Curt Columbus talks about 'Paris by Night'

Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI will stage the world premiere of Artistic Director Curt Columbus' original gay love story, Paris by Night, which opens in previews on April 25^th.

Columbus wrote the book and lyrics with music by Andre Pluess and Amy Warren. The show is directed and choreographed by Birgitta Victorson, and features Trinity Rep resident acting company members Stephen Berenson, Janice Duclos, Mauro Hantman, Stephen Thorne, Rachael Warren and Joe Wilson, Jr.

Joining the company are guest artists James Royce Edwards, Timothy John Smith and Erin Tchoukaleff, along with Brown/Trinity Rep consortium actors Lynette Freeman-Maiga, Charise Greene, Michael Propster, Jude Sandy, and Adam Suritz.

A press release describes Paris by Night; an "unconventional love story is at the heart of this jazzy new play with music, set in 1960's Paris. American expatriate Sam (Joe Wilson, Jr.) is nursing a broken heart in Montmartre. Certain that he's left romance behind, he meets a young soldier (James Royce Edwards) who is brimming with life and confidence. As Sam's romance unfolds, beautiful chanteuse Marie (Rachael Warren) is searching for her own soulmate in brash American soldier Frank (Mauro Hantman). Basking in the romance of the City of Light, the magic of Paris inspires Sam and Marie to follow their hearts."

Recently, Curt Columbus sat down with Broadwayworld.com writer, Randy Rice, to discuss the new musical. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation: 

Randy Rice: I know that this play has been in the works for years.

Curt Columbus: I has been in a drawer, mostly.

RR: When we first spoke, as you were beginning your first season of being Trinity's Artistic Director, I remember you telling me that you had a complete story for this musical.

CC: The genesis of [Paris by Night] is, I started writing it a over a decade ago as a part of my….(pauses for a few beats). I didn't come out [as a gay man] until I was 26 years old, and when I did, I was vaguely academic about it. I gave myself a little course on "Gay and Lesbian Studies". I started reading [Jean] Genet and James Baldwin and The Well of Loneliness and A Boy's Own Story.

RR: I read the less academic stuff by Andrew Holleran and John Rechy.

CC: Oh, and that too, but I got really obsessed with 40's, 50's and 60's gay short fiction. It was generally erotica, but by contemporary standards, it is so incredibly tame. The "erotica" part of it was that it was two guys who hooked up and that is why it was banned. There was one short story that caught my attention by a guy named Samuel Steward, who was a pornographer, a tattoo artist and an academic. He was once the lover of Thorton Wilder; not for very long, apparently. This story is set in Paris. There is a tattoo artist and a young soldier shows up at his shop. I was also reading Baldwin and Genet. Genet was a tattoo artist in Paris, which most people don't know. I was thinking of émigré African-Americans moving to Paris. Lena Horne lived in Paris for years.

RR: Like Josephine Baker and Alberta Hunter, who went there to work.

CC: Right. The period of the late 50's and early 60's is my favorite time period [for movies]. Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn. I always wanted Givenchy to dress me.

RR: We all did.

CC: I know we all did. Maybe that's the secret.

This story started to come together. It was originally as [the character] Sam to be a black tattoo artist living in Paris and [the character] Marie being an African Jazz singer, a Parisian. [It was about] their friendship and the guys they fell in love with. Over time, casting had made Marie black and Sam white, which was a disastrous version of the play. In this production, we have Rachel Warren playing Marie and Joe Wilson Jr. playing Sam. That is the more correct version of the story. The project bounced around in the early 2000's and died. It went back into my drawer. When I got here [to Trinity] I showed everything to Craig Watson, the Associate Artistic Director. Everything I had ever written. All of my [tucked away in a] "drawer" projects. All of my stuff that was un-produced.

A couple of years ago, when I said that I wanted to do a new musical we started reading scripts, and reading scripts and reading scripts. About six months into it [Craig] said "What about that thing you have sitting in your drawer with the gay musical thing?" I said, "No one wants to produce that." Well, we gave it to the company and they raised their hands for which parts they wanted to play and that is when it really took off.

RR: Has the story been, since inception, an interracial, gay love story?

CC: It has been a part of the picture I have seen in my head. Yes.

RR: You wrote the book?

CC: I wrote the book and the lyrics.

RR: Who is doing the music?

CC: Amy Warren and Andre Pluess. Andre was my student at the University of Chicago in the early 1990's, which is now nearly two decades ago. He has since gone on to do incredible work with I Am My Own Wife and Metamorphoses, both on Broadway and a bunch of other shows.

RR: So, he was your student just as you were coming out?

CC: Indeed, he was. Part of the germ of the idea was [Andre] got a job playing piano for a Christmas show, the name of which, to this day we cannot remember. We call it "Homo for the Holidays", which was this gay, Christmas musical. Andre is not gay, but one morning he said, "Curt, these gay guys are lining up down the block [to see this show]. I don't understand. This show is ass. [It's terrible.] Why are they coming to see this?" I said, "I don't know. Maybe because it's a musical." and he said " Dude, you have got to write a gay musical. You just have to. And I will do the music." So it is entirely Andre's fault that we are even here. Because "Homo for the Holidays" was so horrendous.

RR: Or a huge success.

CC: It was a huge success, but artistically he couldn't believe that people were paying money [to see this horrible show].

One of my earliest memories is memorizing The Sound of Music in the front seat of my dad's car, on the 8-track player. [I was] in the garage, with the engine on, playing it over and over again and singing the lyrics at the top of my lungs and having my mom open the car door and ask me what I was doing. I told her that I was learning the songs. She thought it was cute.

