On Wednesday June 20th we continued into Act One
and worked on the entire BMI Musical Theatre Workshop sequence which includes three
musical numbers: “Fridays At Four”, “Charm Song” and “Paris Through The
Window”. This is a well-known weekly NYC workshop where budding songwriters get
to try out their material in front of their peers. The workshop was originally
taught by the legendary Broadway conductor Lehman Engel, and he is a character
in the show that inspires Ed Kleban to work hard at his craft. A cool part about this
sequence is that in our production I will be on stage as the accompanist of the
workshop! After lunch, we reviewed the work we did and got into the scene
between Mona and Ed, a fellow songwriter (but not very good one) who attempts
to seduce Ed. (Although Ed is the hero of our story, he is only human and
certainly not without faults- and one of his big ones was juggling multiple
women.)
On Thursday June 21st we continued working the
Mona/Ed scene in Act One and progressed through a scene at Columbia Records.
Felicia, a member of the BMI workshop class, becomes a producer at the label
and tries to convince Ed to give up his desire to write a famous Broadway
musical. In real life, Ed worked as a producer for Columbia, but his
assignments were for exotica music titles like “Cha-Cha for Lovers” or for
B-list music artists such as Jim Nabors and Percy Faith. This was a frustrating
time for Ed; he was making a decent living but he felt artistically
unfulfilled. One of his major coups was producing the extremely well received
and financially successful soundtrack album of the 1960’s musical JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL.
In today’s rehearsal, we were able to rehearse and stage five
tunes: “Mona” (a bossa nova that humorously describes the show’s character as
if she were a tourist attraction), “Making Up Ways” (a tender love ballad that
Ed sings to Sophie), “Under Separate Cover” (an upbeat rock number about a couple’s
separation from marriage), “Don’t Do It Again” (a vampy Billie Holiday type
blues that Felicia sings to Ed) and “Gauguin’s Shoes” (a soft-shoe comedy
number).
Many of the songs in ACA were originally written for a show
Ed was trying to get produced on Broadway called GALLERY (later retitled SAVING THE MUSE). The main character
goes to an art gallery and is inspired by the paintings of artists like Chagall
& Michaelangelo. Tahitian artwork by Paul Gauguin is the inspiration for “Gauguin’s
Shoes”. Linda Kline revealed to us
that “Gauguin” was originally done with hats and canes. Our version will be a Tahitian fantasy. To be sure, it will be
very funny!
