Haley Marie, foreground, with the musicians in Becoming the Beatles, a live musical documentary combining Beatles songs, historical commentary and projections.
Photo credit: Leelind Keary
The final chord of the Beatles’ “She Loves You” sounds like a declaration, with the voices holding a harmony familiar from an earlier generation of popular music. Producer George Martin later compared the major-sixth ending to Glenn Miller. To musician and producer Haley Marie, that chord is one way to explain how four young players from Liverpool drew on music that had already been around for decades, then made it sound unmistakably their own.
Marie brings that kind of musical comparison to Becoming the Beatles, the live documentary she tours with a band, narrated history and more than 300 projected images. Its 20 live songs are chosen for the part each plays in the group’s development, from the influences they absorbed as young musicians to the increasing experimentation of their recordings. After a series of Alberta performances in October, the show comes to River Run Centre in Guelph, Ontario, on November 5.
A McGill University music graduate with a master’s degree from Yale, Marie is also artistic director of Aurelia Productions. Her classical training provides a way of examining the recordings, but she also has to make the history work in a theatre, where an explanation may need to give way to a musical excerpt before the audience loses the thread. That has meant deciding which songs, people and incidents deserve space in a performance with a limited running time.
The question she pursued during the show’s development was “What happened?” Marie said in an email interview with SCENE 49. She was interested in the circumstances behind the band’s rise: their childhoods, the place and period in which they grew up, the music available to them and the choices they made once they began recording. Becoming the Beatles carries that account beyond the breakup into the musicians’ later lives, with songs used at different points to illuminate the history.
Hearing the history in the songs
Marie’s discussion of “She Loves You” starts with its closing chord, a major sixth that also appears earlier in the 1963 recording. In jazz and big-band music, this sort of harmony was well established; by the time the Beatles used it, Marie says, it could suggest the music their parents had listened to. The group did not seem troubled by that association. Martin’s recollection of the recording session describes his own recognition of the sound alongside the band’s enthusiasm for the ending.
In the show, Marie excerpts the chord and compares it with other harmonies, including passages by the French composer Claude Debussy. She draws a musical connection between jazz writing and Impressionist compositions, using the comparison to explain a sound that crosses styles and generations. She also discusses performers who influenced the Beatles more directly, among them Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, identifying the earlier musicians rather than allowing their contributions to disappear behind the Beatles’ fame.
The connections grow more involved in the second half. Marie includes “Because,” from the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road, near the end of the performance. Lennon said the song originated when he heard Yoko Ono playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and asked her to try the chords backwards. The account is a way of hearing the relationship between the two compositions, although “Because” is not a literal reversal of Beethoven’s score.
Marie also discusses the role of early Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe in Lennon's interest in visual art, particularly painting and the artists associated with Impressionism. She links that wider artistic curiosity with the group’s later appetite for experimentation. These connections are part of her interpretation of the musicians’ changing interests, supported onstage by excerpts that an audience can hear rather than a catalogue of names and influences.
“Song selection was a much-debated topic,” Marie said. Each recording had to justify its place in the story by illustrating a point in the Beatles’ development or a change in their music. Their catalogue contains far more material than one performance could accommodate, and Marie jokes that theatres have little interest in a five-hour show. The 20 selected songs consequently carry much of the work that a longer documentary might give to interviews and archival footage.
George Martin’s part in the recordings
“Yesterday” appears early in the second act. McCartney recorded the song in 1965 with acoustic guitar, and Martin proposed adding a string quartet. According to the Beatles’ official history, McCartney was initially unsure about the idea; he and Martin subsequently worked together on the arrangement. The finished recording features McCartney without the other three Beatles, accompanied by the quartet.
Marie calls the use of classical strings “groundbreaking” and “daring,” and says the idea was also a little embarrassing at the time. The production uses “Yesterday” to examine the band’s growing exposure to different kinds of music and the contribution of collaborators who helped turn those interests into recordings. It also offers a concrete example of Martin’s influence: audiences can hear the addition of strings and consider what they bring to a song otherwise built around a voice and guitar.
Martin’s own experience is a recurring thread. Before producing the Beatles, he had worked on comedy records at Parlophone and had a background in classical music, two areas Marie considers important to the decisions he made with the group. His memoir, All You Need Is Ears, became one of the books she relied on while developing the show.
“For me, his story is notably under-recognized,” she said. Marie is particularly interested in his conversations with the musicians and in specific production decisions. The string arrangement for “Yesterday” is an example audiences can recognize immediately; elsewhere, she uses his involvement to explain how the Beatles’ experiments moved from an idea to a finished record.
The research also drew on discussions with musicians and historians. Marie recalls a conversation with producer Dan Donahue about British sea merchants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century as one lead she found useful. She combined such conversations with published sources and recollections from people close to the group, a process made more complicated by the number of competing accounts of familiar incidents.
When the Beatles’ stories disagree
Marie points to John Lennon’s birth as an example of the difficulty. Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940, during the Second World War. His aunt Mimi recalled an air raid around his birth, but Beatles historian Barry Miles places no German attack on Liverpool that night. Other biographical research also disputes the account. The timing matters because the story has become an often-repeated detail in descriptions of Lennon’s early life.
“The most difficult scenario is when two Beatles recount events in conflicting ways,” Marie said, adding that other eyewitnesses can disagree just as easily. She says she compares accounts and considers the distance between an event and a person’s later memories. Yet the production’s current website still describes one of the four musicians as having been “born during an air raid,” even as Marie acknowledges that wartime records challenge the story. The public description therefore remains at odds with the historical chronology she discusses; her interview does not establish how the passage is presented in the current stage performance.
Marie says the show’s historical material has continued to change as the team revisits its sources. Becoming the Beatles was previously presented as The Men Behind the Music: Beatles Edition, and she distinguishes the later change of title from the revisions to its content. That work became particularly concentrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when performance opportunities were limited and the production team returned to the material.
Mary-Lu Zahalan directs the show, which has to work across theatres with different stage sizes and seating capacities. Marie says the performers watch how audiences respond and sometimes give additional emphasis to sections that engage them. She has been surprised by the strength of the response to some of the more intimate passages, an observation that has influenced how she thinks about the relationship between the performance and its audience.
“The ultimate goal is a mix between consistency and spontaneity,” she said. For a production with so many songs and projected images, maintaining its structure is part of touring; Marie is equally interested in what a different audience notices when it hears the same music and stories.
River Run Centre has school performances scheduled for students in Grades 7 and 8 from November 3 to 5, followed by the public performance of Becoming the Beatles on November 5 at 7:30 p.m. The Canadian tour continues in 2027 with engagements in Markham and Chatham, Ontario; Spruce Grove and Airdrie, Alberta; Vernon, British Columbia; and Parry Sound, Ontario. Tickets for the Guelph performance are available through River Run Centre.
