Photo Source: Matthew Murphy
“It’s hard to get a show up on its feet, to get a labor intensive thing like a musical to the next stage,” says Isaac Robert Hurwitz, the festival’s executive director and producer, who likens what NYMF – the largest annual musical theater event in the country – does for musicals to how Sundance serves as a breeding ground for smaller independent movies.
This year, NYMF has made a fairly significant change in opting to move the event to summer, instead of its past perch in October. “As an organization we really wanted to make NYMF more accessible and possible for people to experience more of it when they come,” Hurwitz says. All shows will also be performed within a four-block radius in midtown Manhattan, making it easier for fans to catch multiple shows within the same day.
Hurwitz also cites competing annual fall events, such as Fashion Week, the Food and Wine Festival, and Broadway openings, as another reason for the move. “For the sake of our shows, it’s really important to have a space on the calendar to make a bigger splash for these artists for whom this is their big opportunity,” he adds.
He praises this year’s selection of shows, which “highlight the diversity of contemporary musical theater and what musical theater can become. Our musicals are culturally diverse, with new voices and new styles. We have everything from a mariachi musical about Zapata (‘Zapata!’) to musical with a bunch of Filipino inmates and a southeast Asian cast (“Prison Dancer: The Musical”) to a show like “Rio,” which is ‘Oliver Twist’ set in contemporary Rio de Janeiro.”
The shows in the 2012 NYMF lineup do not only demonstrate a wealth of geographic diversity, however. They also represent a wide array of subject matter, ranging from the comic gross-out adaptation of the cult 1980s movie “Re-Animator the Musical” to “Living with Henry,” a biographical drama about living in the modern era with HIV.
For Christopher Wilson, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics of “Henry,” the show represents a very personal journey. Diagnosed with HIV a decade earlier, the Toronto native created a metaphorical world, comparing having the virus to sharing common space with a roommate. “It became a way for me to take the ‘scary’ out of HIV and give the virus a persona,” Wilson explains. “The healthiest way to exorcise my demons was to write about it.”
Wilson also stresses the continuing topicality of his subject. “There are still hard-hitting issues that need to be addressed, like criminalization, medication management, stigmatization, fear,” he says. “‘Henry’ forces us to understand that it’s not a topic that is off the table yet.”
Stuart Gordon, the director of the film “Re-Animator,” says that after listening to other people suggest he adapt his film about a killer corpse into a musical, he realized they were on to something. “It’s a compact show, with characters that are very operatic and practical effects that could be done onstage,” Gordon says.
Another festival entry, “A Letter to Harvey Milk,” is based on Leslea Newman’s short story about a retired kosher butcher taking a writing class taught by a lesbian in 1986 San Francisco. Music writer Laura I. Kramer, who describes the work as “both extremely funny and very sad,” explains that this is a project with a lot of history, dating back to her days in 1994 at the BMI workshop. “Our job was to adapt a stunningly funny short story into a musical,” she explains. “We loved writing about these characters. They’re real people to us. This is a family I am talking about here.”
“Swing State” is a topical work about the tension between the left and the right in this country, with a book and lyrics by Dana Yeaton and music courtesy of Andy Mitton. According to Yeaton, “The message is to stop listening to any message that starts from the premise ‘there are two kinds of people,’” he says. “In ‘Swing State’ the question is, ‘What if those awful people who are ruining the country…were your only hope?’”
In addition to the main shows on display, NYMF also features such extras as concerts, readings, and other special performances. One such special event is “Requiem for a Lost Girl,” a chamber musical exploring the themes of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and poverty. First commissioned by the Lands’ End Chamber Ensemble, “Requiem” had its world premiere in Canada in 2010 and backed by a seven-piece orchestra, choir and soloists, combines true stories and fictional narrative to illuminate plight of the homeless. “I went to the Calgary Drop-in Centre (Canada’s largest homeless shelter),” librettist Onalea Gilbertson explains about where she went to educate herself on the issue.
Like Yeaton, Gibson, too, hopes her show has a lasting effect on its audience. “Homelessness and poverty and the stigma around it and system set up to perpetuate it is an international emergency,” she says. “I hope that audiences are touched and challenged and empowered. This piece wants to erase the line between ‘us and them.’”
NYMF runs July 9-19. For tickets and further information, visit www.nymf.org.
