TheatreWorks used to put on shows in basements and parking garages; 40 years later, it’s a professional company with some 10,000 subscribers and a yearly budget of $7.2 million. Even so, founding artistic director Robert Kelley is still thinking about the linoleum.
At the moment, he’s sitting in his Menlo Park office mulling over the details of the new TheatreWorks show, “Tinyard Hill,” which he’s also directing. One could say the musical takes place long ago and far away — small-town Georgia in 1964 — so research is needed to make everything ring true.
“That’s part of the fun of theater,” says the ponytailed Kelley, who goes by his last name only. “What did a tablecloth look like in that era? What color was the linoleum?”
He ponders the proper luggage for the character Aileen, who comes South from New York to visit. Who is she? What would her suitcases look like?
“I get involved in these details. I’m kind of a history buff,” Kelley says, then laughs. “But in this case, I was there.”
Not Georgia, but 1964. Kelley was 18 then, like two of the musical’s central characters, Aileen Garrett and David Kingsley.
That’s just one of the many parallels between past and present. As Kelley and the rest of the “Tinyard Hill” team prepare the musical for its world premiere later this month, they’re both creating something new and paying tribute to TheatreWorks’ beginnings.
The company’s first show was “Popcorn,” an original anti-war musical. Vietnam also looms over “Tinyard Hill.” Young David (played by Chris Critelli) runs the local blacksmith shop with his father, Russell. He’s full of ideas for bringing the old business into the modern world, but his life gets shaken up when lovely Aileen (Melissa WolfKlain) and a draft notice both arrive in town. The show’s music is a blend of country, pop and rock, with five musicians playing instruments including piano, bass, banjo and fiddle.
The time period is not far from 1970, when TheatreWorks began. Both “Popcorn” and “Tinyard Hill” are also about change on a small level, in one family or one town, while world change is brewing all around.
New Works Festival
At the same time, “Tinyard Hill” is very much new. Kicking off TheatreWorks’ 40th anniversary season, it’s also the centerpiece of the company’s New Works Festival, which each year draws composers and writers developing and seeking feedback on new pieces of theater. In July and August, the fully staged “Tinyard Hill” will be accompanied by script-in-hand staged readings of three new plays and three new musicals.
The festival also includes a “Coffee Talk with Kelley,” a showcase of local teen playwrights, and concerts by Broadway singer Maureen McGovern and singer/composer Vienna Teng.
“Tinyard Hill” has had readings, and a developmental production by Red Mountain Theatre in Alabama, but its premiere is a major event for the show’s young creators, lyricist/book writer Tommy Newman and composer Mark Allen. Mr. Newman and Mr. Allen also wanted to write a show in which Southerners were shown as real people, not comic relief, Mr. Allen says in an interview before rehearsal at TheatreWorks. “We were tired of Southern stereotypes on TV and in shows.”
Interested in the moral questions surrounding war, they created a story with Vietnam as a backdrop. At its heart, though, “Tinyard Hill” is a tale about a father-son relationship.
Kelley was introduced to “Tinyard Hill” when he saw an earlier version at a National Alliance for Musical Theatre festival in 2007. He was taken with the father-son dynamic and the music and lyrics, which he called “alternately funny and touching and clever.”
TheatreWorks rehearsals started on June 22, and it’s been an intense few weeks for the company and for the show’s creators, who seem delighted with working with the group.
“This is our baby. You give it to them and hope it’s in good hands,” Mr. Newman says. “Kelley is wonderful, very good at picking through the details. And we are so in love with our cast.”
The pair said the major structural reworking of the show has been done. Still, rehearsal always leaves room for discovery, and the two say they’re enjoying watching Kelley and the actors find subtext and humor in the script that they didn’t expect.
“This is when things start to get fun,” Mr. Allen says. “It’s eye-opening.”
INFORMATION
• “Tinyard Hill,” a musical by Tommy Newman and Mark Allen, previews at 8 p.m. July 15-17, and opens at 8 p.m. July 18, running through Aug. 16, Tuesday through Sunday, at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto. Tickets are $29-$67. For information and tickets, go to theatreworks.org or call (650) 463-1960.
• For more information on the New Works Festival, go to TheatreWorks.org.
