Day 3
Many NAMT shows go on to record cast albums. Here are a few shows that have recently gone through this exciting process. Click on each album cover to hear songs from the show or purchase the tracks!
*Lizzie will be released October 8th. Jump on this exciting pre-order right now!
An interview with Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor, writers of the upcoming Festival show The Sandman, about adapting the horror genre for the stage and writing “a little nightmare musical” for kids and adults alike.
NAMT: The Sandman is a true horror musical, not something that we see a lot of. Have you always wanted to write in this genre?
Richard Oberacker: Ever since I was a very young child, I had two obsessions: musical theatre and haunted houses. I think I understood that a good haunted house was actually interactive, immersive theater. And, oddly, throughout most of my youth, I became a bit of an entrepreneur, designing and building haunted attractions. I guess I always wondered if my two obsessions could be combined—but, of course, it had to be the right story. The best horror movies are always of a singular vision and have a delicate balance of fright and comedy. Both of those are authentic and therefore work only if they are organically connected to the story—they arise out of the givens of the circumstances. That means only the perfect story can give rise to the perfect recipe. If we had not happened upon Hoffmann’s work, and “Der Sandman” in particular, we would not have attempted a so-called horror musical.
NAMT: How did you discover the stories The Sandman is based on? Did you immediately know you wanted to adapt them into a musical?
Robert Taylor: Saying “we happened upon Hoffmann’s work” as Richard indicated is somewhat disingenuous, in that German romanticism in general, and the complete works of E.T.A. Hoffmann in particular, were a major area of study for me in my years at the Universities of Bonn and Princeton. Further, every child of the Western World knows Hoffmann’s Nutcracker. Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann actually contains elements of The Sandmanstory, as does Delibes’ classic ballet Coppelia. So in truth, I’ve known and been fascinated by Hoffmann’s sinister fairy tales (as well as those of Edgar Allen Poe, who counted Hoffmann among his favorite writers) for most of my life—and they seem to naturally lend themselves to musical theatricalization. I’m not sure why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with Hoffmann having been a brilliant musician and composer in his own right, with chamber music, symphonies, ballets and operas to his credit, as well as an unparalleled writer of fantasy. His fiction is filled with music and tales of musicians. He worshiped
Mozart—the “A” in E.T.A. Hoffmann stands for Amadeus, a name he took to honor the composer he considered to be the greatest genius of all time. And though never a playwright, his story–telling is inherently and brilliantly theatrical. So, how could we resist trying our hand at adapting some of Hoffmann’s tales for the musical stage? We’re certainly in good, though it must be admitted, rather intimidating company.
NAMT: While adapting, what did you consider the most important key to staying true or honest to Hoffman’s original work?
RO: The most important elements were two-fold. One, that the horrible or disturbing actions be presented as truthful experiences within the world of the play. Hoffmann often presents supernatural or nefarious happenings as perfectly plausible in the lives and environments of his characters. And secondarily, that Hoffmann’s sense of humor and social satire be honored. We found that when we combined both those elements, filtered through the conventions of a musical theatre piece, we landed on a style that closely resembled the sensibility of Tim Burton’s animated works.
NAMT: Tell us about the musical style of this piece, as it relates to the horror genre of the story.
RO & RT: The Sandman is set in Germany in the late 1830’s, about as horrific a setting for a musical as one can imagine, with the possible exception of Germany in the late 1930’s, so it gave us an opportunity to pay homage to the great German masters—Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann—while infusing the score with more nefarious and satirical sensibilities a la Kurt Weill, and the classic German horror film techniques of a Franz Waxman or Bernard Herrmann. I think the key to a successful horror film, and therefore a horror musical, has to do with the creation of a unified world which gives the viewer a very specific set of rules within which the plot and characters will function. Many of these rules often make no logical sense in the real world, but that is in fact the fun and the attraction of the medium. This ‘base line’ set of rules and the unified vision of the world serves as an entry point, an invitation to participate in the story. It’s a sort of seduction so that one is ready and willing to accept the dreadful and unnatural things that will surely follow. In the score of The Sandman, we do much the same thing. We create a very specific vocabulary which is at once melodic—and therefore accessible—and slight cartoony, which tells the listener the rules of this slightly odd-ball world and seduces them with a sense of play and a fairly assured ‘entertainment value.’ It’s showy. It has musical theatre in its DNA. That should please the listener, invite them to notice the German homages and enjoy in the winking acknowledgment of them, and gain their trust and participation before the real fun begins. Then of course, those themes and motifs begin to twist and distort. They begin to become aggressive and dissonant. The music becomes as unnatural as the goings on of the play. But it never loses its initial vocabulary.
NAMT: What was it like to marry the music and the text of the play together?
RO: The text and the music are really cut from the same cloth. It wasn’t a matter of having to “marry” them exactly because they are both born of the same off-kilter, darkly satirical vocabulary. The language has a certain musicality built into it. It all seemed to unify itself once we fully understood the world of The Sandman as we interpreted Hoffmann’s original.
NAMT: The Sandman, and another of your Festival shows, Ace, features a story based around children and their way of interpreting the world. Why does this narrative appeal to you, or is it just coincidence?
RO & RT: Though our musical Ace has matured, and no longer employs the theatrical conceit of a ten–year–old boy’s dream adventures to deliver the narrative as it did when it first premiered at NAMT in 2005, a child’s imagination, quick to enhance, distort, exaggerate and altogether alter reality, is something that does hold immense theatrical appeal for us—especially when telling a fairy tale of horror. Irrational childhood fear of ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night, is a state to which most of us gladly regress as adults when we want to be entertained – horror films, haunted houses, cemeteries, abandoned buildings or farms on dark moonless nights.
A child’s imagination can be so much more facile than an adult’s. They have the capacity to return over and over to stories and films, willing to experience the same journey many times and even extend it through their own playing, writing and art making. When a child experiences The Sandman, there should be a slightly naughty sense of getting away with something, a sense of seeing something just slightly beyond what they suspect their parents might have thought they were going to see (or would have even approved of their seeing). And in that experience, their imaginations are the most alive. They fill in voids with what they want to see. They believe in the most outrageous possibilities. They imagine what is not there. They delight in blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.
NAMT: Have you enjoyed a particular response to your shows from young audiences in the past?
RO: We were fortunate enough to have a first reading of The Sandman in a beautifully restored jewel-box theater with an extraordinary cast and full technical support—sound, lights, a few projected images and even a Foley artist. It was presented as a benefit performance and attended by a large audience including many young children and teens. This was a huge gift to us because we could gauge if our gamble on creating something that would appeal to both children and adults was successful. As it happened, the performance was enormously successful, and children in particular ate it up. So based on that experience, I would say we’re more encouraged about how this show will be received by young people and look forward to continued development on the piece in ways that will only strengthen their enjoyment of it.
NAMT: As mentioned, you guys are no stranger to the Festival. What keeps you coming back?
RT:We just thought it would be good to let everyone know we still existed. And we hear the Festival is still a really great place to pick up chicks. But beyond the obvious… It’s the best, most organized, well–respected showcase for new works in the country. The industry actually shows up, pays attention and has direct access to the writers in a way that leads to real productions—and for those of us who live and work outside of New York, that is absolutely invaluable.
Day 2
Today we highlight David Kirshenbaum—the only author to have four shows presented through the NAMT Festival: Vanities (2006), Party Come Here (2005), Summer of ’42 (1999) and Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1997).
Take a look at this video spotlighting the Original Off Broadway production of Vanities, and featuring an interview with David:
Congratulations on all your successes, David!
P.S.: Attend “SHOW OFF!” for a special performance from one of the Vanities original cast members. Can you guess who?
A guest blog entry from Tim Rosser, writer of The Boy Who Danced On Air to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
Everything about making a demo takes an extraordinary amount of time. Writing the orchestrations, rehearsing the singers, doing take after take, mixing it all together. Hours and hours and hours of your life. And it can always take longer. It’s basically up to you – how many hours and dollars are you willing to put in. You want it to be perfect because in some cases you need to sell your show with a song or two and the better technology gets, the more perfect it can be. And if you are a product of the catholic school system like me, you never think you’re trying hard enough. It’s the perfect storm. And then there are the practical decisions that make me want to pull my hair out. Who should sing the song? Who should play? How many people does it take to sound like a chorus? Like an orchestra? Will a click track make this song sound super tight or squeeze the life out of it? To use computer generated sounds or acoustic? How much money are we really willing to spend on a track of a song that could very realistically be cut from the show in a month? I have a heart-breaking story (my heart!) for every one of these variables and even so I still don’t feel like I’m in control most of the time Charlie and I go into the studio. I’d like to think I’m a little better at recognizing when we have a real problem on our hands and knowing how to fix it efficiently. But even then, I don’t actually know how much people care when the drums aren’t tuned right or there’s a mysterious purring sound on the guitar track or the tempo is too slow. Maybe no one notices any of those things. Or only some of them. That’s the thing with writing music and recording demos, I guess. It’s all taste and guessing.
I’d like to think that you can’t make a bad song sound like a good one with a good demo or a good song sound like a bad one with a bad demo, but I don’t believe that. I don’t necessarily believe that
the average listener can tell when a piano/vocal performance of a song has potential to be extraordinary in the future with a full band and a killer singer — probably because I don’t necessarily believe that I can tell. Especially now with contemporary musical theatre, where musicals can look and sound like virtually anything. I think musical theatre lovers are pretty adapted to imagining a full orchestra when they hear a pianist play Rodgers and Hammerstein — we know when a piano lick is meant to imply a woodwind solo or a lush string passage. Guitars and active drum parts are game changers. Pianos often don’t do good, clear impressions of these things and they can impact the nature of a song in a gigantic way. Nothing is more bland than a pop-rock score played on solo piano. It’s a style that relies much less on the rich harmonies and variable dynamics that pianos are fantastic at producing and much more on timbre and overlaying of parts. Pianos sound like pianos and overlaying lines on top of other lines with one hand is generally out of the question.
The Boy Who Danced On Airhas been an adventure as far as figuring out the most effective and basic ensemble needed to get the songs across. When we first started writing the show, I would send Charlie demos of me singing over a large array of electronic sounds. Faux-rubabs and domburas, a multitude of drums, auxiliary percussion, harmonium, piano, flutes, loads of things. I was experimenting, trying to see what worked and what didn’t. Looking for something special and transportive. We recorded our first set of demos over those original tracks with professional singers because it was less expensive and time–consuming than writing charts and bringing in players. Then, every time we performed any of the songs in concerts, I had to soul-search to decide what instruments we needed to re–create the essential sound. At different points I had a synthesizer playing dombura parts, strings pizz-ing to meagerly simulate rubabs, a real dumbek, a djembe pretending to be a dumbek, glock, electric bass, acoustic bass, no bass, a tambourine, leg strap jingles that I still don’t know the real name of… After lots of experimenting, it boiled down to an acoustic guitar (because the amazing Eric Davis proved to me that it’s actually possible to play the lute stuff I wrote on an acoustic instrument. And it sounds way better than synth. Surprise, surprise.), an assortment of percussion instruments and a hybrid hand drum, a piano and maybe harmonium. Admittedly, we probably need a bass. And maybe an actual rubab. Or maybe not. All subject to change with the wind… We eventually made new, acoustic, demos because we think they come across better — again, and ever, that question of what comes across better. I still listen to my original demos sometimes and wonder if anything has gotten lost in all paring down and acoust-ifying. And then, sometimes I wonder if I can save myself a lot of trouble, and just perform the songs with a piano. I can’t tell you the answer, but I’m functioning under the belief that a solid demo really matters and it’s better to leave as little as possible to the imagination.
