Interview with Love Kills author in Edge New York

Edge New York ran a feature on upcoming NYMF shows, featuring interviews with Kyle Jarrow, author of LOVE KILLS, and B.D. Wong, director of YELLOW ROAD.
http://www.edgenewyork.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=theatre&sc2=features&sc3=&id=5340

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Inside the New York Musical Theatre Festival by Scott Stiffler EDGE New York City Contributor Thursday Sep 13, 2007     From September 17 through October 7, The New York Musical Theatre Festival occupies five midtown theaters to present over thirty shows-plus some 100 readings, workshops, concerts, parties, seminars, and master classes. Now in its fourth year, NYMF bills itself as "the biggest musical theater event in the whole effing world" and backs up that cheeky marketing slogan with an ambitious slate of traditional and unconventional works. Although a cursory examination of the roster revealed only one show with explicit GLBT-themed fare (Gemini the Musical), the very nature of the festival (and the dearth of musical theatre muffins sure to occupy many of the seats) gives it implicit queer credibility. NYMF’s big tent covers subject matter ranging from Attention Deficit Disorder to thrill killings to one bitter roller derby rivalry and two Jane Austen adaptations. Executive Director Kris Stewart says: "The biggest priority for us is the diversity of shows that get selected. . .We encourage risk taking in our artists and our audience. A twenty dollar ticket is the opportunity to try a couple of musicals that are outside of your experience. . .When we are programming, we’re looking for people who are doing something new or different with the form that has a unique personal voice. These are shows that deal with very contemporary subject matter but also have a very contemporary palate. We see writers and composers being influenced by pop, punk, contemporary and classical." Unfortunately, the financial challenges of mounting a full-scale musical often means that writers and composers who create stage-worthy projects with must struggle for years before their ambitions are realized. NYMF provides a short cut to the process; and with it, a certain amount of artistic freedom from the demands and compromises of the bottom line. Stewart acknowledges the ". . .enormous gulf existing between what it costs to write and develop a musical and the resources needed to bring it to full production. As Off-Broadway musicals became a million or a million two to be produced, there needed to be a new way for works to be seen by the public and the industry. One of the biggest challenges of writing a new musical is, what’s the end process I’m writing for? It can take five or six years. The festival gives a real clear finish line. In January and February, we’ll get around four hundred submissions. There’s a freshness and vibrancy and a rawness to the works, because the act of writing and rewriting and getting endless notes on the show hasn’t beaten the life out of them." A prime example of seeing a work in the raw that went on to glory is Altar Boyz, the 2004 NYMF hit that’s currently in the third year of its Off-Broadway run and recently celebrated its 1,000th performance. Citing Altar Boyz, Stewart says "It’s nice to know you were one of the first people to discover it; to spread the word about how great it is and start a momentum about the show." Purely speculative and highly subjective on my part, here are some festival highlights: The Last Starfighter (September 28-October 7) adapts the 1984 sci-fi/romance film about a fast-talking alien who recruits video game prodigy Alex Rogan to help fight a war in a distant galaxy. Roller Derby (September 20-27) takes place in 1972, as "a brash young rookie from NYC’s mean streets takes on the sport’s beloved but aging star in a battle royal for the title of Roller Derby Queen." Five-time Tony Award nominee Donald McKayle directs and choreographs to a pop/rock score by John Braden and Harold Wheeler (Orchestrator: Dreamgirls, Hairspray). Despite the undisputable fact that she makes for a painfully boring read, folks just can’t seem to stop themselves from adapting the works of Jane Austen. NYMF has two of them: Austentatious (September 18-29) is a backstage musical following "a community theater group as they attempt to stage a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice." Emma (October 2-7) puts a musical comedy spin on the Austen tome about Emma Woodhouse’s matchmaking schemes gone wrong. The Beastly Bombing (October 2-7) is a "Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style romantic operetta about white supremacists and Al Qaeda terrorists plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge." The L.A. Weekly Awards gave it Best Musical of the Year. Sympathy Jones (September 24-October 4) is a would-be super spy who, when passed over for a promotion, "steals a top-secret file and sets out to stop villainess Kitty Hawk." And in Gemini the Musical (September 18-October 1), "Francis Geminiani comes home from Harvard to his working-class neighborhood to come out to his macho father. Sex, guilt and opera make for a hot summer in South Philly." If those projects sound ambitious, consider the jam-packed genre mash up happening in