Interview: Where the Next Generation of Musicals Is Born

"New theatre work is important because it is more likely to reflect what is actually going on in the world; it can speak to global happenings and events and find ways to digest them and cope with them."

Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre Curt Dale Clark is talking about his recent visit to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) Conference and Festival of New Musicals in New York on October 24-28, 2016. Clark, who has been a NAMT Board member for the past two years and currently co-chair of the membership committee, is proud that his theatre company, MSMT, has been a founding member of the organization since its inception thirty-six years ago, and praises "our continued efforts on its behalf that help cement the relationship between the two not-for-profits."

With Frank Young and Michael Price as early prime movers, NAMT was created in 1985 with the goals of "nurturing the creation, development, production and presentation of new and classic musicals; providing a forum for the sharing of resources and information relating to professional musical theatre through communication, networking and programming, and advocating for the imagination, diversity and joy unique to musical theatre." Comprised of 160 organizational members and over forty individual members, NAMT boasts prominent names among the musical theatre world's Broadway and regional producers, presenting organizations, and higher education programs. "The conference and festival are a great way for me and my partner [Managing Director] Stephanie Dupal to interact with our colleagues in this business. And especially for MSMT, which has only a twelve-week summer season, it is important for us to be seen and heard. The conference is an excellent vehicle for getting MSMT's and MSMT Costume Rentals's names back out there in the musical theatre world."

In 1989 NAMT created the Festival of New Musicals to showcase the work of writers and composers and to help shepherd them through the sometimes long and costly process of development that new plays follow from page to stage. NAMT has introduced 326 musicals and 534 writers in its first three decades and more than three-fourths of the festival productions have received subsequent development, full productions, or been published and recorded. "The Festival of New Musicals is by far the most successful model we have in the industry for discovering new work," Clark says. "It is one of the oldest and most consistently successful festivals of its kind."

This year's 28th Festival, held at New World Stages on West 50th Street in Manhattan featured eight new musicals in various stages of development. These are each cut to a forty-five minute performance format and then presented twice (once on each day of the festival) as musical readings. An additional pre-festival event, The 46th Minute, allows the writers to select a song that didn't make it into the 45-minute reading to perform in concert. The musicals' creators each respond to these constraints in different ways; some choose to condense the entire arc of the play and its songs; others present large chunks of a first act leaving the audience hopefully to want to know more about what happens in the second.

Asked how well he thinks this 45-minute format works, Clark says, " It is great for people with vision, but not good for those who can't imagine the total picture. Sometimes if we bring people without theatre experience, they may not entirely get it or see through to the resolution. But really, there is no other option because there just isn't enough time to see eight shows in full."

This year's festival selections included Benny and Joon with book by Kirsten Guenther, music by Nolan Gasser, and lyrics by Mindi Dickstein; Joe Schmoe Saves the World with book, music, and lyrics by Brett Ryback; Lempicka with books and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer and music by Matt Gould; The Loneliest Girl in the World with book and lyrics by Gordon Leary and music by Julia Meinwald; Mortality Play with book and lyrics by Alana Jacoby and music by Scotty Arnold; Soho Cinders with book by Elliot Davis, lyrics and book by Anthony Drewe and music by George Stiles;The Unauthorized Biography of Samantha Brown with book, music, and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk; and We Live in Cairo with book and lyrics by Patrick Lazour and music by Daniel Lazour.

Having had the privilege to attend the festival myself, I was struck by the diversity of the offerings which are selected in blind review by the NAMT festival selection committee. The musical styles ranged from rock to country, pop, and to more traditional Broadway modes, and the themes embraced everything from intimate coming of age stories to epic historical events, to musical biopics, and to symbolic and mythological retellings. When I query Clark as to which presentations most appealed to him, he lists Benny and Joon, Soho Cinders, Samatha Brown, and Lempicka, and I find myself concurring.