Today marks 25 days until our Benefit “SHOW-OFF!” celebrating 25 years of NAMT’s Annual Festival of New Musicals. Leading up to the concert on October 20, we will be posting daily facts, photos, videos, and more, remembering some of the shows and authors from the last great 25 years.
DAY 1
We begin with a blast to the past, heading back to the year 1989 to rediscover some of the shows that started it all…
Little Ham recorded a cast album and it also available for licensing through Samuel French—visit their page on the show.
Read a New York Times review of Capitol Catwalk, which calls the show “ambitiously conceived” and “ingenious.”
Browse a newspaper article announcing the premier of the new musical Angelina by Barry Kleinbort.
And if you have the means, head to the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York City to watch the Goodspeed Opera House production of The Real Life Story of Johnny De Facto.
A guest blog entry from Irene Sankoff, writer of Come From Away to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
On August 6th, I delivered a brand new production that my husband and co-author, David Hein, and I had been working on for nine months. At 6 lbs, 1 ounce, she was heavier than most of our scripts (although nowhere near if you counted every draft). The delivery took 37 hours, but thanks to a crazy rotating team of doctors, nurses, residents, doulas and David, trying (in vain) to look calm and distract me by reading all the parts from Peter And The Starcatcher, opening night was (relatively) painless. We named her Molly.
Two days later, with a newborn in one hand and a keyboard in another – with the wi-fi password from Mt. Sinai hospital – we delivered the NAMT Act One 45-minute cut of our musical, Come From Away: Molly’s sibling. This cut and the entire presentation at NAMT took no less of a stellar team of professionals to accompany its birth.
We’d been working on Come From Away for longer than nine months – we started writing it in 2011, when we traveled out to Newfoundland to research it. Come From Away tells the true story of when thousands of international residents were stranded in a tiny, Canadian community in Newfoundland – and how the experience changed the lives of the passengers and the people there. It’s an inspiring story of cross-border collaboration during an international tragedy. We spent almost a month out in Newfoundland interviewing countless passengers, flight crew, locals and more. We returned home, continued to interview people across the world over Skype and then finally started putting the pieces together in workshops at Sheridan College’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project and then at Goodspeed Musicals’ Festival of New Artists. Then we got the incredible honor of being accepted into NAMT’s Festival… and did I mention I had just discovered through a series of (not so) subtle signs and discomforts that I was pregnant?
As Canadian playwrights, we don’t know many people in the New York Theatre world, so we considered it good fortune when
we knew at least one of our NAMT advisors – Bob Alwine from Goodspeed. Bob is awesome. Not only had he welcomed us warmly to Goodspeed’s Festival earlier this year, but he had traveled to a different country to see our show’s continued growth at Sheridan’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project. Bob’s great and knows our show inside out. Lucky Canadian playwrights.
Dana Harrel from La Jolla Playhouse was a complete stranger though and we still have only talked to her on the phone (we only figured out 2 calls later that “Dana” is pronounced “Donna”). She’d never seen our show or knew us from Adam, but to quote a lyric from our show, she “jumped right in with both feet tied.” Our first conversation with Bob, Dana and Branden from NAMT was incredibly exciting – tossing ideas around and getting feedback from people who had been developing incredible theatre for years. Near the end of the conversation we nervously mentioned that we would get totally derailed from the process by our third co-writer’s arrival, somewhere around Aug. 14 – two months before the festival. Dana, a mother herself, told us that she also had put on a show with a ONE-month old! She promised she would be “an overbearing mother” to me, that she would help us with whatever we needed, baby stuff, babysitting, etc. but she couldn’t promise that we wouldn’t be exhausted. And she said it was completely worth it. Lucky lucky Canadian playwrights.
As the process continued, we added more team members: Brian Hill (of Bartram & Hill fame) came on board. Brian had directed the workshops at Sheridan and Goodspeed and his show, The Story of My Life, was also part of the NAMT Festival in 2007. Bob made it possible for Dan Pardo, our music director at Goodspeed, to join us. Michael Rubinoff, our terrific producer at Sheridan checked in and advised every other day. Michael originally suggested the idea for the show, and since it was the first show in The Canadian Musical Theatre Project, I think he feels kind of fatherly about the show. Robb Nanus, our NAMT line producer, and John Michael Crotty, our stage manager, hopped on board. Every day our team grew larger – and then we started casting.
Bob, Dana, Branden, Brian and Michael all threw a million suggestions into the hat. Again, being Canadian, we barely recognized most of the names, so every night was spent googling and youtubing each actor – all incredible performers that we could only dream of working with. Bob and Dana, having worked with what seemed like EVERY actor at Goodspeed and La Jolla, had an encyclopedic list of amazing actors. Meanwhile, we kept refining the script, developing our demo recordings, choosing band members, re-orchestrating, sending out invitations – all the while going to prenatal classes and installing baby gates. But we still had plenty of time to get it all done before my Aug. 14th delivery date…until my water broke on Aug. 4.
We sent out a mass email, volunteering our director to take charge of the casting process (thank you again, Brian!), and our wonderful advisers Bob and Dana, also sprang into action. FYI, show updates are a great distraction from labor pain. We spent the next ten days or so in two hospitals (welcome to Canadian healthcare!). Molly was perfect, but they wanted to run tests and keep an eye on her. And our team didn’t bat an eye, continuing to put together an incredible band and cast.
As I type this, Molly is lying on one side of me on our couch and David is next to me typing on his computer on the other. We are book-ended by our cats. In the past couple weeks a succession of family and friends have paraded through, helping us with everything from dinner to diapers. It truly takes a village to raise a child.
And the same can be said for a NAMT show – and especially for this show about cross-border collaboration. We’ve been blessed to have so many wonderful (former) strangers donating their time and passion to our show. Come From Away is about Canadians and Americans coming together to create something magical – and the story behind the show’s development is the same. Bob just wrote to confirm a casting question we had. Dana, who worked on the true stories behind Hands On A Hardbody, is helping us with waivers for the people we interviewed. Emails come in literally every day from Branden, Robb, Brian, Dan and John.
Lucky lucky lucky Canadian playwrights.
An interview with George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, writers of the upcoming Festival show The Three Little Pigs, about the ups and downs of writing for children, the insights gained from international productions and their upcoming performance in the Festival of New Musicals. Interview conducted by NAMT’s Program Intern Audra LaBrosse.
NAMT: Three Little Pigs is a familiar story to most people. During your writing, how did you go about updating the tale and adding original touches?
George Stiles: Well, we did a similar thing with Honk!, our re-take of The Ugly Duckling. We enjoy making the characters as “human” as possible, and updating the dialogue so it feels contemporary and classic all at the same time! Family dynamics always interest us, how brothers and sisters manage to get along with each other, even though they’re often very different characters. So with the Pigs, we liked the idea that the father of the family had been “taken” by the Big Bad Wolf, so there’s a tension from the outset and makes the Mother a strong but put-upon figure who’s had to raise her piglets single-handed. We also thought a Wolf who reckoned he was “misunderstood” was fun… after all, he’s just doing what wolves do!
NAMT: This show is part of a “trio of trilogies.” Tell us a bit more about that concept.
GS: That’s all [Anthony’s] fault. He’s greedy. One’s never enough. But what’s great about it is that a theatre can choose to “mix and match” the shows. The second is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which we premiered earlier this year – and the final part will be The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Each is 45-50 minutes long, so you can do 1, 2 or 3 of them with the same 5 actors, and design a simple set that works for all three. That way, theatres can program the shows for daytime or evening presentations.
NAMT: Can you tell us briefly how you went about updating the other stories in the trilogy?
Anthony Drewe: Well we haven’t written The Three Billy Goats Gruff yet, but Goldilocks And The Three Bears is ready to go and played very successfully in Singapore earlier this year. Our self-imposed conundrum in writing the trilogy was that we wanted it to be possible to perform all three shows with the same five actors. In the story of Goldilocks there are traditionally only 4 characters, but this limitation actually gave us our way into retelling the story. We first meet Goldi as she
accompanies her father, Mr. Locks, a lumberjack, to the woods. Our new character, Mr. Locks, is felling trees to make way for a new road that is going to pass through the wood. It is when the tomboyish Goldi wanders off that she encounters the Bear’s cabin and her adventures begin. Despite the fact that Goldi has eaten Baby Bears’ porridge, broken his chair, and even had the temerity to sleep in his bed, the Bear Family see her as an ally who can help save their woodland from the bulldozers. So, as well as telling the much-loved fairytale, we have given it a modern day, ecological twist.
NAMT: The Three Little Pigs and your shows are directed towards family and younger audiences. What do you like about writing for this audience?
GS: You can’t fool younger children. They let you know immediately if they’re engaged and entertained. Often it’s their first time in a theatre, and that’s also a thrill and a responsibility for us. I also don’t think there’s a more heart-warming sound than the giggles of a kid when the show has made them laugh.
NAMT: Since young children always come with a chaperone, do you add anything to make it more enjoyable for the adults involved too?
AD: When devising shows for younger audiences, we have always tried to write in a way which will appeal to the target audience as well as to their older brothers and sisters, who are usually reluctantly “dragged” along, and to their parents and even grandparents. There is something very moving about seeing three generations going to the theatre together and all getting something slightly different from the experience. We try to throw in a few gags for the older members of the audience, which go over the heads of the kids hopefully without detracting from the story. With Honk!, Just So, Peter Pan and Mary Poppins the target audience is a bit older than that for The Three Little Pigs, but the same principle applies: tell the story clearly, with humor and hummable songs, add a few surprises and hopefully everyone goes home smiling.
NAMT: The Three Little Pigs was commissioned by Singapore Repertory Theatre (and has already been translated into Mandarin!). What was the experience like mounting the production there?
GS: We’ve a long history with Singapore Repertory Theatre. They have been fantastic at commissioning new work across the years and deserve to be recognized for that. English is the first language of Singapore—but of course there are many local idiosyncrasies and it’s part of the reason we named our three little pigs Cha, Siu and Bao, after our favorite dim sum of barbecued pork dumplings! #tasty. Gaurav Kripilani is the artistic and producing director and he loves getting new work premiered at his theatre and is very nurturing in the process—so the show has now had two successful runs there, one in English and one in Mandarin. We read both shows in London before mounting them. The other great discovery was our orchestrator, Ruth Ling—she’s a fantastically talented musician who has created our backing tracks—and she lives and works in Singapore. She’s trained in London and the USA—and I predict a glittering future for her.
NAMT: Because of your shows’ great successes, you tend to encounter international audiences often, and have been translated into many other languages. Have you learned or discovered anything about your shows, including Three Little Pigs, through a response from a non-British (and non-American) audience?
