A Conversation With MAURY YESTON

On the day that the “chamber” version of his Tony Award winning show Titanic opens at London’s Southwark Playhouse the loquacious MAURY YESTON – composer of Nine and the “other” Phantom – chats to EDWARD SECKERSON about his journey in musical theatre. An undergraduate at Yale University, Yeston majored in music theory and has been influenced by everything from Stravinsky to Doo-Wop. His Titanic score is a compendium of all things British from Gilbert and Sullivan to Charles Villiers Stanford. Yeston has been a major presence at the BMI workshop in New York, mentoring and encouraging music theatre talent and crucially giving them an “audience” in the honing of their skills. As anyone who has ever heard the opening “symphony of voices” in Nine will testify his is the most fertile of musical imaginations which married to a great nose for drama makes for a master practitioner in the genre.

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