Internship gives young composer inside look at musical theatre

By Kate Watson - The Weekly News
For most young people, a summer job is simply a way to help finance an education. That's not the case for 20-year-old Michael Robson of Dartmouth. He recently completed a job that actually furthered his education.
The Dalhousie music student spent six weeks at The Ross Creek Centre for the Arts near Canning, Kings Co., working as a paid assistant to Canadian composer Allen Cole.
Cole, son of long-time CBC Radio host Leon Cole and brother of renowned jazz singer Holly Cole, was in rehearsal with Two Planks and a Passion Theatre in preparation for the world premiere of Rockbound.
Rockbound is a musical drama based on the 1928 novel by Frank Parker Day. It's the story of greed and love among fisherfolk in the loosely fictionalized Mahone Bay area. The book gained a whole new audience when it captured the 2005 Canada Reads contest title.
Back in 2007, Robson's parents attended a public workshop of the first act of Rockbound. Afterwards, they struck up a conversation with Cole about their son's musical interests. Around the same time, Robson was singing in the Nova Scotia Youth Choir and rethinking an earlier decision to study linguistics at university in favour of studying musical composition.
"Getting the job really was a tremendous incidence of being at the right place at the right time," says Robson. "Allen had just been talking to Ken (Schwartz, artistic director of Two Planks and a Passion) about getting a paid assistant. I got a chance to try out the position on a volunteer basis at the next workshop in December of 2008."
Robson says Cole seemed happy with his work, and a grant was applied for to enable him to be hired on as a paid intern.
A typical day of work for Robson began with a short commute from Wolfville - where he shared a house with some of the actors involved in the production - to the Ross Creek Centre. As Cole worked on rewrites that would fine-tune the synergy between the music and the staging, Robson was afforded a "birds'-eye view" of the process, and he was often called upon to transcribe the changes.
"I really learned what the eight-hour rehearsal day of professional theatre is like!" Robson says. "And I really got inspired by Allen and his technique."
Now that Rockbound is off and running, Robson has the time to work on some of his own compositions, which will likely be performed by the local youth theatre company Saints Alive!
"I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to actually learn the ropes, and to see how Allen does what he does. Composing doesn't have an obvious career path, but things like this are helping me figure it out."
k-watson@ns.sympatico.ca