AD: We have been unbelievably fortunate that our shows, particularly Honk!, have been translated into so many languages—Hebrew, Icelandic, Danish, Filipino, Dutch, Japanese, Finnish, German, Belgian, Portuguese, Swedish and Mandarin. Translations bring many challenges, particularly for the poor translators. We advise them to try keep “the essence” of the meaning without doing a slavish translation—in some languages it is very hard to find an exact equivalent and, in the case of Danish, for example, the vocabulary is only a quarter of that of the English language. I actually directed Honk! in Tokyo and I had to have a translator and interpreter on hand all the time so that I could at least understand what the actors were saying. The other challenge is that sometimes a simple monosyllabic word in the English language requires a multi-syllabic word in the local language, which has a knock on effect in a song where one syllable is usually allocated to one note—so occasionally a few extra notes have to be added to the melody!
When we watch productions overseas it is interesting to note the way in which different audiences react. Generally the key moments, be they comical, moving or scary, elicit a similar reaction. I remember in Japan that the audiences were very respectful, clapping at the first appearance of the star performers, and generally only clapping 7 claps (I counted) after each song. There was little laughing out loud, which seemed to be a cultural thing, but at the end of the show the audience went wild! I guess a good story is a good story, no matter what the language and, in the case of Honk!, Hans Christian Andersen did the hard work for us!
NAMT: You were previously at the NAMT Festival with Honk!. What part of the Festival process are you excited to revisit again?
GS: Pretty much every part! Working with insanely talented Broadway performers for a start. The chance to showcase our piece to so many great regional theatres, as well as New Yorkers—it was hugely beneficial to the life that Honk!has enjoyed since 1999 when it was at the Festival. The chance to meet other writers, to work with the brilliant Vicky Bussert and Ryan Garrett—and just to be in NYC for another week always puts a spring in our steps!
NAMT: Have there been any recent edits to The Three Little Pigs that you are excited to try out in New York?
AD: With The Three Little Pigs, we held a semi-staged reading in London before the show opened in Singapore in 2012. A few changes were made between the reading and the production, and some further edits and additions were made in rehearsal. For the NAMT Festival we have made a few little edits to get the running time down so that we are “in and out” in 45 minutes—so you pretty much get the whole show for this presentation. As I think Michael Price of Goodspeed Opera House once said to me, “No-one ever complained about a show being too short!”
A guest blog entry from Michael Shaieb, writer of The Astonishing Return of… The Protagonists! to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
About fifteen years ago when I graduated from the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program, I was faced with the reality of what I would do for a living. I had some recording equipment and thought that perhaps I could start a recording studio. When I met my partner, Brent Lord, who had the technical knowledge, we formed a company which later became FatLab Music. We specialized in recording demos for music theatre writers and performers.
When I began writing The Protagonists with my collaborator, Kevin del Aguila, the question was how do we record our show to convey the different stylistic choices we created for our world. The Protagonists contains a world of
funk, classic pop and epic superhero music. It’s difficult to showcase this on just a piano. So as Kevin and I were writing, I built the song tracks using the many tools of my trade to create the demo that we have today.
As far as the vocals go, we invited our actors in separately and recorded them one at a time which gave us more flexibility during the mixing process. And because it’s our own space, we have the leisure of taking the time we need since we’re not on the clock at another studio.
Regarding the use of instruments, real or sampled, I always ask the question “Can a listener understand the world of the show with just a piano?” Believe me, I would prefer the ease of doing a demo with just piano and vocals. But when the style of the show is also a character, I think that the extra time and effort is definitely worthwhile.
So here we are, demo in hand, about to showcase The Protagonists at NAMT. We are very thankful for this opportunity. I have to admit, my favorite thing is being in the recording studio, and I’m very excited to share our demo with everyone.
An interview with Charlie Sohne and Tim Rosser, writers of the upcoming Festival show The Boy Who Danced on Air, about the careful process of writing a show about the Afghani tradition of Bacha bazi, which literally translated means “boy play,” a practice where wealthy men take in poorer boys and train them to dance. Interview conducted by NAMT’s Program Intern Audra LaBrosse.
NAMT: Bacha bazi is not a well-known practice to a Western audience. How did you learn about this tradition and what about it inspired you to write a musical centered on it?
Charlie Sohne: We saw a documentary about bacha bazi called The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan and it kind of smacked us in the face. The access that the filmmaker got to both the men and boys involved was really amazing and the existence of the practice brought up so many questions that to us felt universal to all cultures, including our own. The discussions we had afterwards about religion, the different ways sexuality expresses itself and the intersection of tradition, morality and a community’s power structure made us feel like there was a lot there to be mined.
Tim Rosser: We were also very interested at the time in finding material that “demanded to be musicalized” – as in, it would feel like a let down to tell this story without music because music and dance are essential to this subject matter.
NAMT: Was there a moment of this documentary that stuck out most, that you saw and imagined a dramatic moment immediately?
CS: The most striking moment for me was when one of the boys talks about growing up and owning boys of his own. It was absolutely fascinating to hear how matter of fact it was and how much of an inevitability it was for him.
TR: And that moment was actually the basis and inspiration for the song “When I Have A Boy Of My Own” that ends Act I. (Editors note: listen to a clip from this song on the Festival info page)
NAMT: Historical and cultural accuracy are important in the writing of any show, and especially one with a sensitive subject matter like The Boy Who Danced on Air. What has the process of writing the show been like, keeping this in mind?
CS: Our first step was
to do as much reading as we could. We started with overviews about the political history of Afghanistan and then delved into more specific aspects of Afghan culture – firsthand accounts of people who had actually lived there proved most useful in giving us a picture of the world. We also watched a bunch of documentaries which served us not only as far as getting more information about Afghanistan but also to sort of root us visually in what contemporary Afghanistan looks like. Once we had a draft, we asked that Zarina Maiwandi, who’s an academic with experience in Afghanistan read the piece for accuracy – and she was very kind in making herself available to consult not only on that first draft, but as we developed the piece.
TR: I bought a bunch of CD’s of Afghan folk music when we began working. Beyond that, I learned about the instruments that were local to the region and experimented with those sounds. I’m not too interested in writing music that could be mistaken for actual Afghan folk music, just as I’m not interested in writing music that could be mistaken for Sondheim. I do want to borrow the beautiful sounds, rhythmic patterns and tone I’m hearing on my CD’s but the most important part for me is working them into an expression that feels special and new to me.
NAMT: Tell us a bit more about the musical stylization of the show.
TR: We both agreed pretty early on that we wanted to find a hybrid sound for this show, a mix of east and west. It’s one of the ways we respond to the challenge of giving the story a sense of place while creating something that feels unique to this particular show. It’s also a way to acknowledge that this isn’t just a story about Afghanistan, it’s a bigger picture. I thought it was important to have at least one strummed string instrument in the band. Lutes have played a major part in music of the Middle East. I wanted a piano for warmth and a sense of magic. Western audiences have a lot of associations with the piano. And percussion is the wild card. Percussionists can play anything; they know no borders! Lots of shows begin with a piano reduction, but because this palate is so unusual and not meant for a full orchestra or other familiar kind of treatment down the road, I’ve relied heavily on the program garageband to work out the arrangements as I write the music. It can be incredibly time consuming to work this way, but who knows what a dombura, harmonium, piano and snare drum are going to sound like together? I have no point of reference for this kind of combination. And that’s the fun!
NAMT: Given American involvement with Afghanistan in the past decade, the content and context of the show feel very relevant. Do you think it is important for musical theatre to comment on current events?
CS: I think writing about contemporary topics in musical theater presents its own unique challenge in that musicals take so long to come into being that you risk that the situation you’re writing about changes by the time you’re done. So while the setting of the piece is contemporary and it feels very relevant to us in this country because of our political involvement in Afghanistan, the show is not about the war or even Afghanistan as a whole. While being rooted in a particular place and time, the show deals with something pretty universal: the intersection between a society’s power structure and its views on morality – and at the show’s heart is a timeless and romantic love story.
I do think that musical theatre has an almost magical ability to remind us of a common humanity – if done right, it’s a medium that allows us to empathize with, connect with and understand characters who otherwise we’d hold at a distance. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I really do think that’s the power of song. Because of that, I think it’s wonderful when a musical explores something that an audience might initially feel distanced from or unable to understand – there’s nothing better than walking out of the theater and feeling an unexpected sense of empathy or connection that wasn’t there before.
NAMT: After an audience leaves The Boy Who Danced on Air, what do you hope they are left with?
CS: I think this is probably an area where I come off as annoying, but I worry about saying too much – just because the topic is so rich, and I know what I’ve used to help me organize and clarify the piece, but I want people to have that same flood of feelings and thoughts that I had when I first saw the documentary.
TR: Basically, it’d be great if people are moved enough to talk about the show during the ride home.
A guest blog entry from George Stiles, writer of The Three Little Pigs to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
The Three Little Pigs was written in response to a specific brief from the Singapore Repertory Theatre. Over the past few years, they have built up their younger audiences – from 3 years and over – with their dedicated “The Little Company.” Singapore has a huge number of school-age children, for whom English is their first language, with Malay, Mandarin or Hokkien as their second. SRT realised that this audience was barely catered for with live entertainment and that, aside from large, highly-visible branded tours, there was a lack of high quality musical theatre material.
Since we already had considerable experience writing for a truly “family” audience (Honk!, Mary Poppins, Just So, Peter Pan) we were intrigued to see how we could adapt our style to cater for an audience of 3 years and upwards. We were encouraged to find a story that “sold itself” by having title recognition, and that had a small cast to make the numbers work. We briefly thought of Snow White, before realizing it inherently demanded at least 8 in the cast! So we soon settled on The Three Little Pigs – immediately wondering if we could write a “trilogy of trios” – and move on to Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Well, we figured the “rule of three” works even better as the rule of three threes!
We quickly found a sense of liberation knowing that we wanted the show to run at 45-50 minutes, have just 5 in the cast and be understood by very young children as well as be enjoyed by their older brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents. As kids, we both remember loving
watching shows with our parents and sometimes not getting everything that was said or sung, but knowing our folks were having as great a time as we were – all laughing at the same jokes and singing along to the same catchy tunes. So we set about trying to do the same ourselves. Shorter song structures, repeated lyrical ideas, fairly straightforward messages but also a wide range of musical references and lots of “suddenly”s (our old friend the playwright David Wood’s phrase for making sure that on every page of script there is at least one metaphorical “when, suddenly…”) as a device to keep the children engaged and focused.
We loved writing the show. It flew by and we clocked up the key songs “A real Pig-sty”, “A Bit Misunderstood” and “A Little House” over a couple of months while working on other projects. We then sat down to assemble the show over a few weeks at Ant’s house in the South-West of France.
The show was a very considerable success in Singapore – the run was extended and played for over 70 sold-out performances – on the set of another show that played the regular 8-show-week. It’s since been translated into Mandarin and played a further 4 sold-out weeks in the same 350-seat theatre.
We believe that there is a huge opportunity here for theatres to program more creatively – reaching out to locals schools and pre-schools and building an audience for this kind of educative, fun and accessible musical theatre. And of course the show also works for the whole-family weekend and holiday schedules. Down the line, our idea is that you could also choose to perform two of these short shows as a double-bill to make a full evening’s entertainment – thus giving the shows the ability to be programmed in many different ways.
