Former busker Trevor Preston jokes about his vocal journey, where he enjoys the great outdoors in WA, and what he thinks about his dual roles of stage actor Harry Trevor and Shakespeare’s Baptista in Kiss Me, Kate.
With a versatile vocal range of tenor / baritone, how did you discover this dimension to your voice?
I used to be a busker, and found that in order to be audible without amplification – so that people could hear me and remind me to get a day job – I went for a higher range. Dogs didn’t like it.
When I started singing in musical theatre and choirs I reverted to a more natural range.
So I jammed a square peg into a round hole and became Trevorotti, Baritenor to the Stars. Which mainly means singing outdoors on moonless nights, to the delight of my neighbours.
Nature and the great outdoors look to be an aspect you enjoy, with interests in cycling, snorkelling, and gardening. Do you have a favourite track, dive, or park either here in Australia or overseas?
I’m not really serious – these are mainly leisure activities designed to prevent my Adonis-like physique from resembling the Michelin Man. I love living in a city where you can cycle, walk, and garden on the same day. Being a prisoner of the legal profession I tire of the warbling, squawking, tweeting, chirping, and screeching of my peers. For genuinely intelligent conversation I’ll ride around Herdsman Lake and converse with magpies, crows, ducks and currawongs. Also, don’t forget some of history’s greatest events have taken place outdoors, like World War Two for example, or the moon landing. So when I’m cycling around a wetlands I feel I can almost smell the Bolshevik revolution. Well, I can smell something.
Kiss Me, Kate is a show within a show, with as much drama on stage as behind-the-scenes. How is your 1940’s character of stage actor Harry Trevor different from your Shakespearean character of Baptista?
Harry is the guy who does whatever he can to pay his debts to Mack the Steak Knife, the most lenient of the short-price bookies at Aqueduct Racecourse. When someone says ‘break a leg’, Harry will quietly trouser the dough and do the job. Baptista, on the other hand, has a bankroll the size of a metropolitan broadsheet, and likes to throw parties in the hope that some louche, dissolute wastrel will abscond with a daughter. Not having kids I feel perfectly qualified to play a man with two of ’em. Pretty sure you just open a branch of the Bank of Dad.
What do you love the most about being on stage and performing?
Looking around the stage and seeing what needs a lick of paint or a tech screw is particularly thrilling, and I keep an eye out for the cat. When these reveries are disturbed by live props I mainly enjoy re-acting to skilled and trained actors, and thus learning the craft by osmosis. And naturally it’s a great thrill to bring words and music to life, and hopefully tell an entertaining story.
What are five things you couldn’t live without?
Oxygen. Sustenance. Consciousness. Sleep. Heaps of pharmaceuticals. I’d probably struggle without any of that. But there would be no purpose shuffling around this mortal coil without beer, the works of Miles Davis and Igor Stravinsky, Mexican food, books, and a musical instrument.
There’s someone near and dear to me who I should probably mention… but five was the limit.
