Five Minutes with Johanna Allen From The Songs That Got Away

A while ago I was preparing for a big band gig and needed to give the musical director a song list of standards. I had several of my favourite songs piled around me – ‘Stormy Weather’, ‘The Man That Got Away’, ‘Old Black Magic’, ‘One For My Baby’ and of course ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’. I suddenly realised they were by the same man, Harold Arlen. A man I might add, I knew very little about. I knew all his contemporaries – Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin – and I had a sense of their life but Arlen was an enigma. I started to research his life and realised there was a tremendous story there and a catalogue of incredible songs.

He’s the writer behind ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’, ‘Blues In The Night’ and more. What do you think it is about his writing style that makes those songs so enduring?

There is a sass in Arlen’s music, an inherent melancholy and a strong sense of survival. He could never really say what he was feeling in life – one of the quotes I use in the show is, “All I want to say, everything I feel: I pour into my songs.” And he does. The music is timeless – emotional but never self-pitying. It’s rich with feeling and for me, the melodies are the best of popular music.

How did you go about deciding which of Arlen’s songs to include?

There is a strong correlation between Arlen’s life and The Wizard Of Oz, for which he wrote the musical score. The Wizard said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”. In this piece, the man behind the curtain is Harold Arlen. I didn’t want to play myself in this piece – you can’t transport an audience to the 1930s Cotton Club and speak in an Australian accent. Hence I play a character from the 1930s called ‘the storyteller’. The stories dictated the song choices, but we’ve included all the famous ones because that’s what people have come to hear.

Opening night is coming up. Are you nervous about the debut performance?

I’m not nervous yet, but I will be. Aren’t nerves always there? But what I do want to work on is the nuances of all the characters I play within the same show. If I don’t get the physicality right: audiences don’t see who I am playing as clearly, and the story suffers.

What do you want the audience to walk away from your show thinking/feeling?

I deliberately didn’t want to make another biographical cabaret piece. I wanted to make something that was an acting challenge as much as a ‘big sing’. The further I got into writing it, the more I knew I had given myself that. This is a piece of theatre. I want people to feel transported. But ultimately it’s all about the music – ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ is the most recorded song in history. Its timeless appeal never fails to surprise me, and I want everyone to feel its magic. Aren’t we all searching for the magic at the end of the rainbow? Mr Arlen makes us feel it’s just there in sight.

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