We’ve already written and premiered Goldilocks, to even greater success and will start work on the Billy Goats later this year for a 2015 premiere. We already have movie and TV interest in them – there’s no doubt that children’s entertainment across the world is massively in the ascendant. Don’t be left behind – there’s a whole new audience for theatre to be won over here, and a whole new chance to make your theatres full, vibrant and earning at times you didn’t think could be profitable.
An interview with Paul Gordon, writer of the upcoming Festival show Analog and Vinyl, about revisiting his musical roots and just how different developing Analog and Vinyl is from working on his 2006 Festival show Emma. Interview conducted by NAMT’s Program Intern Audra LaBrosse.
NAMT: Analog and Vinyl marks your second time as part of the Festival. What part of your experience with Emma in 2006 drew you back?
PAUL GORDON: The Festival is such a wonderful opportunity, not only to show your work to a large theatre community, but it also allows the authors to see their work in an entirely different light, as we are required to present the essence of the work in 45 minutes. This forces you to truly identify what’s important in your storytelling and make hard choices. With Emma,the big discovery was having the character of Emma break the fourth wall through narration, a device we use today that never would have been discovered without the Festival. The Festival directly led to many first class regional productions of Emma and a possible Broadway future.
NAMT: Has the Festival process so far revealed or refined anything about Analog and Vinyl?
PG: Absolutely. When you condense your script to 45 minutes you learn things about the storytelling you didn’t know before. My biggest challenge with Analog and Vinyl was trying to balance the songs between the two leading characters. Once I cut the script down, the character of Harrison was short changed on songs at the beginning of the show, so I decided to write a new song just for the festival called “My Mythology.” Now I can’t imagine doing the show without that song. The Festival has already improved the show and we’re not even in rehearsals yet.
NAMT: Tell us a bit about the genesis of Analog and Vinyl.
PG: Analog and Vinyl’s original title was: “Analog and Vinyl: A Jukebox Musical of Songs That Nobody Has Ever Heard of That Were Never Hits.” (Too long?) A few years ago I decided to write a musical based on my own catalogue of pop songs that I used to perform myself back when I was a singer-songwriter playing clubs around Los Angeles. I wrote the first draft of the show as an exercise for myself to see if I could write a jukebox musical. Since I did not have access to a famous music catalogue, I decided to use my own, which I own and control myself. So I took one song and
imagined a story around that one song and I began writing the book. Then an odd thing happened. I ended up being more drawn to the book than I was to the score. I felt that half of the songs just felt clunky and didn’t work. So I threw those songs out and wrote new songs. I re-wrote lyrics to the few remaining “original” songs. Then I tweaked the book more. And slowly, organically over time, it became a hybrid of something entirely new.
NAMT: The music for Analog and Vinyl might be a surprise to those who know you from Jane Eyre. Have you always wanted to write a musical with a more pop-influenced score?
Emma at member theatre The Old Globe
PG: I think what people don’t know about me is that I started my career as a pop songwriter. I’ve had a few #1 hits as a pop songwriter (Peter Cetera and Amy Grants “Next Time I Fall,” among a few others), and my songs have appeared on many gold and platinum records. When I wrote Jane Eyre– that was the surprise, not the other way around. So Analog and Vinyl is actually closer to my musical roots than Jane Eyre or Emma.
NAMT: What changes in your approach to writing pop songs for a musical versus for a non-dramatic context?
PG: When writing songs for Warner/Chappell, Universal and EMI, I would simply write about my latest romantic crush or heartbreak and it all worked out pretty well. But after a while I got pretty sick of myself and writing about myself. When I started working on Jane Eyre for the first time it was an amazing epiphany. Here was a wealth of genius and experience that I could basically plagiarize and turn into songs that were not about me. I was in heaven. And it actually felt easier than staring at a blank page, trying to find a phrase that hadn’t already been used a thousand times and didn’t feel generic. Once I started adapting from novels, the lyrics became fresher, more finely tuned and connected to a larger story, and songwriting became exciting again. And I am no longer under any outside artistic pressure for my life to be interesting.
NAMT: All of Analog and Vinyl‘s components (book, music, and lyrics) were written by you alone. How is the solo process different from a collaboration with other writers?
PG: Well, for one thing, when I write all the components myself, I’m writing in a vacuum and it’s more challenging to evaluate your own work when your writing partner is not sitting across from you saying, “well, that could be better.” I love working with John Caird because he’s never afraid to tell me that what I’ve just written is crap. (He never says the word “crap.” He’ll just say that’s a CDB—”could do better.”) When I’m writing on my own I am always afraid that what I’m writing is crap—and if John were here he’d tell me so—but he isn’t, so I must decide for myself whether or not if what I’m writing is truly crap or worthy of at least another listen. So that’s the big disadvantage. The upside is that eventually critics will tell you you’re crap, so there’s no real worry there. But I truly enjoy writing everything myself, especially as a first draft.
NAMT: As mentioned, Analog and Vinyl is an original musical, but you have written a number of adaptations as well. What do you like about the process of creation for each?
PG: Creating an original story is much more difficult than doing an adaptation and here’s why: with an adaptation you know going in—the story works. That part is done. (And that’s huge.) The tricky thing with an adaptation is deciding which parts of the story to tell and which parts to leave out. Not easy, but not nearly as difficult as creating an engaging original story that hasn’t stood the test of time. But I love writing original stories simply because it is so challenging. And I also enjoy the freedom it gives me to go anywhere and do anything.
With Analog and Vinyl I was able to express myself in a world uninhabited by corsets and Regency dresses. My characters can finally say four letter words and use slang. When I break out my rhyming dictionary I can consider words used past the 1900’s. With that said, I just got through adapting another novel and I absolutely loved the experience. For entirely opposite reasons. I loved the limitations, simply because I trust the author and I know the linear storytelling is completely in place. I love the framework a novel gives me and I love knowing how it’s all going to turn out before I begin.
NAMT: Not having a plot to work off of, did you ever surprise yourself with where the story was going while writing Analog and Vinyl?
PG: Yes. I remember reading something Neil Simon said years ago—although he always outlined his plot points—he let his characters tell him where the story was going. In writing Analog and Vinyl, I had plotted in my head “the plot,” but once I started writing, the characters had different ideas and I just went with it. I was actually surprised when the story veered towards the metaphysical, that was not my original intention. But I’m grateful for the character of Satan. He was actually much friendlier than I had anticipated.
An interview with Tom Mizer and Curtis Moore, writers of 2012 Fest show Triangle, about the development of the show and their upcoming production at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma in the spring.
Logo for the Lyric Theatre workshop production
Triangle is an original romantic drama that weaves together the story of two couples from different eras — in 1911 a Jewish seamstress and her Italian foreman, in 2011 a chemistry grad student and a free-spirited stranger who has broken into his lab. It all takes place in the same building, the site of New York’s infamous Triangle Factory Fire. Although the facts of the Triangle fire are tragic, the musical is full of humor, love, mystery and emotion. In the end, it’s not about grief — it’s about moving beyond the past to find joy in the here & now — how we need to take a risk and reach out to another person.
What was the response like to the show at the Festival?
The response to Triangleat the Festival was incredibly warm and positive. Once we could actually breathe again after the terror of our first presentation, we were so grateful that the audience seemed to fall in love with the characters as much as we have. The best part, more than any of the productive conversations about “next steps,” was seeing people emotionally affected, truly moved — and from just a cutting at music stands. Honestly, with just 40 minutes to tell our multiple stories, we would have been thrilled if people had simply followed the time period jumps without their heads exploding — but to have people also getting a good cathartic cry at 11am at New World Stages, that was amazing! It gave us such encouragement to know that the story we are telling can move people and that it belongs in a live theater where people can experience it together.
You were rewriting leading up to the Festival. How much did the Festival presentation influence your continued work on the show?
It was essential and transformative. Doing a 40-minute cut of the piece forces you to get to the heart of the show, to figure out what really matters in each scene and get rid of everything else. When we went back to the full script, we wanted to keep that momentum and focus – get rid of extra complications, cut the chit chat and get to the emotion and the conflict. As much as we may enjoy a page long conversation about the retrosynthetic analysis of haplophytine, it’s not the chemistry people come to the theater for… though Curtis will perform it for you if you ask him nicely.
What has changed with the show since the Festival?
Our Festival experience confirmed what we’d been feeling since our readings at TheatreWorks Palo Alto. Since then we’ve been focusing on the first 20 minutes of the
show to clean out the excess plot, jump into the heart of the story more quickly and make Brian’s (our leading man) problem clearer and simpler to engage with. More specifically, there’s a new opening number (with two other new songs in the works as well), one strand of Brian’s plot has been completely removed, we’ve allowed Brian to start the show from a more positive place so he has further to travel emotionally and we’ve reconfigured when we transition from present to past so that you live in each time period a bit longer (and have time to get emotionally invested) before jumping back and forth.
Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma will be presenting a workshop production of Triangle this spring. Tell us a bit about this production and what you hope to achieve.
In Oklahoma, Brian is not a singing chemist; he will be a singing cowboy. Seriously, we are so excited to be working with Michael Baron and everyone at the Lyric. We will be heading out to Oklahoma in March for an extended rehearsal period, to workshop the new draft on its feet. The public performances will have full costumes and lights and sets and there will be a 6-piece orchestra! The chance to hear those big romantic melodies on some strings… it’s going to be so emotional for us. The big goal is to “write” the physical world of Triangle, to work through how we transition from the present to the past on stage. In readings, we can simply read a stage direction (“it is now 1911” and presto) but on stage, how do we make those transitions magical and theatrical and meaningful. And on a practical level, can Ben get into his Vincenzo costume in the two lines that we have on the page for him to change or are we going to end up with Bencenzo?
Why should people head to Oklahoma to catch Triangle up on its feet?
Well, first of all we’ve heard that the facilities at the Lyric are first-rate, so you’re going to get a great-looking and-sounding show. But I think the big thing is that the story of Trianglemay work in a reading but you’re always missing out on some of the magic of it, the theatrical elements that are just as important to the themes and story as the book and score. This show is about theatricality; the script has always had stage directions that emphasize what can only happen in a live theater experience… and they are finally going to happen. It’s about the moments when the present slides into the past, where ghosts appear and the past reaches to try to touch the present, where one actor with a slight change of posture or a single prop becomes another character right in front of the audience. It’s going to be challenging work for all of us to figure out how to do it right, but I think it will be exciting for the audience to see the show take those leaps at last.
For more information on Triangle, please visit www.lyrictheatreokc.com
A guest blog entry from Jennie Redling, writer of My Heart Is the Drum to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
As a librettist and playwright, I’ve always considered rehearsals to be the most exciting part of a production. It’s when the characters who have allowed me to hear and write their voices and passions and who have lived inside and beside me are suddenly before me—alive.
In terms of preparing for rehearsal, choosing a director is, for me, the most important part. This is a story about how we discovered a director who is an uncannily ideal match for our NAMT presentation of My Heart Is the Drum.
You need to know that for this show I had developed a major case of the jitters. I had become unusually attached to, and protective of, the characters I had been writing for our musical, especially the two lead girls: a tenderly naïve sixteen-year-old protagonist from Ghana and her equally innocent best friend of the same age. Could the universe deliver the special person in whose hands they would be safe and bloom?
