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Steppin' Out with Geoffrey Tyler
| Source: |
The Kurt Files |
| Date: |
May 3, 2011 |
| Author: |
Tina Tyan |
In over two decades of performing and entertaining people, Kurt
Browning has shown the audience many sides of himself through his
exploration of characters, music, and choreographic styles. With his
Steppin' Out of My Mind program, he goes even further, giving
the audience the chance to look right inside his head and ride along
with his thoughts while he skates.
Lacking mind-reading technology, Kurt needed help translating his
vision into reality. He found the perfect partner in his friend
Geoffrey Tyler, a seasoned performer whose approach to his craft
mirrors Kurt's in his willingness to try new things and push creative
boundaries. Geoffrey worked with Kurt every step of the way,
developing the concept, shaping the music, helping write the reworked
lyrics and script, choreographing, recording the song, and even
performing live with Kurt on the ice. As such, the friendly,
gregarious Canadian is uniquely positioned to offer deep insight into
the development of Steppin' Out, and he was kind enough to take
time out of his busy schedule to talk in-depth with the Kurt Files
about this unique program.
How a Lost Boy met Peter Pan
As a young boy growing up near Toronto, Geoffrey Tyler always knew
that he wanted to be in show business. He loved to sing and dance and
act, and refined his skills at the Etobicoke School of the Arts and
the music theater program at the Sheridan College in Oakville. In his
20 year career "in the business", he's worked all over the globe in
many mediums, from London's West End to the Stratford Festival to many
of the major musical theater productions that come through
Toronto. His website describes him as an "actor, singer, dancer,
musician and director." Asked which of the many hats he wears is his
first love, he found it hard to choose.
"I really do love them all equally. I find when I'm singing and
dancing, I miss the acting, when I'm acting and dancing, I miss the
singing, and so on and so forth," he says. "If I had to choose, if I
was forced to choose, it would be hard to do without
singing. That's sort of second nature to me. I can't imagine a day
without music."
Like many other small-town Ontario boys, Geoffrey played hockey from a
young age. He's long been comfortable on skates, but had little more
than common interest in or awareness of figure skating; he watched the
big events and knew of the big names, but otherwise didn't pay much
attention. All that changed in 2007, when Kurt Browning stepped into
his life.
Every year, Ross Petty puts on a Christmas panto show in
Toronto. Panto has a long-standing tradition in the UK and Canada. The
productions provide a hilarious, skewed take on a well-known story,
and usually cast a celebrity who isn't typically known as an actor. In
2007, the production was Peter Pan, and when the opportunity to
audition came up, Geoffrey didn't hesitate.
"It's one of those fun, fun things that you kind of hope you get asked
to do at Christmas. Not everyone can, because there's only so many
parts, but it's one of those jobs that's always really fun to do. You
look forward to it if you get the chance," he explains.
Cast as Lost Boy Miguel, a temperamental Spanish chef, Geoffrey was
intrigued to find that his Peter Pan was four-time World Champion
figure skater Kurt Browning.
"You can't really be a Canadian without knowing who Kurt Browning
is. My mom loved figure skating, and I remembered sort of watching him
in his heyday, but more second hand," he says. "I honestly didn't know
anything about him other than that. I just thought it would be, oh
wow, Kurt Browning's going to be doing this. This is going to be
interesting!"
Despite Kurt's lack of professional stage or singing experience, he
quickly impressed Geoffrey during his first day of rehearsals when the
full cast did a "sing-through" of the script.
"He's in a room with probably 20 other professional singers and
dancers, and the first time he ever sang in public was then,"
he says. "And he was the first person to sing, because he sang the
song at the top of the show."
"He was just so game, he was like 'ok, let's go, let's just try it
out.' You almost forget that he's never done it before, because he
seems to so easily throw himself into it. Like he doesn't seem to be
stressed, or worried, or anything. He doesn't pretend to know what
he's doing, but he doesn't pretend to not know what he's doing," he
says.
