Tori Amos | News | The Light Princess (Original Cast Recording)

Even for the most gifted and experienced musicians, creating a new stage musical presents daunting challenges. The music and lyrics must allow the performers to evoke characters and tell a coherent story, and the stage presentation needs to create a compelling theatrical experience. Even after creating 14 of her own studio albums and selling over 12 million copies of them worldwide, Tori Amos found she had plenty to learn about the process when she set out to create The Light Princess for London’s National Theatre.

“I didn’t have a professional exposure to the theatre world until this experience,” Tori says. “I grew up listening to musicals as a tiny child. I auditioned at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore with scores from Oklahoma and things like that when I was five, so I had an exposure to some of the great musicals that I still love and treasure.”

She found that unlike her work as a solo recording artist, where all the creative decisions ultimately rest with her, musicals are intensely collaborative. Thus it was that when Tori was approached by the National Theatre in 2008 with the idea of adapting George MacDonald’s story The Light Princess for the stage, they put her together with Samuel Adamson, a playwright well versed in creating original works as well as in adapting pieces by Ibsen, Chekhov and many more. “We had a few meetings and we got on really well,” says Adamson. “That was the impetus of the project and it all began from there.”

As he explains, MacDonald’s original story, published in 1864, “has a very simple idea, which is that a girl can’t cry, she can’t really feel deep emotion, until she understands what love is and what a lack of love is.” This has the mysterious effect of making the girl – Princess Althea – so light that she hovers in the air. Only when she’s finally able to cry does the weight of her tears bring her back to earth. “We took his wonderful original idea and the power of that metaphor and made the story our own,” Adamson adds.

Although they’d chosen to work with an existing story, Amos and Adamson had bold, forward-looking ideas about how they wanted to develop it. They added a Romeo and Juliet-like aspect in their depiction of a princess and a prince from the warring kingdoms of Lagobel and Sealand coming together to heal the conflict, but they also wanted to express ideas about parents, childhood, and the problems of attaining adulthood and emotional maturity.

Amos, whose work has often been concerned with issues of female empowerment, has described the result as “a feminist fairy tale”, and she was determined that she and Adamson shouldn’t “dumb down” their message merely to make it a more commercial product. “It’s a fairy tale, but fairy tales are stories that often have a danger and a darkness in them,” she points out. “When fairy tales are rated G [for general admission] they shy away from that, but we felt we had to roll up our sleeves and tell a story about the journey of becoming a man and a woman, for teenagers.

”We challenge the patriarchy. The two fathers in our story are kings, they’re very powerful men, and we do explore that. Our teenage princess and her father, King Darius, have a certain dynamic because he didn’t deal with the death of her mother very well, and this has caused a huge divide between them. But more than that it’s a teenage coming-of-age story. It’s about a young woman, Princess Althea, and a young man, Prince Digby, who are becoming adults and are challenging their parents."

They knew that all of this could only work if the music successfully carried the audience into the story and made the characters come to life. The process of developing the Light Princess songs was painstaking, and the music and lyrics went through many changes and rewrites before Amos and Adamson finally knew that they’d attained their objective. They had valuable help from their director, Marianne Elliott (acclaimed for her award-winning work on War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), as Amos explains.

“We had to learn a new language, where I wasn’t trying to talk theatre-speak and she wasn’t trying to talk music-speak. Then we began to talk about what she wasn’t getting from the music emotionally, and then we would figure out how to achieve it. I must say it feels like your skin is coming off sometimes when you have to rewrite things so many times, but Marianne created a very safe place where nothing left the room and she protected that.”

The uniqueness of the project meant that there was no rule book to work from. “There’s no one way to write a musical,” Sam Adamson points out. “It’s about working out who you are as people, and what your relationship is. It’s about becoming friends as well as collaborators. There were all kinds of ways the piece developed. Sometimes Tori would write a song, sometimes I’d write a scene, we’d work on songs together, there were all kinds of things really.”

A fundamental consideration was the way that songs in a musical can’t merely be stand-alone pieces, but must always be driving the narrative forward or telling us something about the character who’s singing them. Was that difficult to achieve?

“Well that’s Sam’s job,” says Amos. "Sam’s running the plot and I’m not bad with a hook, so we found our partnership grew as we went along. We’d encourage each other to play to our strengths and it was really collaborative. “

”Often by the end of a song you need to be in a completely different place from where you started," Adamson explains. “Things need to have happened, and the audience is in a new place and the characters are in a new place.. We need to have gone on that journey musically and lyrically. In the song ‘Darkest Hour’ for instance, by the end of the song Althea is actually committing suicide in the lake, and we didn’t know that at the beginning.”

When the piece finally reached the National Theatre stage in 2013, critics hailed the songs, the staging, and the remarkable performance of Rosalie Craig in the role of Althea, which brought her an Evening Standard award for best actress in a musical. However, when it came to creating the brand new cast recording of the show, a whole new set of demands and possibilities presented themselves. Amos and Adamson wanted the recording to be a record of the National Theatre production and its cast, but they had to make it work successfully as an audio-only experience without the theatre trappings of lights, scenery and effects.

Expanding the instrumental forces used at the National Theatre and showcasing the music in vivid close-up, the recording presents The Light Princess as a coherent narrative while highlighting the scope of the musical arrangements. From an urgent, militaristic piece like “Sealand Supremacy” to the lyrical “My Fairy Story”, or the ecstatic and faintly Philip Glass-like “Amphibiava” to the ethereal “Zephyrus Call & Levity”, it’s a mesmerising journey through shifting moods, contrasting musical textures and fast-moving dramatic action.

“What was great about working with Sam,” says Tori, “was that he’d say right, in this piece ‘Queen Material’, we have to start in the tower where bolshy teenager and her father have an argument, then we have to get out of the palace, through the wilderness and an attack of the dragons, and before that we pass the Lagobellan army, and then they find the secret lake. I was thinking ‘oh my goodness, all this has to happen in one song!’ The challenge was figuring out how it makes sense musically, so if you don’t get to see the staging, if you’re just listening, then it should tell you everything you need to know.”

“It’s a different experience, an aural experience,” adds Adamson. “We worked hard to make sure the story is being told, so you’re able to sit down and listen from beginning to end and hopefully you’ll have a sense of an over-arcing narrative. It’s a totally different experience from seeing it in the theatre. It’s more intimate, and I think some of the detail of the score which perhaps is washed out in a theatre environment is heard very precisely and beautifully on the album.”

Something you get on disc which you certainly didn’t hear in the theatre was a pair of songs performed solo by Tori at the piano, “Highness in the Sky” and "Darkest Hour”.