BWW Exclusive: Meet the Company of NYMF's MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET

One of the most eagerly awaited new shows of this year's New York Musical Festival (NYMF) is the special event "Midnight at the Never Get" which will be presented at 42WEST (514 West 42nd Street) for three (3) performances: Thursday, July 28 @ 9pm; Sunday, July 31 @ 7pm; Monday, August 1 @ 8pm.

Produced by Michael Chase Gosselin, the musical is conceived by and starring Sam Bolen and Mark Sonnenblick, with musical direction, arrangements and orchestrations by Adam Podd, choreography by Andrew Palermo and directed by Max Friedman. Audiences will be transformed back to 1965 when they enter the venue to the back room of The Never Get. Featuring a sultry score fashioned after the American Songbook, "Midnight at The Never Get" imagines two men who never existed at a time that very much did.

Trevor Copeland (Sam Bolen) and Arthur Brightman (Mark Sonnenblick) have the perfect New York romance. That's swell. Again it's 1965, so that's also against the law. So in the back room of The Never Get, an illegal Greenwich Village gay bar, they put together a show called "Midnight" - a queer nightclub act where Arthur writes love songs for Trevor to sing to a man. But as they hurtle towards the end of the decade and tensions in the Village reach a breaking point, the lovers find themselves caught in a relationship they can't control and a movement they don't understand. Our own Richard Ridge dropped by a rehearsal at Don't Tell Mama, where the show enjoyed a sold -out run this past spring, to chat with the company about working on this exciting new show.

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What is it like working on this brand new version of "Midnight at the Never Get"?

Sam Bolen (Co-Conceiver and Star): It's really exciting. We have been working on the show together, the three of us, Mark, me and our director, Max, for a little over a year now. It's always been just the three of us, self- produced. And now we have a team with expertise and ideas and creative energy in the room. It just feels like it's getting to live its fuller life. That's really exciting because the show wants to be so atmospheric and so evocative and so transportive and now that there is this extra energy with more music and new costumes and all of those things, it feels like we can go back in time and create the 1960's more vividly.

Mark Sonnenblick (Book, Music, Lyrics and Star): Well we did the show at Don't Tell Mama and it was the first time we had done a production of it. We had a full script and a full show and we put it up and even over those 5 shows we ended up changing it a whole lot getting lots of feedback both actual spoken feedback and just hearing the audience in the room, so this new production features a whole new draft, we get to add a band on stage, we have a bigger budget and get to work with our wonderful producer Michael Chase Gosselin and partner with NYMF to turn it into the first big production of the show. It's a vision of what we think the show could really be in a way that we really couldn't do before. Really excited about it.

Max Friedman (Director): "I'm very excited about doing this new production at the New York Musical Festival because we get to expand the visual world of the show and we have made some very strong tweaks to the text. We are thrilled to be working with our producer Michael Chase Gosselin. He is really smart. He came in to see the show this past April at Don't Tell Mama and I loved right away how passionate he was. He was committed to helping us find a larger version of the show. Only during the last few weeks of our run at Mama's did I see the potential outside of those four walls, but Chase immediately saw that potential and helped bring in a new perspective shifting the show onward and upward."

Then there is this our great group of designers. Vanessa Leuck is designing new costumes ,and Christopher and Justin Swader, are designing the setting to look like an illegal gay bar from the 60's. We have been able to open up the fantasy element of the story. What we are seeing now is a lot from Trevor's memory. Some of that is a Romanized memory of this relationship, so we are able to manifest that through design and I'm really excited about that.

What I'm most looking forward to is being able to share not just the history but also this very personal love story. People will be able to see themselves in one or both characters and that will bring people into the history. This is not a show about the gay movement or stonewall. It's historical fiction. I want an audience to learn about that history but through this beautiful love story.

It's all about identity and knowing that who you are is what you love and the heart wants what the heart wants. These themes in the show you can't turn away from them and the show in some ways shows what happens when you try to turn away from your true identity.

Michael Chase Gosselin (Producer): "When I first saw MIDNIGHT, I instantly was attracted to how viscerally moving and universal the relationship at the core of the piece was. The love that these characters' exhibit is so truthful and so human, and the harsh reality of the conflicts they face sheds light on a unique, volatile time in NYC history that gives the piece a deep resonance and ethos.

Plus, Mark's score is the most impressive piece of musical theatre writing I've encountered in recent memory, with every song sounding as if it's a classic pulled straight out of the American Songbook. He brilliantly shaped the piece with Max and Sam to ultimately create a theatrical experience incomparable to anything else out there."

"I wanted to produce MIDNIGHT because that experience, both of the show's emotional journey as well as getting to physically sit at a cabaret table in a 1960's gay bar, excited me as an audience member. I love non-traditional theatrical events paired with strong storytelling, and this is the pinnacle of that concept. Above all else, MIDNIGHT is a story that just needs to be heard. We're living through a time where there is so much hate in the world, and there's no better case for love than this story. I feel honored to be helping these gifted artists share it with a larger audience."

