Creating and mounting a new musical is an Everest-like challenge – one that only the smallest handful of U.S. theatres have the nerve to do, and theatres that commission local artists to create them are scarcer than hen’s teeth. So count the creators of Cricket on the Hearth doubly lucky. Bookwriter and lyricist Wayne Turney and composer Sebastian Birch are getting a second production of their holiday show this year, which opened last weekend. The plucky area theatre that commissioned them is working closely with director MaryJo Alexander, they’ve done a lot of revising since last year’s premiere. In a freewheeling conversation, the three collaborators talked with Cool Cleveland theatre correspondent Linda Eisenstein about the process.

MJA = MaryJo Alexander; WT = Wayne Turney; SB = Sebastian Birch

Cool Cleveland: What made you decide to create this piece? Commissioning a new musical, that’s an incredibly brave thing.
MaryJo Alexander: We needed a new holiday show. We’d done A Child’s Christmas in Wales several years in a row, and frankly we thought our subscribers needed a change. So we were looking for a new project. We found this Dickens novella, Cricket on the Hearth, began to read it, and immediately said: “Let’s give this to Wayne.”
Wayne Turney: I started working on it very briefly, and soon realized there needed to be music.
Sebastian Birch: I was downstate at the time, teaching at Ohio Wesleyan. Wayne called me and said, “Can you write a little music for this?”
WT: At the beginning we thought it would be a play with music, with just a couple of Dickensian carols at the beginning and the end. That soon got out of hand! (all laugh)
SB: Now there are 17 musical numbers, including reprises.

How did you two – Wayne and Sebastian – first become collaborators?
WT: When I was working at Cleveland State, back in ’95 or ’96, I got a Kulas Foundation grant to have a score written for a production of Sophocles’ Aias. I had worked for many years with David Gooding, but he wasn’t available. I called around to ask people about composers, and one after another brought up Sebastian. He wrote an astonishing score; everything I had hoped for.
SB: I started doing theatre scores once a year with Wayne. I wrote scores for his production of As You Like It, for his play The Eunuch’s Mother-in-Law.
WT: Then Sebastian moved to Florida, but thank God for email. It’s good to have him back in the area again.

Tell us a little about the show.
MJA: It’s from an earlier Christmas novella by Charles Dickens -- a love story, set in Victorian England. Many of the characters are precursors to those he later created in A Christmas Carol. There’s a deliveryman, John, and his wife Dot. There’s Caleb, a toymaker, and his gruff boss Tackleton. Caleb has a blind daughter Bertha, and he’s created an imaginary world for her. He also has a lost son, Edward, whose fiancé, Mae, has now become engaged to Tackleton in a marriage of convenience. Then a stranger appears, there are complications and surprises, and of course, everything ends well.
WT: It’s full of revelations & love scenes, party scenes, storytelling scenes -- Dickens is such a great storyteller. It’s also a mystery.
MJA: Wayne has framed it within a context of a company of actors in the 1850’s acting out the story, and he plays Charles Dickens, who narrates.

What kinds of things have you changed from last year?
WT: We rewrote entire sections.
MJA: We learned a lot from last year’s production. It’s hard once you get a show up, to make all the changes you need. My mantra this year was “Cut! Cut!”

So you’ve been the one holding the whip?
WT: More like a whip and a chair.
MJA: They’ve been great about making changes.
SB: The biggest change has to do with the accompaniment. Last year the entire score was on tape. I was out of town, so I created a performance CD with a large orchestration, which sounded like a Victorian orchestra.
WT: It sounded gorgeous, but it was too big for the room.
MJA: And, of course, the tempos were preset. That works for dance – the dancers need to be able to count by measures – but what you need for dance doesn’t really work for theatre.
SB: So I took the whole thing apart, and I redid it for piano and bass.
MJA: Yes, Sebastian now gets to play the show live, which helps a great deal with the tempi. We’ve put the musicians onstage in the center of the set so Wayne has given them some lines.
SB: Last year we were being too artsy with the songs, having them move right into dialogue.
MJA: The audience wanted to applaud!
SB: So I put some buttons on the endings. I had to listen to show tunes to remember how to do that!

What does the score sound like?
MJA: It’s lovely.
SB: I used several different styles. I wanted something very tonal, but I used lots of chromatic passing tones & modulations.
WT: But it’s not obvious. In “We See the Love in Your Eyes,” our first cast thought it was 12-tonal.
MJA: I think it’s very singable. There’s a clarity to it with piano and bass.
WT: I can’t play his stuff at gun point.
MJA: We’ve got a pop-40 hit, though -- “Home is Love.”

How did your audiences respond to the piece? It’s always a risk doing new work.
WT: It’s a brave, brave, brave thing to do.
MJA: Sure, it was risky. In a theater as small as ours, I can’t afford to lose a single seat. But it was well-received. We even added two additional performances for holiday parties. We were pleased enough with the overall response that we scheduled another production – this year with a 4-week run.
WT: Come and see it.
MJA: This year we even built in a hearth. We decided, yeah, the cricket needs to have a hearth.

Cricket on the Hearth runs thru 12/19 at Actors’ Summit. http://www.ActorsSummit.org
Interview by Cool Cleveland theater correspondent Linda Eisenstein Linda@coolcleveland.com

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