community


andrew lippa


it an oratorio, but ultimately, it’s a theatre piece that incorporates singers, orchestra and chorus. “Obviously, a musical is a play that is about characters


in conflict having situations with one another,” he said. “The label’s been tricky for us, because people want to know what it is. I feel like, in a way, I’m reviving an old form of chorus and orchestra and principal actors can tell stories in a theatrical environment.” It’s very fitting that the Orange County Gay Men’s


Chorus is involved in performing what Lippa called “the core of the piece.” The Gay choral movement sprang from Milk’s assassination in 1978, when a group of singers who would later go on to be known as The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, performed at a rally following his death. For Lippa, it’s the life that Milk led for which he feels a


ANDREW LIPPA & I AM HARVEY MILK


MENALIVE’S HEROES by tim parks Andrew Lippa must have been born with a song in


his heart, as is illustrated by his vast Broadway resume. He wrote the Tony-nominated words and music forThe Addams Family, starring Nathan Lane as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia, adapted the fanciful film Big Fish into a musical, and contributed three new songs to the 1999 Broadway version ofYou’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown starring Kristin Chenoweth. If that weren’t enough, he wrote the music for Aaron Sorkin’sThe Farnsworth Invention, The Wild Party andAsphalt Beach among others. This July, the Irvine Barclay Theatre


along with MenAlive: The Orange County Gay Men’s Chorus, will play host to Lippa’s I Am Harvey Milk, based on the life of the legendary champion for LGBT rights. Milk was the first openly gay official elected in the state of California and was tragically assassinated in 1978. The production follows Milk’s life from childhood with Boy Soprano Colin Eaton portraying young Harvey Milk, Soprano Brooke Aston as his mother and Tenor Stephen Brothwell as the older version of Milk. It will be performed as a part of MenAlive’sHeroes concert, at which they will join the cast onstage. The Rage Monthly spoke with the


by tim parks


as he explained. “The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was celebrating their 35th Anniversary in 2013 and they wanted to do an evening of ten to twelve composers writ- ing a five-minute piece based on their perceptions of the life of Harvey Milk,” he said. “I said to him that I didn’t want to do a five-minute piece—I wanted to do a 60-minute piece—can I write the full evening?” A week later, he received the news


IF WE ARE SILENT AND WE ARE HID- DEN, NO ONE WILL KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT US, NO ONE WILL KNOW HOW TO EMBRACE US. WE MUST COME OUT. ALL WE NEED IS EACH OTHER TO HOLD HANDS AND TO BE UNITED AND THE WORLD WILL OPEN ITS DOORS.”


prolific Lippa about the inspiration forI Am Harvey Milk, what he learned from Milk and what he has seen audiences take away from the performance. The genesis ofI Am Harvey Milk took place through an


email exchange between Lippa and Tim Seelig, the artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus in 2011,


that they “were in, let’s do it.” Lippa had a momentary panic around “I have to write this now” and wanted to find a different avenue on which to travel with it. “I decided that I did not want to write a bio musical. I didn’t want to write a full-on this is the story of Harvey Milk,” he explained of the creative process that he used. “I wanted to write images of Harvey Milk’s life and I decided that I was going to create a piece that emotionally told an experience from each month of his tenure as a supervisor in San Francisco.” The piece was written as twelve


movements, including the opening wherein the younger version of Milk meets the older version “and recognizes what his life could be,” as Lippa put it. He decided that the medium he would use for the telling of Milk’s life, is what is referred to in music circles as “oratorio”


and he enlightened us as to how that differs from a standard musical. “The original oratorio was from the 17th, 18th, 19th-century, were often story-based music theatre works,” Lippa described. “They were pieces where people always told a story. Over the years, people have done oratorios with staging and movement, we called


deep and abiding affiliation and in a number of ways. He told us about the parallels that he feels connect them together, “I was 48 whenI Am Harvey Milkpremiered and that’s how old Harvey was when he was assassinated. I was gay, Harvey was gay, I’m Jewish and Harvey was Jewish,” he explained. “I’ve spent 31 years of my adult life in New York, Harvey spent much of his adult life in New York. There were a lot of similarities and I felt a real kinship. Most of all, I felt like I was being given permis- sion by the universe to express my talent, my sense of social justice, my love of diversity, my sexuality and my love of Harvey Milk all at the same time.” He also expressed what he has learned from Milk and


how that is most definitely applicable in today’s world. “If we are silent and we are hidden, no one will know anything about us, no one will know how to embrace us,” Lippa stated. “We must come out. All we need is each other to hold hands and to be united and the world will open its doors. In fact, over time, that has been the case.” Lippa is hopeful that the audience, both gay and


straight, will come away from the “sophisticated and joyful work” that is I Am Harvey Milk,with a sense of what the man this piece is based on was all about... “human beings and equality.” He recounted opening night and how the story has


the ability for people to live their truth and love their truth. “We premiered it on June 26, 2013 and that morn- ing The Supreme Court of the United States brought down DOMA and Proposition 8 in California, made them illegal,” Lippa said. “We premiered it two blocks away from where Harvey Milk and George Moscone were gunned down in cold blood. “At the end of the night, a young woman who was


friendly with our director, turned to him and said, ‘I need to go call my parents,’” he described. “She was a lesbian who was not out and she was inspired by that performance to call her parents and tell the truth about her life. I’m so moved by that story and I’ve heard that story many times aboutI Am Harvey Milk and how it has inspired people to live their truest lives.”


MenAlive’sHeroes concert along with the O.C. premiere of Andrew Lippa’sI Am Harvey Milk takes place Friday and Saturday, July 20 and 21 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. For tickets and more information, call 866.636.2548 or go to menalivechorus.org.


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RAGE monthly | JULY 2018


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