`No matter what,” says lyricist Arthur Perlman, “we try to find things that are different. It’s important for us to stretch.”
There’s not an artist alive who wouldn’t make such a claim. But Perlman and his partner, composer Jeff Lunden, can point to a portfolio with enough curiosities to make you want to say, “No kidding.”
In the ’70s, as close friends in high school in Silver Spring, Md., they wrote an existential musical called “Trio” and one inspired by the life of Julius Caesar. By college (Perlman went to Brown, Lunden to Oberlin), they crafted a musical inspired by Sinclair Lewis’ meaty sociological dissection of small-town capitalism, “Babbitt.” They followed that with their first show to win an outright professional mounting, “Once on a Summer’s Day,” about Lewis Carroll.
In 1992, they produced one of the most unusual fusions in contemporary theater: They transformed Arthur Kopit’s “Wings,” a graphic journey through the mind of a stroke victim, into a lean, crystalline meditation that touched the heart. The final, prolonged note was an elegy intoning the final moments before death.
Now they’re undertaking their most ambitious work yet with “Another Midsummer Night,” inspired by William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” premiering Monday at the Goodman Theatre. Unlike “Wings,” the new show is a comedy.
“After `Wings,’ we wanted to come 180 degrees,” says Lunden.
“I’d always been intrigued by the idea of a modern fantasy,” says Perlman, who first hit on the idea. “We wanted to put people in a situation where magic is involved, but it always seems when that happens on stage the setting is another time and place.”
“Midsummer” evolved as a logical hybrid. In this scenario, the three main fairies from Shakespeare’s work–Oberon, Titania and Puck–exist for all time and emerge to dally with mortals every century or so, a little like the mythical village in “Brigadoon.” To suffer the slings and arrows of their mischief-making, Lunden and Perlman concoct two modern couples out to see a performance of the classic play in the park, where a small band of performance artists are in rehearsal and serve as modern counterparts to the comical craftsmen in Shakespeare’s rendition.
To wit: In the original, Bottom and his cohorts are putting on what turns out to be a hilariously bad version of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” As part of the interplay with the fairies, Bottom is literally transformed into an ass.
In “Another Midsummer Night,” Bottom is present in the form of a female performance artist named Nicki (played by Hollis Resnik). A technical foul-up opens a window in cyberspace and conjures up the fairies. Instead of changing into an ass, Nicki finds herself imprisoned inside a video monitor.
The transposition enables Lunden and Perlman to meld contemporary satire and fantasy in both music and tale. Madrigals accompany the fairies, who show up in Elizabethan wear; rock ‘n’ roll envelops the moderns. “But it’s not that the music stays in separate parallel tracks,” says Perlman. “It’s cross-fertilized. The longer the fairies hang out in modern times the more their music takes on modern sounds.”
“Midsummer” reunites composer Lunden and lyricist-book author Perlman with “Wings” director Michael Maggio for their second world premiere project together in less than three years. There is profound poetry in their collaboration. Before a double lung transplant that saved his life in 1991, Maggio staged an unsatisfactory version of the original “Midsummer Night’s Dream” on the Goodman’s mainstage–he left in mid-stream because of his illness.
Later his first project after bouncing back turned out to be “Wings,” an unflinching celebration of human dignity in the face of catastrophic physical odds. The triumph was unmitigated; though “Wings” has its detractors, it was remounted at the Public Theater and won the songwriters the Lucille Lortel Award, among other honors.
“When I first heard they wanted to follow up with something related to `Midsummer,’ I groaned,” Maggio says. “I didn’t want anything to do with `Midsummer.’ But the more I heard about it, the more I learned about what they wanted to do with it, I began to think this would be a way of getting vengeance, or maybe making peace.”
All of this is made even more bewitching by the presence of Michael Rupert, one of Broadway’s brightest musical stars, as one of the four lovers. Rupert is best known for playing the lead role in the William Finn-James Lapine musicals, “March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland” off-Broadway, and in their combined version, “Falsettos,” on Broadway. He boasts a distinguished performing career before that, however. His work has included a revival of “Sweet Charity,” which won him a Tony Award in the mid-’80s, and the Sondheim revue “Putting It Together” with Julie Andrews off-Broadway two seasons ago .
Rupert hasn’t played Chicago since the winter of 1977-78, when he toured in “Pippin” and bad weather left him with an unfavorable memory. But he is sympathetic to the plight of creators trying to craft a new musical. As a composer, he wrote two of his own, “Three Guys Naked From the Waist Down” and “Mail,” “which was a success in L.A. and then got the worst reviews I’ve ever read in New York.
“I saw `Wings’ and I loved it,” he says in explaining his choice to spend the summer in Chicago. Rupert says he shares creative goals with Lunden and Perlman.
“This was a pretty disturbing year in New York and sad from the viewpoint of new musicals,” he says. “Friends of mine who auditioned for this show in New York called me up and said, `I hear you’re doing “Another Midsummer Night.” Isn’t it great?’ Actors don’t say that to each other. New work, especially good work, is next to impossible to find.”
New musical work almost always now goes through a not-for-profit tryout somewhere–costs make any other approach highly impractical. Lunden notes that New York’s not-for-profit theater organizations, unlike the Goodman, are mostly too small to accommodate a musical the size of “Midsummer.”
“Except for the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, we couldn’t workshop a musical for 12 people in a New York not-for-profit theater,” he says.
“For us this show is a kind of culmination of what we’ve been working toward with our musicals in the summer,” says Maggio. “We started with a large-scale musical with `Sunday in the Park With George.’ We managed a big-scale revival with `Pal Joey,’ a revue with no script with `Book of the Night’ and a show with a new script and old songs with `Riverview.’
“This is the whole shebang–a full, original musical.”
Beyond that, Maggio–now in the sunlight of good health–wants to help Lunden and Perlman a bit more. “They’re still a secret,” he says. “They deserve to be better known.”
