Hey NTSIBbers, Help Some Cool People Put On a Show!
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jennifer here, and I’d like to introduce you to my friends Racheline Maltese and Erica Kudisch, also known as Treble Entendre, and the musical they’re working on, called Dogboy & Justine. It’s an adaptation of a short play that Racheline wrote – I saw it last winter in Queens, and it was sharp and funny and amazing – and they need some assistance with getting it all the way to a stage. Here they are to tell you more about it:
NTSIB: There’s some information about your experience in music and theater work on the Dogboy & Justine Workshop Kickstarter page , but is there anything else that you have you participated in that people outside New York could watch or listen to or read?
Racheline: I’m Vito’s Roadhouse Dancer #10 in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, and while uncredited, I’m also a dying junkie in American Gangster. I’ve a lot of publication credits, but in terms of writing on pop-culture [you] can check out Whedonistas, an anthology from Mad Norwegian Press, in which I have an essay that talks about my relationship to gender and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve also got several pieces (including one relevant to Dogboy & Justine) in Idol Musings: Selected Writings from an Online Writing Competition from Fey Publishing.
Erica: And I’m not exactly a staple of the opera world, not yet anyway, but I have performed roles in Pittsburgh and Boston. As publication credits go I’m responsible for the current State of Research (the annotated bibliography of sources to date as of 2007) in the Video Game Music anthology From Pac Man to Pop Music .
NTSIB: What is Dogboy & Justine about? What are the stories you are telling?
Racheline: We like to call it a story about “life, love, and head injuries” and it very much comes out of our feelings about New York and the way that everyone here has to live so many different lives, even if they aren’t carrying around stigmatized secrets like sex-work. New York is one of the world’s biggest cities, and that means it has tons of small quasi-secret worlds. But doing what you have to do to survive – to pay your rent, to follow your dreams, to meet your desires – those are really common stories, and those are the stories we’re telling, just in an uncommon way. Although, we are using a somewhat conventional format to tell them — the musical theater backstage story.
Erica: Which is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of the story. I’ve described it before as a “girl comes to the big city and gets a weird job” story just like 42nd Street and Thoroughly Modern Millie and Wonderful Town. But the spin D&J; puts on it doesn’t just tell a good story on its own, but it also takes apart those other stories and lends new depth to them.
NTSIB:What are some of the challenges of transitioning it from regular play to musical play?
Erica:The first big challenge is expanding it. Musical theater has different format conventions and requirements than straight theater. There are some composers who take the song-as-reflection stance (most classical musicals do this, like those by Rodgers and Hammerstein), and others who treat the music more operatically and have song-as-heightened action (Sondheim does this, sometimes Schwartz). I have to lay down what rules the music follows as I write it and make sure the audience can still believe that these characters have to sing in order to speak.
And I think the next hurdle comes when I have to decide what each of the characters sounds like. I’m also writing the lyrics, so that’s a little easier, and I can approach their personalities with words as much as with music. But with a cast like this, it’ll be really easy–and fun–to differentiate between their styles.
NTSIB: What are your musical influences? Where does D&J; fit in the broad spectrum of musical theater, which includes Broadway/Golden Age musicals like 42nd Street and South Pacific as well as Glee and American Idiot? Is D&J; “your father’s Oldsmobile”, or something completely different?
Erica: I’m an opera nerd. A lot of my influence is classical. Then again, so was Freddie Mercury’s. I’ve joked about the style I use when I write more classical pieces as Wagner-after-NIN. That influence definitely still persists when I write pop and musical theatre pieces, because I can’t turn my brain off.
But that’s good, because that means D&J; will have a weird and cool sound. So far it’s really jazz-influenced with this sense of the chords not going quite where you’d expect, and changing time signatures and irregular phrase lengths. The progressions are getting a little Radiohead in places, and, well, a lot Queen. Definitely not your father’s Oldsmobile–or maybe it was before you tricked it out and replaced the motor with a nuclear reactor.
Racheline: I’m someone who grew up on traditional Broadway and Golden Age musicals, but I’m also someone who is all over things like Wicked and Avenue Q and the really fantastic Passing Strange, which was created by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, and there’s a great concert film of it from Spike Lee. So I think you’ll ultimately find all these things in what we create. There are a few reasons our production company is called Treble Entendre, and one of them is that we love to bend expected stuff in unexpected ways.
NTSIB: What else are you working on?
Erica: If you want to check out INCEPTION: THE MUSICAL, it’s up on the Treble Entendre website! That’s the first project Racheline and I worked on together. It is, as you can guess from the title, a spoof musical based on the film Inception and the kinds of reactions there have been to it in the press, and also makes fun of the Joss Whedon musicals and movie musical resurgence tropes.
We’re also going to put on a fundraiser in the spring, “Key Change”. That’s going to be a cabaret evening in which we use Broadway and musical theater standards and sing them completely unaltered–except for the performers. It’s like D&J; in that we’re taking the old Broadway style and shedding new light on it.
And later next year, we’re hoping to put on one of my short operas, a modernization of Pygmalion–the Ovid, not the Shaw. It’s a weird and aggressive piece about art and populism and copyright infringement. Perfect topics for an opera.
NTSIB:And finally, the “what is the money for?” question.
Racheline: The funds will allow us to rent a theater for a week-long run of a workshop production. It will also allow us to rent studio space for the casting and rehearsal process, print programs, and do some basic publicity, as well as provide us some funds for sets and costume. It will also allow us to make sure that everyone who works on the show gets paid. We believe that artists deserve to get paid for their work and that means every cast member, every musician, every tech who works on the show will get a fee. We get paid last, if we get paid at all, and also only at stipend rates.
If there’s anything left-over it gets put back into the pool for future bigger and better productions. Right now we’ve already put about $500 of our own funds into getting this process up and running, but the best way to guarantee the pe
ople we work with get treated well is to have a guaranteed pool of funds to work with — that’s what Kickstarter is going to allow us to do.
Hopefully this will just be a first step in a project that really will generate jobs for working artists. Also, because one of our main characters is living with a disability, we’re going to set aside a portion of the door proceeds to benefit the Brain Injury Foundation of America, and that’s always going to be a part of what’s going on with this particular show. From the workshop, we’re writing them a check for at least $200, but depending on ticket sales and audience generosity that number may be higher.
***The Dogboy & Justine Kickstarter deadline is December 21!***