"That's pretty extraordinary, actually, for someone, and certainly
someone in his position, to be that sort of down-to-earth. It takes a
lot of humility to be just sort of ready and raring to go."
A friendship was soon born that continued after the show's run. The
two shared their respective talents with each other. When Kurt
expressed regret that he didn't know how to play the piano in his
house, Geoffrey quickly offered to give him lessons. Brushing off
Kurt's desire to repay him somehow, Geoffrey jokingly suggested figure
skating lessons, an idea that Kurt enthusiastically latched
onto.
"He's like, that's a GREAT idea! So he found me a pair of skates, and
it kind of started from there. It took a few times to get comfortable
in figure skates. And now I have to say, I'm extremely
comfortable in them. It's fun! I look for any chance to get them
on."
An idea takes flight
Fast forward to 2010. Kurt was looking to flesh out a concept that
he'd been contemplating for a while, and knew just who to turn to for
help.
"Kurt had originally said to me, he said 'I've got this program that I
want to do. I've always wanted to do this program where you can hear
my thoughts [while I'm skating.]' And I thought, that's a very
interesting premise, because you know, even actors, if you've been
doing a show for a long time, even in the middle of some of the big
tragedy scenes, just a little part of your brain is going 'did I leave
my keys in my jacket or my pants pocket?'"
At the time, Kurt had just the idea, but no real conception of how to
execute it. So the two of them started from scratch, throwing ideas
back and forth and gradually building the program up piece by
piece.
One of the fundamental components was the music, a part of the program
Geoffrey could particularly help with, with his connections in the
music industry in Toronto.
He explains, "Usually you get a song that's finished, away you go, and
then you tailor your program to whatever that song dictates. But we
were doing it the other way. We had to figure out what the song was
going to be. Because I said to him, you can pick a prerecorded song,
or you can pick a song that you like, and we can re-record it. And
that way, you can have the song be anything you want. You can
basically at your whim decide, oh I want it to change key here, I want
it to go faster, I want it to go slower, I wanna change the lyrics, I
want to do another part of the song. So once you do that, once you
decide that you're going to rerecord the song, then you've got a lot
more control, you've got a lot more that you can do."
Having decided to re-record their own version of Steppin' Out,
Geoffrey helped hook Kurt up with Steve Thomas, who did the music
arrangements, and the recording studio where they recorded the music.
They then needed to flesh out the concept.
"The only way to sustain this, really, is if we kind of come up with a
mini-storyline. Needs to be sort of a beginning and a middle and an
end, in order to bookend it. If not, it just becomes a random jumble
of thoughts, and that might not be exciting to people," he says. "We
just kind of talked - what's the story, what do you want to say? You
know, basically, it's, he's older, it gets harder, he's got more
responsibilities in life, but he's still doing it, and why is he still
doing it? And in the end, he realizes he's still doing it because he
truly does love it."
Geoffrey's background also came into play in developing the
choreography.
"He also then said I want it to be choreography that you'd see in the
movies, not figure skating choreography. He said I want to do actual
Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire stuff," Geoffrey explains. "So we got a bunch
of old movies, and we watched all their steps and things like that,
and we would video the screen to see the really cool steps ... Now
that's another place where I come in, because I'm familiar with that
kind of stuff, I grew up with that kind of stuff, I've danced those
kind of things. So I could say, ok, well I'll stand on the carpet, and
show it to you, and let's see if you can do it on the ice."
The whole thing needed to be shaped into a coherent structure.
"We said, ok what sections do we need? Let's break it up into four
acts. It's basically what we had. We had the beginning, you know act
1, act 2, act 3, act 4. Is it going to be 3 minutes, is it going to be
10 minutes? How long is it going to be?" he says.
"You've got to start out easy, because it's a long program, and you
don't want to be, you know, in a coffin by the end of it every
night. You want to meter it out. So it starts easy, brings people in,
they get it, and then we said, ok, at some point, we've got to shut up
and skate. And that was literally the phrase we used. 'So now just
shut up and skate.' And then the big finish, and then the big
band..you know the big band's gotta come back in."
