alan! It’s evidence of what a great sport he is that he stepped that far out of his norm at my request. I laugh every time I hear it. It was awesome on stage with a 14-year-old boy acting it out with an electric guitar.

I have had such a nice time working with students, directors, and my brother Alan as we have written and produced music for three Shakespeare performances. I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to try my hand at writing music, to have Alan’s help getting it ready for performance, and then to watch my students bring it to life on stage. This really is a farewell to Shakespeare for me as I retire to other pastures after seven years as a director. Thanks for the great memories, team!

Alan’s Notes

Playing with someone else’s music is a lot of fun. As with my previous projects with Scerinda, these pushed me into genres and instrumentations where I don’t normally tread, and I think the result was pretty good. I hope that Scerinda will find the time and motivation to keep making music, even though she doesn’t have the Shakespeare productions to give her a specific project with a deadline any more.