Tony had written an account of his search for his father, the singer Johnny Flamingo, which was published in the Guardian, and it struck me that it had potential as a drama; we chatted about it and he suggested I try and work something up and send it to him.
In retrospect I ought to have waited before getting in touch with him. Even if I didn't want to invest a lot of time in a piece and then find out I hadn't been granted permission to take it any further I could have made further inroads first. Because when he had given his okay, and I did sit down and try to rough out an idea ... I found that I couldn't.
The trouble - if you can call it that - is that Tony's memoir was too good. That is, it was extremely well suited to its form, as befits someone who was a lecturer in Journalism, and much of it was internal. An epiphany on a doorstep reads well but shaping a play from elements such as that, especially when there was no eventual meeting between father and son to provide a climactic scene, was too tough, at least for the likes of me. And Tony, understandably, didn't want his mother to be contacted, so the information about the past in the memoir was going to be all there was.
There was one thing he told me during our phone conversation which
seemed to have the germ of a possibility: he was involved himself in
music as a youth and he recalled a moment when he and his bandmates
stumbled across a bit of doo wop singing. Maybe they were improvising,
or maybe this was just something they heard - I can't remember - but he
reacted to it in a way that his friends didn't. Could this have been his father in him?
Tony did talk about his plans for creating a more interactive version of the piece; I don't know whether he did so but according to the Louie Report site it seems that at one time he was also working on a documentary, which may or may not have been finished.
The Guardian piece is still available on the paper's website. The key thing about the story is that in the fifties, in England, his white mother had a relationship with a black airman; the relationship didn't last but, with the support of her parents, Tony's mother didn't give him up for adoption. When he was in his mid-forties Tony began to search for details of his father; the story of his journey and what resulted can be found in the piece.
I do hope that Tony managed to finish his documentary. I regret that I couldn't deliver the goods with that ill-thought-out play proposal. I didn't want to shut the door on the idea by saying that explicitly to him, so I said nothing ... which amounted to the same thing in the end.
In mitigation, I do recall Tony saying that any adaptation had to be of the highest quality, which was an offputting thing to hear at the off, as was the fact that it was a real story. That's a lot of challenge just as you are starting. I think he mentioned that a screenplay had been mooted at some point but had already fallen through, though I'm not certain.
One thing which I do recall coming up as we talked was that doo wop songs weren't very good when it came to carrying a narrative forward: they aren't exactly full of lyrical complexity - not that they need to be. Tony didn't feel the need to have the songs in a play adaptation limited to, or even necessarily reflecting, his father's repertoire, but with the wider world of doo wop songs to choose from it would still be difficult to know what to choose.
One of the few plays or musicals which I think accurately reflects the doo wop world is very slight: a chamber piece called Sister Suzie Cinema, set in a picture house with minimal plot. Essentially it's a meditation about the unreal women on the silver screen, reflecting those elusive women in so many doo wop songs. Originally it was just a long poem, I think. And Soul Harmony, a recent musical about the Orioles, contains vintage numbers by the group and others along with a separate set of newly composed songs specifically designed to advance plot and reveal character.
Tony's story still has the potential for a play, I believe, although settling on a structure could be difficult. How do you find a dramatic equivalent for a paragraph such as this, in which Tony imagines a fleeting contact with his father, whose real name was Melvin, before the latter's departure?
... a few weeks after I was born, Melvin chanced upon us when my mother visited the base on business. It was cold. Perhaps I was asleep. But perhaps I saw his dark blur of a face and bright teeth. I would have heard the lulling voice that would make him special, and felt his rough uniform as he held me for the only time. And perhaps I cried while my mother watched a father and son amid the dreary huts of the air base.
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