Having suddenly lost Florida Stage this past June, when it abruptly declared bankruptcy and closed its doors forever, the local theater community is jumpy over any signs that another long-running professional stage company may be in jeopardy. Signs like an artistic director calling the media to insist that such rumors are untrue.
Developmental workshops and concerts of new musicals happen all the time, but rarely does a Broadway-bound show do test performances in Boynton Beach. Call it a way-out-of-town tryout.
Unusual, perhaps, but it is a natural choice for a musical version of Susan Seidelman’s 2006 film comedy Boynton Beach Club, the tale of six South Florida seniors who meet at a bereavement support group and start their lives over after the death of their spouses.
This weekend, Feb. 10 to 12, the show gets four readings at the Park Vista Theatre.
Why here? In addition to being the home of Seidelman’s mother, Florence, who originated the idea for the film and also produced it, Boynton Beach has a potential audience that is a mirror image of the show’s onstage characters.
The Boynton demographic is "reflective of an audience you could find in Sarasota or Tampa, places where there is a larger population of people over 55," explains Seidelman. "Arizona, Las Vegas – all the places where the movie did really well."
Oscar-nominated Seidelman is best known for writing and directing such films as Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right. She readily concedes, however, that the musical theater world is totally alien to her.
It would never have occurred to her to turn Boynton Beach Club into a stage show, until she got an email from the songwriting team of Ned Paul Ginsburg and Michael Colby soon after the movie was released.
"I guess they heard music when they saw it," she says. "I knew nothing about theater and I knew nothing about musicals. But as I started hearing their songs and learning how librettos are different than movie scripts, I sort of got into it."
As composer Ginsburg recalls, he had a feeling that Seidelman’s film would make a good musical even before he laid eyes on it. "I saw the ad in the paper for Boynton Beach Club and I said, ‘That looks like a musical.’ The ad copy, the picture, I just had a hunch about this one."
Seeing the movie only increased his enthusiasm. "Because it’s full of emotions," says Ginsburg. "And characters that we haven’t seen on a musical stage a lot – modern, older adults."
As theater veterans Ginsburg and Colby began writing the musical score, they approached a few playwrights about adapting the screenplay. For one reason or another, though, they came up empty.
"There were certain people that we wanted for it who weren’t available, there were other people whose ideas I didn’t necessarily agree with," notes Seidelman. "One thing I thought was really important and I hope it works, is that this be an ensemble. It’s not just one man and one woman’s story, it’s about this group."
So somewhat reluctantly, Seidelman – who had co-written the movie’s screenplay – took on the chore of penning the musical’s book.
On the differences between the movie and the show, Ginsburg says, "The screenplay moves along in little increments, little episodic moments. We jettisoned a lot of that in favor of big moments. When you get rid of those other things, you have room to make the musical moments special. And there are also some plot points that are brand new. It is not the screenplay put onstage. It’s a musical."
By 2009, they had a score of 15 or 16 songs and a draft of the book. But as Seidelman soon learned, they were only beginning. "Unlike a movie, where once you get the financing together, you film it and then you can kind of weed it out in the editing, here you edit it up front," she explains. "It’s hard to get the money to make a movie, but once you get it, it’s boom!, you go. You film it and you instantly know what’s working or not. This, because it’s live, it’s just a whole other kettle of fish."
Boynton Beach Club, the musical, has already had two staged readings in New York, about a year apart, attended mainly by the writers’ friends and neighbors, as well as invited theater insiders.
That audience liked the show from the start, but Ginsburg knew further work was needed. "We had some structural problems with the first draft. The placement of songs," he says. "We’ve also thrown out about three or four songs. The biggest challenge was bringing the stories together and keeping them balanced. It took us two or three shots before we got the stories unified."
Ready for public test
So now, more than four years after they began writing the show, the creative team believes it is ready for the paying public and an out-of-town test in Boynton Beach, a non-traditional step for such a venture. As Ginsburg puts it, "This one-week reading where the cast rehearses in New York and performs in Florida is very unusual, one of the most ambitious developmental projects that Actors Equity has sanctioned."
