Peter Pinne

Peter Pinne
Born Peter Norman Pinne
(1937-05-27) 27 May 1937
Victoria, Australia
Occupation Television producer
Partner(s) Don Battye (1960–1987)[1]

Peter Norman Pinne (born 27 May 1937) is an Australian-born writer and composer, he has worked frequently in America and Britain.

Pinne started working as a television executive for the Reg Grundy organisation. Firstly, as Head of Production from 1980, later rising to become a Senior Vice President of the company. During this period, he worked on numerous shows including The Young Doctors, The Restless Years and Neighbours. He also co-composed the theme tune to Sons and Daughters. In 1992, he was responsible for overseeing the production of Dangerous Women, an American series based loosely on the popular Prisoner. The show was not a huge success running to only 52 one-hour episodes.He also travelled to a number of Latin American countries where he was responsible for overseeing the production of local versions of some of Grundy's most successful hits. He left the Grundy organisation in the late 1990s in order to set up his own record label, Bayview, with fellow former Australian television producer, Don Battye and now writes and composes music. He currently resides in the Brisbane area of Australia.

Stage musicals

Since the late 1950s, Peter Pinne (variously working in collaboration with Don Battye, Ray Kolle and/or John-Michael Howson has been one of the most prolific creators of original Australian stage musicals. Examples include:

Most of these musicals were originally performed as amateur or semi-professional productions. Although private demonstration recordings of the scores are known to exist, few of the shows had commercial cast albums released. A song from A Bunch of Ratbags was released as a single, cover versions of two songs from The Computer and Love's Travelling Salesman were included on a 1970 compilation LP entitled Australian Musicals Now, and a studio recording of selections from Red, White and Boogie and Sweet Fanny Adams was released in 1983 on Don Battye's Trigpoint label. The only stage production to generate a complete original cast recording was Caroline; the original LP was released in 1971 and subsequently re-issued on CD (by London-based label Dress Circle Records) in 1998.

Although all of Pinne's musicals were successful in their original productions, few of them have been mounted since. As mentioned above, the 1968 show It happened in Tanjablanca was revived in 1974, in a substantially revised version entitled Red White and Boogie. The following year, a suburban amateur theatre company in Melbourne (Altona City Theatre) staged a production of Caroline. More recently, A Bunch of Ratbags was revived in 2005 by Magnormos, which resulted in the release of a "premiere" cast recording. In 2007, Magnormos staged a 30-minute workshop production of Pinne's latest musical, Suddenly Single, which was written in collaboration with Paul Dellit.

In the mid-1990s, Pinne and Battye also wrote a stage musical adaptation of the cult 1970s Australian television series, Prisoner: Cell Block H. Ironically, the show was first produced in England (where the original programme had become more popular than it was in its native land), in a lavish West End production that starred Lily Savage and original TV cast member Maggie Kirkpatrick, reprising her role as Joan "The Freak" Ferguson.

Pantomime

In addition, Pinne and Battye co-wrote a number of pantomime-like musicals especially for children, which were produced at the Alexander Theatre at Monash University during the 1970s. Mostly based on popular fairy tales, these shows included:

Books

References

  1. ↑ Pinne, Peter (5 March 2016). "Vale Don Battye (1938–2016) a man with many talents". Absolute Theatre. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
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