Love Kills (September 18-29). OBIE award-winning playwright Kyle Jarrow based this "world premiere emo rock musical" on the 1958 Nebraska thrill kill case of teenage lovers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate. Jarrow "wanted to write a play about love and I wanted to explore this question of how love changes as we age. First love is tumultuous; the emotion is overwhelming. As you get older, some of the emotions become muted. With that comes a greater security and maturity; but there’s an intensity of feeling that is lost." The films Badlands and Natural Born Killers were also based on the case-although those versions comparatively suffered in that nobody broke into song amidst all the sex and slaughter. Jarrow explains his musical treatment of the story as being part of "an American tradition of teenage couples killing." As for film versions, "I felt the media treatments hadn’t really explored the nature of the love between these two people. They felt so much for each other, they believed they had to kill to express it. The passion they felt is too much for spoken word; so it has to explode into music." The specific style of music employed by Love Kills is Emo. Rock dinosaurs and fuddy duddies should note that emo is short for "emotional"-and besides Hip Hop, it’s all the rage with the kids today. Jarrow explains: "emo has a lot of melodrama and theatricality. I felt the style was right for use on the stage. As far as I know, it hasn’t been done. Although it is anachronistic, it seemed to make a lot of sense. The music’s really about stripping down to raw emotion. That’s sort of what these characters are doing. The play takes place in the 1950s, but I didn’t want to use the music. Emo has some of the same chord progression of 50s rock; so it was an opportunity to reference the period but also have fun with it." Loud fun, that is-provided by an onstage band. "When I go to the theater, I want to get a visceral experience. Myself and most people I know don’t got to a lot of theatre, but we go to a lot of rock shows. If you can bring the energy of a rock concert to the theater, that’s a great way to make the medium appeal to a younger generation. Hedwig, Spring Awakenings and Rent, to a degree, are examples of that. I don’t really like traditional musicals; which is not to say they’re bad, but they sometimes feel like an archaic form. To create a musical that feels contemporary and does something at least a little bit new with the form is my goal." In The Yellow Wood (September 19-October 1), "17-year old Adam takes a fantastic, unpredictable journey as he struggles to accept all the parts of himself: his ADD, his Korean heritage and his complex relationships with friends and family." Actor B.D. Wong, who certainly knows his way around a musical, makes his directorial debut. Asked for his thoughts on being a veteran actor and a novice director, Wong explains "There were tons of unexpected things that I am constantly experiencing and learning in this process. Even if I’m not reinventing the wheel as a director, I do feel that my perspective as a person who knows about the actor’s process is extremely valuable here. The actors all seem to be able to accept the direction I give them and have a kind of trust for going to places outside of their comfort zone that I have rarely seen in the rehearsal process with non-performing directors. Also, as an actor, the audition process was fascinating. I was really surprised by how participating in a different aspect of the process demystified the whole thing for me." Wong also weighs in on how the musical theater format can enrich and heighten The Yellow Wood’s themes of heritage and self-discovery: "Heritage and family relationships are real large issues for Adam, though he doesn’t know it in the opening scenes of the musical. Because Adam’s connection to his ancestry and his family are such huge journeys for him, it plays a major role in the score itself. Many of the songs deal with either Adam’s or someone in Adam’s life’s point of view in these areas. . .The basic tenet of an emotionally authentic musical, in my opinion, is that the music almost always takes the character’s feelings to an enhanced, theatrical plane that non-musical dialogue cannot. You can almost always identify a successful moment in a musical when the emotions that a character is feeling build gracefully until the music feels inevitable, and/or simultaneously furthers the action of the plot. Adam, the main character, is an anxious, hyper-imaginative teenage boy with Attention Deficit Disorder. . .an unexpected but perfect candidate to be a singing character in a musical. His feelings are so intense and his creativity so freely associative it seems perfectly natural and right that he express both his anxiety and his unique vivid fantasies through music." --All Tickets, $20 --For Reservations, call 212-352-3101 VENUES: Julia Miles Theater, 424 W. 55th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues) TBG Theater, 312 W. 36th Street (between 8th and 9th avenues) The Acorn Theater, 410 W. 42nd Street 3rd floor The Sage Theater, 711 Seventh Ave, 2nd Floor. Between 47th and 48th Streets The Theater at St. Clements, 423 W. 46th street (between ninth and tenth Scott Stiffler is a New York City-based writer and comedian.