When Branden [Huldeen, NAMT’s Festival Producing Director] presented our team with a list of possible directors to choose from, Stacey, Phillip and I set about learning as much as we could about them on the Internet. I can’t remember in what order I reviewed the various (fine and highly reputable) directors, I only know (thank you, PBS Video) that the smiling image of
Schele Williams’ ingenuous, exhilarated (and lovely) face was easily the most compelling of them all.
In the video that followed that initial image, I watched Schele work with high school students as a drama and vocal coach. The video clip was part of a documentary about kids who won local awards for their performances in high school musicals throughout the country and were now in New York City competing for a “Jimmy Award” (dedicated to James M. Nederlander) given to the most talented actor and actress among them. In this segment, Schele was working with teen-aged girl on how best to deliver her song.
Naturally, as the main characters of our show are also teen-aged girls, this grabbed my attention. And if that weren’t enough of a coincidence, I had a personal connection to the Jimmy Awards; I had attended the very first Jimmy Awards presentation because, as an acting coach, I was a frequent judge for my area’s “Metro Awards” given to high school musicals in the New York suburbs where I live. As a result, I was quite familiar with kids like these, the pressure they were under and how the power of their emotions can be helped by sensitive guidance; on how to be specific, how to release defenses and how to commit to a song.
Schele Williams
Which is exactly the sort of guidance I watched Schele impart. She gave this young lady a crucial tip as to what a certain lyric really meant to her particular character, and with this new understanding, the student really delivered the goods. Then while commenting on the experience, Schele made it obvious that she sincerely cared about the young woman, rejoicing in her final discovery and success. Here was a director with insight and warmth that young people responded to who was saying that she felt her job was to let the kids know they could be real and honest and not have to pretend to be a Broadway star. Perfect much? I was sold.
My partners agreed she was at the top of our list but felt it was fair to consider several people. And so, although my mind was made up, I agreed to a meeting. Not only was Schele as caring, unpretentious and smart in person as she appeared on film, but she seemed to truly “get” our show, with its delicate balance of joyous celebration and dangerous events. And she more than got it—she was already immersed in it. While reading Act II on the subway, she had become so engrossed that she missed her stop!
After we unanimously chose Schele and she and I had a chance to speak one on one, she shared her goals with me. They included keeping everyone committed to the story, to giving a true interpretation of the play, helping the actors recognize that these are real people they will represent and that these people confront the challenges to health today caused by those who dismiss or deny the gravity of HIV.
So the universe came through. It brought us somebody who I believe is the somebody to bring the characters I wrote to life, in the strongest way possible. I can hardly wait for rehearsals to begin.
A guest blog entry from Ben Sussman, writer of Eastland to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
Years back, when I first heard Andy White’s pitch for Eastland, I was incredulous. “Another sinking ship musical? Are you kidding me?” The Titanic story has already been romanticized for decades, because it has all the elements of a tabloid headline: fabulously wealthy people, tremendous hubris, followed by karmic retribution.
But the Eastland story is almost exactly the opposite. While the time period is the same (1915), here we have a bunch of low-income, blue collar immigrants boarding a boat for their corporate summer picnic. Before the ship even leaves the dock, it capsizes and more than 800 people drown. There is brief media attention, then silence. This was the worst boating disaster in U.S. history and to this day almost nobody has heard of it.
And so Andy approaches his script thoughtfully: if such a tragedy is so easily forgotten, what does that mean about the value of these people’s lives? Does their socioeconomic status make them less important? What is the value of anyone’s life? And are we really in control of our path to the extent that we think we are?
Things shift, they change
That’s life, it rearranges
And speaking of unexpected twists — I recently discovered that this story is directly relevant to my own. Through genealogical research and interviews, I learned that my own great grandfather was yet another employee set to board the Eastland. He arrived a bit late, after the boat had already turned over. If he had showed up 20 minutes earlier, would I even be here to help tell the story?
Needless to say, it was an intense and thrilling experience bringing this show into a full production at Lookingglass Theatre last year. And now the excitement has returned again as we begin to make cuts, dust off the score, and discuss casting options for the NAMT production. We can’t wait to spin this tale with new voices, to an even larger audience.
A guest blog entry from Anthony Drewe, writer of The Three Little Pigs to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
2013 actually marks my third return to the NAMT Festival. My first visit was in 1993 when I came purely as an invited visitor to sit in on some of the conference sessions, as well as seeing several of the Festival presentations of new musicals. I was blown away by the standard of the new writing, the quality of the presentations, the fact that actors of such caliber were happy to participate in such readings and the phenomenon that an organization existed purely to discover and nurture new musicals. The fact that NAMT was made up of professional theatres from all across America was inspiring, and the approach of those theatres to sharing and co-funding productions was something that I knew was sorely lacking in the UK at that time. Back in 1993 I wasn’t sure that the NAMT Festival was something that Brits could apply for, but I knew it was something that I would love to be a part of. Even the names of some of your theatres like Goodspeed Opera House, Walnut Street Theatre, Papermill Playhouse, Seaside Repertory Theatre, Bay Street Festival Theatre sounded somehow more romantic and exciting than British theatres. So, you can imagine how thrilled I was in 1999 when a little musical I had written with my long time collaborator, George Stiles, called HONK! was accepted for the Festival.
Actually, two amazing things happened for HONK! in 1999. As well as being given a reading at the Festival, in December of the same year it was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London. The NAMT Festival preceded the RNT production by three months, and we were delighted with both the reaction the show received and the interest shown in it by so many theatres. Tony Stimac at the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Centre in Nyack was the first to produce the show in the Spring of 2000 and
it was during its run there that the RNT production back in London won the ‘Best New Musical’ category in the Laurence Olivier Awards, beating THE LION KING and MAMMA MIA. Suddenly it seemed everyone wanted our little show about an Ugly Duckling. Jon Kimbell at North Shore Music Theatre mounted its second US production and now, to date, there have been over 8,000 productions of the show around the world – most of them in the USA, and a very large proportion of those being in NAMT member theatres.
Now, George and I are returning to the NAMT Festival with THE THREE LITTLE PIGS – a musical unashamedly aimed at the next generation of theatre-goers. In advertising for submissions for the 2013 Festival, NAMT expressed a wish to encompass as wide a range of musicals as possible for different audiences. We wrote THE THREE LITTLE PIGS as part of a musical trilogy for children (along with companion shows GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS and THE THREE BILLY GOATS GRUFF). The show is aimed at children from the age of 3 and up with the hope that it will introduce them to
the wonders of theatre by taking a well-known fairy tale and musicalizing it. The kids arrive with title recognition and certain expectations, and hopefully leave singing. In the UK we have seen a proliferation of child-friendly productions whereby theatres, including some in the West End, stage two daytime performances to busloads of children, on an easily storable/touring set and then, in the evening, resume performances of the resident “adult” production. We very much hope that our three little pigs may set out on a similar journey to our ugly duckling across America as a result of being presented at New World Stages in October.
We are delighted to be coming back to New York for the Festival, and to share in the celebrations for the NAMT’s 25th Anniversary. To misquote Oscar Wilde, to be included once in the Festival may be regarded as fortunate, to be included twice is little short of miraculous.
A guest blog entry from Richard Oberacker, writer of The Sandman – a little nightmare musical to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.
In 1999, I became the first American conductor ever hired by Cirque Du Soleil. It was for their new Big Top tour, Dralion and it was at a time when it was still really chic to even know what Cirque was. My theater friends were confounded by how a New York musical theater industry guy had managed to break into the mysterious inner circle of this seemingly impenetrable rising giant. The truth was it had to do with one small connection followed by about three months of extensive interviews. Many of these interviews focused on my work as a musical theater conductor, composer and lyricist. It began to dawn on me then – and continued to be even more clear once I was on the inside – that Cirque was as confused and intrigued by (but ultimately ignorant of) musical theater as the American musical theater industry was by and about Cirque Du Soleil.
That same year, I was selected to present my original musical In That Valley at the NAMT Festival of New Musicals – another organization that was a new frontier for me. Of course I was thrilled to learn about NAMT and to have the opportunity to showcase a very challenging musical that I knew had very little chance of ever being produced commercially (or otherwise, for that matter given its subject). I set about trying to figure out how I would be able to deliver a great presentation at the festival – with all that NAMT demanded – while doing 10 shows a week on the road with a brand new Cirque show that was still at
the time making substantial changes daily as it prepared for an American premier in Los Angeles. As it happened, the answer was simple and at that time the only answer possible as far as Cirque was concerned: do NAMT only on my days off.
Now, in 1999 the Festival was a slightly different animal. The physical presence of the writers was not demanded to the extent it is now. Rehearsals could be scheduled over a longer period of time and lots of rules that concerned Equity could be gently bent. And so with the help of my co-author, I learned how to present a NAMT Festival show by way of telephone coaching sessions, mailed rehearsal tapes and many Sunday night red-eye flights.
The fact was that those three months of interviews to get the job with Cirque turned out to be their way of determining how committed I would be to them and how serious I was about continuing to be a writer of musical theater. Working for Cirque is a lifestyle change. It is a completely different philosophy about the performing artist and his relationship to his chosen discipline, the show and the company as a whole. There are very specific clauses in the contract about what an artist can and cannot do outside their work with Cirque. Some of these clauses would appear to an American performer as going way above and beyond a standard “non-compete” clause. However, once I had accepted this contract and indeed this entire approach to the work, I saw its value as it related to creating and maintaining a Cirqueshow. It isn’t anything like doing American theater – musical or otherwise – and it must function by these rules to be everything that the world has come to admire.
After my first NAMT show, my challenge became how to gently guide my Cirquecolleagues to an understanding of my work back in New York. I knew that I would not simply stop writing and if I was writing, I would naturally be looking for opportunities to develop and present my work. And that would mean I would have to ensure there was some protocol in place at Cirque that would allow me to get away when it was necessary to fulfill future writing obligations. And so began my education of Cirque.
The first step was to introduce them to the idea of an associate conductor. I’ll pause here while you contemplate the full implications of that statement… Remember, they had never hired an American conductor and never dealt with the structures of a standard musical direction team as we know it on a musical. Subs in the pit? Unheard of. I mean really, REALLY unheard of. As in, “What’s a sub? How does that work?” My Cirque colleagues and I can laugh about it now, but at the time I had to develop a pretty good poker face so that I wouldn’t damage my jaw by all the many times it was sent dropping to the floor. I then had to carefully explain to them the concept of how a musical is developed – the many different paths that it can take. I had to explain what readings were, what workshops were, what a standard rehearsal and tech period was. I had to explain where in those processes an author or composer might be required to be present and why. I had to explain to a large degree, and delicately of course, revenue streams. At what point was a composer being paid? Where is the line between time away to develop a piece without being paid and pursuing “other employment” based on future royalties? How might these new works of mine be considered in competition with what I bring to Cirque in terms of my own (uncredited) composing for them?
