Engineering Paradise the Musical

Music and vocals by Andrew Richardson.
Lyrics: David Gardiner

This is the opening song of the musical. It is sung by a sinister male figure who walks slowly down from the stage and along the aisle, while gunmen in Balaclavas train their weapons on the audience, 'covering' the singer. The song ends with a fusilade of gunfire as the lights cut to black.

We dream of Eden’s verdant fields
The present to the future yields
Our history hasn’t yet begun
There’s so much of our race to run

The old shall usher in the new
And we, the noble, eager few
Our privilege to pay the price
Of engineering paradise

It hovers slightly out of sight
We must not doubt that we are right
There can’t be any compromise
We’ll kill or die or trade in lies

The innocent are merely means
They decorate our battle scenes
Your principles you put on ice
While engineering paradise

Do what it takes to seize the day
And God will look the other way
Be ruthless for our cause is right
And nothing comes before this fight

A boil needs cutting – use the lance!
The time has come to take your chance
The Devil’s here to roll the dice
For engineering paradise

This isn’t work for feeble will
You cannot hesitate to kill
The way ahead is clear to see
And when we’ve won they’ll all agree

There wasn’t any other way
The priests, the Church, the world will say
How right we were to pay the price
For engineering paradise 

SINGERS & SONGWRITERS WANTED to help develop this project
- contact sirat@davidgardiner.net

Opening Song

Music and vocals by Andrew Richardson
Lyrics by David Gardiner

Father Walsh, the headmaster of Danny's school, explains his position on life, the universe and everything.

SINGERS & SONGWRITERS WANTED to help develop this project
- contact sirat@davidgardiner.net

Introducing Father Walsh

Music and Vocals: Andrew Richardson
Lyrics by David Gardiner

Father Walsh explains the evils of Soviet Communism to Danny.

Russia is a godless foreign country
Where Roman Catholic teaching has been banned
All instruments of mass communication
Are government controlled throughout the land

There isn’t any freedom of assembly
And people watch each other night and day
And instant execution would await you
If from the party line you were to stray

Their atom bombs are trained on all our cities
Their rockets just await the button’s press
And if we didn’t have our own deterrent
The world would be one communistic mess

For Khrushchev is the servant of the Devil
The Anti-Christ incarnate, nothing less.

Russian Song

Music and vocals by Andrew Richardson
Lyrics by David Gardiner

Big Jim Harrison, the Commander of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, falls into a reflective mood and has a vision of the carnage he is about to set loose in initiating a new uprising against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Circumstances gave me this position, 
Put the steering wheel of history in my hands
The barricades are rising in this city 
And the rival groups are taking up their stands.

In a little while the taunting and the shouting 
Will turn to something nastier by far
Bullets will replace the broken bottles, 
Just watch them as they ratchet up the bar.

Once more the IRA will spring to action, 
Once more the cause of freedom to the fore
Another chance for Irish liberation, 
A united land to last for ever more.

And even if we fail in our objective, 
Our heroes and their exploits will be sung
And future generations will revere us, 
When the bell of freedom finally is rung.

Once more the fertile soil of chaos beckons
For revolution’s seed is well prepared
The young are more than willing to come forward
I pray to god that some of them are spared
I pray to god that some of them are spared



Circumstances

This is a somewhat longer version of the Love Theme from Engineering Paradise the Musical
Composed and performed by Andrew Richardson
SINGERS AND SONGWRITERS WANTED TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS PROJECT
Full details: http://davidgardiner.net/EPOpen.html

Love Theme (longer version)

I would like to thank all the singers, songwriters and others who helped develop this project over the course of the last three years, most especially Roger Wicks, Andrew Richardson, Dayna Lynn, Rick Hayter, Leon Rosselson, Becky Simpson, Lily Brooke, Barbara Korner, Hjalmar Nordén, Dieselle May, Jean Lui Toudou, James Fraser, William Playle and Claire Flanagan. Apologies to the people I have left out, of whom I fear there are probably many. 

The musical was created as an 'open source' project based on my 2011 novel 'Engineering Paradise' ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Engineering-Paradise-David-Gardiner/095693790X ) in which I was responsible for the script, including the song lyrics, Other kind people turned my words into songs and recorded the demo versions that you will find here.

The complete script with lyrics and scores, which is essentially finished now but may well undergo revision in response to experience gained from stage performances, is free to download from http://davidgardiner.net/Engineering_Paradise_the_Musical.pdf . Printed copies are also available from http://www.lulu.com/shop/david-gardiner/engineering-paradise-the-musical/paperback/product-23152678.html at £4.64 + postage, which is cost price and includes no royalty element.

'Engineering Paradise the Musical' is a Public Domain intellectual property. There is no Performing Rights fee or payment of any kind  required for performing this work

The action takes place in 1960s Belfast, where Roman Catholic Grammar School boy Danny builds a pirate radio transmitter, falls in love, sleepwalks into the IRA and discovers too late the Faustian nature of the bargain that he has made, and the real motives of those he has trusted. The title comes from a Stafford Beer quote:

'The Holocaust has shown us that the creation of hell on earth is just a matter of engineering. The creation of an earthly paradise is an engineering problem also.'
Stafford Beer (1926 – 2002)

The work has a 'folksy' 1960s atmosphere, and  the cast includes teenagers of both genders as well as parts for adults. It is intended for production by small 'amdram' or student theatre groups.  

If you might be interested in staging the work, or contributing to the project in any other way, please email me at:  sirat@davidgardiner.net