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Unburied Treasures Synopsis
Jack Summers
Tom McLean
James Smoker
Adam Walker
Jessica Sherman
Blackout. Lights come up on a coffin centre stage.
The four men sing the OPENING NUMBER, introducing the show, a revue telling the adventures and exploits of various celebrity corpses and other dead bits.
The are about to start the second number when Man 4 points out that the audience probably won’t know what PHRENOLOGY is, so they sing a brief definition of that subject. There will be a test later.
Which is brought to the fore during JO AND MO, the stories of Haydn and Mozart. At one point, the rather nervous Man 1 is alarmed to hear a woman’s voice – seemingly coming from somewhere on stage – sighing on cue. He is even more worried when the number finishes without his being able to finish the story of the adventures of Mozart’s skull.
Nonetheless, he perks up in the next number, HAPPY IN HOLLYWOOD, in which he gets to play Errol Flynn, notorious rake.
At the end of the story of the posthumous travels of Christropher Columbus, CRISTOFERO, the woman’s voice is again heard - singing this time.
A search determines that she was asleep inside the coffin. She comes out to sing the story of the Portuguese queen, INES DE CASTRO.
Three of the men are very keen to impress the woman. Man 2 sings a virtuoso history of the PERE LACHAISE cemetery in Paris.
The woman is persuaded to join in with a melodrama telling the story of the attempted kidnapping of Abraham Lincoln, then Man 2 and Man 3, who is determined to be the narrator of the show, fight violently whilst telling the story of THE BONES OF BOONE.
The woman is keen to sing her other solo number so that she can leave. She sings WHAT REMAINS, as Mary Shelley who kept her poet husband’s heart in a casket for the rest of her life after his cremation on a beach in Greece.
Before she can get away however, she is persuaded to stay on and play the corpse of Eva Person in EVA OR EVITA.
And then she’s given a script and told to read the story of LIVINGSTONE.
The tales are almost all told. The woman persuades Man 1 to finish the story of Mozart’s skull which leads into the new finale recorded in 2020: EVERYBODY DIES.
Of the four blokes on the original cast album, only Tom McLean in Glasgow was still available to record the new finale, so he was joined by Dale Branston in South West London; Jay Bryce (who you can also hear on Being Colonel Barker https://www.beingcolonelbarker.com) in North London; and Thomas McFarlane, a Royal Welsh vocal scholar now based in South West London. The new track was produced remotely online - and during the COVID lockdown (!) - by the dazzling MD David George Harrington and wizarded together by Auburn Jam studios.
Unburied Treasures opened at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, London N1 3DT on April 20, 2010. The music tracks, except for the new finale EVERYONE DIES, were recorded and mixed at Carleton Studios, London.
CD cover design by Joseph Maynard.
If all of this gory recounting has whetted your appetite for more tales of the posthumous adventures of famous corpses, you can dip into Edwin Murphy’s highly entertaining essays After the Funeral (Barnes&Noble, New York: 1995).