Little Women's jagged history

Little Women's jagged history

by Miryam Gordon - SGN A&E Writer LITTLE WOMEN BOOK BY SEAN HARTLEY, LYRICS BY ALISON HUBBARD, MUSIC BY KIM OLER DIRECTED BY DANIELLA TOPOL VILLAGE THEATER IN ISSAQUAH THROUGH APRIL 27 IN EVERETT, MAY 2 - 18 Writing musicals seems like one of the toughest assignments in theater. Unless you're Stephen Sondheim and can write the lyrics, compose the music and write the "book" (story dialogue) all yourself, you must work with one to several other people. Even Stephen Sondheim has worked with others on his musicals from time to time, and perhaps made a stronger musical because of it. But the collaborative process takes much more effort and, very often, a much longer time to develop material. Alison Hubbard and Kim Oler, lyricist and composer of Little Women, began working on this material with each other many years ago. Their first efforts began with another "book" writer, Allan Knee, during a seven-year effort to develop the musical. Knee and Hubbard and Oler had initially been commissioned to write Little Women by Theatreworks USA, whose website says, "America's largest theatre for young and family audiences. Our plays, musicals, and guest artists tour all over the United States, to at least 44 states every year!" The TW model is to create a children's musical of about 80 minutes in length and send it on the road. Alison Hubbard describes, "The way they worked then was they had five actors touring in a van. They would just take the shows from Alaska to everywhere in the country." TW was intrigued by Little Women and thought they would experiment with a full-length musical (closer to two hours), instead of the usual 80-minute model. However, after three years of working with Oler and Hubbard and Knee, TW decided not to move forward with a full-length show. The three writers continued to work on Little Women and in 1998, after five years of working together, they submitted the work to the Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award competition. This annual award, conceived of by Mary Rodgers, daughter of famed composer Richard Rodgers, was established to encourage promising young composers of musical theater. Submission is by nomination only (another composer has to submit it). Little Women won the award! The award attracted the attention of some young producers who optioned the musical to produce on Broadway. In 2000, after seven years of working together, the producers of the upcoming Broadway show decided to change direction. Suddenly, Oler and Hubbard were cut from their own musical, given their music back, and Allan Knee was to continue with the book and new composer and lyricist (the producer decided to be the new composer!). Oler says, "They fired us from our own show. They always had the idea that it was their idea and their project, but it wasn't. Because it's based on public domain material they were able to do that." Hubbard adds, "It was very hard being involved in that show for that many years." The team was demoralized until the John Wulp Theatre in North Haven, Maine, commissioned them to continue with their music and a new book writer. Hubbard explains, "We knew Sean Hartley from the BMI workshop [a musical development group]. He knew we won the Rodgers award, and he asked to hear a tape of the score. He listened to it and said he loved what we had done. I said, 'all it needs is a book.' He said, 'I'd write one, but you probably have lots of people asking you.' I said, 'No, you're the one.' "He's a wonderful lyricist and song writer. But in writing the book, he was so respectful of those boundaries. He had a different focus [than the other book]. He wanted it to be a family journey instead of 'Jo March Takes New York.' We felt it was much more true to the source material." Oler adds, "It was more interesting to us. The songs we had written were the story of a family. We were never interested in the story of ambition. That didn't become as clear until we were working with a book writer who was much more in sync with what we wanted to do." Sean Hartley, the book writer, talks about why this process can take so many years. "As far as that issue of why does it take seven years or four years, it's not seven years straight without doing anything else. It usually means an intensive period of, say, six months working on a piece and then maybe there's a reading and an agent sends it around. That sort of thing." Hartley describes how he began working on this piece with Oler and Hubbard. "Little Women was the reverse of the usual process for me, because the score was already written and usually a book writer is ahead of the composer and lyricist in that the project is already begun as a script and the composer and lyricist comes in and decides what song belongs in a scene. Some writers write in [the script] 'sings a song here.' I find composers want to find where the song fits in for themselves. They [composers] normally take the greatest emotion in the scene. In this show, we did it essentially in reverse. I began with the CDs of about 30 songs including several different versions of the same moment. I got to listen to the songs and was reading the original book at the same time and could imagine the context of the songs. I chose which songs that I felt were the most dramatic, and once I had a feeling for them, I decided how to write scenes around the ones that matched my vision of the book. "I had wonderful songs to choose from, and was able to decide which I liked best. After I wrote scenes around songs, I began making connections between the two, sort of like building a house, putting all these songs together. I began noticing transitions that there weren't any songs for [yet]. Like Laurie discovering he was attracted to Jo, and there wasn't a song for that. There were about five different places that I asked them to consider creating songs for. I'd write a scene and they decided what the song would be. "What personally informed this [process] for me was I learned that my older sister had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, and it [writing] became colored by my losing my own sister. Alison and Kim were very supportive of me and my process during my sister's dying; she did die during this time and we all explored what that meant. That's just one of the plots [losing a sister], but it's one that is a main strain throughout the whole play. There were three strains that I thought were most key: Jo's emergence as a writer - she starts out not writing anything with soul until she suffers and has a breakthrough to another level in writing - Jo's relationship with Beth, and Jo's relationship with Laurie and, by extension, her sexuality. "She seems to start out gender confused, often doesn't want to be a girl, fights against the role of a girl at that time, ends up finally ready for romance on her own terms. A lot of people have told me that people root for Jo and Laurie to get together in the book, but I don't think he was the boy for her, and