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| The 2013 developmental production of Watt?!? (starring Hugh Hastings - front) during Festival of New Musicals (photo by Sam Freeman) |
The annual musical development party is almost here. Village
Theatre’s robust Festival of New Musicals is a well-established, nationally and internationally
known, incubator of musicals, many of which move on to more development. Often,
one of the festival’s musicals makes it to Village’s next Main Stage season.
Once in a while, excitingly, one makes it to Broadway! Two were next to normal and Million Dollar Quartet. That hope fuels everyone’s ambitions.
The format, now, is five draft musical “readings”
(unmemorized, but rehearsed, with music stands and zero to rudimentary
costuming) and one musical that gets a “developmental” production, with full
staging and memorization, though only a two weekend run.
The developmental production this year had its debut last
summer as a reading: The Noteworthy Life
of Howard Barnes is created by book and lyrics writer Christopher Dimond
and composer Michael Kooman. This is a delightful story that will tickle the
funnybone of musical theater lovers, with some inside jokes. Why? Well, the
press release says, “Howard Barnes is a perfectly average American guy; he
likes baseball and grilling things. That is, until he wakes up to discover that
his life has become a musical.” It’s actually not so fun to have your life be a
musical and Howard has to go on a quest to find the person who knows how to
escape from Musical Land.