The show has been able to attract a 13-member cast of Broadway veterans, including Alan Campbell (Sunset Boulevard), Heather MacRae (Falsettos), Janice Lynde (Pippin) and Barbara Walsh (Big). They, in turn, hope to attract financial investors and perhaps a seasoned producer.
Theatergoers will have an opportunity to offer their opinions of the show at a post-show feedback session after this Saturday’s matinee. "We want to see how people down there react to it, whether we have to reshape anything or add jokes," says Ginsburg. "Since the last one, a couple of years ago, we’ve made some significant changes and we want to see if we have it in the appropriate shape now."
If so, Boynton Beach Club could take its next step toward Broadway. "I think anyone who writes for the musical theater would like to see their show get to Broadway," says Ginsburg, "but we’re not trying to get there instantly. I think we’d like to get the show out to the country and see how it takes in other cities and try to build some momentum. Then if it makes sense to play the show in New York, then by all means."
Seidelman is well aware, however, that unlike a movie, if the show does not please a few critics in New York, her years of work and the investors’ money could evaporate overnight.
"I think it’s crueler than the movies," she says. "If a movie doesn’t work, you still have the DVD, there are other lives for it if it doesn’t work theatrically. But here, if it doesn’t work, that’s it, you’ve got nothing."
Still, its creative team remains optimistic.
"It’s a very entertaining show, with comedy, with song, with some heartfelt moments. And we have a terrific cast of Broadway veterans," suggests Ginsburg. "It’s not just fluff. It’s got a message and it ends on a real high. If audiences down in Florida react to it the way some of the audiences in New York have, they’re going to have a great time."
‘BOYNTON BEACH CLUB’
Park Vista Theatre, 7900 Jog Road, Boynton Beach. Friday, Feb. 10 through Sunday, Feb. 12.
Tickets: $25
Contact: (561) 738-0552
Louis Tyrrell, producing artistic director of the late, lamented Florida Stage, launches his new venture – dubbed The Theatre at Arts Garage, in Delray Beach – with a Master Playwright Series, this Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
For his first bestseller, novelist Eric Weiss exploits his New York outer-borough background and his Jewish roots. But in his personal life, he has turned his back on both of them.
It is no coincidence that the main character of Donald Margulies’ semi-autobiographical play Brooklyn Boy has the same name as that of illusionist Harry Houdini, but he cannot escape his past. In the middle of a promotional book tour for his new book – also named Brooklyn Boy – he is duty-bound to return home to visit his father, who is dying of cancer. It is a trip that will put him on a collision course with his ethnic identity which he has long denied.
It is hard to believe that Urinetown: The Musical is a decade old, for this Brechtian send-up of the eternal battle between the haves and the have-nots seems ripped from today’s headlines.
For what is the conflict between corporate mogul Caldwell B. Cladwell, whose firm bought up all the public toilets in order to overcharge the masses to relieve themselves, and those who think such bodily functions are an inalienable right, but a thinly disguised parable of the one-percenters versus the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Someday sociologists will surely study the genesis of two recent phenomena – the healing rite of passage known as the divorce party and the bonding "girls’ night out" theatrical revue.
Historians may even note that the intersection of the two began at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse with a demographically targeted – and punctuation-challenged – trifle called Divorce Party The Musical.
Its prototype is the wildly successful Menopause The Musical, which began a decade ago in Orlando before being cloned across the country, pulling in $300 million. No wonder producer Mark Schwartz has been in search of another celebration of female empowerment, fueled by existing pop songs with parody lyrics.
Adam Bashian, Donte Bonner and Brandon Morris in 'The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.'
Because professional wrestling is rigged, with pre-determined outcomes and designated winners and losers, some participants make their living as fall guys.
And in Kristoffer Diaz’s crafty, rock-’em-sock-’em, highly theatrical look at the scripted "sport," The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, the focus is on one such perpetual loser.