These conversations took place gradually over the next several years and eventually they began to see the value to the company as a whole to having at least some measures in place that would allow other Cirque artists and employees to explore creative endeavors outside their commitments to Cirque. But most importantly I gained the trust of my colleagues. I let them know that my work with them would always come first and that my gratitude to them for taking a chance on me back in 1999 was absolute. When they invited me to be the original conductor for the creation of a new show in Las Vegas titled Kathat mutual trust was a given. Within the first year of public performances of Ka,I was selected to present another original musical for the 2005 NAMT Festival.
However, I still requested of Cirque only the least amount of time away because Ka was so new. As it happened, I needed only 2 days away because at that time
NAMT still didn’t require the writers to be “in residence” as it were. I also found to my surprise that my colleagues at Cirque asked many more questions about my show at the Festival – how were rehearsals going? Did I get the cast I wanted? Will important people be seeing it? And even (gasp!) – can I hear some of the music from it?
From that festival presentation forward, I noticed that other Cirque artists were taking advantage of this newfound idea of pursuing personal artistic endeavors outside of the regular show. Some were doing independent films, some were showing in art galleries, some were founding improv troupes that performed late nights in small clubs. And I saw the upper management of Cirque begin to embrace the idea that their artists could find a healthy balance between their work within Cirque and outside it; that these independent projects could fuel their passion and pride in Cirque and give them a much longer run in a given show before burnout might set in. That was certainly my case. Since that second NAMT presentation, I have been able to balance my weekly show schedule in Las Vegas with five full scale regional premiers of my various works, another
New York new works festival premier, a fringe festival premier and all the attendant readings and developmental stages along the way. My days have become very structured over the years with writing and phone conferences, various rehearsals and such followed by the consistency of going to the Katheater Tuesday through Saturday evenings to disappear into the world of Cirque. Conducting Ka has become a foundation, a grounding and not a distraction or a competitor for my energies. And yes, come Saturday night, I am very often on the red-eye out to New York or wherever I need to be.
To get the demo recording of The Sandman that we knew we needed, I had to fly to New York on three consecutive weekends to accommodate a studio schedule that afforded me the ideal cast. And the mixing and mastering of the demo was done long distance – daily rough mixes were emailed to me and I would send notes back to the engineer. This went on for a few weeks to get just what we knew the show would require. It cost us more money but the truth is, doing what we do long distance will always cost more money. That’s just part of the deal I’ve made with myself.
With this year’s invitation to present The Sandman at the NAMT Festival, I was a bit concerned about scheduling a full two weeks away from Ka since writers are now required to be in residence. And Cirque contractually reserves the right to grant or deny any requests for leaves of absence. I was also concerned about my daily schedule before my evening show times because I happen to be preparing another new musical for a New York reading and yet another new musical for a series of work sessions with a new director. I have found that the trick is to deliver any assignments for NAMT as soon as they are requested. “5 Things you should know…” – hand it in that week. Song clips? Do it that night. Script edits? As soon as humanly possible. It’s a bit like being back in school and knowing if you got your homework done early, you would have more time for the fun stuff. We were all that disciplined in school, right? Well, at any rate, this has certainly been a second chance to do it the right way.
And as it happened, Ka experienced an unimaginable tragedy in July that forced us to temporarily close the show for over two weeks. While much of that time was filled with meetings and rehearsals to bring the show back into performance as soon as it was appropriate, I did find that it afforded me extra time to focus on The Sandman. I was able to deliver a more considered edit of the script still very much ahead of the deadline. I was able to schedule phone conferences at more convenient times, especially with the East Coast without worrying too much about my rigid performance/gym/sleep schedule. And I was able to get an enormous amount of work done on the other two musicals so that when the NAMT crunch time rolls around, it will be my one and only concern. To quote Dot by way of Sondheim, “You choose things, and then you lose things.” It’s very true. I chose to accept the original offer from Cirque. I chose to be away from New York for most of the year, to be away from all the opportunities of the city with showcases, parties and chance meetings on the street that can lead to wonderful connections and even more wonderful new work. I chose financial security over the bohemian thrill of piecing together a living as a freelance musician in the city. I have lost out on opportunities for sure. Out of sight is indeed out of mind, although a good showing of the right material at a NAMT Festival can make up for years of being off the radar. But I have thirteen years of creating magic with Cirque Du Soleil. I have been in the inner circle for the creation of two magnificent and groundbreaking productions.
My own musical contributions are on those stages nightly. And most importantly to my future, I have taught a behemoth company that has always prided itself on being the first to do things, that sometimes it’s okay to adopt some of the long-established practices of the musical theater world. I taught them a thing or two about how a new musical is made. I taught some of them what a musical actually is… I know, breathe, take a moment… And thank heavens, because really, what on earth would they have done if they had to learn it from “SMASH”!?
An interview with Joe Barros, Artistic Director of New York Theatre Barn in New York, NY about NYTB’s work with Sammy Buck and Brandon James Gwinn’s Small Town Story (formerly Speargrove Presents), a 2011-2012 Writers Residency Grant recipient.
At the urging of his father Larry, adorkable Scott Ames auditions for the Speargrove High School musical to get closer to drama club queen bee Caroline. But when Larry discovers the show is Rent he pulls Scott out. With the arrival of New York transplant Alex, her outspoken mom Lois and rising community fear about the show, the stage is set for a controversy unlike any small town has ever seen. As the escalation drives wedges between parents and children, Speargrove, Texas will discover that the show can’t open until their minds do. Inspired by actual events, Small Town Story explores the indelible power of theatre and the inherent dangers of silence.
Small Town Story has a unique genesis. How did NYTB originally go about commissioning this show?
In January 2010, New York Theatre Barn assembled 17 writers, led by sole book writer Sammy Buck, to conceive a new musical. Real-life events in Rowlett, Texas pertaining to a controversial production of Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent provided an irresistible springboard for the writing as NYTB set out to create a show by a community of writers about community. NYTB’s involvement with Small Town Story actually led to a change in the artistic and institutional mission of the company. We became so attracted to telling untold stories about real people, and often based on real events, that we made it our primary focus.
Why did you narrow the team down to just two writers?
After launching NYTB in 2007, we were given the unique opportunity by Daryl Roth Theatricals to produce a monthly show in their D-Lounge, and our core developmental platform for emerging writers and new work was born. Through this monthly program (now in its 6th year), I was immediately exposed to over 50 writers in the first three years alone. With such incredible creative resources at our fingertips, I knew we had to devise a piece together. While Small Town Story (then Speargrove Presents) started out as a piece written by committee, I ultimately made the decision to choose Sammy Buck and Brandon James Gwinn as its sole writers in order to give the piece clarity and authenticity, primarily in the score.
After working on the piece for about a year, the team went from 17 to 2 to improve the show’s cohesion. Buck and young composer Gwinn were serendipitously paired on a song to
transcendent results—and they were chosen to write the show. Their collaboration is unique in that this is the first show that they have written together; Sammy writes the book, Brandon writes the music, and they write lyrics together or separately.
Buck was raised in North Texas, and the “Speargrove” townsfolk he has created are imbued with the personalities he remembers from his childhood–a sensibility of North Texan suburban life is rooted in his flesh, bones and spirit. Gwinn (composer/co-lyricist) was raised in rural Tennessee. Country and pop music is his lifeblood–fresh, authentic and accessible. Moreover, Brandon understands intimately the students’ perspective, in perfect counterpoint to Sammy’s maturity. I am a huge supporter of these two writers and am mesmerized by the world they have created in Speargrove, TX.
The show has had a reading and workshop in New York over the past couple years. What has changed in the show as it has been developed?
The first version that Sammy and Brandon wrote together was completed in November of 2011, and we did a table reading in December 2011. Only three songs remained from the original version of the show—two were written solely by Brandon and one was written together. Following that reading, a demo was recorded and there were major rewrites that took place, including the creation of numerous new songs and an overhaul of the book (rearranging, cutting, adding new material). In May 2012, NYTB produced a workshop at The Cell (NAMT 2012 Writers’ Residency Grant). The workshop marked the first time that the piece was on its feet and the process elucidated for the writers precisely what themes upon to focus: (1) communication between parents and children, and (2) theatre as a catalyst for change. Since the workshop, the writers and the NYTB team have collaborated with NYTB’s community of actors on numerous private writers’ work sessions to explore new material aloud, as well as fine tune existing material that is constantly evolving. Significant revisions to hone the themes and storytelling have taken place over the past year, and the show also has a new title: Small Town Story. I am very proud of the new draft and am eager to see it on its feet.
What are the next steps for the show?
The show will have a reading in at The Village Theatre in Washington this summer. We are very excited about this opportunity and to hear the new draft! Additional opportunities have come our way but are not yet confirmed—including a developmental production in San Francisco where actual teenagers would assume the roles of the students of Speargrove High School. New York Theatre Barn looks forward to producing the show in New York sometime soon.
Why is Small Town Story an important story to tell today?
We continue to see controversial productions populate headlines in the news that deal with the very issues that are explored in this powerful new musical—fear, communication and change. Following the recent headlines of Loveland, Ohio’s high school production of Legally Blonde and the firing of its director, I believe that the time is now to tell this untold story. New York Theatre Barn and the authors hope that Small Town Story engenders the types of open conversations that scare the characters in our show. We see that our show celebrates the mother lode of power in musical theatre.
For more information about Small Town Story, please visit www.SmallTownStory.com.
An interview with John Simpkins, Artistic Director, of TriArts Sharon Playhouse as they prepare to produce Next Thing You Know, by Fest Alumni Joshua Salzman and Ryan Cunningham (both, Fest ’05-I Love You Because). Next Thing You Know was developed at CAP21 thanks to a Project Development Grant from our National Fund for New Musicals.
Next Thing You Know is the story of fourNew Yorkers as they laugh, love and drink their way through the big questions that face all young dreamers who wake up in the city that never sleeps. Does marrying a really nice guy mean you’re settling down or just settling? Does taking a nine-to-five equal giving up or growing up? Does a decade in the city break you down or break you in?
Sharon Playhouse has recently embarked on presenting new musicals. Why do you think it is important for your theatre to present pre-existing shows alongside new musicals during your summer season?
Part of our mission at the Sharon Playhouse is to celebrate and nurture emerging as well as established artists. We are excited to add writers and new musicals to this focus. It is our hope that we can begin commissioning new works in addition to presenting new musicals that have already been in development and might be looking for further development and/or productions.
You have a long history with Next Thing You Know starting with directing the first workshop of it back in 2007. How has the show changed since that first presentation at NYU Steinhardt?
We did the first workshop presentation of the show in October 2007, with some of my students at NYU Steinhardt. At the time, it was a collection of songs without a specific book—all centered around the time in one’s life where the dreams and plans you make as a young 20-something aren’t necessarily turning out the way you thought. The show always felt like it was wanting a stronger and more specific structure to these songs that seemed to really speak to people. Ryan and Josh went back and began to add a book to surround the songs. All three of us were initially suspicious of this exercise—thinking it might feel ultimately
“tacked on”—but as we worked and had other developmental opportunities (AMTP at Northwestern, Ars Nova, Cap 21, Berkshire Theatre Festival), we realized that we were on to something that was really working for the piece. We found that these four cast members could function as a microcosm of any number of other people going through these same basic problems—and, like any show, the more specific we got with our four characters, the more universal the thematic applications would become.