it was painful for her to reject him, but it was good and strong for her. I don't think she was really ready to deal with her sexuality at all. Maybe going through loss and mourning allowed her to acknowledge that she needed someone. Maybe she didn't have room for a boyfriend, because she was so close to Beth. In the play, she asks Beth if she's really ready to write this [book about her life] and Beth says yes, Jo can do this, she can grow up. "The other thing I would add about how a musical gets written, is the role of various directors along the way. We had three directors and each one pushed us in a new direction. I can't tell you how many pages of notes and suggestions there were. I'd be so hungry for comment. The director would be the person who would say, 'I love this, this needs work.' Some of the songs are 12 years old and no word was changed in all that time, but everyone wants to change the book writer's work." Daniella Topol, the director, brings her own perspective to the making of a musical. "Everybody wonders how you get a musical 'up' [produced] and at the end of the day, it is what people say ['it's who you know'], and it ends up who you know helps open a door and once you're in the door, it's about what you do once you're in the room." So what was the process of getting Little Women produced at the Village Theatre? Topol illuminates, "I had a relationship with Village. I knew them from my work with a service organization of musical theater producers from around the country: National Alliance for Musical Theater. One aspect of what it does is a national festival of new musicals which is essentially a marketplace for new musicals. Producers from around the country come to see these new musicals. That's where I met the Village people. The Village was interested in a musical I could work on, and we [Oler, Hubbard, Hartley] had connections since we four all have the same agent. I came in kind of late in the process of the writing of the piece. It was 90% complete. We made more changes to the book than the score when I started working on the piece. We did a reading for the Festival of New Musicals at Village in 2006. We [all four] came out for one week of work [before the Festival]. The actors learn the music and we spent time putting together the reading. It's a great chance to see how the musical works and we had a chance to put in some new changes." COLLABORATORS AND CHANGES What does it mean to "make changes" in a musical? What does it mean, exactly, to work in this type of partnership? A couple of examples surfaced in interviews for this article. The first example is of a "happy accident." Topol describes it this way. "At our first rehearsal for the reading, everyone introduced themselves and an actor introduced himself as Mr. Laurence. Well, there was a Mr. Laurence character at one point, but Mr. Laurence was cut out. The casting director in Seattle had apparently been working with an old draft, because Village Theatre had cast an actor for that part. We felt badly having this actor sitting there without a part, so we had to put that part back. We reinserted a song, "The Music of Our Home," and it turned out to be one of the most moving parts of the whole piece. "There is no road map (in a new musical). We're all figuring it out together and I love that. It enables everybody and challenges every part of the team. The designers were trying to figure out how does the attic work? What do the costumes need to be? There are no other models for this, we have to create our own. You create a scene and then the scene is cut and you have to go from point A to point C with no point B in the middle." Oler adds "When I saw Mr. Laurence with his nametag on, I thought, 'Now, I get what I want.' We'd already written "The Music of Our Home" and I was really sorry to see it go. It was cut for book reasons that were legitimate. So, I was especially pleased to put that song back. "Whenever someone asks me to play a song from Little Women, I play "The Music of Our Home" because it's the easiest way for someone to get an experience of what we are doing with the musical. It's what people call a 'liftable' song or a 'take-home' song. People can sing that song for each other and it means something outside the context of the show. We really need to have songs that live outside the show so that people can be drawn to the show." Hubbard continues the discussion of learning to work together. "In process of learning to work with Kim, beginning back when we were writing shows for Theatreworks USA, we learned how to throw a song out and write a new one. We learned the power of rewriting. You had to do it on demand and reach in there and it didn't matter if you were staying up all night, and sometimes we didn't sleep for weeks because we were in production with material. It was a good introduction for how to write in the theater." Hartley describes another key collaborative moment in the play. "One of the last songs we wrote [together with dialogue] is "How's That For a Story." It fills two functions in the plot. The professor is the first one to introduce to Jo that she should write about real life, but he's also flirting with her and wants to ask her out. He starts by telling a story about the two of them. That is completely interwoven with dialogue. He actually asks her to the opera in singing, and she accepts with dialogue, and he goes on to finish the song." Topol explains, "That moment became trying to figure out if the moment should be musicalized. Should we put music under the lines, how does music intersect with the storytelling?" Oler says, "We had another song for Fritz to sing, called "A Most Peculiar Girl," in which Fritz was musing to himself about this girl who moved in next door, who's noisy and forgets to buy ink and he's never seen anything like this creature. Over the course of the song, you realize he has feelings for her, he just doesn't know it yet. We used the music of that song for the foundation of the music for this one ["Story"]. Alison, being the lyricist and musician she is, she was able to see the way to change this, musically. We wanted to make something more active between Jo and Fritz instead of reflective and we could learn something about their relationship and advance the story. Sean figured out a way for it to be a solo for Fritz, but Jo can take a journey with it, too. He suggested, 'Can't we make it a song for both? She doesn't have to sing.' It became a duet without Jo singing. "One of the things I love about that song, just as in the original song, Fritz didn't know how deep his feelings were, but in this new song he was more aware because he'd bought the tickets to the opera. It holds stage better, because there's more of a dynamic. This is the true art of what Alison is able to do with the music; with wit and charm and depth of emotion, she writes songs that make you laugh and cry in the same verse and I think that is a remarkable achievement." For tickets, go to www.villagetheatre.org or call 425-392-2202.