No, not Chad, but the guy whose job it is to make Chad look good, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican named Macedonio Guerra – a/k/a Mace – a skilled wrestler so typecast for defeat that he does not even rate an entrance into the ring, elaborate or otherwise.
Yet Mace, the most fully dimensional character, narrates the play that is receiving its thought-provoking, bone-crunching area premiere in a brawny production at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre.
Chances are you already knew that the fix is in in pro wrestling. Fortunately, playwright Diaz has more on his mind than that. After all, Chad Deity was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010, for what the play has to say about us as a nation, our faux-reality show mindset, society’s pervasive racism and our collective suspicion of all things foreign.
On another clever Tim Bennett set, dominated by a wrestling ring at center stage and two huge video and projection monitors on the sides, Mace clues us in on the inner workings of THE Wrestling. That is the corporation that broadcasts and promotes these televised "bread and circuses" for the bloodthirsty, xenophobic masses.
Avi Hoffman (right) with Sy Fish in 'Brooklyn Boy'. (Photo by R.J. Colman)
While his wife, Laura Turnbull, continues at Palm Beach Dramaworks in The Effect of Gamma Rays in Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in a role she insists has little in common with herself, Avi Hoffman is preparing to appear in the opening show of Boca Raton’s Parade Productions in a part he finds has numerous similarities to himself.
"In many ways, it’s not far off from me," Hoffman says of Eric Weiss, the title character in Donald Margulies’ Brooklyn Boy, the dramatic comedy of a best-selling author at middle-age, battling with his ethnic roots.
"What I don’t talk about a lot in my one-man shows" – Too Jewish? and its sequels – "is for how long I tried to escape from my Jewish background," he concedes. "I was doing more and more projects with some kind of a Jewish content, and it was becoming a trap.
“In a similar way, Eric Weiss "has been spending his life trying to get away from himself. The show is about how do you accept who you are and where you’re from."
After two critically admired novels that virtually no one bought, Eric writes about his Jewish roots and suddenly he has a best-seller on his hands. "And I think he struggles with the idea that this may be a sellout," says Hoffman. "He’s also talking a lot about success, and while unfortunately I have yet to experience the kind of success that Eric Weiss is experiencing, hopefully one day I’ll be able to say that that too preys on my mind."
In part because the Maltz Jupiter Theatre has served up such polished and elaborate productions in recent years, it has had a hard time convincing its subscribers that these are not touring shows intended for a larger audience.
That misunderstanding can only increase with its current, otherwise excellent offering of the landmark John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, Cabaret. For the theater has chosen to reproduce the revelatory concepts and staging of the 1998 Tony Award-winning revival which upped the decadence, depravity and darkness quotients of the show which looks at the insidious rise of the Third Reich in prewar Berlin.
That’s fine, I suppose, particularly when the results are so chillingly on target. But by hiring a director who has helmed this version so many times on tour and using several performers who have appeared in it previously on Broadway or the road, it hardly feels like a home-grown Maltz production.
Janet Dickinson and Janna Cardia star in 'Divorce Party: The Musical' at the Kravis Center.
Dr. Amy Botwinick of Boca Raton has had four careers. First she was a chiropractor, then a divorce coach, which led to her third life as an author of the self-help book Congratulations on Your Divorce – The Road to Finding Your Happily Ever After.
But she is having the most fun with her fourth job, turning her knowledge of the pitfalls of divorce and its aftermath into a stage show. Tonight, Divorce Party The Musical has its world premiere at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, where it plays through Feb. 19.
The musical might never have happened if Botwinick had not struck up a conversation with a complete stranger at a reception at The Breakers. He turned out to be Mark Schwartz, producer of the wildly successful off-Broadway hit, Menopause The Musical. He not only saw the potential in a show about divorce parties — those popular rite-of-passage celebrations of uncoupling — but he taught Botwinick how to write a musical, using Menopause as the template.
You take four female characters, add a dozen and a half familiar pop songs with parody lyrics, stand back so you are not trampled by the crowds of women looking for an entertaining "girls’ night out," and then giggle all the way to the bank.
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