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For
the Ages
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Teri
Currie
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By
combining their different perspectives and worldviews on one
world- historical event, Ed. Lange, Will Severin and George
David Weiss hope to produce a musical of lasting appeal
By
John Rodat
Strolling
down the Great White Way today, you might have a mild feeling
of being transported backward in time—it’s a sensation that
shouldn’t prove too uncomfortable though, because as it turns
out, you’re not going far. The marquees of the big-name theaters
read like those of the multiplexes in recent years: The
Lion King, Titanic, The Full Monty and the
comparatively aged Footloose all have been recycled
as stage musicals. Desperate for
proven hits, Broadway producers
have seemingly been scouring recent back issues of Premiere
for safe bets in a notoriously fickle business. But in
Troy, off-off-off Broadway, the New York State Theatre Institute
is preparing for the debut of an original musical that is—literally—the
stuff of which history is made.
On Saturday (April 20), NYSTI will debut Magna Carta,
which deals with the events leading up to the signing of that
document in England in 1215. Playwright Ed. Lange had
to look somewhere other than the ticket stubs in his jacket
pocket for an idea, obviously, but when asked to recall the
exact source of his inspiration, he shrugs and laughs, “Oh,
gosh, who the hell knows?
“I’ve
been fascinated by it since I was a kid in high school,” he
continues, speaking of the agreement between King John and
the baronial class of feudal England, which limited the power
of the monarch, and—some historians claim—led indirectly to
the American Bill of Rights. “It’s a world-changing event
that too few people know about. It has a story that wraps
around it that is absolutely fascinating, and on top of that,
it has tremendous pertinence today. So, you go, ‘Why didn’t
anybody else do this?’ Literally, I said to myself, ‘Magna
Carta? Somebody must have written this,’ and nobody had—and
it’s a fabulous story.”
The musical—for which Lange wrote the book, with Will Severin
and George David Weiss writing the music and the lyrics—begins
circa 1172, when, in the words of the theater-issued synopsis,
“feudalism’s rigid structure dominates society, with royalty
and nobility holding unquestioned authority over the nameless
common man.”
Or, we quibble, the heretofore nameless common man. For Magna
Carta features not only the eminent figures of the historical
record—King Henry II, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and
their rival sons, the eventual kings John and Richard—but
also fictional representatives of the folk, now given not
only names but lovely singing voices.
“That
was critically important to me, and remains critically important
to me,” Lange explains. “History writes about the famous people,
but history is populated by people who nobody’s ever heard
of. People like you and me who just live our daily lives and
that kind of thing, just regular folks. And I wanted to tell
their story, too. What was it like living with these incredible
characters? And what effect might they have had on this, that
history never recorded?”
While Lange claims that he and his collaborators attempted
to present the story with a respectful adherence to fact,
he believes that modern audiences will have no trouble with
the material.
“We,
all three, had to walk that tightrope,” he admits. “Do you
simply do history, or do you make compromises so that it touches
people today? Because none of us wanted to make a historical
document, or a history lesson, or something you put in a museum.
We wanted to make a really exciting musical entertainment
for today’s audience.”
Despite the unusual nature of the production—the pitch for
which must have sounded like an outtake from Mel Brooks’ History
of the World, Part I—confidence in the ability of this
trio to reach a modern audience must have been high: Lange’s
work as a director, actor and playwright has won him numerous
awards, including two Metroland Best Of awards (as
a director in 1997, and a playwright in 1998) and a national
Audie award for the audiobook of his play Sherlock’s Secret
Life, and he recently was chosen to adapt two mysteries
penned by the best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark; Severin,
who received a classical musical education at several prestigious
schools including the Berklee College of Music, has written
and performed everything from big Broadway numbers to rock
songs for his own band, Severin’s Fortune; and Weiss is the
current president of the Songwriter’s Guild of America and
a member of the National Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, in recognition
of the major cultural impact and staying power of his compositions
such as “What a Wonderful World,” “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”
and Elvis’ show-closing theme, “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
Available talent notwithstanding, the choice to present this
story in a musical setting wasn’t an obvious one—even Lange,
with his abundance of optimism and enthusiasm for his subject,
acknowledges that it was by no means a lock.
“Where
the collaboration begins is me saying to these guys, ‘What
do you think of this idea?’ ” He continues with a smile, “If
they like it, it becomes a musical. If they say it sucks,
it becomes a straight play.”
As it happened though, both Weiss and Severin—who had worked
together previously, composing for NYSTI’s A Tale of Cinderella—felt
immediately drawn to the potentials of Lange’s idea.
“I
think the way Ed. explained it, that it has so much to do
with yesterday as well as today, that sparked us,” Weiss says.
“We felt the same way about the situation. And secondly, there
was so much drama in the idea that we felt that we could compose
properly for—just one thing led to another.”
Severin, too, emphasizes the organic flow of ideas and the
easy fit of personalities and approaches: “We had a very fluid
working relationship. Ed. had an idea for the story he wanted
to tell, and then it was us figuring out where it was that
certain things could be musicalized. There were even whole
segments of dialog that he had that we ended up making musical.
So there was a lot of back and forth.”
Though the reasons for the success of artistic collaborations
can be difficult to qualify—by and large, they just work or
they don’t—Lange has a theory as to why this particular effort
was as natural-seeming and pleasurable as it was.
“One
of the reasons, I think, that we’ve been working well together,
and hopefully have made something special, is that we’re in
these three separate generations,” he reasons. “I’m in my
mid-50s, Will’s in his 30s, and George David’s, well, a couple
of years older than me, and we’re each bringing perceptions
and insights and experiences to the project from different
worldviews, if you will.”
So, though Lange confides that “the nerves never go away,”
he and his partners are proud of the work they’ve done, and
confident that audiences will—as they have—find the story
a compelling one.
“Creating
was what it was about with us. Nothing else,” Weiss says.
“And if our own perspectives combined, we had faith. We knew
we were going to be OK, we knew we were going to be good.”
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