Reading Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” as a fifth-grader helped spur along the vivid imagination of Mark Turnbull, who built a career as a successful composer and songwriter.
In his current role as the balladeer in the Laguna Playhouse Youth Theatre adaptation of Twain’s book, Turnbull looks back at the story from a contemporary vantage point, acting as its singing narrator. “I am looking at the book which I devoured at age 8 from an adult point of view, a century later,” said Turnbull, who is 66.
The play, on stage April 10-19, was written and directed by Joe Lauderdale and produced by Donna Inglima, director of the Youth Theatre.
Lauderdale has modified the script as well. “I have fleshed out the part of Tom Sawyer as well as Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain left so many things unexplained,” he said. “As a director, I have taken new ideas from the original ones. The production will be very theatrical with only a small amount of literalism.”
He and Turnbull have modernized the production while keeping the tenor of the time, including, for example, “The River Hymn.” among other music written by Turnbull.
“I was raised in a milieu that encouraged reading and the arts,” Turnbull said. “My father was an actor, dancer and choreographer working in television, and my mother started out in vaudeville and went on to radio and film. She was also a founding member of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, now the Orange County Museum of Art,” he said.
A native of Glendale, Turnbull’s family moved to Newport Beach, where he attended Newport Harbor High School. He moved to Laguna Beach in 1968 and currently lives in Irvine, sharing digs with artist George Herms and writer Sue Henger.
College got short shrift with a semester and a half at Orange Coast College. “It was not for me; I had too much living to do,” he recalled.
Instead, he built on the guitar, music theory and voice lessons he received while in high school.
Turnbull made his acting debut on the “Jimmy Durante Show” at age 5. At 6, he played ukulele, and at 15 played guitar with Glen Yarborough. As a teen, he opened for Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Muddy Waters and other club luminaries of the period and received a Grammy nomination for best children’s album. His solo album “Portrait of the Young Artist,” for Reprise Records was a Billboard pick in 1968. F.M. & Fine Arts magazine listed him alongside top songwriters Randy Newman, Laura Nyro and Bob Dylan.
While his musical credits are long, he left the stage to devote himself to writing songs, musicals and cabaret numbers. “Too much business, not enough music,” he recalled.
Turnbull composes largely on the guitar, but sometimes steps away from the instrument to compose on paper, he said. “An idea hits me as if I can see the whole thing or feel it all at once. Then it becomes a matter of connecting the dots, it’s a lot like seeing a finished painting,” he said. “But, after that initial hit, one still sits in front of an empty page,” he said.
While musical director and resident composer for the Laguna Playhouse between 1984 and 1991, he staged a biographical musical about Edouard Manet, the seminal French painter whom Turnbull describes as spanning artistic movements old and new. It took him eight years to write.
Other musicals had more historical content such as “Tales of Fannie Keenan, Better Known as Dora Hand,” a true story about an American opera singer who, in the 1800s, forsook European stages to perform in Dodge City, Kan. “I do love history. Fiction has eluded me. I don’t read it, but I’ve come to recognize a certain truth in it.”
In 1999, Turnbull toured local schools with Inglima, who had established the Playhouse’s TheatreReach program. He composed and performed curriculum-based musicals such as “By the Great Horn Spoon,” based on the book by Sid Fleischman.
“Mark, Joe Lauderdale and I turned the book into a play with music,” recalled Inglima, who also worked with Turnbull on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in 2013.
“Mark has been a wordsmith all his life, a contemporary folk prophet with his music,” she said. “Whatever he does, he has the mark of excellence.”
