Alum's Musical Ill-Produced

Suffer Little Children: An energetic but patchy staging of Some Call It Magic was performed last Sunday. (photo by Areca Treon)

In the spring of 1998, Bill Stevens ('00) began work on his musical Some Call It Magic, an ambitious non-narrative arrangement of dance, poetry, music and dialogue. Last Sunday, he was able to test his work before an audience in Warner concert hall, though, unfortunately, with a rather compromised production.

"We had scheduling problems with cast and staff," first-year director Laura Shepherd said, "and it seemed like the best way to put it together was to lower the commitment a notch. We took out all of the dance and most of the staging of the show, focusing on the music and the poetry, and even those aspects were not entirely fleshed out."

The musical is a series of vignettes exploring one day in the lives of a dreamy, forlorn boy, his uncomprehending parents, a prophecy-spouting girl with whom he falls in love and a magician who encourages everyone to look beyond the daily grind. However, lacking dance and full staging, Sunday's performance left the audience little to grasp at. Every character was offered only surface treatment, exemplified by their astonishingly impersonal names (Boy, Woman, Man, Little Boy, Youths). Clearly not a plot-driven piece, the production explored various states of mind: a desire to leave home, the tendency to attach memories to objects. However, it dealt with these themes so vaguely, it was difficult to care about them. The play tried to tackle ideas before establishing characters and thereby wallowed in abstraction.

"It's not a show about plot," Stevens said. "It's a trajectory through a psycho-acoustical architectural space. It's about the kinds of architectures of the mind. It has to do with our perception of architecture, sense of our awareness in timeŠ It's really hard to pull that off. The material needs to be presented with a great deal of conviction."

Unfortunately, Sunday evening's performance lacked that crucial degree of conviction. Clearly under-rehearsed, most of the actors read their lines with script in hand.

The evening's saving graces were sophomore Aquila 'Kiki' Mayle's gorgeous, soulful vocals and junior Jason Brown's tense drumming - which did more to convey dramatic action than most of the acting.

What one finally took away from Sunday night's rough, skeletal production was the sense that Some Call It Magic demands a full staging - and more time to grow. Finally, seeing the material performed was helpful to Stevens. "I could discover what the errors of the score are," he said. Now, he plans "to go on retreat Šand edit." Stevens has also been asked to write a score with alum Gayden Wren (OC '83).

Sunday's performance suggested a wealth of ideas, currently too abstract to carry an audience. With a little paring, reshaping, and character development, Some Call It Magic should be an exciting, dynamic production to anticipate.