Festival 2013 show Analog and Vinyl is jumping up to
Vermont's Weston
Playhouse this summer for its world premiere. This
month we check in with the show's writer Paul Gordon about preparing for
the musical's first production.
 Harrison is obsessed with LPs from the
sixties and the superior quality of analog. Rodeo Girl, a quirky Silver
Lake hipster, is obsessed with Harrison but he barely notices. With his
vintage record store about to go under, Harrison and Rodeo Girl are visited
by a mysterious customer who makes them a devilish offer they can't refuse.
What did you learn about Analog and Vinyl
while preparing it for the Festival?
Preparing for the
Festival wasn't as much a learning experience as it was an
"inspiring" experience. Once you know your show is going to be
seen by an industry audience, it does strange things to the creative
process. You start looking at the material with more fluid eyes. You start
questioning and examining the material (all while trying to create a
45-minute presentation), and suddenly you begin asking yourself the serious
dramaturgical questions of theme and character (that you had previously
avoided) that are vital to the developmental process. One of the great
gifts that came out of my preparation for the Festival was that I felt
incentivized to write a new song for the lead character that helped to
transform the show.
Your show only
had readings leading up to the Festival and now is preparing for a world premiere
this summer at Weston Playhouse. What has it been like to jump from reading
to production without a workshop in between?
Heaven. I love workshops and readings but there's nothing like preparing
for a production. In our day and age some have been critical that shows
have "too many readings" and "too many workshops" in
the developmental stage. To me that is pure nonsense. I have never done a
reading where I didn't gain some primary understanding about my show (even
if that understanding was, "hey, this is crap..."). With that
said, after several readings and the Festival, I'm delighted to actually
have, for the first time, a proper rehearsal period to really further
develop the work with cast, crew, designers and director.
What have you
been working on since the Festival?
Michael Berresse, the director of Analog
and Vinyl, has wonderful dramaturgical skills. Since the
Festival we have had several extensive note sessions and I have written two
new drafts of the show and three new songs. We are still hard at work:
tightening, refining, raising stakes and trying out some new ideas. The
"essence" of the show remains unchanged, but improvements are on
the way.
In the Festival, we
mixed things up a bit and made “The Stranger” a woman (played by the
wonderful Harriet Harris) when it had always been a man in previous
readings. Have you settled on a preference of genders for “The
Stranger”?
The idea of The Stranger being a woman was so well received at the Festival
that we have decided that, at least for now, we'd like to continue with the
character being female. It works either way, but there were some new
discoveries we made when Harriet did the part that we'd like to keep intact
in the script.
What are you
hoping for next after Weston Playhouse?
Ideally we'd like to take the show into New York. We feel the themes of Analog and Vinyl are
universal and contemporary. We hope the show's esoteric humor and its indie
rock score will appeal to a wide range of theater-goers. And we hope to
offend EVERYONE with our irreverent take on spiritual themes often
unexplored in rock musicals.
Why should people
head up to beautiful scenic Vermont this June and July to see Analog and Vinyl?
Because this show, above all else, is FUN. If you learn anything from this
show or if the show gives you insight or deeper understanding about how the
universe works— that is purely accidental. We simply want you to see this
show because we think you will have an amazingly good time. And you will
laugh. And you might come home with a song or two stuck in your head and
then illegally download songs from my website. And that would be fine.
For
more information about Analog and Vinyl, please visit www.westonplayhouse.org.
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