Benny and Joon, which reshapes the movie into an original musical, soars with a lovely melodic score, rich in instrumental and vocal textures and captures the tender poignancy of the story most effectively. Soho Cinders layers onto the Cinderella tale the contemporary story of a young gay man scraping together a living in London's Soho and navigating his way through a series of tricky relationships (including one with a prominent politician) in his search for love. Stiles' music is rich in character and the Drewe/Davis book and lyrics are replete with amusing and touching character portrayals. Samatha Brown is a well-crafted memory play that takes place in a fraction of a second decision that will shape a young girl's life forever; it speaks with a quietly truthful force about an adolescent's coping with grief, risk, change, and self-definition, and the score - several of the songs already well-known through You Tube and performance by singers like Aaron Tveit - is laden with lovely potential. Lempicka is perhaps the most ambitious of these selections - an epic musical biography of the artist who fled the Russian Revolution and made a new home, as well as a new personal and sexual identity for herself in Paris of the 1920s and 30s. Nonetheless, its book is well crafted, its music has an inspiring epic sweep, and its characters are intriguing.

So what relevance do these readings hold for a producing entity like Maine State Music Theatre? "Producing new work can be a tricky business for any theatre," Clark says. "and it is even trickier for MSMT because we only operate twelve weeks a year. If a theatre has fifty-two weeks, they can make a mistake and have a chance to remedy up with other shows. We do not have that luxury, so it becomes a balancing act. When we do make an attempt to produce a new musical, we have to do it cautiously with plenty of backup plans for funding well in advance."

Still, Clark believes new work is vital to the continuing legacy of American musical theatre. "The older repertory of shows, like Rodgers and Hammerstein works, for example, are fantastic and totally valid, but their themes which were groundbreaking in their time, may seem somewhat tame today. So it is definitely important to make sure the theatre-going public is exposed to new musical theatre shows. The big problem," he continues "is selling this to your public. People are less likely to plunk down large amounts of cash to see a show they don't know or aren't sure about, whereas with recognizable titles like the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, they know they will like it."

He cites the company's experience with Chamberlain A Civil War Romance by Stephen Alper and Sarah Knapp, which he and Dupal mounted in their second year at the helm in 2014. A relatively new work, which had been commissioned for MSMT in 1996 and had enjoyed only that one prior production, MSMT revived it in a new streamlined, revised version and gave it a luxurious production that won enthusiastic critical and audience acclaim. It was the unknown quantity in a lineup which also featured three sure-fire titles like Buddy Holly, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Footloose, and surrounding it with these well-known older shows helped to make the season a success. Similarly this past 2016 season - a record breaking one for MSMT in terms of box office - the season opener featured the East Coast premiere of the newly rewritten Ghost, The Musical. Based on the movie with book and lyrics by Billy Joel Rubin and music by Glen Ballard, and rescaled in director/choreographer Marc Robin's vision to a work of intimate proportions, this co-production with Lancaster's Fulton Theatre took the Maine audiences by surprise and went on to sell out almost every performance.

So what are MSMT's plans in terms of new works for the future? "At the moment," Clark says, "if we can secure the proper funding, we are considering doing some readings of new works in our off-season. We have the perfect facilities in our Elm Street rehearsal studios to handle staged readings [similar to what is done at the NAMT Festival], and that would be a great way to expose our audience to new musical plays," says Clark who has voiced a long term MSMT goal of acquiring a second smaller stage for year-round performances - something that would permit more experimental programming. "And we are looking at some other new musicals for future main stage seasons."

Nonetheless, even without an immediate plan to produce a new musical work in 2017, Clark feels the conference, the festival and the work that NAMT does are invaluable to him as a professional. From this year's conference, he says he has taken away the inspirational message "about the power of yes. The workshops re-established my desire to surround myself with people who want to make it happen!" Summing up his recent experience and his and MSMT's long relationship with NAMT, Clark enthuses, "I am thrilled to be associated with NAMT. The organization is personally valuable to me because it represents the continuity of what I've chosen to dedicate my life to. My entire career [as an actor, director, author, and artistic director] is absorbed by musical theater, and this is the place where the next generation of musicals is born."

Photos Courtesy NAMT

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