LOS ALAMOS LITTLE THEATER NEWS
A playwright’s craft is as complex and varied as a full theatrical production.
First, there are ideas; then execution, which can take years; then performers breathe the work to life in private for the playwright; rewrites and sometimes rewrights ensue, with more private readings; then invited or public audiences attend unrehearsed or rehearsed readings in which performers might be seated, on their feet at music stands, or moving around a stage with book-in-hand; next come bare-bones workshop-productions; and finally the finished script is ready for the full complement of creatives and performers.
Musicals are that much more complicated, requiring accompaniment and rehearsal even in the readings stages. That’s why DS Magid finds it so exciting that Los Alamos supports her process from soup to nuts – and this musical is more than a little bit nuts!
Magid’s lighthearted One Crazy Day, a multicolored genderbent televangelist musical farce is the gender-struggle love-child of Mozart/Da Ponte’s slyly political class-war opera “The Marriage of Figaro” and Beaumarchais’ death knell of the aristocracy play “Une Folle Journée,” by way of the American South. While Magid took great inspiration from these works, as well as a few tunes, this isn’t a modernized adaptation but rather, a story with its own cans of worms.
Beaumarchais and Da Ponte focussed on class wars, but while audiences familiar with Mozart’s opera won’t see the working class making fun of the aristocracy, they’ll recognize and laugh with potshots at infidelity, menopause, aging, intolerance, preference, bufoony religious leaders, fashion sense, garden plants that attack their gardeners… all via the neverending romantic struggles that also carry “Figaro” and “Une Folle Journée”.
Synopsis: The Soulpepper Ranch, property of singer Rosie Faye, is home to the Church of the Wake Up And Take Notice Or Else. It’s high summer in her rosebush-choked garden, where husband Rev. Timmy Braggart’s Daily Sermon Livecast is livecast. There’s a wedding planned for this afternoon – singer-songwriter Suzy will wed Newton, makeup artist to Rev. Timmy, whose on-camera weeping requires a lot of touch-ups. The Braggarts’ daughter Cher is a natural evangelist about to be banished for her love of the gardener’s daughter; Timmy’s preaching the abomination of same-sex sex is about to cause a lot of fireworks on the ranch and off; and backup singer Marcy holds a secret that could blow the whole enterprise wide open.
An all-Los Alamos cast of old-timers and newcomers (and some in-between) will breathe life into Magid’s characters for the first time in public, a crucial step in the playwright/ composer’s understanding of how the world she has created interacts with audiences’ synapses and viscera. Magid will tweak, hone, and sharpen the script and score by what she’ll have learned from the audience’s involvement and reactions, so come on down! Be a participant in a local, nationally known playwright’s process!
WHAT: Free, public staged reading of One Crazy Day, a multicolored genderbent televangelist musical farce by DS Magid
WHO: Local performers and musicians
WHEN: Saturday, Jan. 25 at 2:00 p.m.
WHERE: Los Alamos Little Theater, 1670 Nectar, Los Alamos
FURTHER INFO: (216) 320-0969 / SMMSLT111@gmail.com