Bernard J. Taylor

A concept album was released in 1991 with a cast of West End musical stars including a former "Phantom Of The Opera" Dave Willetts, as Heathcliff, Lesley Garrett (Cathy Earnshaw), Bonnie Langford (Isabella Linton), Clive Carter (Hindley Earnshaw), Sharon Campbell (Ellen "Nelly" Dean) and James Staddon (Edgar Linton).

Peppered with parody and pastiche, with additional lyrics by Vivian Wadham, its typical, and often cynical, view of the ups and downs of show business was accompanied by a jazzy and sometimes tender score, with Claire Moore, Lon Satton, Kathryn Evans, Jessica Martin and Maurice Clarke forming the CD cast.

made its debut at the Civic Theatre, Rotherham, in September 1995, Taylor had returned to the classics, in the form of Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice.

With Claire Moore as Elizabeth Bennett and Peter Karrie in the role of Darcy, the concept album also featured Gay Soper, Janet Mooney, James Staddon and Christopher Biggins as Mr. Collins.

Stand-out tracks, according to the Virgin Encyclopedia of Film and Stage Music (VEFSM), were considered to be "Through The Eyes Of A Child" "Good Breeding" and "Thank God They're Married".

Once again, the album cast was led by Claire Moore (singer) (as Mina) and Peter Karrie (as Nosferatu), supported by Mario Frangoulis, former pop star Mark Wynter, Barry James, Annalene Beechey and Simon Burke.

Derek Berlin won an excellence award from the Alamo Theater Arts Council for his performance in the title role in a production in San Antonio in 2015.

The CD cast included Paul McGann (Benedick), Claire Moore (Beatrice), Simon Burke (Claudio), Janet Mooney (Hero), Barry James (Leonato), David Pendelbury (Dogberry) and Peter Karrie (Don John).

The work was translated by Lőrincz Levente, directed by Benkő Péter, and the main roles were played by Udvarias Anna (Beatrice), Lőrincz Levente (Benedick), Bardóczy Attila (Don Pedro), Czakó Ádám (Claudio), Zseni Zsuzsa (Hero), Fekete István (Leonato), Monori Balázs (Dogberry), Cservenák Vilmos (Don John).

As the 1990s drew to a close, Taylor, in collaboration with orchestrator Gareth Price, attempted "to portray some of the key developments in the advance of civilization over the past 1,000 years" via his Millennium Suite.

Encouraged by his latest reviews, Taylor composed another symphonic work, Passion's Progress, a suite of ten pieces tracing the development of a romantic relationship.

A recording of the show was made at the J.B. Sowards Theatre in Ashland, Kentucky, in 2010 and featured on YouTube:[5] For this show, completed in 2007, Taylor took a number of the most popular songs of Gilbert and Sullivan and incorporated them into a more modern story of a corporate mogul (a Franchise King, also known as the Corporate Pirate of Penzance) who is hoping his daughter will marry into the British aristocracy, and a penniless young poet who falls in love with the daughter.

You can hear a song from the show, sung by Joshua Goldberg, on Youtube:[6] In 2008 Taylor began to revamp the Cinderella fairy tale using the music of Leo Delibes, W.A.

Bach, Jules Massenet, Carl Maria von Weber, Antonín Dvořák, Luigi Boccherini, Edvard Grieg, Josef Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Jacques Offenbach, P.I.

You can see/hear two songs from the show on Youtube:[7][8] One of Hans Christian Andersen's lesser-known fairy tales is considerably expanded and re-worked by Taylor in a comic opera using the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

You can see excerpts from this production on Youtube:[11] Completed at the beginning of 2013 in tandem with Rock n Roll Cafe, this is an updated version of Tom Brown's Schooldays, the classic 19th Century novel by Thomas Hughes (which created the blueprint for all school stories that followed, including Harry Potter).

An introduction to the show can be seen on Youtube:[12] An introduction to the musical version of A Christmas Carol was posted to Youtube in September, 2023:[13] The musical sticks fairly closely to Charles Dickens's novella but condenses some of the scenes and excludes the necessity of certain elements (like some of the Cratchit children apart from Timy Tim), and the giant figure that requires an actor to walk on stilts.

This tells the story of an introverted and burned-out writer who ends a hollow relationship with a married woman at the same time as he rents a room in his city apartment to an extrovert out-of-towner named Rachel, a generation younger than himself.

A take of entrapment based on incidents that happened to the playwright when he went to live with a younger woman in the Appalachian foorhills This play with music was published by Stagescripts in the UK as "Hear a Song That Echoes.

Inspired by the epic poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, it tells the story of a young literary professor who keeps the world at a distance until she is challenged by the passion of a former student.

Adapted from another novel that Taylor has withdrawn from circulation, it is about a man who kills women he meets through the internet in the belief that he is doing them a favor by ending their miserable lives and sending them to a better place.

In 2018, solo theatre artist Jade Esteban Estrada starred in the San Antonio production of Taylor's The Kindness of Strangers, a one-person show about the life of Tennessee Williams.

Both Taylor and Estrada deftly sidestep the cloying cliches to offer a gripping and vastly entertaining hour or so in the company of an American genius bent on self-destruction.

His attention is soon diverted, however, when a female member of the group breaks down after being unceremoniously dumped by her lothario boyfriend, Alfonso, for another woman.