You worked with the writers on putting together a cast album of the show. Why was it important to you and the writers to get this show on the record and out in to the world?
Ryan Cunningham and Joshua Salzman’s terrific songs were always the origin of this piece—and they seemed to speak to everyone that heard them. We started hearing young singers use them for auditions, concert nights, cabarets, etc., and we were very excited about the chance to record the album as a way of preserving the work. As a quirky “off the beaten path” kind of show, we also felt it was important to get a well-produced album together in order to continue to seek out developmental opportunities and have other theatres get excited about producing the show. It’s a terrific calling card for the piece.
Are there any planned changes for your upcoming production?
Definitely—I think there is always a chance to make a show better and this is no exception. A theatre company in London just did a production this spring, and we learned quite a bit from that experience. None of us was directly involved in the production—so we were able to see it with fresh eyes and are working on some changes for the Sharon production.
Why is Next Thing You Know a great match for your theatre at this time?
Next Thing You Know will be our first musical in a brand newperformance space we are dedicating this summer. It’s an intimate theatre (99 seats compared to our mainstage space that seats 365) and will be perfect for chamber-type musicals like this one. I also think our audiences will respond to the nostalgic aspect of the show–of a particular time in life where people are struggling with how to modify the dreams of youth. And, as with any Ryan Cunningham book, it is hilariously funny and dares to verbalize things that usually remain unsaid! The physical production will be perfect for our new space and I can’t think of a better way to dedicate our new theatre than with a show I’ve been proud to work on for many years.
Why should people head up to Sharon, CT this summer to catch Next Thing You Know?
There is something very special happening at the Sharon Playhouse. We are a growing company with a firm commitment to the artists that we choose to surround ourselves with. We would love very much to begin to share our new works with the larger theatre community. Next Thing You Know features a cast of four talented performers accompanied by a three-piece band. This is a perfect show for any theatre’s small performance slot or second space production opportunity. We’d love to have you see our production and think about a way it might be programmed at other NAMT theatres in coming seasons.
For more information about Next Thing You Know, please visit www.triarts.net or www.nextthingyouknowmusical.com.
An interview with Shami McCormick, Artistic Director, of The Depot Theatre in Westport, NY as they prepare for the first full production of Kirsten Childs’ Funked Up Fairy Tales, from our 2012 Festival, this summer.
Funked Up Fairy Tales—a collection of delightfully twisted urban fairy tales for sophisticated children and grown-up kids—welcomes you to the world of Titania, Faireetheeya and Magikwanda, teenage fairies with attitude. They wag their heads and suck their teeth as they turn things upside down to pass their Fairyland Academy exam. Will they pull through with flying colors and earn their Happy Ending Crowns?
What drew The Depot Theatre to Funked Up Fairy Tales?
We sat down [at the Festival] not knowing what to expect and in seconds were completely entranced by the piece (as was everyone around us)! You could feel Kirsten’s sense of delight, her heart and commitment in every element of the script and score. The piece seemed poised for a collaborative, artistic experience that could bring Kirsten’s vision to first fruition; a production in a place that could embrace and celebrate both the writer and the work and give the piece a team to develop it for a continuing future. We felt The Depot Theatre could be that place and are so honored to have this wonderful work in our season!
Why is the show a great match for your audience?
When it comes to musicals we have a multi-generational demographic that appreciates the classics of the American musical canon and more contemporary fare. They like the intimacy of our space, how much a part of a production it makes them feel and how
adventuresome it encourages them to be—they are indeed both generous and engaged. We feel that Funked Up Fairy Tales will appeal to all generations and bridge any divide between those who gravitate towards familiar story-lines and those who are titillated by the unknown. It brings a wonderful twist and take on the familiar with a contemporary sound and a diverse cast. We also expect Funked Up Fairy Tales to help pave the way for our current audience and upcoming theatre-goers to become more curious about and supportive of new work and the artists writing for the future.
How will the show differ from what people got a taste for at the Festival?
Funked Up Fairy Tales is part of our 35th main stage season—it’s a featured element, a full production and full-blown celebration of a wonderful work in a unique place!
How does the show match up with your mission and goals for the theatre?
The Depot Theatre is committed to providing professional theatre to an under-served region and to creating a vibrant creative home for diverse artists to explore and celebrate their craft. Our mission includes providing an eclectic season that includes new work in order to develop and sustain dynamic connections with professional artists, expand our audiences’ theatrical horizons and provide a service to writers and composers by fully producing their work in a nurturing environment.
Why should people head up north to Westport this summer to catch your show?
Summer, Trains, Adirondacks, Lake Champlain, Fairy Tales, Kirsten Childs, Professional Theatre, a Fabulous Cast and Production Team…it’s all at the Depot Theatre. Plus, getting here from NYC is easy…go to Penn Station, get on Train # 69, get off at the Depot Theatre overlooking Lake Champlain in the foothills of the Adirondack High Peaks Region (AMTRAK also often runs a two-for-one special)! However you choose to get here, we are where you want to be for part of your summer!
For more information about Funked Up Fairy Tales, please visit www.depottheatre.org.
An article from Wayne Bryan, Producing Artistic Director, of Music Theatre of Wichita as they prepare to produce the American premiere of Betty Blue Eyes.
Betty Blue Eyes is a highly original and very funny new musical which opened on the West End in 2011, and is making its American debut this summer at Music Theatre of Wichita, July 24-28.
Set in 1947 England, when Princess Elizabeth’s forthcoming royal wedding is to be the cause for nationwide celebratory banquets, a meat-deprived village wages internal subterfuge to abscond with a prize pig named Betty.
With a clever libretto by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, Betty Blue Eyes is based on the Maggie Smith and Michael Palin film, A Private Function, screenplay by Alan Bennett. The tuneful new score is by NAMT Festival alumni George Stiles (Honk! and The Three Musketeers, both Fest ’99) and Anthony Drewe (Honk!, Fest ‘99), whose other works include Just Soand the new material in the stage version of Mary Poppins.
After the 1999 Festival presentation of Honk!, several NAMT theatres expressed an interest in producing it, including Music Theatre of Wichita. Our transatlantic communications with authors George and Anthony quickly blossomed into an international friendship. This was solidified when MTWichita, with the writers’ blessings, produced and distributed the American Cast Album of Honk! in 2001.
George and Anthony, along with licensing house Music Theatre International, subsequently credited the well-received album as one of the show’s best marketing tools. Hundreds of Honk! productions followed the Festival presentation and the release of the
cast album, and the writers have stayed in touch with our theatre ever since. We produced Honk! again in 2012 and audiences loved it even more the second time.
When Cameron Mackintosh presented Betty Blue Eyes on the West End in 2011, it was met with very positive reviews. The London cast album bore vivid testimony to the show’s wit and melodic richness. But after the show closed in London, the title seemed to disappear from the news.
Last fall, when it seemed that our upcoming Music Theatre of Wichita season was starting to lean toward a British theme, I emailed Matt Boethin and Carol Edelson at MTI to ask if they’d heard anything about the show and if it might be coming into their catalogue. They promised to look into it and get back to me, which they did quite promptly.
The feeling from London was that the show’s very British themes might not resonate with American audiences.
“Did they want to find out?,” I asked. “Where could you ever find a more American audience than in Wichita, Kansas?!!”
“So do you want to do it?,” they asked. Yes we did. All right, then. They’d inquire. And in blessedly short order, Cameron Mackintosh okayed it.
The authors wrote immediately, very excited that Wichita was going to meet Betty.
Music Theatre of Wichita runs each production for only one week in our 2100 seat theatre. We believe our audience’s affection for Honk!will ensure quite enough interest to fill our auditorium for our short run.
We also believe our audiences will respond enthusiastically to the comic invention of this fantasy-laced farce. All the hard-scrabble characters in the story foster lavish fantasies about how their lives might be different, and each fantasy is the basis of a terrific musical sequence. The songs in the show are just as tuneful and clever as the songs our patrons loved in Honk!.
Beyond that, the librettists and songwriters have deepened the somewhat cynical tone of the original film by focusing on how two people trapped in a disappointing marriage find their relationship re-energized and strengthened during the course of their unique “pig-napping” adventure.
To get a good feel for the humor and magic of this unique show, go to YouTube and type in “Betty Blue Eyes Theatrical Trailer HD,” and you’ll see a few terrific highlights from the original London production.
We invite anyone who is intrigued to please visit us in Wichita, Kansas this summer and experience the show for yourself.
The beautiful new sets are being designed by Robert A. Kovach (a familiar face at many NAMT theatres). All the sets, props (including two life-sized pig puppets) and costumes (by Dixon Reynolds) will be ready to welcome a possible future life at other NAMT theatres.
I’m directing the show, partnering with an inventive young choreographic team, Lyndy Franklin Smith and Jeromy Smith. Our leading players are Tracy Lore, Stanley Bahorek, Mary Stout and Justin Robertson. They will lead a large, hugely talented group of performers.
Just let us know you want to come and we’ll be delighted to show you all the Midwestern hospitality you can stand!
For more information on Betty Blue Eyes, please visit www.mtwichita.org.
It is a big year for NAMT and our Festival of New Musicals (Fest #25!), and we plan on celebrating in style! If you have not heard already, we will present a special benefit concert two days after the Festival on October 20th. In the last 24 years, we have presented 211 shows by 410 writers-that’s a lot to be proud of and we want to SHOW OFF! (which also happens to be the title of the benefit!).
Unfortunately, we will not be able to do a song from every musical as that would be a 14-hour show. But we are assembling a 90-minute star- and song-packed concert that will show not just what we have done, but also what we have started. The benefit will be a celebration of NAMT, our founders, our leaders, our writers, our shows, our impact and, most importantly, our future.
I hope that all of you will mark your calendars now (I will wait while you get out a pen or double click on your calendar) for:
25th Festival of New Musicals: October 17 & 18
Fall Conference:October 19 & 20 (portions will be open to alumni)
SHOW OFF! Benefit concert:October 20 at 7pm at the NYU Skirball Center
We can’t wait for these 4 days of celebration, discovery, dialogue and catching up. I hope to see all of you there as we honor you and the great work of this small but mighty organization that, in 1989, had the simple idea of gathering together theatres and producers from around the country to share great new musicals in development.
My, how far we have come, but we are only just getting started.
An interview with Itamar Moses, one of the writers (along with Gaby Alter) of 2012 Festival Show Nobody Loves You, about the show’s path so far and what to expect as it heads Off Broadway this summer to Second Stage. The show is a past recipient of a Project Development Grant from our National Fund for New Musicals for its development at The Old Globe.
The new musical comedy Nobody Loves You follows a philosophy grad student who auditions for—and surprisingly finds himself cast on—a reality TV dating show, all in an attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend. But when an unexpected on-set love connection threatens to ruin his plan, manufactured drama collides with real emotion in this original new musical.
What was the industry’s response to your show at the Festival?
Whole-hearted praise. Worship really. It was mayhem. The ghost of Oscar Hammerstein rose from the grave and placed a mantle labeled ‘The Future of Musical Theatre’ on my and Gaby’s shoulders. Or, whatever, people seemed to like it okay.
What has changed with the show since being at The Old Globe last year and being at the Festival?
