JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – A former Bishop McCort Catholic music director’s work bringing a Shakespearean musical’s songs to life in Delaware has brought him back to Johnstown to record that music on a grander scale.
Johnstown native Michael Meketa, a Pittsburgh resident who recently spent nearly a month handling orchestrations for “Twelfth Night, O Lo Que Quieras,” is working with the production company to ensure its score lives on.
Until now, the music of the bilingual production was presented only through drums and layers of keyboard music, he said.
In the Spotlight
Over the past week, Meketa assembled a collective of 15 seasoned musicians in Johnstown to incorporate brass, strings and reed instruments. They spent several days recording this month at First Presbyterian Church on Lincoln Street in downtown Johnstown.
“You can have music on paper … but without an album, nobody can really hear what this music was meant to sound like,” he said.
Meketa is a 2012 Conemaugh Valley High School graduate who got a master’s degree in musical theater writing at New York University before moving to Pittsburgh. He works as an adjunct accompanist at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and St. Vincent College in Latrobe.
“Twelfth Night” was written in the early 1600s by William Shakespeare. The romantic comedy tells the story of twins separated by a shipwreck and their romantic entanglements in a foreign land.
Over the centuries since it was first performed, Shakespeare’s story has been represented in a 1960s-era setting, as an opera, and more recently inspired two separate movies in 1996 and 2006.
Meketa said Philadelphia-area actor and writer Liz Filios and writer Tana Marquez adapted the story with a South American twist, presenting a bilingual tale in “Twelfth Night, O Lo Que Quieras.” It reimagines the classic with Venezuelan twins who wash ashore as immigrants and find themselves pulled into the powerful houses of two opposing political families.
“It’s an old story, but there are a lot of modern parallels,” he said.
Meketa said the play was featured at the Delaware Shakespeare Festival this summer. He said he can envision the story continuing on other stages in the future.
Meketa said the music being recorded at First Presbyterian Church will be offered by the Twelfth Night Company as an album through apps such as Apple Music and Spotify.
He said it was only natural to return to Johnstown for the right ensemble of musicians to record the score.
“I don’t know that many musicians in Philadelphia,” Meketa said of the location where he originally recorded keyboard music for the play. “But back in Johnstown I know world-class musicians.”
That group includes performers with the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra, faculty from Penn State and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the local group Jazz in Your Face, he said.
“It’s wonderful to be able to bring things like this back to my hometown,” he said.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
