Virgins in New York
by Dean Bryant, lyricist and bookwriter
Virgins' premiere at NYMF is the latest stage in a four year journey for the musical. We started writing the show during the off-Broadway season of our first musical,
Prodigal – which played at the York Theatre in early 2002. It was a frantic time – we'd been commissioned by a Festival back home in Melbourne, but due to the
Prodigal season being so fraught (brilliant cast, but a director who was sacked during previews) – our plan of leisurely writing the show during
Prodigal's run never happened.
When we got home we had about a month to write the show before it had to go into rehearsals. I think the panic kind of helped us break out of the mould of our first show – and Virgin Wars (the first part in the threesome that makes up
Virgins) was a complete shift for us – a pastiche pop score (Britney, Destiny's Child, Buffy, Kurt Weill (it's eclectic)), a parody of teen comedies, and subject matter that was just bizarre (a group of teens touring their song-and-dance virginity show around high schools).
The show was a big hit at the Festival, so the next question was – what do you do with a half-hour musical? We'd loved writing intricate harmonies for the girls – so chose to write two companion pieces to showcase a cast of five amazing women. Each show would live in the world of popular culture, and deal with cultural phenomena that was totally contemporary. Over the next year we wrote
The Girl on the Screen (a burlesque about a journalist looking at the world of women-run internet porn) and
Jumpin' the Q (a reality TV song competition for refugees) and started workshopping them. We did workshops, readings, a college production, a Sydney fringe stand, each time finessing the material, arcing the whole thing, finding out what really worked.
Our last workshop was in NY in March 05, with a brilliant cast of Broadway talents –
Amanda Watkins,
Paige Price,
Montego Glover,
Jessica-Snow Wilson and
Sara Schmidt. We'd always been a little dubious at the merits of a sit down reading of
Virgins – it's such a performance piece, and listening to dance numbers never really gives a sense of how they play. After that workshop we decided to let the show simmer, and moved on to writing other pieces (including our new musical –
The Silver Donkey – which is also playing NYC next Friday – bizarrely enough).
Towards the end of the year, we decided to finally put
Virgins on its feet, how we wanted to see it, to see what was there. We fully expected that it would be appreciated, but maybe too eclectic. We spent a few months in rehearsal with our current cast – letting the piece shape on its feet (plus we were working on the Oz premiere of
Spelling Bee at the same time) and opened it in January this year. The Melbourne response was overwhelming – critically and from the audiences. Tickets were impossible to get, we added more shows, and felt that finally we could let go of the show – having seen it properly, and had it appreciated.
And then NYMF came calling. During the season,
Kris Stewart read the reviews, looked at the promo DVD and invited us to come over. The easy version of this would have been to rehearse a NY cast into the show – but the Melbourne cast were so brilliant in each of their roles, and so pivotal to the success of that season – that we decided to go hard and bring the whole production over.
It's been incredibly tough, but the support has been overwhelming, right from the start. NYMF linked us with a brilliant young producer, Matt Murphy, who took the production load off our shoulders. The airfares were raised in one amazing concert – led by some of Australia's top talents, thrilled to give their time to help get Australian musical talent to the home of the musical.
And now we're here – rehearsing at The Barrow Group Theatre – ready to open
Virgins to NY on Thursday night. It's unbelievable to be part of this Festival, and to share the experience with my cast and musicians, most of whom have never even been to NYC before. No matter what happens next – the
Virgins experience has already been wild.
Visit www.nymf.org for more information and tickets.