Adam Podd (Musical Direction, Arrangements and Orchestrations): The first thing I got was just a demo of the songs and I thought they were really nice, pretty good songs, but I didn't know the story that was attached to them, so I thought maybe Mark was writing a Cole Porter musical or something. What I've fallen in love with is the unfolding nature of it. I love the point of the show. It has major depth as you get to the end of it. You're not just listening to a bunch of jazz songs; the show turns pretty emotional.

For 'The Never Get' I am using my jazzier background to keep the style and tone of the period that Mark wants it to be. I have orchestrated the show for a three- piece horn section and a three- piece rhythm section. Six instruments altogether. I love living in the world of the American Songbook. It's great stuff. it's the music that I play most often. It's been a pleasure living in this genre. I'm glad that composers like Mark are out there with the same kind of love that I have for the jazz age and its music.

Andrew Palermo (Choreographer): Max is an old friend and we had worked on other projects together. He sent me the material and it's such a unique mix of things on the surface. It's this fun, in a good way, pastiche kind of show in its style, a little Judy Garland cabaret loveliness that we love, but underneath it there is this really heartfelt and heartbreaking story about these two guys and I feel it's very timely in the story. Considering everything that is going on today, this new generation needs to know what that generation of men did to help the freedom of today if they happen to be gay.

The challenges for me with choreographing this show when there are just two of them onstage in some ways it's super challenging. I was thinking about it today. I'm working on another show that is a big show. It has fourteen cast members with some big numbers. In some ways that it easier because it's set up for that, but in this show, with one guy holding a microphone on a five by eight stage, you can only do so much, and you can only do so many variations of things and keep it interesting, so it's like spicing the soup. In a way putting some dashes that make sense, and both Sam and Mark are excellent and have their own style which they bring to it, so it feels really organic.

"I want the audience to have that wonderful mix of being entertained and laugh and cry and be riveted, but also learn a little history in a really good way."

How did you come up with the idea for the show and write it?

Sam Bolen: Mark had moved to the city and we were working on a little musical of his. We were recording a demo at his house and I pitched him an idea, sort of reminiscent of what we have now, in his kitchen, and he was like. "Yes!" Mark can just write these kind of songs so beautifully. He lives in the jazzy American Songbook world. It's seems so easy for him and the idea sort of morphed and grew and then we brought on our director Max Friedman and it really has changed a lot of over the last year. It has been a truly collaborative process. Mark has done all of the writing of the script and the music, but it has come into the room as a moldable piece of clay, and we all just live with it, and then Mark takes it back and chips away and then we do that a bunch of times.

Mark Sonnenblick: It was Sam Bolen. We have been friends since college and he mentioned that he wanted to do a cabaret that was kind of telling the story between a singer and a songwriter. Using the fictional song writers' songs. He knew that I kind of loved to write older sounding, American Song Book style music, but it's hard to find a good reason to write that kind of music. When you put it into a show it makes that show a throwback pastiche that we have seen a lot before, like those 1920's musical farces, or if you write one or two of these type songs in a contemporary show it's like, 'Well here comes a throwback number'. So when Sam talked to me, I got really motivated to try and figure out a way to write a show that used that American Song Book sounding music while also telling a different kind of story. And using it to create a world that maybe hadn't been seen on stage before in quite the same way . The more we talked about it, the more we thought of where would this music fit? What kind of interesting story could we tell?, We realized, since we would be doing it at Don't Tell Mama, that there is this world of cabaret and it than the 60's was also a time of intense political and social turmoil and it seemed that was a really cool backdrop to do a cabaret but then, it turns into something much more onstage.

Talk about the role of Trevor?

Sam Bolen: He is an interesting role. He is someone who is far removed from the period that he lived in even when he was in that period. Sort of like 'Midnight in Paris'. Trevor really lives to be onstage. He's living in the 60's. The music evokes another time, but he longs to be an entertainer in a smokier, plusher blue tinged time sort of a lost generation type and that's when I feel Trevor is the most himself. I imagine he finishes this show, and goes home with Arthur, and is a little quieter during the day, because something about the dinginess of the city and the day light is not really the romantic life that he leads in his head. So that's what I hold on to as an actor. It's not that difficult capturing those elements of Trevor, because in the show, doing a night club act it's so easy to slide into the grandness of it. The nostalgia of it all. What it really comes down to is the pure powerful love that he feels for Arthur, and the music about it. He says in the show, 'Arthur wrote a whole song for me. Can you imagine?' and that really is the kernel of it. Arthur writing these songs is a love letter to Trevor and it's something so fulfilling to him. It's exactly the romantic dream that Trevor has, and that is what defines his life moving forward. Even as the gay rights movement happens, there are personal things in the show that are trying to tear his love and optimism apart. The music is really what Trevor holds on to. It's the proof that the love between Arthur and Trevor is worth living for. It's sumptuous receiving all the attention. That is what Trevor lives for and that's what the show is because the audience is there to give it to him.

