MAGIC, PACIFIC OVERTURES headline Blackbird Theater's second season

Nashville's Blackbird Theater, fresh off its successful, critically lauded premiere season, is offering two rarely produced shows for audiences in the company's eagerly anticipated second season - G.K. Chesterton's Magic (running August 12-27) and Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning Pacific Overtures (February 9-19, 2012) - creating a buzz that other theater companies can only envy and hope to create for their own season announcments.

Magic, according to a Blackbird press release, "is a funny, fiercely dramatic, unabashedly romantic play that has, like its author, been unfairly neglected over the past fifty years. This past January, a professional theater in Washington D.C. mounted a production of it that was so popular they extended the run. Before that, however, the play had not been performed in the U.S. for decades. It deserves a much wider audience. The story involves an aristocratic family whose conflicting beliefs and doubts about the supernatural are all challenged by the arrival of a mysterious conjurer. Like all of Chesterton's work, it's charming and thought-provoking and perfect for an evening's entertainment and coffee with friends afterward, as the play features dramatic debates between believers and skeptics about miracles and the question of spiritual reality."

How did Magic make its way onto Blackbird's 2011-2012 season? According to company artistic director Wes Driver, who helms the production, Magic is "one of my favorite writers is G.K. Chesterton, who was a legend during the Edwardian era - alongside figures like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells [who figured prominently in Blackbird's original work Twilight of the Gods, which marked the company's debut in Nashville] - but is largely unknown today. Of course, the fact that he's been forgotten only fuels my enthusiasm for him and mydrive to point others to his work.

"I've considered for some time adapting one of his novels to the stage, but thought-you know, he actually wrote a few plays himself, let me take a look at those. And with Magic, it was love at first sight. It matches our mission for plays that are both intellectually rich and yet grandly entertaining, but also appeals to my affinity for stories about the supernatural. And after producing a play like Arcadia, which has such a complicated story and structure, we wanted something a little more straightforward.

"You know, with Magic you've got these clever, fascinating characters, passionately expressing their varying views about Spiritualism and materialism, all through this simple, enchanting story, with romance, suspense, and a good bit of mystery. Everything you'd want in an evening's entertainment. It's really like a Twilight Zone written by one of history's great wits."

Directed by company artistic director Wes Driver, Magic stars David Compton and Amanda Card McCoy, both veterans of Blackbird's production of Arcadia, Alan Lee, Mike Baum, Zack McCann and Robin Berg.

The cast, a veritable gathering of Nashville all-stars, will admittedly make Driver's job easier and more fulfilling: "Playing the central figure, the Conjurer, is one of Nashville's most esteemed actors, David Compton, rejoining us after his spot-on portrayal of Bernard in Arcadia. Also returning to the Blackbird stage is the ever-luminous Amanda Card McCoy as Patricia, our romantic heroine. You know when you've got David and Amanda as your two leads, you're off to a great start. We're also thrilled to have a number of Nashville's top talents making their Blackbird debut, including Alan Lee and Mike Baum. They've worked onstage together many times before and will reunite in our show as foils Dr. Grimthorpe and Rev. Smith. Patricia's hotheaded brother Morris will be played by Zack McCann, one of First Night's rising stars of 2010. And Robyn Berg, a terrific actress who's relatively new to the region but already gaining much attention, will be playing Hastings. Strong actors in every role-we couldn't be more pleased with the cast."

For Greg Greene, the company's managing director, the selection of Pacific Overtures as the second offering of the second season fulfills a long-held dream.

"I fell in love with Pacific Overtures on a spring day in the '90s, alternately listening to the score on a bootleg cassette in my car and then wandering the rainy neighborhoods of old Franklin, trying to piece the story together sans liner notes as the songs cast their spell," he remembers.

"I've had a love for Japanese culture since childhood. My favorite toys were the Japanese-designed Micronauts and the Shogun Warriors robots. I loved their cartoons long before I knew they were Japanese imports - shows like Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets (aka Gatchaman),and later Robotech. Their cartoons had a respect for story arcs and character development that the studios behind Scooby Doo, He-Man, and GI Joe would never have considered.

"Pacific Overtures tells its story through the eyes of the Japanese using American musical theater conventions with Kabuki stylings. That alone would get our attention as theater lovers, but add the true historical incident between Commodore Perry and the shogunate, a dramatic story arc and reversal of fortune for Kayama and Manjiro, the two main characters, a truly gorgeous score, and Sondheim's peerless lyrics, and it's not too hard to see why we're doing this show."

Peopled by characters both oriental and occidental, Pacific Overtures can present a casting conundrum in a city with few Asian performers currently on the board. How will Blackbird Theater approach the show from a casting standpoint? For Green, it offers the company the opportunity to once again show off its imagination and inventiveness in order to bring the show to life for Nashville audiences.

"The 1976 Broadway premiere of Pacific Overtures featured an all-Asian, all-male cast in keeping with the Kabuki theatrical conventions from which Sondheim and Hal Prince drew," Greene explains. The AsIan Males played characters of all nationalities, as well as the female roles. It was a clever idea, and they drew some remarkable talent, but for Pacific Overtures to succeed as a regional show - and it certainly deserves to - it really has to be produced without those casting restrictions."

According to Greene, a recent regional production at Arlington, Virginia's Signature Theatre capitalized on the possibilities of casting, while inspiring he and Driver to pursue the show for their own company.

"We saw a recent production at Signature Theater that employed male and female actors - none of whom were Asian - using Kabuki-esque makeup and wigs to represent the required ethnicities. That's probably the direction we'll take, so we can encourage actors of all ethnicities to audition. We're more focused on finding great musical theater talent, and fortunately Nashville is blessed in that arena."

Both shows will be presented at David Lipscomb University's Shamblin Theatre, Blackbird's onstage home, Driver says.

According to Greene, both Magic and Pacific Overtures dovetail nicely into Blackbird's prescribed theatrical mission and should prove to be as popular with audiences as did Twilight of the Gods and Arcadia in the company's first year.

"We want to present Nashville with shows that are both thrilling and thought-provoking, stories that Nashville theater-goers haven't seen before, and productions that are perhaps a little ambitious. Magic and Pacific Overtures are those shows, and if we do our jobs, fifteen minutes in, you'll forget you're watching a play," Greene maintains.

"Both shows unfurl big ideas. Magic takes on the challenge of belief and disbelief in the supernatural, and what happens when you're presented with a fact you can't accept. Pacific Overtures warns us that getting our way today comes with a price tomorrow. America's gunboat diplomacy tactics in 1853 succeeded in opening Japan to American trade, but 125 years later Japan had grown into a manufacturing superpower - in the name of expanding capitalism, we created our biggest economic rival. And that doesn't even speak to the enormous change that Pacific Overtures depicts in the lives of individuals and how the Japanese adapt to a rapidly Westernizing society. Both Magic and Pacific Overtures are dramatic, and convey serious themes while being darkly comic. That's a sweet spot for Blackbird."

For more information about Blackbird Theater, visit the company website at www.blackbirdnashville.com.

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