Music director and one of three composers for original musical Midsummer Madness, a modern musical theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged at the Cellar Theatre from March 2nd-12th, 2022.
Alex contributed seven original songs, along with contributing to lyrics for the opening number. Alex’s contributions largely followed the Mechanicals, tackling the challenge of evoking a rugged hip-hop sound world with only a live instrumental band and the musical theatre ensemble cast. This sound world aims to faithfully encompass a broad range of eras and styles within the hip-hop musical language, from incorporating ‘samples’ and strict loops with some jazz flavour to evoke ’90s Wu-Tang style flavours, through ’00s superstar rap group stylings a la D12 with large, ostentatious group soli features, to taking on the avant-garde, highly technical reaches of modern rap music as embodied by acts such as clipping. through jumping between time signatures, metric modulations and musical styles at the drop of a dime.
Unfortunately, no recording exists for this work; excerpts of scores from numbers composed by Alex are featured below: