Ravinia 2021 - Issue 2

CLAIRE MCADAMS (REINEKE) Dear Evan Hansen (2015) became the first in a string of hit productions by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul , followed immediately by the movie musicals La La Land (2016) and The Greatest Showman (2017). Evan Hansen is an awkward high school student whose clumsy and misguided attempts to gain acceptance plunge him into deceit and heartache. To help with his social anxiety disorder, a therapist suggests that Evan should write daily letters to himself about the good things in life. Evan breaks his arm in a fall from a tree, in what he later acknowledged to be a suicide attempt. The similarly friendless Connor Murphy signs his cast before finding one of Evan’s letters in the printer. Furious to see his sister Zoe’s name, Connor takes the letter with him. This same letter is found with Connor’s lifeless body and is interpreted as his suicide note. Evan begins to invent a friendship with Con- nor that he never had, one lie builds on anoth- er, and the consequences spiral out of control. Dear Evan Hansen had a six-week run at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2015. The following spring, the show moved off-Broadway to the Second Stage Theater for another short run. On De- cember 4, 2016, Dear Evan Hansen officially opened at the Music Box Theatre, where it remained until Broadway shut down due to COVID-19. The show is scheduled to reopen on December 11, 2021. During 2016–17, Dear Evan Hansen compiled an astounding collec- tion of nominations and awards, including two Obie Awards, nine Tony Award nomina- tions (winning seven awards), a Grammy Award for Best Music Theater Album, and a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Mu- sic Performance in a Daytime Program. Southern waitress Jenna Hunterson is a mas- ter pie maker who sees a local baking contest as her way to escape an abusive husband, Earl. In a visit to her gynecologist, Dr. Jim Pomat- ter, she learns that a recent liaison with her drunken husband has left her pregnant. Jen- na begins to set aside a portion of her salary for the pie contest entry fee. Meanwhile, she has begun an affair with the married Dr. Po- matter. On her way to the hospital to deliver her child—whom she names Lulu—Jenna en- counters Joe, the owner of Joe’s Diner where Benj Pasek and Justin Paul she works, who gives her an envelope. The baby’s birth gives Jenna new perspective: she tells Earl she wants a divorce and ends her re- lationship with Dr. Pomatter. Upon opening the envelope from Joe, who recently died, she discovers that he has left the restaurant to her, in exchange for a pie in his name. Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles com- posed the music and lyrics for the 2015 musi- cal Waitress , based on the film by Adrienne Shelly, which was released after the director’s tragic murder. Shelly’s work debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival to accolades she was never able to experience. The musical that her film inspired opened at Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre on April 24, 2016, and continued to add laurels to her life and work with nominations for four Tony Awards, six Drama Desk Awards (winning one), two Drama League Awards, and four Outer Crit- ics Circle Awards (winning one), as well as a Grammy nomination for Best Musical The- ater Album. Bareilles released her own studio recording, What’s Inside: Songs from ‘Waitress,’ in 2015 and will return to the cast of Waitress as Jenna beginning September 2, 2021. Andrew LloydWebber ’s hit musical Cats was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats . First produced in London in 1981 and later in New York in 1982, Cats won seven Tony Awards. With producer Cameron Mackintosh, Webber completely reconceived the musical-theater format. Human charac- ters were replaced by feline personalities. This show had no discernable plot but a sequence of mostly unrelated numbers. The glamor- ous Grizabella sings the only verifiable hit song, “Memory,” which has been recorded by countless pop artists, including Barbra Strei- sand and Barry Manilow. Furthermore, Cats was designed from the beginning as a dance show, with almost continuous choreography. Stephen Schwartz scored another Broadway success with his enchanted musical Wicked (2003), based on Gregory Maguire’s nov- el Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) in an adaptation by Winnie Holzman, which is itself loosely de- rived from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the classic Wizard of Oz Sara Bareilles in Waitress movie. Schwartz’s musical received 10 Tony Award nominations, 11 Drama Desk nomina- tions, 10 Outer Critics Circle Award nomina- tions, and