6 MusicWeek 28.06.13 NEWS FORMER MANAGER WORKING WITH BROADCASTER SANDI TOKSVIG ON BIOGRAPHICAL PLAY
New Dusty Springfield musical coming to London
LIVE BY PAUL WILLIAMS
D
usty Springfield’s life is set to be turned into a stage musical with the
backing of her one-time manager Vicki Wickham. She revealed a West End
production, with a story by author and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and featuring a number of the singer’s biggest hits, was now in the planning stages with a launch likely next spring. Wickham (pictured far right), who managed Springfield at the height of her career and co-penned with Simon Napier- Bell the English lyrics to her chart-topping You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, has teamed up with leading West End producer David Ian and former EMI, Sony and Really Useful Group executive Tris Penna for the venture. She said: “Tris has been a
friend of mine literally forever and, when I used to go over to workshops and script readings for Dusty, I often would ask him to come with me and we both would come out going, ‘The music’s great but they just
years, Wickham confessed she had not heard of her, but a quick Google search later and Toksvig was approached, she came on board and now “it’s almost written”. She added they would begin
don’t get Dusty. It’s got nothing to do with Dusty.’ So in the spring of last year we sat down and said, ‘Let’s just put down on paper what was great about her, all the divadoms, but also why everybody was loyal, stuck with her - just the real Dusty we knew’ so we did this.” Penna then suggested
contacting Ian whose company was behind the revival of The Sound of Music at the London
Palladium and oversees The Bodyguard musical currently running at the Adelphi Theatre. “David came right back and
said, ‘I love it. I’m in,’” said Wickham, who was then recommended by her friend Susie McKenna, creative director of the Hackney Empire, that Sandi Toksvig would be a great choice as the show’s writer. Having been based in the US for a number of
“workshopping” this autumn and were aiming for a late spring 2014 release, although the choice of who will play the lead role still appears a long way off. “There are several people
we’ve thought about. You also have to get into the whole thing of whether they’d be available, and would they want to do it,” said Wickham who was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours earlier this month.
She disclosed several people had made approaches about doing a production before Springfield died in 1999 “and Dusty being Dusty always said, ‘Yes, but I’d want to get involved and I don’t feel I have time at the moment,’ so we never went any further than that”. “It was the same with the
book,” Wickham added. “She always said the same thing: ‘I don’t really have time at the moment.’ It’s a shame because she would have done a really good one. Do I think she would be pleased [with a musical]? I think she would be really pleased with the one we’re doing. I really do. It’s fun. It shows the real Dusty.”
New software ‘will revolutionise festival planning’
A new festival simulation software package could help promoters cut costs by
as much as half as well as predict ticket sales and potential effects of adverse weather conditions. TESBL, the music industry
software specialist behind the system called Caterpillar, has dubbed its new technology “revolutionary” with director and CEO Gopi Setivarahalli (pictured) confident that festival
organisers can cut costs significantly and save time by using it. “Our system takes away the months of planning for festival organisers and saves them up to 48% in their actual spending budget,” said Setivarahalli. “The UK music industry is an old school industry where people still rely on traditional techniques to do their planning. We are trying to change this by introducing some revolutionary technologies. “We’re very confident that our
systems can optimise performance in festival planning so that festival organisers can
make more money - at least 48% more than their average festival profits,” he added. The Caterpillar software comes as part of a service where festival organisers and their team work with TESBL in the company’s digital simulation labs. The system builds a 3D model of the festival and allows planners to control a range of aspects from stage planning to crowd management. A number of real life scenarios
can be programmed into the system including severe weather conditions to identify risk areas, security staff positions for crowd
management and the live footprint of the crowd itself on the day of the festival. The system can also estimate ticket sales using artificial intelligence even before tickets are made available to the public. “We’ve also integrated RFID
for ticketing and cashless payments,” said Setivarahalli. “Tags are shipped directly to the customer rather than having them exchange tickets for tags at the festival entrance. “With this system we think
we can clear 10,000 people in an hour at the gates. “You can also track every
RFID chip anywhere in the festival to monitor crowd-flow in real time or find a missing child, for example,” he added. TESBL’s live festival
accounting software ‘Omni’ also obtains real-time information from bars and stores on festival sites enabling organisers to account for all income received. TESBL is headquartered in
Canada Square, Canary Wharf. It demonstrated the Caterpillar software this week as the headline sponsor of this year’s MI Retail Conference and Expo. For more information visit
TESBL.com.
www.musicweek.com
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