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ABSTRACT
Jeri Kroll’s verse novel, Vanishing Point, exists as a text and a performance piece, adapted for the stage by Leslie Jacobson. Productions at George Washington University and Horizons Theatre from 2009 led to a staged reading at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts ‘Page to Stage’ Festival (2011), followed by a professional workshop with original music (2012). In 2014, a 90-minute performance with musical score by Roy Barber was produced at George Washington University. That version became a winner in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Puncher and Wattman published the verse novel, shortlisted for the 2015 Queensland Literary Awards.
This article takes a case study approach, using the adaptation in America of Vanishing Point into musical drama. It discusses the suitability of a verse novel for adaptation, provides context about American musical drama and focuses on shows that break new ground through dealing with challenging social and psychological material. Vanishing Point treats a young woman’s struggle to overcome anorexia and bulimia. The article explores music and emotion in drama and concentrates on the composer’s, director’s and poet’s interpretations of how music and lyrics shape the production’s affect. These ‘emic’ perspectives strengthen the case study methodology.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Jeri Kroll was the inaugural Dean of Graduate Research at Flinders University in Australia and is Professor of English and Creative Writing. Recent co-edited works are Research Methods in Creative Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and ‘Old and New, Tried and Untried’: Creativity and Research in the 21st Century University (Common Ground 2016). She has published twenty-five books; the latest are Workshopping the Heart: New and Selected Poems (Wakefield 2013) and a verse novel, Vanishing Point (Puncher and Wattman), shortlisted for the 2015 Queensland Literary Awards. A George Washington University stage adaptation by Leslie Jacobson was a winner in the 47th Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Kroll is also studying for a second PhD, a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong.
Leslie Jacobson has spent close to 40 years producing, writing, directing, and teaching theatre committed to giving voice to people often marginalized by the dominant culture. She is the Founding Artistic Director of Horizons Theatre. Under her leadership from 1977 to 2007, Horizons introduced Washington DC audiences to over 60 new plays and playwrights through fully staged productions, and another 50 through public staged readings. Jacobson has been nominated for the Helen Hayes Award in the category of Outstanding Director three times. She is a Professor of Theatre at The George Washington University. For the past 12 years, Jacobson has been running a cultural exchange program between GW and the Bokamoso Youth Centre in the impoverished rural township of Winterveldt, South Africa. She first met Jeri Kroll when on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in South Australia in 2008.
Notes
1 After university, Barber began to combine music with theatre in a serious way and took a Master’s degree in Expressive Therapies from the Cambridge-based Lesley College. ‘Highly evolved and uniquely conceptualized, our pace-setting Master’s, certificate, and doctoral programs in Expressive Therapies provide a meaningful connection between the arts, theory, and practice in clinical training’ (http://www.lesley.edu/expressive-therapies/).
2 Highlights include stints with teen groups at the Kennedy Center Program for Children and Youth; a DC Cabaret Company piece with Bari Biern called A Dance Against Darkness: Living with AIDS, which toured nationally; and a sole-authored musical focused on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle called Children with Stones that was nominated for several Helen Hayes theatre awards.
3 A case study needs to find a balance between being ‘both unique and representative’ (Meyrick Citation2014, 7) to be useful as PAR; researchers can wait, if necessary, until sufficient data is generated to settle on research questions and conceptual frameworks. In sum, Meyrick suggests that ‘what stands to be explained (clarified) is not the case (in PAR, the performance), but a problem in the case, constructed as an object of study’ (Citation2014, 8; also see 10).
4 Oliver states that after years of debate, ‘both perspectives were deemed valuable in the study of social behavior’ (Citation2014, 4), although in some fields the divide between ethnographic and survey research persists (see Morris et al. Citation1999, 781).
5 ‘“Yet while performance is based on repetition, mimicry, and reproduction … it also varies to a great extent, even from performance to performance of the same play, song, or epic, which is often referred to as the emergent quality of performance”’ (Lord 2000, quoted in Korom Citation2013, 2).
6 Peter Eckersall particularises these mercurial conditions related to dramaturgy by saying that it ‘is everything that has action or effect; not only text and actors, but also’, as Eugenio Barba enumerates, ‘“sounds, lights, changes in the space … “’ (Eckersall Citation2006, 284, quoting Barba 1985, 76).
7 Alone and in concert with the director.
8 Vanishing Point is a narrative told in verse, but it also contains short prose sections.
9 This summary of Western performance traditions is standard in most theatre study books. The Reference list contains a number of relevant texts.
10 The designers for these productions were often originally from Europe (such as the Ziegfeld Follies’ Joseph Urban), and their elaborate scenic artistry and sumptuous costumes rivalled – and sometimes surpassed – the Folies Bergère in Paris, established in 1869 (Mordden Citation2013, 98–106; http://www.britannica.com/topic/Folies-Bergere).
