We’d conceived the rock opera as a dark fable of teenage weltschmerz. Jordan Haze and Sea Water Bliss, attempting to rock up Room To Breathe. The songs were shortened, and the show evolved into a musical – a play with musical interludes – rather than a sequence of songs bridged by minimal narrative, as we’d envisioned. Secondly, in order to get the show produced, we gave up creative control, and the director imposed changes we were never really comfortable with. We couldn’t really fight it the Mendel was footing the bill. We found it schmaltzy and decidedly unrock-n-rollish. But the folks at the Mendel thought putting the word “breathe” in there would help tie the show in with the exhibition of tuberculosis-related paraphernalia upstairs in the gallery. First off, we didn’t like the title Room To Breathe, which was chosen over our objections. For the most part, our audiences just seemed confused.Īndrew and I weren’t too keen on how things turned out when our rock opera was produced at the Mendel in June of 2002. The story ends with the patient alone in his room, singing desperately to the girl’s image, frozen on a TV screen.įor a variety of reasons, not least my own crappy writing, this ending never came across quite as poignantly as I’d intended. A nurse attempts to cheer up a dying patient by sending a succession of visitors to entertain him: a singing cowboy, an Indian, and the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII). Meanwhile, the patient falls in love with a female patient who might be a ghost or a computer program or both. In both iterations, the setting was the Fort San tuberculosis sanatorium in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, in the 1930s. It debuted under the title Room To Breathe in the Mendel auditorium in 2002. The rock opera was originally commissioned by Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery as part of an exhibition called Qu’Appelle: Tales Of Two Valleys. I’m not sure exactly what the above couplet means (it’s a line from our song Dream of the Descending Satellite), but we seized on it for the tagline of our rock opera 404 when we revived it for the 2003 Saskatoon Fringe Festival.

Choices a rock opera