We came away from The Old Globe wanting to replace some songs, clarify and sharpen certain elements of the story, improve some jokes, and take some time off the show. That process had already begun by the time we did the Festival, so we got to hear some new versions of scenes and try out one of our new songs. We’re even farther along in that process now. A bunch of stuff has been rewritten, we’ve replaced two songs and cut two others entirely, on top of streamlining certain aspects of the book. Musicals are very, very tricky and I expect we’ll be working right up until they make us stop.
The show is about to premiere Off Broadway at Second Stage Theatre this summer. How has your approach to the show changed going from an in-the-round space in San Diego to a traditional proscenium in New York?
This is really a question for our director and designers. But generally speaking, the approach is always just about figuring out how to use the space you’re in to support and enhance the storytelling and themes. I’ve premiered three shows in that in-the-round space at The Old Globe, and every time I think, “How are we gonna do this in the round?” And every time it forces solutions that are very cool and that I almost miss when it’s time to do it in a proscenium even though that’s usually how I envision things in the first place. Certainly doing this show in a proscenium allows you to have more stuff, to render the backstage world of the TV show more vividly. In the round, you really can’t have much in the way of set. You can’t even have any walls!
What are you guys most excited about for this summer production? Any surprises in store?
Getting to see the show with all the improvements on the page back up on its feet. And getting to see these characters come to life again, I’ve developed a genuine affection for them. As for the second part of your question, if we answered that, they wouldn’t be surprises anymore, would they? Or, I guess: “Yes.”
Why should people head to Second Stage this summer to see Nobody Loves You?
Because it’s going to be a cultural moment of earth-shattering importance. But if you like to miss out on that kind of thing, by all means, skip it.
For more information about Nobody Loves You, please visit www.2st.com.
We are honored to announce this year’s recipients of our National Fund for New Musicals grants. Now in its fifth year, the National Fund has distributed 56 grants totaling $234,000 to non-profit member theatres around America.
A special thanks to our funders including Stacey Mindich Productions, The Alhadeff Family Charitable Foundation and The ASCAP Foundation. This fund would not be possible without their contributions. If you are interested in supporting theatres developing new musicals around the country, please consider making a contribution to our National Fund for New Musicals.
National Fund grants of $10,000 to support full productions have been awarded to:
Barrington Stage Company (Pittsfield, MA) for Southern Comfort by Dan Collins and Julianne Wick Davis. This project previously received a Project Development Grant in support of its time at CAP21, a Writers Residency Grant for its time at Playwrights Horizons and was presented in NAMT’s 2012 Festival of New Musicals.
Transport Group (New York, NY) for The Memory Show by Sara Cooper and Zachary Redler, with support from Stacey Mindich Productions. The Memory Show was presented in NAMT’s 2009 Festival of New Musicals.
National Fund grants between $2,500 and $5,000 to support a workshop or reading have been awarded to:
Chicago Shakespeare Theater (Chicago, IL) for Summerland by Laura Eason, Jenny Giering & Sean Barry. Giering is an alumna from NAMT’s 2005 Festival for Princess Caraboo.
Dallas Theater Center (Dallas, TX) for The Fortress of Solitude by Itamar Moses and Michael Friedman, with support from the ASCAP foundation. Itamar Moses is an alumnus from NAMT’s 2012 Festival for Nobody Loves You, which also received a Project Development Grant in 2011-2012 in support of its time at The Old Globe.
Human Race Theatre Company (Dayton, OH) for The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes by Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond with support from The Alhadeff Family Charitable Foundation. Kooman and Dimond are alumni from NAMT’s 2011 Festival for Dani Girl.
Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, OK) for Triangle by Thomas Mizer and Curtis Moore with support from Stacey Mindich Productions. Triangle was presented in NAMT’s 2012 Festival of New Musicals.
An interview with Peter Rothstein, Artistic Director of Theater Latté Da about the launch of their new NEXT series developing new musicals in Minneapolis, Minnesota, next month.
Theater Latté Da will cap its 15th Anniversary Season by launching the major new works initiative NEXT. The inaugural season will feature readings of three new ventures into musical storytelling in various stages of development at The Lab Theater in Minneapolis’ historic warehouse district. NEXT will provide Twin Cities audiences the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the creative process and witness new musicals in the making. The musicals are When the Moon Hits Your Eye by Jon Marans; C. by Bradley Greenwald, Robert Elhai & Peter Rothstein; and Bessie’s Birthday by Kate Baldwin Eng & Jeff Tang.
Why did Theater Latté Da decide to start a new work festival?
Theater Latté Da’s mission is to explore and expand the art of musical theater. Launching a program that gives playwrights, composers and lyricists the opportunity to experiment is central to fulfilling our mission; shepherding new works from incubation to full production is a priority for our organization. We also want to be part of the national dialogue around the future of the American Musical Theater and have an impact on the next generation.
Why do you think Minneapolis is a great place to test out new works?
Minneapolis is home to one of the largest and most vibrant theater communities in the country. We have an incredible pool of talent in the Twin Cities, thinking artists who can bring talent, skill and insight to the development process. We also have a loyal and adventurous audience who I believe can play a vital role in moving a show to the next level.
This is the Festival’s first year. What will the programming of NEXT look like?
We have always been energized by the marriage of content and form, looking for innovative ways for music and story to intersect. Our inaugural year of NEXT will feature a diversity of stories, a wide range of musical styles and adventurous forms.
What do you hope your writers will get out of their Minnesota experience?
Our goal is to put the writers at the center of the process and have them articulate the next step for their work. Hopefully we can provide a safe, supportive environment and surround them with the talent to do so.
What do you hope your audience will get out of NEXT?
For a number of years we have been creating video trailers leading up to opening night that help to illuminate the design and rehearsal process. We want our audience invested in the creative process as well as the finished product. A new work series is the next logical step in that immersion, inviting our audience in on the development process from its early stages.
Why should people head to the Twin Cities to catch NEXT?
We have a dynamic line-up of shows and writers, and the snow should be melted by then.
For more info about NEXT, please visit www.theaterlatteda.com.
An interview with Dan Collins & Julianne Wick Davis, writers of 2012 Festival Show Southern Comfort, about creating such a bold show, how far it’s already come and preparing for its upcoming presentation at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA. The show is a past recipient of a Writers Residency Grant (Playwrights Horizons) and a Project Development Grant (CAP21) from our National Fund for New Musicals.
Based on the Sundance Award-winning documentary, this heartwarming musical about a group of transgender friends living in rural Georgia is, at its core, a love story between their patriarch, Robert Eads, and newcomer Lola Cola. Through a unique folk and bluegrass-inspired score, the musical chronicles a year in the lives of this unique American family as they courageously defy the odds by simply remaining on the land to which they were born, reminding us that home is where we find comfort in our skin.
What were the first steps you took when you were asked to turn a documentary into a musical and how did you find the story’s voice?
We were approached by Tom Caruso and Bob DuSold, who hold the stage rights to the documentary, to consider adapting it into a musical. After watching the documentary, Julianne and I had a few discussions about what music would mean to these characters, and in this environment, and if/how it could enhance their story. We began by discussing a number of intriguing points in the documentary that might be able to sing, and ultimately wrote the solo “I’m Goin’,” which Robert sings near the end of the second act. While the documentary’s subject matter, and our discussions, revealed many challenges to be faced in adapting the story to the musical stage, writing “I’m Goin’” revealed just the opposite: it was one of those rare moments in which each part of the process (spotting the song, writing the lyric, setting the lyric) unraveled with great and exciting ease. Energized by that rewarding experience, we moved forward. Inspired by the seasonal framing of the documentary, we explored the score by creating a song for each of the seasons – to be sung by an onstage folk band. It was these seasons, coupled with “I’m Goin’” and the conceit of our onstage band that served as the foundation for the rest of our process. But it wasn’t all beautifully simple, of course. Adapting a documentary meant we had to take some license in the storytelling for dramatic purposes, which is a tricky undertaking as it was important to us to be able to keep the integrity of the true story and characters (most of whom are still living), while also ensuring that we were creating a dramatic narrative that would engage theater audiences – because to fail at the latter would mean that the story, for all of its good intentions, would never reach much further than the page.
Southern Comfort has evolved a bit from your first reading at Playwrights Horizon a few years ago to your presentation at the Festival. How has it changed over the years?
Most of the developments and changes in Southern Comfort have revolved around either the integration of the onstage band or our exploration of the narrative outside of the specific action of the documentary. We’ve conceived the band in a myriad of ways; a group of vocalists who are separate from the instrumentalists; a male and a female soloist who act as the ‘lead singers’ of the band; etc., but we found, particularly through our experience at CAP21 (discussed below), that the concept of having the instrumentalists present as both singers and actors really resonated with audiences. As for the narrative, Kate Davis (the producer/director/editor of the original documentary) has been incredibly generous, supportive and gracious throughout our entire process; one such occasion is when she shared with us the original transcripts of documentary, which contain many scenes and interviews that were not part of the film’s final edit. These transcripts, coupled with her encouraging attitude toward our process, have been (and continue to be) invaluable as we explore the world, characters and their stories as they have come to exist on the musical stage.
You had a great workshop production at CAP21 in 2012. What did you learn from getting the show up on its feet?
The workshop production at CAP21, which was so beautifully supported by Eliza and Frank Ventura, was the first time we had seen the show move. We had never been able to see if our idea about the band being on stage, moving in and out of the action and playing all the characters outside of the chosen family, would work! We were asking a lot of these actors/musicians since they had to memorize the score and be free to move with instrument in hand at any time. The idea to have the band function this way was there from the very beginning for us, and it was an idea which people kept questioning and telling us would be nearly impossible. The CAP21 workshop production was the first time we saw that it indeed worked and it was exactly what we had hoped for.
The show is heading to Barrington Stage Co. this summer. What further work do you want to do on the show for its next step?
Our main objective is to continue to streamline and strengthen the narrative. We’ve learned so much throughout all of our development opportunities, and we look forward to the opportunity to implement those in Pittsfield this summer. There have been cuts, rewrites, edits and restructuring, all of which we feel have strengthened the piece, while retaining those aspects that have consistently resonated with our audiences throughout our presentation history.
What do you hope comes next for Robert and his chosen family?
Our hope is relatively simple: that we continue to find wonderfully supportive theaters and institutions, such as Playwrights Horizons, CAP21, NAMT and Barrington Stage, who are willing to tell Robert’s story and widen its reach. Just as the medium of film/documentary was able to bring light to this important subject, the medium of theater (particularly, musical theater) has the ability to bring that light to a new audience, further expanding the reach of the affirming life and message of Robert and his chosen family. Our hope is to broaden that audience as much as possible.
Why should people head up to beautiful Pittsfield, MA this summer to catch Southern Comfort?
Aside from the (already mentioned) beautiful setting, our cast is a dream. Not only are they a privilege and a pleasure to work with, but their commitment and passion to this story is astounding, and it is evidenced in each performance. Our band is equally amazing – they are onstage throughout the entire show, playing the score, singing and performing ensemble speaking roles! When we conceived the idea on paper, all we could do was hope that it would work, but this amazing group is able to make it more than just work; our hopes are exceeded night after night after night!
For more information about Southern Comfort, please visit www.barringtonstageco.org.