With all these components to hash out and put in place, "it was about
two good months of a couple of three days a week, working on it from
like 8 in the morning until noon." For Geoffrey, the time flew by,
working in sympatico with the like-minded Kurt.
"To me, that's the best fun, that's why I'm in this business. To make
something that was never there before. And the truth is, I found that
that's exactly what Kurt likes to do. He likes to do something new. He
didn't want to do something he'd done before. And for someone who's
been in this career for so long, and has done so well, who doesn't
have to put that kind of effort into something, he really likes to do
that. And so do I. So it ended up being just a kind of perfect working
environment for both of us."
Steppin' Out of Neverland
After those months of work and creative development, Geoffrey and Kurt
had a finished product that they liked. But would audiences like
it?
"When you're doing something brand new, that doesn't have any sort of
history to it, you just don't know how people are going to react. You
never know. It doesn't matter how happy we were with it. The next
stage is putting it up in front of an audience," he says. "There's
never a guarantee of how an audience will react. Whether they'll enjoy
it or not, or understand it, or really take to it."
The finishing touches and final recorded masters of the music came
together just days before Kurt premiered the program at opening night
of Stars on Ice in Lake Placid.
"I know he was nervous. He was also really tired, too, he was very
busy right before that. And I was very nervous, 'cause all I
could think of is, 'please don't screw up the reputation of the
four-time world champion Kurt Browning, just because you wanted to
play and have fun.'"
By all accounts, Steppin' Out Of My Mind had a great debut, and
the audience took to it right away. Kurt went on to perform the
program in several holiday shows in December. However, Geoffrey and
Kurt weren't content to just leave it at that. They continued to
refine the program as they got a better sense for how it was being
received by audiences.
"Once the audience hears it and sees it, then you can start to really
figure out what the little nuances are that can help clarify it, clean
it up. You start to go 'you know, I don't think they're hearing that
little bit.' Or you know, maybe I'm speaking too fast there. Or maybe
we've got a couple extra ideas in here that they can't follow," he
says. "Once you get it in front of an audience, that's your next task,
to sort of fine tune it in front of an audience. I still think it
worked the first time, we just made it that little bit better for the
next few times."
Having developed and refined the program for North American audiences,
they were then presented with yet another challenge - how to shape the
program for a Japanese audience? Would the Stars on Ice audiences in
Japan be able to fully appreciate a program where an English voiceover
was such an integral component? What unexpectedly ended up being a
bigger issue was the length of the program, a problem that was
ultimately much harder to solve without completely tearing the program
apart.
"It was longer than they were used to. Literally they said to him
'It's very good, we really like it, but can it be very much
shorter?'. And now that was the dilemma, because the way it's
structured, it can't really. You'd have to do some major work," he
explains.
After debating possible alternatives, "[Kurt] finally said in the end,
'you know what, this is a problem that I can't solve.' So he just left
it. He said, ok I'm going to do the program for the live audience
that's there, and then sort of let the Japanese deal with it when it
comes to editing it for television. Then that way they can edit
whatever they want."
Geoffrey is conscious that this wasn't a perfect solution, but
"hopefully people still enjoyed it."
While the program has been developed specifically for the Stars on Ice
tour, with the assumption that the audience would largely be comprised
of North Americans who would understand the voiceover, Kurt and
Geoffrey were very aware of the importance of not making the program
so concept-centric that it lived or died by the voiceover.
"We said [when we were working it], we've got to make sure that if
there's no voiceover, that it's still just something interesting to
watch. And so, we really choreographed most of it before we solidified
what we were going to say. We just thought, you know what, if worst
comes to worst, and the voiceover doesn't work, we get rid of it and
it's just a cool program."
Taking it on the road
For all of Geoffrey Tyler's experience in music, writing, and
directing, he is first and foremost a performer, a fact that Kurt did
not forget. Despite the fact that Stars on Ice typically does not have
live musical performers, Kurt quickly turned a plan for Geoffrey to
come see the program on tour into an invitation to have him sing
live.
