This summer, Oli Guselle’s music is taking listeners on a tour through the ’90s greatest hits, the present-day digital world, and dozens of parks and green spaces . Guselle is the music director, composer and arranger for The Reel Whirled, SUM Theatre’s original Theatre in the Park play for 2024. To tell the story about balancing online and off-line lives and the pressures of living up to digital identities, the entire SUM Theatre company brought ideas to the table.
Then it was Guselle’s job to turn all the themes, melodies and notions into one cohesive score. “During our ‘creation week’ in January, my job was to work with everyone else to collaborate and write as much music as we can,” said Guselle. “Then for the next few months, between creation week and the actual rehearsal period, I was sifting through all this content that my colleagues and I had made, and was putting together all these little to create fully-fledged arrangements.
“I also made all of the backing track arrangements — I composed those myself — and then, as the music director, my job was to teach this to the cast and work with them on their vocals and harmonies, and on .” To bring The Reel Whirled to life, Guselle reached a few decades back in time, finding inspiration in the pop hits, iconic genres, video game soundtracks and music subcultures of the ’90s. They researched the kind of “cheesy, feel-good, fast driving” drums and horns they would need to build a ska song from t.
