PJ Harvey Lends Her Musical Talents to the Broadway Stage

Posted on Mar 16th 2009 5:00PM by Nick Zaino
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The current production of 'Hedda Gabler,' at Manhattan's American Airlines Theatre through the end of this month, marks the first time PJ Harvey has scored an entire work for the stage or screen. She told Spinner that only one thing has prevented her from taking on a project like this in her two-decade music career: No one ever asked.

"All my musical life I've wanted to write music for theater or film," she says. "And I'd never been asked, ever. I'd written the odd song for a film, but I always wanted to get stuck into writing the whole soundtrack."

As a fan of 'Hedda Gabler' playwright Henrik Ibsen, she was drawn to writing music for this Broadway adaption, which stars Tony- and Emmy-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker. Harvey notes she had mixed feelings about director Ian Rickson's previous work, but she was happy with the end result. "I'd seen some of the director's other work, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't," she says. "So that was a bit of a gamble -- but enough to think, 'Great! Somebody's asked me to do the whole music score.'"

Writing for the Broadway stage was a different experience for Harvey, who is used to composing for herself or with collaborator John Parish. (She will release her second collaboration with Parish, 'A Woman a Man Walked By,' on March 31 and will appear with him on 'The Tonight Show' on March 24.) "I'm responding to the director's requirements," she says. "You have to see the rewrite of the script, the adaptation, and then you have to talk a lot with the director about what he wants... In some ways, you're just a vehicle for making the director's vision materialize and become sound."

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