"We decided that I would just come down and hang out and get to see
the program in the environment," he explains. "And that's when he said
'well do you want to sing?' And literally I was like 'uh..ahh..uh.. I
don't know!' and then I thought, what the hell, why not?"
Kurt wasn't done, though. As audiences in Boston, DC, Cleveland, and
Toronto may have noticed, Geoffrey's singing location was quite
different from that of the typical musical performer at a skating
show.
"I get there, and I'm literally expecting to be standing on the edge
of the ice. Just like on the carpet and just sing. And he said 'well
get your skates on!'" he laughs. "So we're skating around, and he says
'yeah, you should do it on the ice'. And I was like (laughing)
'uh..all right..are you sure?' And he's like, 'yeah!
absolutely!'"
Which is how Geoffrey ended up performing in figure skates, quietly
moving around the periphery of the ice so he could be the one to toss
the hat and cane to Kurt, as well as singing.
"I'm very comfortable on skates, so in the end, it really didn't
matter if I was standing on the carpet or on the ice. My concern was
that I didn't upstage him. I didn't want to take away from his
program. It'd be nice to have a little enhancement - oh there's a
singer! - but I just didn't want to take away from his work," he
says.
Geoffrey may have done too good a job of trying not to upstage
Kurt. Many have commented that his live vocal performance was so spot
on, it sounded exactly like the recording, and that he was so not
highlighted in the show that they didn't even realize he was there at
first. Those who did notice him were very impressed by his vocal
fidelity, which he attributes to his training as a live singer who is
used to doing eight shows a week.
It is that skill which ironically means that, while he did sing in the
Toronto show, Geoffrey will not be performing in any further shows on
the Sears Stars on Ice tour. He is currently deep into rehearsals for
a new musical, Ned Durango, at the Theatre Orangeville, which runs
from May 5 through May 22.
Reflections
Although his foray into the world of figure skating is over for the
time being, it's a world that he would be happy to revisit,
particularly if he had the chance to work with Kurt Browning
again.
"There's this thing these days where everyone's terrified to make a
mistake. Everyone's terrified to do something that's slightly wrong,
or not perfect, or not proven. One thing that I admire greatly about
Kurt is that he's not really concerned about that. He'd rather do
something new, that keeps him going to the next day, that keeps him
getting out of bed, you know and going to the rink to figure stuff
out."
"When you're working with Kurt, it's very different. Kurt's a very
special performer. The things that I showed him how to do..the dance
moves. Dancers have trouble doing that on firm ground. The fact that
he was able to do them on skates is a remarkable thing. I mean, that's
one of the reasons that makes Kurt so amazing, his footwork on the ice
truly is quite incredible."
Asked if he would ever try his hand at figure skating choreography
again, Geoffrey is hesitant but game to try it again if anyone was
ever interested.
"It would have to be a special situation. I would certainly love to,
but I don't know enough figure skating vocabulary. It would depend on
the skater, obviously," he says. "I don't know, if somebody wants,
give me a call! (laughs) We'll figure it out."
"To me it's all gravy, because it's nowhere I ever expected to be in
my career. I mean as a young boy dreaming of Broadway, I still never
expected to be singing in an arena with some of the best figure
skaters in the entire world. That's just not something that ever sort
of occurred to me. It was a lot of fun, and I would love to do it
again, but if it never happened again, I'd still be thrilled. I'd be
more than happy."
Ultimately, his response sounds a lot like something his friend Kurt
Browning himself would say.
"You can't do any more than just put yourself out there, and say I'm
game if you are. If it happened, if I got the opportunity again, sure,
bring it. I'm willing to try anything."
Geoffrey Tyler can be seen in Ned Durango at the Theatre
Orangeville in Orangeville, ON from May 5 - May 22. For more
information: http://www.theatreorangeville.ca/2010/Ned-Durango.php
Thanks to Sharilyn Johnson for her help developing this article!
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