Xavier Brouwer

Xavier Brouwer (born 1972) is an Australian musical theatre writer and composer based in Melbourne, Australia.

Education

Brouwer started writing musicals at the age of 16, encouraged by a pioneering primary and secondary school music program at Xavier College, Melbourne, in the 1980s. He first played violin then trumpet, including in the Victorian Youth Symphony Orchestra, then learnt a number of other instruments in order to gain a broad and deep understanding of orchestration.

While still at high school, Brouwer wrote his first musical, a teenage rock musical called Hey! (1988) and a one-act jazz musical called Jesse Christopher (1989, turned into a two-act musical with Richard O'Shaughnessy in 2004) which set the Passion of Christ in New York in the 1920s.

After graduating from high school, Brouwer studied composition at Dr Hoch's Konservatorium in Frankfurt, Germany, then returned to Australia where he studied opera singing with acclaimed Australian opera singer Geoffrey Harris and deepened his performing arts experience through various musicals, choirs, plays, modern dance pieces, and directing and producing activities around Melbourne including at the famous performing artist incubator of the Union Theatre at Melbourne University.

Career

Brouwer's most successful musical has been MACKILLOP (2008), a dramatic musical on the life of Australia's first saint, Mary MacKillop. This has had three productions over three years (2008–2010) in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide).

In addition to musical theatre, Brouwer has written music in other styles such as pop, rock, modern classical, a capella, jazz, world, liturgical, lieder and for film and modern dance.

Brouwer's most recent musical, DIVE (2011), is an Off Broadway-style rock musical which exposes the lives of four disadvantaged Australians cooped up together in a pressure-cooker rooming house in Melbourne. He has also written and recorded a song cycle based on the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon called Sighs of Sorrow (2012).

References

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