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Whalin' songs
White Horse Theatre
rocks Melville's world.
It’s entirely possible that the concept for Keep Ishmael is half-baked. Loosely adapted from Moby Dick (and by loose we mean Paris Hilton loose), it tells of a sheltered Naperville kid who, upon losing his oceanographer girlfriend to a SeaWorld internship, flees in pursuit of her and ends up chasing Shamu.
One thing about the shoestring project is certain, though. The Gen-Y talents assembled for this world-premiere rock musical— all names we’ll likely get used to hearing—are determined to reinvent the rock musical as a non-precious genre.
Meet the cast. Mat Smart, the 27-year-old New York playwright who wrote the book, has already been commissioned by influential South Coast Repertory. His script The Hopper Collection has played the 900-seat stage of Boston’s Huntington Theatre. And the royalties from that play pay most of his NYC bills.
Evan Cabnet, the 28-year-old director shepherding the project who’s also in town from New York, is an artist-in-residence at Richard Foreman’s avant-garde stalwart Ontological-Hysteric Theater. He’s served as assistant director on multiple Broadway shows, and when he gets home next month he’ll helm the newest play by Kyle Jarrow, author of the cult hit A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant. (He first crossed Smart’s path in a yentalike program at Soho Repertory that pairs writers and directors for workshop purposes.)
Then there’s Ethan Deppe, the 30-year-old Chicago composer, who—in addition to his Jeff-nominated musical direction and the music lessons he gives out of his house—plays drums for the death-metal band Deaden.
They’re all assembled under the umbrella of White Horse Theatre Company, the rising young purveyor of storefront musicals that’s peed a circle around its territory by steadily producing modest but impressively sung shows in the vintage book tradition. Paradoxically, though, the seed for Ishmael was planted more than 15 years ago.
“Danny Sama and I have been friends since the fifth grade,” Smart says of the show’s shrewd 26-year-old producer, a White Horse company member. “He asked me if I was interested in writing a musical, which I’d never done before, and he introduced me to Ethan.” Residing in separate cities, playwright and tunesmith somehow managed to cook up Ishmael and its 18-song score over a series of phone calls (Deppe would play melody lines while holding the receiver, not always successfully), visits (Smart often returns to see family in his native Naperville) and e-mailed MP3s and sheet-music PDFs (music-composition software rocks).
A larger musical would surely be out of reach for four-year-old White Horse, but with only a cast of six and five musicians, a world premiere isn’t out of the question. Working within typical storefront constraints, the company will pull off Ishmael for a lean $35,000, about 25 percent of which, Sama says, goes to personnel.
“We both did financial planning a year in advance so we could take the time off,” Deppe says of his collaboration with Smart. Looking at the numbers, it’s clear why. For his commission at South Coast Rep (a multimillion-budgeted nonprofit), Smart picked up $8,000. For The Hopper Collection at the Huntington, he cleared 5 percent of that show’s box office. (“That paid me close to a year’s wage,” Smart says.) For Ishmael, he and Deppe pick up $100 in royalties per performance, then split 5 percent of any profits over budgeted revenue.
Meanwhile, Deppe gets $1,000 for his musical direction, and his musicians earn $25 a show. (“It’s a slave wage, so I can only ask my friends to do it,” Deppe says, “but they’re more than willing because it’s a labor of love.”) For the entire run, the actors get a $250 stipend.
White Horse sees Ishmael as a long-term investment, and hopefully a trend-setting one, as new musicals premiering in Chicago are few and far between. In particular, advancing the rock musical as a genre is important to Deppe.
“There are people in theater who are trying to do rock, instead of the other way around,” Deppe says. “One of my problems with rock musicals, and I make fingers quotes when I call it that, is that it’s so keyboard driven. I want to inject heavy metal into theater.”
Director Cabnet is eager to get a piece of that action; he knows that networking among yet-uncharted writers and composers is a career essential. “If you can get yourself connected to the best material possible, you’ll ascend with it,” Cabnet says. “No one’s interested in the next new crop of directors. They’re interested in new theatrical voices.”
Keep Ishmael beaches at Theatre Building Chicago Friday 18.
