Festival Show Update: ANALOG AND VINYL

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?

Festival Show Update: PREGNANCY PACT

An interview with Gordon Leary and Julia Meinwald, the writers of Festival 2011 show Pregnancy Pact, as they prepare for the show's world premiere this August at the Weston Playhouse Theatre Co. in Weston, VT.

Pregnancy Pact is a pop-rock musical about a group of teens who make a pact to become single mothers together. 15-year-old Maddie is devoted to her three best friends and they are to her. So when Brynn gets pregnant, the friends all plan to have children, raising them together in a dream of a perfect life. Their pact grows as other girls find out and want in. The bubble finally bursts when their secret is revealed, leaving each of the girls to face the hard realities of love, responsibility and growing up


The show was fairly young when it came to the Festival. What was it like to put it up in front of the membership and industry at such an early stage?
Having only had one staged reading of the show before the Festival, it was thrilling to be able to share our work with such a large and enthusiastic audience. Beyond the thrill, the process of preparing for the Festival was immensely helpful. Since we chose to present an abridged version of the full piece, we were tasked with condensing the show down to its most important elements. It gave us a very clear idea of what story we are telling, which has helped us greatly as we continue to refine and reshape the piece.

FROM THE ROAD: VT and CT - Hurricane Irene Edition!

Like the postman, I will brave all weather for the sake of musical theatre and NAMT, but thankfully Irene held off long enough so I could swing by the Weston Playhouse Theatre Co., in Weston, VT and see the opening night of the world premiere of Saint Ex, by Sean Barry and Jenny Giering (Festival

Alumna from Princess Caraboo). The Weston Playhouse received a $15,000 grant from our National Fund for New Musicals for this production, so I was honored to represent NAMT on opening night. It was a beautiful production of a sweeping and touching musical about the life of the man who wrote The Little Prince, directed by Kent Nicholson. Resident Producing Director Steve Stettler and his team did a wonderful job of nurturing this show and bringing it to life. The night was capped off with the late-night cabaret performance downstairs from some of the cast and staff entertaining the elated crowd.

After a quick stop by the Vermont Country Store for cheese and maple syrup, it was off to see the matinee of The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown at Goodspeed Musicals. I was

supposed to see the evening performance but with Irene in Virginia, I thought it would be best to catch an earlier show so I could get home and avoid the hurricane. Sam Brown is by Brian Lowdermilk and Kait Kerrigan and is about a young woman on the morning of her first day of college who can’t decide between school and finally doing what she wants. It was a great production and the small audience, of those willing to brave a storm for art, loved it!

Sadly, the actualities of the storm started to set in after that show. It was supposed to be Sam Brown’s third-to-last show, but because of Irene…it became their last show during the performance. They had a great run but it was sad to hear that they and the audience would be deprived of the final two performances.

After Irene passed, the effects of the storm really hit home when I heard that the Weston was flooded, halting their production of Saint-Ex until the theatre was cleaned up and what was able to be saved was salvaged. As the photos on their Facebook page started to come in, it became clear that while flood was horrible, the Weston staff, volunteers and actors were resilient and wouldn’t let a little water and mud get in their way. By the end of the week, the show was back up (modified to embrace some necessary changes); an amazing feat! And I know that, storm or not, Saint Ex will fly again at many theatres around the country!