11 This practice contrasted with earlier musicals, in which songs were interpolated into the performance, stopping the action with musical interludes often irrelevant to the plot.
12 In fact, its hybrid status seemed to confound the critics – the music critics thought it was too much like musical theatre, and the theatre critics thought it was too much like opera (Pollack Citation2006, 592–608). Continually in production, and important not only because of the many songs from its score which have become standards in the American popular musical repertory, it defies categorisation (Pollack Citation2006, 609–640).
13 These short stories, written as letters from ‘your pal, Joey’, were first published in the New Yorker magazine beginning in 1938, and later collected in an epistolary novel in 1940 (see Block Citation1997).
14 At the time of the show’s Broadway opening, however, Brooks Atkinson, principal theatre critic of The New York Times, ended his review with these words: ‘Although Pal Joey is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?’ (Brantley Citation2012, 92).
15 While audiences in pre-war America disapproved of the character of Joey, the musical’s 1950’s revival reflected a more cynical American zeitgeist. The show then had a long, successful run – including a revision of opinion on the part of Mr. Atkinson (Block Citation1997, 104–114).
16 ‘Note the distinction between “musical play” and “musical comedy”. … Lady in the Dark is a feast of plenty. Since it also has a theme to explore and express, let’s call it a work of theatre art’ (Brantley Citation2012, 94).
17 Based on a play, Green Grow the Lilacs, by Lynn Riggs, and produced in New York by the Theatre Guild in 1931, this unassuming play, with folk songs interpolated into the story, was a Broadway failure in 1931.
18 See Carter’s Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Citation1979). The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1937, and while the lives of the nine men were saved, it took almost 20 years for the last defendant to be released from prison.
19 In his review of the Broadway opening of Next to Normal in 2009, the current principal critic for the New York Times, Ben Brantley, writes:
No show on Broadway right now makes as direct a grab for the heart – or wrings it as thoroughly – as Next to Normal does … . Anger, yearning, sorrow, guilt, and the memory of what must have been love seem to coexist in every note she [i.e. Alice Ripley, the star] sings. None of these are particularly comfortable emotions … . Nor do musicals have to bubble with cheer to transport an audience as this one does. (Brantley Citation2012, 346–47)
20 An investigation of audience reaction is beyond the scope of this article.
21 In the 2012 production, music of the five songs composed to date had to be recorded, necessitated by Barber’s hand surgery. Its impact on the performance was evident to both director and poet, as transitions were sometimes awkward and the audience occasionally lost focus because of delay. It is worth noting that in 2014 the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival adjudicators who were to assess the performance asked the poet and director how they would define the production. They agreed it was not simply a play, a musical in the Broadway sense, or a verse opera. It was a species of musical drama albeit on a smaller scale.
22 Poetry therefore appealed to ‘audiences in specific social, cultural or religious contexts and occasions … genres had not yet become separated from occasion and context’ (Thomas Citation2013, 28).
23 ‘So far, no experimental study has systematically manipulated all three factors – listener characteristics, music and context – in an attempt to predict specific emotions to music … ’ (Sloboda and Juslin Citation2011, 87).
24 See for example, http://www.musiccareer.com.au/index.php/Musical-Theatre_Composer and http://www.musicalwriters.com/write/stephen-schwartz/musicals/musiclyrics.htm.
25 The background and linking music in Vanishing Point has affinities with the emotional aspect of film music, as in both cases ‘the audience selectively attends to only the part of the music that makes sense with the narrative. Selective attention is a common perceptual-cognitive operation’ (Cohen Citation2011, 884). Loss of focus on one of the verse drama’s aesthetic dimensions (as well as visual focus on the composer who sits to the side of the stage as performer generating the music) exemplifies ‘inattentional deafness’ (Cohen Citation2011, 884).
26 ‘ … described in Section 31.2.4’ (Cohen Citation2011, 896).
27 The sound designer, Natalie Petruch, a student who had spent a semester abroad in Australia, contributed the introductory music (a recorded didgeridoo to indicate the Australian setting).
28 ‘Cohen (1999) described eight functions of music in a film or multimedia context’ (Cohen Citation2011, 891).
29 For example, Barber needed to take account of the director’s intent, the time limits (a 90-minute performance) and budget (also see Cohen Citation2011, 899). At one point the director considered guitar music as well, but it was simpler to opt for the composer playing the piano.
30 The published text mentions or alludes to the Wizard of Oz, and Dorothy’s struggle with the Wicked Witch of the West (see ‘Mariska Who?’ 156–57 and ‘Firewater’ 160–61). The words of the Wicked Witch, the epigraph to ‘Firewater’, have multiple meanings: ‘“See what you have done!“ she screamed. “In a minute I shall melt away”’ (160).