People make musicals about almost anything today. Heck, there’s even one called “Urinetown.” But a production based on the writings of avant-garde American authoress Gertrude Stein isn’t exactly the first idea that comes to mind when thinking of a new musical vehicle.
Yet the outrageous, hilarious and often poignant new chamber musical, “A Long Gay Book,” makes a surprisingly easy job of navigating the treacherously abstract terrain of openly-gay Stein’s life and work.
Best known for penning the phrase, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” Stein has works loaded with repetitious and fragmented language. So it makes sense that “A Long Gay Book” mirrors that unconventional format.
Fusing together various texts of Stein’s with a lush, vibrant score, the play begins with a lecture she delivered at the University of Chicago in 1934 and quickly flashes back to her college days and her first encounter with Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s lifelong companion. The production then loosely proceeds through her life, slipping between vignettes of Stein’s experiences — stories within stories and musical numbers.
Brian Ogilvie, one of the production’s eight cast members, remembers that when he first saw the script he wondered how Stein’s words would ever translate into a musical.
“I was knocked over by how random and abstract and seemingly incomprehensible it was,” the Music senior says. “The show could be humorous in a bad way, in a ridiculous way. But in reading it, I realized Gertrude had a sense of humor that she was able to explore in very wry, repetitious and hyperbolic ways.”
“A Long Gay Book” does seem to tread the fine line between over-the-top outrageous and comfortably off-center. And the musical format only serves to enhance Stein’s words.
“I think her words are quite musical in themselves,” says Communication associate professor Cindy Gold, who plays Stein. “The logic of creating a musical out of Stein’s words escaped me, in principle, before we started work on the project. But now it feels utterly natural and organic.”
Indeed, one of the highlights of the production is the sumptuous, haunting score, written by Stephen Flaherty, who won a Tony in 1998 for “Ragtime.”
Equally masterful is the way Flaherty’s collaborator and fellow Tony award winner (“The Grapes of Wrath,” 1990) Frank Galati, a performance studies professor at Northwestern, handles the adaptation and direction of Stein’s work. Not everyone can intermingle phrases like “This is a picture of lifting belly having a cow,” with, “When tenderness overwhelms us, we simply eat veal.” According to Ogilvie, part of the beauty of “A Long Gay Book” is that while you may not understand exactly what everything means, just letting the words and music and images simply cascade over you is enough to enjoy the production.
“I think working on this show was the first time I’d ever been able to appreciate abstract art in any form,” says Ogilvie.
It seems that Stein’s eccentric ways got to the cast in the end.
“We have been having a wonderful time,” says Gold. “This has been one of the most fun and silly rehearsal periods in my memory. Which seems entirely appropriate. I think Gertrude would have approved.”
