mariaricciobryce.com
Maria Riccio Bryce was born and raised in Amsterdam, NY. She had her first piano lesson at the age of nine, and that was the beginning of her story.
It seemed that the silent, dark piano waiting for her each day in the living room threw open the door to her whole life, the moment she touched the keys, and catapulted her into being. How she loved it! She loved it all! — the rigor; the growing certainty of her touch; the way her fingers responded to the enigmatic markings on the staves. The miracle of the music of Schubert and Chopin ….and especially Beethoven! The delirious joy of Musical Theatre, as her heart beat in time to the gorgeous, magical craft she was discovering, learning , and preparing to join one day (although she didn’t know that, at the time). She soon found her way to the stage, performing in high school musicals, and accompanying all the choruses.
It seemed that the silent, dark piano waiting for her each day in the living room threw open the door to her whole life, the moment she touched the keys, and catapulted her into being. How she loved it! She loved it all! — the rigor; the growing certainty of her touch; the way her fingers responded to the enigmatic markings on the staves. The miracle of the music of Schubert and Chopin ….and especially Beethoven! The delirious joy of Musical Theatre, as her heart beat in time to the gorgeous, magical craft she was discovering, learning , and preparing to join one day (although she didn’t know that, at the time). She soon found her way to the stage, performing in high school musicals, and accompanying all the choruses.
For her first paid job ever, she was hired as the Music Director for the Amsterdam Recreation Department’s summer production of HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. Playing the piano - in the theatre - for $50 a week! She thought that surely, the Big Time wasn’t far away! ….and she made up her mind to pursue it.
As a student at Manhattanville College, she changed her major from music to English, and began acting regularly in productions at nearby Iona College.
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In her first season of Summer Stock, at Weston Playhouse in Vermont, she met a fellow actor - an Englishman named Alan Bryce. Shortly thereafter, in her senior year at Manhattanville, Maria won the Best Actress Award in the New York State College Theatre Festival for her performance in the title role in Iona College’s production of MOTHER COURAGE. Immediately upon graduation from Manhattanville, she married her Englishman, moved to London…and there, her career as a theatre professional began.
With an inspired idea, the determination to bring it to fruition, and a few magical strokes of luck, Maria and Alan created and ran, for nearly a decade, THE OVERGROUND THEATRE, which became one of the leading Fringe theatres in London in the 1970s. They produced over 100 plays there.
As a proud member of British Actors Equity, Maria performed in many Overground productions.
Several of the Overground’s original productions moved on to larger theatres, and one actually found its way to the West End.
An original musical, OOR WULLIE, written by Alan, with music by Milton Reame James, and directed by Maria, premiered at the Overground…and then had a National Tour of Scotland, playing at all the major houses, including the Kings Theatre, Glasgow and the Kings Theatre, Edinburgh.
It was during her years at the Overground that Maria began songwriting. She wrote incidental music for several original plays. She wrote a theme song for a production of THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT that she sang herself, as she played the leading role.
Branching out, she wrote music and lyrics for BY GEORGE, a musical about George IV, with book by Royce Ryton, author of CROWN MATRIMONIAL; and music and lyrics for PUFFBALL, based on the novel by Fay Weldon.
She was beginning to return to her roots as a musician more and more, in those days ….but the work that she considers the turning point in her career was inspired by an unexpected Life Event.
In 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s government made significant and shocking cuts to arts funding, and the Overground Theatre lost its Arts Council subsidy. The chances of the Overground continuing without the grant were slim.
In response, Alan and Maria decided to write a musical about a married couple, successfully running a fringe theatre, who lose their government subsidy. Alan would write the script, and Maria would write the songs. They would then produce the play at the Overground, as a way of voicing their protest and their need. Maria entitled the play A TIME OF YOUR LIFE, from a beloved quote by William Saroyan.
Writing A TIME OF YOUR LIFE was the first time that Maria felt the wondrous sense of creating something borne of her own life’s experiences….weaving her own stories within a fictional plot, and speaking her truths through song.