What are you looking forward to the most of being a part of NYMF and what would you like audiences to take away after seeing MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET?

Sam Bolen: For NYMF, I'm really looking forward to playing the show in this new space to more people and just getting to live in this more fully realized production. We had a band rehearsal the other day, and it feels like we're in this old movie. I want people to take away the story. They will love the music and they will love what it looks it and they will have a great night out, but I really want them to feel transported back to this time in the 60's. If they come out feeling that they were alive when these songs were first written, I think that would be the most magical thing for them to feel.

There is a band in the show but it's really just the two of you up there on stage and you do practically all of the singing. What is like living in this type of show as a performer?

Sam Bolen: It's a lot, but because Mark is so alive on stage and this music is so evocative and that I really get to play to the audience because the show takes on a form of cabaret, you get to feed off their energy in a more palpable way, more than you would in a fourth wall kind of show. There is just so much life and energy in the room, that when it's over, it sort of feels like "Oh Wow! did that just happen?' I feel like it's like a whirlwind. It's a train. You get on it and you ride it through. It's very difficult because it's a lot of heavy lifting of emotional stuff that I tell through song and dialogue. It's just the two of us, but once you are in that room, filled with all these people that are taking the journey with you, the hard effort kind of goes away and you ride it.

You are so young and you are telling this story about the 1960's. What attracted you to that time period of gay life and what it will say to this new generation today?

Mark Sonnenblick: Part of it was just my interest as someone who is gay. Everyone has their own story of what that looks like for them and what that journey is for them but knowing that the history of gay rights in America and across the world is something that allows you to be open or not open. It affects you today in ways that you can't fully understand and so that's where the initial interest in the history happened for me. The more I read about it I realized it was a complex time, not only because of the intense social and legal pressures but the violence against being gay. Also within the gay community at the time, there was lots of conflict and discussion of what that progress should be and what it should look like. And I think that is something that very much exists today, especially in the process of writing this new draft. It was right when the shooting in Orlando happened. It was in ways that I had not fully appreciated or thought about. Just the physical space that a gay bar creates and the way it created a space for the people back in the 60's, but still continues to create a space today. In a city like New York, all the bars are open to everyone. But in a small town, a gay bar is the only place that you can go to connect and see a positive vision of what gay life looks like and it's just as relevant. It's just as true today as it was back in the 60's and its tragically just as powerful and relevant as it has been for a while.

Collaborating on the show?

Mark Sonnenblick: It was a blast collaborating with Sam. We had never worked on a project like this and I had never really ever worked like this either. This is the first show that I have done all the elements for, book, music and lyrics. In the past most collaborations are in the writing stage, but with NEVER GET is was bringing all the material to the stage, because you have Sam, the actor, onstage, giving you feedback. 'This feels right, this doesn't feel right' and the fact that we both love the story we are telling and the music so much, made it a very fun process. That is very different from anything that I had done before.

How did you originally get attached to direct the show?

Max Friedman (director): It was Mark Sonnenblick. I heard a standalone song of his in a concert years ago at NYMF that I co-directed and immediately I thought he's the second coming of Kander and Ebb or Cole Porter. He is just a brilliant lyricist. I had my residency here at Don't Tell Mama and he told me he had this cabaret piece about the beginning of the gay right movement and I was like 'yes, yes, yes' If Mark is writing it and it's about these important themes, then I absolutely want to work on that.

It's been about learning about our own privilege and about all the ways outside of this project it's very hard to imagine what it was like to grow up without gay people on TV without strong representation with gay leaders and gay figures. I just read an article in the New York Times about a gay politician in Indiana who could someday be a strong presidential candidate. It's been very important to us to know that our set of experiences are so vastly different from the characters in this piece. We think that is very important to sort of hold up the mirror to another time and show that to a young gay audience.

What would you like the audience to leave with after seeing the show?

Mark Sonnenblick: I would love for them to leave with the story of a lonely gay bar in the 60's, which ideally touches on memory and relationship and love, and think about what it means to try to love another person, and understand another person and the difficulty and impossibility of doing that either in the moment, or looking back and try to remember what it was like with that person." Being able to put up a show that you feel really excited about and have amazing people on the team with you helping you to do that. I love this music. It's going to sound amazing with the band and the orchestrations by Adam Podd and Sam is this amazing performer and Max is a wonderful director and Andrew is our terrific choreographer. It's been a humbling incredible experience.

Check out photos from rehearsal below!

For tickets and more about the show, go to nymf.org/midnight or nevergetmusical.com.