With the exception of La Cage aux Folles, which is about two men in their sunset years, there are no young love or even middle-age [gay love stories]. Where are the Tony and Maria love stories or the Captain Von Trapp and Maria love stories?

RR: You have said that the plot of Paris By Night does not seem that far-fetched, when compared to, say, the plot of The Sound of Music.

CC: No. It is fairly simple actually. It is Sam and a young soldier who comes into his [tattoo] shop and it is a "will they or won't they?" situation.

RR: Is it a coming out situation for Sam?

CC: Oh no. Not for Sam. It may be for Buck, [the young soldier who comes into Sam's shop]. We don't know what the resolution is. It is one of those musicals where there have to be obstacles to love.

RR: I know that you are still writing songs.

CC: We have just finished the last song, which is blessed. It has been a great process. This is the way I want to make plays. To be in the room with the actors and have them say, "That piece that you wrote, doesn't work." Structurally, it is a house of cards. If you change one thing, and all of this other stuff changes. We didn't know what the last song should say, until about a week ago. We wanted to leave it an open question whether Buck is gay and whether he is going to act upon it with Sam.

RR: Do we get that resolution?

CC: Yes. We have an answer by the end of the play.

RR: So, it ties up nicely?

CC: It ties up. The other element that runs throughout is that Buck is a boxer. So there is a physical violence to the choreography that includes this big boxing match in the second act which may or may not prove fatal to Buck.

RR: So by the time Paris By Night officially opens on April 30^th, it will be done, right?

CC: Yes. Done.

RR: So looking ahead to a time when the play is done. Can you imagine directors tearing out scenes, re-writing lines of your play, the way you do it to other writer's work?

CC: [My translation of] Crime and Punishment which has been traveling around for four years has been different in every city. Directors will contact me and my co-writer [with a list of possible changes]. And we will say [regarding the requested changes] "Yes, Yes, Yes, No. Yes." We more often say "Yes" than we say "No". Have we raised a generation of playwrights that are so precious that they shit marbles? A play lives or dies on its flexibility or rigidity. Now, I hope I don't have to re-write the songs, but we have already thrown out three songs.

RR: Does it hurt to cast aside a song you wrote?

CC: Well, at least one of them will work itself into something else. I already have a plan for it. There is this great song called "On a Day Like Today". It is really cute, bouncy, catchy and fun. I have a whole other play that I am going to write around it.

RR: You have been adamant about working with "actors who sing" not "singers who act". When you describe Paris by Night you call it "a play with music" not a traditional musical.

CC: That's right. In a traditional musical, there are numbers that are placeholders, not necessarily to the story but to the notion of the musical. Further, [in Paris by Night] there is only one number that involves a group song, and that is the first one. Traditionally in a Broadway musical , the end of act closer is the big number. We do have some numbers in the second act that have some choreography to them, but they are all driven by either solo or duet vocals. The music was imagined for piano, bass and drums. The choral sound isn't necessarily in support of what we are trying to do. So, in that way, it is not like a traditional Broadway musical and in that way, it needs actors who will sing what is required but act the through line. In the case of the actor who is playing Buck, he also has to be a credible boxer, and he is.

RR: Who is playing Buck?

CC: James Royce Edwards. He is out of New York. I think you will really enjoy his performance. I wanted to write a musical about race and sexuality that is a love story first and foremost. This play is a gay positive musical.

RR: So the gay characters don't have to die, just because they are gay?

CC: Right. The gay characters don't have to die, because they are gay and the black characters don't have to die, just because they are black. Do you remember seeing Showboat for the first time? Crying because Julie Laverne, played by Lena Horne and by Ava Gardner in the movie, is being separated from her child? The world [that is created] is a musical, but it is so much more than that. There is a way that musicals should treat of importance certain things, but allow you to move on and appreciate the love story and actors singing really great tuneful songs. Randy, honest-to-God, you will leave the theater humming these songs. I promise you that. I can make that promise, because folks have heard the disk of the music and asked, "What is that?" and left my car, humming the songs. If you call the theater and get put on hold, you can hear the music. Which is a little frightening to me and my co-composer, to be hold music.

RR: Are you nervous to finally have an audience listen to what you wrote?

CC: (laughs) Oh no. I want and audience. No. No. No. No. No. I am so ready. Our director, Brigitte [Victorson], who is so f-ing brilliant, did a stumble-through last Sunday, so I have seen the whole show. It is all there. I can't wait for people to see it. I am particularly excited for the young musical theater queen audience. If, when we were seventeen, there was a piece of musical theater that had us, featured. I mean, can you imagine seeing gay boxers and tattoo artists and soldiers? It is all about the images you have to build around yourself to make yourself feel like you exist.

RR: I know that Trinity Rep does a lot of theater, bringing in high school students. Will this play be part of that?

CC: We hadn't planned on doing any high school shows with this. I imagine that after the show opens, we will start to get requests. Because we couldn't show people a script, and we couldn't give them the music, it was hard to say "Oh, trust us. You can bring your high school kids to this." There are a total of, I think, six chaste kisses between the men and the men and the women. That is, basically, the extent of the sex in the show. There is no vulgarity, with the exception of the N word, which gets used once. The show is meant to be a movie musical of the early 1960's in terms of its vocabulary or idiom.

RR: I look forward to seeing it.

Paris by Night opens in previews April 25 and runs through June 1 in Trinity Rep's Dowling Theater. Tickets range from $20 -$60 and can be purchased at the Trinity Rep box office, 201 Washington Street; by phone at (401) 351-4242; and online at www.trinityrep.com. The first performance on April 25 at 8:00 pm is Pay What You Can. Discounted and rush tickets are also available.          

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