Of course, A TIME OF YOUR LIFE did not change Margaret Thatcher’s mind. The Overground Theatre was unable to survive without assistance from the Arts Council. The theatre closed, and Alan and Maria made the decision to leave the UK and return to the USA with their young family. This entire chain of events seemed calamitous at the time. However, despite the loss of their theatre, and the upheaval in their personal lives, Maria felt something brand new, stirring inside: a quiet but insistent intimation that her life’s work had only just begun.
As it turned out, her instincts were correct! Returning to the USA -and specifically, to her native roots in Upstate New York - proved to be the key that opened the floodgates to memory, and to a sense of time and place that has inspired Maria’s work ever since.
Her first full-length musical, a revue on the subject of Womanhood, entitled MOTHER, I’M HERE, was commissioned by the Schenectady YWCA. It premiered at Proctor’s Theatre and was later produced at The Egg, a Performing Arts Center in Albany’s Empire State Plaza.
THE AMSTERDAM ORATORIO, a full-length choral work comprised of 16 songs, each featuring a different facet of life in her hometown, premiered on October 5, 2001, and, at the curtain call on opening night, the Mayor of the City of Amsterdam strode across the stage and presented Maria with the Key to the City. Her father’s boyhood friend and Amsterdam native Kirk Douglas generously subsidized the recording of the Oratorio.
SWAN SONG, her musical memoir, was produced in Amsterdam in November, 2016. Performing with Maria were her three sisters, two of her sons, beloved friends and colleagues, and many children, some of whom had been Maria’s piano and voice students. Also performing in SWAN SONG was a beloved musical icon of Amsterdam, NY : Margaret Lazarou, in her last performance, singing with her daughter, Christine Sherlock, by her side.
Other works include HIROSHIMA, a symphonic piece; MISSA CORDIS , a Mass setting; and HOME AGAIN, a collection of her songs that was performed in late February 2020– just before the Pandemic shut everything down.
In 2021, Maria recorded REMEMBER ME, REMEMBER YOU, an album of her original Christmas songs and arrangements. She created the album as a gift for her grandchildren. She wanted to hand down to them the sounds of Christmas, exactly as she’s always heard them, to remember, each December.
In 1990, Maria was commissioned by the City of Schenectady to compose a piece commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Schenectady Massacre of 1690. To that end, she created HEARTS OF FIRE, a full -length musical theatre work with a cast of 60, which premiered on September 18, 1990, and was produced at Proctor’s again the following year. Maria considers HEARTS OF FIRE to be her Magnum Opus, as it epitomizes the monumental themes that define her life and work: home, loss, faith, memory, and all- enduring love.
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In 2022, having achieved what Maria considers a very good innings in terms of longevity, she was surprised to find herself summoned once more by the mysterious exhortations of her Vocation: to sit again with the empty pages, the old nubby pencils, the complete silence in the room, and the chorus of voices, barely heard but insistent, calling out from the ether. The writing that ensued was a daily event through the winter of that year. It challenged Maria to look deep within, and to examine her mind, to uncover and reveal what she truly believes, and most intrinsically hopes.
It resulted in ‘REQUIEM: What Remains is Love’ - an 80-minute choral work that melds original settings of the traditional Requiem Mass with her own songs about life, death, and the afterlife. Maria considers the writing of her Requiem a gift, springing not only from her life’s journey, but from someplace far beyond … from her ancestors, gathering …from all those whose lives and deaths, loves and losses she bore witness to, in her 25 years as the Music Director at St Luke's Catholic Church in Schenectady. She even suspects she may have nurtured its seeds deep in her own heart, as the pianist she was as a girl, all those years ago…..awestruck, honoring as best she could the genius of her hero, Beethoven, as her young fingers reached reverently for the notes he had left behind.
Maria Riccio Bryce’s ‘REQUIEM: What Remains is Love’ is the triumph of her creative life. She is overjoyed to have brought it into the world … and very excited to see where it might go.
