“How can I get through a year of Spanish? How can I not look dumb in track? How can I gain 20 pounds by Friday? How can I make my voice not crack?” These questions, from “Thirteen/Becoming a Man,” are central to 13, the rollicking teen musical that opens at Live Arts on July 23.
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The cast looks on as music director John Carden (pictured above in red shirt) guides the band through preparations for Live Arts’ production of 13. When he’s done working with Tony-winner Jason Robert Brown’s score, Carden says he will continue writing a new musical for young people. |
Evan Goldman is the 13-year-old in question, a pubescent Jewish dweeb whose parents’ divorce brings him from New York City to Appleton, Indiana, where he goes all meshuga trying to “fit in with the people who fit in.” Worse, with neither rabbi nor temple nearby, wandering through the the land of Christians puts his bar mitzvah in peril. And you think it’s bad that Charlottesville doesn’t have an Ikea?
“It’s not a complex story, but it’s something that we grapple with each day,” says music director John Carden. “Wanting to be accepted, wanting to fit in.” The themes resonate with Carden, a jazz singer, hairdresser and musical composer, who took on music director duties just as a three-year collaboration with the pianist George Melvin ended in April, when Melvin died of complications from diabetes. “It was like one door closed, and another opened,” he says. An added bonus: Carden, whose musical Fabulous Flavio was performed in 2009 as part of a celebration of the PVCC Drama Department’s 25th anniversary, recently started working on a musical for children. “I wanted to get inside of the process and study it,” he says. “You wouldn’t build a clock without studying the insides first.”
Premiered in Los Angeles, 13 grew wildly popular and was transferred to Broadway in 2008, cast with actual teenagers. Its first amateur production was last year. The music by Tony-winner Jason Robert Brown is “one of the most complex scores I’ve come across from a contemporary composer,” says Carden.
But the plot is timeworn. Goldman, a sort of Rebel Without a Cross, must make that timeless choice—to be popular, or to find acceptance in the unpopular?—that Gen X-ers recognize as the Blaine vs. Duckie conundrum (Pretty in Pink), and older folks recognize as the Jim Stark vs. the world scenario (Rebel Without A Cause). In short, the musical traffics in the emotional trauma people incur in the crossfire of the ongoing war between the nerds and the jocks, the in and the out crowd.
As Igor Stravinsky’s dictum goes, “Great art likes chains,” and to hear Carden say it, the set of 13 is littered with golden handcuffs. “There’s a lot of letting go in community theater, but it doesn’t mean letting go in a sense that you’re resigned,” says Carden. “You have to let go of what you don’t have, look at what you do have and say, ‘I have to tell this story with those colors.’ That’s the challenge.”
One thing they do have: Co-director Will Rucker says that Live Arts’ Downstage theater has been fashioned into a schoolyard playground, complete with wobbly bridge. “The best thing a director can hope for is that the actors play around,” says Rucker, who will direct a stage adaptation of Lois Lowrey’s The Giver next season at Live Arts. And while getting teenaged boys interested in performing in a musical can be “pulling teeth,” the female UVA students have risen to the occasion, agreeing to play many of the young male characters. A recent UVA graduate, Rucker himself was invited to co-direct by Laura Rikard, a graduate student in drama whose directing schedule was interrupted with the role of the Baroness in the Heritage Theatre’s production of the Sound of Music.
The crack pit squad includes guitarist Humberto Sales of Beleza Brazil, bassist David Sanford (who is also a saxophonist), drummer David Drubin and Carden’s mother, a pianist who lives in Memphis. 13 opens at Live Arts on July 23 and runs through August 8.