HOW WAS BORN

It was a hot August day on Prince Edward Island, my second home and where my family has a summer cottage. For three weeks, I had been getting up at 6 a.m., brewing some coffee, going out on the deck, and writing lyrics for a show I had in my head, called BABIES. On this one particular day, I had been quickly eliminated from a tennis tournament, and, therefore, headed down to the beach. It was low tide, a time when one can walk forever on the warm sand dunes. While walking, I met Bill Hancox who was CEO of the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown. The Charlottetown Festival, in its wonderful, 1,300-seat theatre, had been producing full stage musicals since 1967, including the perennial "Anne Of Green Gables". They had also produced two of my earlier musicals.

After chatting about kids, the weather and the tennis tournament, Bill asked me if I was working on any new musicals. I described BABIES. He got very excited about it. Two days later, I was called into a meeting with Alan Lund, the award-winning Artistic Director of the Festival. I read a few lyrics from my unfinished work. Alan loved it and it was agreed, all around, that BABIES would be produced on the Main Stage the following summer. Consequently, I started getting up at 5 a.m., and completed the first draft of BABIES by the end of the summer.

For the next two summers, BABIES was a huge hit on the Charlottetown stage and received rave reviews when it was produced in Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo, and Sydney Australia.

During the run in Ottawa, three lawyers, who were extremely active in musical theatre in Canada's capital, loved the productions so much that they offered to fund the production of a cast album.

Over a period of three months, Cliff recorded all the instrumentals at a studio in the beautiful Caledon Hills, just north-west of Toronto, and all the vocals at Number Nine Sound, a studio in downtown Toronto. Some of the solo singers were from the original cast of BABIES, some were from a Toronto, stage musical production group called The Yorkminstrels, and all of the Chorus singing was performed by The Yorkminstrels. Cliff took another six weeks to mix the album. The result is the wonderful, double-CD album of BABIES. Listen to some songs from the musical.