With the world of Broadway 3,000 miles away, Los Angeles is not always recognized for its musical theater. However, Marcia Seligson aims to change that.
Seligson, founder of Reprise Broadway’s Best, along with fellow executive producer Bob Klein, is staging the Festival of New American Musicals, a first annual event that links over 45 musical productions across Southern California.
“There are so many areas of expression for musical theater, both in schools and in small theaters and around the country regionally, that there’s much more possibility for musicals to be produced,” Seligson said. “It is an art form that is distinctly American, and it really plugs into people’s deepest creative expression.”
Seligson said she and Klein were inspired to produce the festival when they recognized the wealth of composing talent in the region.
“(We wanted) to celebrate the amazing explosion of musical theater and new musicals in the culture and also to create new young audiences, to create the professionals of the future, just to expose musical theater to students and kids,” she said.
The festival began last Friday and runs until the end of June. It is held in theaters throughout Southern California and showcases modern, local shows. Participants range from colleges and high schools to professional venues.
To be part of the festival, playwrights applied to Seligson and venues volunteered to either stage a play or offer up a production they were already planning to feature. To see the shows, tickets can be purchased through the participating venues.
Honorary chairs of the festival include Stephen Schwartz, Angela Lansbury, Stephen Sondheim, Jason Alexander and Jerry Herman.
The festival aims to bring fresh audiences from the schools into professional theaters
Michele Brourman, composer of the festival’s “I Married Wyatt Earp,” said the festival’s goals of circulating fresh artistic expression run contradictory to the popular trends of modern theater.
“You’ve got these big blockbuster shows going onto Broadway ““ like “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein” ““ that are based on something already established. I wouldn’t say they were risk-free exactly, but they’re not taking big chances,” Brourman said. “There’s nothing radically new about them. … You can walk in and know what to expect, and that’s what you get. But there are new things and new composers and new approaches to theater writing that are coming up that are really interesting.”
Brourman attempts to infuse this type of novelty into her own work. “I Married Wyatt Earp” turns the focus from gunslingers to the heretofore uncelebrated women on the sidelines of the OK Corral. Brourman highlights those characters with Aaron Copland-esque music that would be familiar to audiences of old Western films.
“We associate that music with manliness ““ sort of that Marlboro Man. But I wanted to give it to the women. I wanted to say the women have power and courage and grit,” she said.
The producers of “Earp” hope to draw more names to their staged reading, which, aside from having secured such big names as Carole Cook and Kirsten Dunst, is still largely uncast. They hope to pick up actors during the festival. Seligson hopes to encourage the growth of new composers in Southern California during the festival.
“Earp” is not the only play in its initial stages. The participants of the Festival of New American Musicals have each entered the festival at varying stages of production, and they contribute to an eclectic range of styles and subject manner.
“Love, Janis,” a musical that has already played in San Francisco and New York, opens May 29 and combines Janis Joplin’s music and personal letters to tell the musician’s story.
Perhaps the more eccentric audience member would enjoy “Brain from Planet X,” which opened Saturday, a musical based on bad sci-fi movies from the ’50s and featuring a singing brain.
Seligson, in particular, looks forward to the growth of these musicals over the next two months.
“We’re very interested in the developmental process of new musicals: how it goes from somebody plucking an E-flat on their piano one night and thinking, “˜Ah, that’s the first note of my new musical,’ to having it produced,” she said.