A-LISTS theatre by bill biss LAMB’S PLAYERS’
OF THE MUSIC OF GENERATION X WITH
A CELEBRATION LORENZO
“Music changed so much during that decade. Rap was coming into its own and we forget that there was country music going on and the invasion of the British New Wave.”
Jon Lorenzo, along with Colleen Kollar Smith, are the writers of miXtape. Their idea
was to take a memorable trip down the pop music road and focus a musical production all around the classic song hits from the decade of the 1980s. It’s been 30 years since big rock hair, leg warmers and the likes of songs such as “Time After Time,” “I’m So Excited” and “Beat It” with Ronald Reagan in the White House at the time. In speaking with Jon Lorenzo, he described where their initial idea began, “I had been
seeing a lot of shows in the 1990s, which were review shows going back to the 1950s and 1960s. It seemed like at the beginning of the 1980s too with Grease, we were con- stantly getting this throwback to the music of that time. I think it was about 1998 when I thought, ‘When is somebody going to do a musical with the music from my youth? When are we going to have one of these shows that has Duran Duran in it?’ Colleen and I met doing a show together called The Christmas Story at Lamb’s Players. Backstage there was kind of this age gap. Younger people in their 20s and 30s and then there were the 50 & 60-somethings. Right away, we started to talk and we were kind of connecting to these references of old songs. That was where Colleen and I were like, ‘We should do a show about that.’ She really hit upon the idea that it was a shared language that everyone in our generation seemed to have.” Just how do you weave the music into a script? Is it more about the music and not as
much about storyline in miXtape? Lorenzo explains, “I definitely think there is more mu- sic than dialogue. Looking back at the 1980s, this was sort of the last time that people were hand-making mixed tapes on actual cassettes…and how people would make those as sort of a musical collage. We thought we’d structure the show like that. So, you do have a group of characters who start out in the present day and then travel back in time through the power of music. But, it’s the music that kind of dictates the journey.” So, do the songs parallel the character’s situations or attitudes in the show? “Yes! Absolutely. We started with kind of the archetypes from The Breakfast Club…so those
are in there. Then, we have three more characters. In one sense, it’s like, ‘Where would those characters wind up later?’ So, as opposed to going, ‘I love this song. Let’s sing this.’ It’s more like; ‘This song takes me back to this moment in time.’ The songs are always associated with a context or a story. We’re hoping the audience will also go, ‘Oh yeah. This is my relationship with that.’” With such a tremendous amount of material written from 1980 to 1989, Jon describes
the process that he went through narrowing down the songs performed in miXtape. “It was really, really hard (laughter)! I think you could do a week-long show and not get all of the best stuff. We had a huge list of ‘This song has GOT to be in there.’ That list was like 300 songs long. But then, we began to attach the songs to the characters and the timeline of the 1980s. That helped us whittle it down a bit. All or most of the songs that are in there are attached to this sort of framework. Yet, there are still the songs that are so classic that we had to get them in there. Music changed so much during that decade. Rap was coming into its own and we forget that there was Country music going on and the invasion of the British New Wave. We’re trying to make it something where there will be a piece of someone’s musical memory in there. We can’t get everybody’s favorites but hopefully, we’ll have some of them. It’s breathing life into the music and I’m also arranging everything. It’s been fun to pay tribute to the original way things were done and also take certain songs and strip the synthesizers away. To just show, what a great song it is. We celebrate the original and also try to bring songs to people in a new way.”
miXtape Lamb’s Players Theatre August 6 – September 26
Lambsplayers.org 619.437.6000
miXtape JON
AN INTERVIEW WITH
18
RAGE monthly | AUGUST 2010
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