a Grammy Award for the original Broadway cast recording. Born in New York City, Stephen Sondheim developed his literary talents at an early age. By 21, he had written four librettos under the guidance of Oscar Hammerstein II. His first contributions to Broadway were as lyricist for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957) and Jule Styne’s Gypsy (1959). Sondheim later wrote lyrics for Bernstein’s Candide (1973). His first musical as lyricist and composer was the immensely popular A Funny Thing Hap- pened on the Way to the Forum . Sondheim began his collaboration with producer and director Harold Prince in 1970, a professional relationship that produced six musicals. Company opened on April 26, 1970, at the Alvin Theatre. The work was one of the first plotless musicals, focusing on the challenges of relationships in the sterile, impersonal mod- ern society. Sondheim described his new ap- proach in this musical: “One of the things that fascinated me about the challenge of the show was to see if a musical could be done without [a strong plot]. …The second was that people were mistaking our saying relationships are difficult for relationships are impossible.” The celebrated partnership between compos- er Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ash- man produced memorable music for a trio of award-winning Disney films— The Little Mer- maid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Aladdin (1992)—before Ashman’s untimely death from complications of AIDS at age 40. The work that attracted Disney’s atten- tion was their musical Little Shop of Horrors (1982), an adaptation of the 1960 horror-com- edy film of the same name directed by Roger Corman, itself derived from any number of films and stories about aberrant plants with a penchant for human flesh. Little Shop of Horrors first played off-off- Broadway for seven weeks at the Workshop of the Players Art (WPA) Foundation Theatre before moving to the off-Broadway Orpheum Theatre on July 27, 1982. The following year, it opened on London’s West End at Comedy Theatre on October 12, 1983, in a production by Cameron Mackintosh. Two more decades passed before Little Shop of Horrors hit Broad- way, opening at the Virginia Theatre on Oc- tober 2, 2003, a production that receive one Tony Award nomination, one Drama Desk Award nomination, and two Outer Critics Circle Award nominations in 2004. –Program notes © 2021 Todd E. Sullivan STEVEN REINEKE, conductor A native of Ohio, Steven Reineke completed Bachelor of Music degrees in both trumpet performance and music composition at Mi- ami (Ohio) University and has created more than a hundred arrangements for the Cincin- nati Pops Orchestra, which he was long con- nected to as associate conductor under Erich Kunzel. Many of these arrangements have been performed by orchestras worldwide and can be heard on numerous recordings by the Cincinnati Pops on the Telarc label. Reineke has also written a number of original sym- phonic works, including Festival Te Deum and Swan’s Island Sojourn for the Cincinnati Pops and Symphony, as well as Celebration Fanfare , Legend of Sleepy Hollow , and Casey at the Bat , which have been performed many times around North America, including by the New York and Los Angeles Philharmon- ics. His Sun Valley Festival Fanfare was pre- miered in 2008 by the Sun Valley Summer Symphony to commemorate the opening of its new pavilion, and his numerous wind en- semble compositions have been performed by concert bands around the world. Rein- eke is frequently a guest conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he has extensive credits across North America, including with the Chicago, Dallas, and Detroit Symphony Orchestras. He has been music director of the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall for 10 sea- sons and also holds the position of principal pops conductor with the National Sympho- ny Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and the Toronto and Houston Symphony Orchestras. Reineke has created programs in collabo- ration with a range of artists in numerous genres, including Maxwell, Common, Kend- rick Lamar, Cynthia Erivo, Sutton Foster, Me- gan Hilty, Cheyenne Jackson, Wayne Brady, Peter Frampton, and Ben Folds. In 2017 he was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered leading the National Symphony—a first on the long-running radio show—and also led the ensemble for a PBS Great Performances broadcast with Nas, performing his seminal album Illmatic . Steven Reineke made his Chi- cago Symphony Orchestra and Ravinia de- buts in 2012 and tonight returns for his fifth season at the festival. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 24 – AUGUST 15, 2021 38 I I