Millennial revue

Alumni of The Rep’s summer youth program put their stamp on genre-blending original show, Project Elan

Project Elan 
The cast of The Rep's production of Project Elan. Photo by John David Pittman.
Project Elan The cast of The Rep's production of Project Elan. Photo by John David Pittman.

Theater

Project Elan

7 p.m. today-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, 7 p.m. May 13-16, and 2 p.m. May 16, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Sixth and Main streets, Little Rock

Tickets: $30, subscribers $25

(501) 378-0405

therep.org/attend

Summer arrives early this year, at least at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, where alumni of the Summer Musical Theatre Intensive (SMTI) program have gathered to stage Project Elan, a musical that premieres tonight.

Nicole Capri, The Rep's resident director and director of education, is directing and choreographing the show, and is one of its writers, along with SMTI veterans Conly Basham, Mark Binns, Bobby Banister, Sam Clark, Robert Frost, Jimmy Landfair and Charity Vance.

"We'll be marking the 10th anniversary of our first auditions for SMTI, which is the biggest commitment of my entire life," Capri says. "And this show will feature 60 of our past and present SMTI kids, in a show that contains six story lines that intertwine. Any alumnus who has been in SMTI in the past 10 years could audition, and we even had someone who has three little girls now and is a veteran of Afghanistan. We have watched these kids literally grow up in the program.

"I have personally wanted to write an original musical. We've done revues over the years and used other people's material. Conly and I, as long as we've known each other, we've always played around with the idea, And Mark and I were in New York a couple of years ago and went to see the musical Once, and we were both so moved by it. And afterwards we just looked at each other and said, 'We can totally do this' and 'We've got to write our own show.'"

Binns, who is also the show's musical director, has extensive credits at The Rep. He was music director of Elf, Memphis, Les Miserables and White Christmas.

"We have original music and the songs come from a wide range of genres," Binns says. "That includes acoustic folk, alternative, contemporary, rock, urban, indie pop, jazz fusion and the sounds of Broadway and Nashville. Bobby Banister and Charity Vance, for instance, were living in Nashville for a long time, but are out in LA now, trying to break through into the pop circuit. They're very much in tune to the sounds of Top 40 radio. If anyone is culture-current, it would be them. And Conly is such a poetic kind of singer-songwriter, so we get a good mix that sort of runs the gamut of musical styles."

Basham, who now lives in New York,

is a veteran of past Rep shows Peter Pan, Gypsy, Les Miserables and Next to Normal. She recently was part of a cast with her original folk/score production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, a part of the

2014 Fringe Festival. She has performed her original songs at Birdland Jazz Club, 54 Below and the Top of the Rock Conservatory at Rockefeller Center.

Basham notes that technology plays an important part in shaping the world that millennials are inhabiting.

"In everyday scenarios, relationships and family dynamics haven't really changed," Basham says. "But the technology ... has affected many things, from cities to spirituality and relationships, so we've tried to come up with characters and scenarios that are interjected or underlying that issue.

"We think that generations, any age, can see something of themselves in one of these scenarios, and maybe make them think about how they are connected or feel comfortable or uncomfortable."

Basham recently "went off the grid" of technology when she broke her phone and decided to see how long she could live without one. When she finally replaced her device, it took her only a week to break its replacement.

"I'm more Downton Abbey than Gossip Girl," she says with a laugh.

Capri notes that the show is about the millennial generation, which she concedes is not hers. Despite generational differences, what remains a constant, she reckons, is that "everyone is looking for someone who will catch us when we fall.

"I knew that I wanted the writers to be 20-somethings," she says. "We keep using the term 'culture-current,' for people that know what's going on in today's world, that are up-to-date on what's new, what's topical in the world. We are trying something that in the 40 years of The Rep has never been done. We've never produced a show in-house that we have written the music for, the book for. We have produced other people's original works before, but we have never produced a show before that we ourselves have written.

"Bringing it all together has been one of the most exciting and at times terrifying projects I've ever attempted."

Style on 05/05/2015

Upcoming Events