BWW Blog: Out of the Box and Bare: A Rock Opera - Where's the Fun in a Safe Bet?

It's mid-heat wave in Santa Barbara, and my flat, second floor and south facing, is a sweatbox. Not the most comfortable place for an Out of the Box production meeting, yet here we are, the regulars, drinking wine and sweltering and thinking about our newest production-Bare: A Rock Opera. There're four of us, which is enough, since my dining room table is small. There's Samantha Eve (Artistic Director), Kacey Link (Music Director), Katie Williams (Stage Manager Extraordinaire), and me, the Et Cetera who's willing to do almost anything but act.

Here's the significance of Bare: unless you spend a lot of time at the Wildcat experiencing the fashionable cabaret of Sunday-night drag performers, there's not a lot of queer theatre in Santa Barbara. Yet, in Out of the Box's continuing tradition of producing provocative, contemporary musicals, Samantha and the gang are bringing this urgent aspect of human culture to the stage. When Samantha first decided to do this show-which can most easily be described as a loose, meta-theatre adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with a queer bent-here in town, it was because no other theatre was telling this story.

"Nothing even touches on it," Samantha says. "Especially in the world of teenagers-this is a show they won't experience in their school theater programs. School theatres would not touch this show. Youth companies would most likely not even look at it."

Out of the Box is in the position to produce the show, so why not give people the chance to experience it? It's a risk-an ambiguously modern rock opera about the romance between two young men at their Catholic boarding school shouldn't be offensive to anyone, but Santa Barbara is a tough town to read, audience-wise. While gay rights and queer acceptance has taken huge strides forward in the last years, it's still a topic with the potential to cause discomfort. The fact that this uneasiness with "alternative" sexuality still exists makes Bare all the more important to produce. Externally, it's a show about a homosexual romance, but more essentially it's a show about forbidden passion with modern, relatable obstacles. Peter (Gabe Reali) and Jason (Tad Murroughs) are in a relationship, but their parents won't approve, the Catholic culture they live in and define themselves by condemns their actions, and, as Jason points out, society still has the capacity to uphold its long-standing queer prejudice beyond high school.

Out of the Box's cast and crew are young enough to have grown up in a time when queer culture wasn't uniformly censured, but we're not naïve enough to misunderstand that the stigma of homosexuality persists. I'm impressed with our cast, all of whom (with the exceptions of Anne Guynn as Peter's mother, Chris Short as the priest, and Miriam Dance-Leavy as the nun) are between the ages of 16 and 22. Not only is Bare taxing physically and vocally, it does have the capacity to seem racy to a more conservative audience. We have cast members from San Marcos High School, Dos Pueblos High School, Santa Barbara High School, Laguna Blanca, Bishop Diego, Santa Barbara City College, UCSB, Westmont, and PCPA. The student body in Bare is represented by performers from almost every school in the city.

Out of the Box has a small budget, which isn't necessarily a death sentence: if you have money you can hire people to do everything for you. If you don't have money, it means a lot of work, but it forces you to think creatively. Reliance on backers and grants rather than on ticket sales exclusively gives Out of the Box the freedom to choose stimulating shows.

"It's a difficult situation to fall into when you're choosing shows just to appeal to your audience," Samantha says, "because you'll do the same shows over and over again. And you'll choose safe bets."

And where's the fun in a safe bet?

Samantha first heard about Bare in college:

"In my last year of Cap21 training at NYU, we had casting directors come in and give mock callbacks for shows they were casting or had recently cast. Shows that were on Broadway or off Broadway, shows that had been recently produced. And somebody gave me a song from Bare, and I had never heard of it before. They gave me this piece of hand-written sheet music saying, oh, we've been trying to reboot it for another run, and this is a role that we could see you coming in for. And they gave me Ivy (the female lead, played by Julia Kupiec in our production). At the time I didn't think of myself as an Ivy, but I fell immediately in love with the music. I looked up the play and read about it. They didn't have a script out yet, and they didn't have any information about it, but I just loved it. It was a hard song to prepare. I was singing "All Grown Up" and belting a high F, which is challenging. I kept my eye out for the show in New York. I didn't see it come back to Broadway or off Broadway, and I didn't hear anything else about it, but I saw that it was available for licensing from a smaller licensing company-not MTI or Samuel French. The company was called Theatrical Rights Worldwide. I inquired about getting the rights to the show. This was when I was still in New York, before Out of the Box was even on my mind. I thought it would be a fun show to put on in an actual church. That was my original idea."

I imagine cramming a bunch of kids in Catholic school uniforms into a church, and I'm curious: Why aren't we doing this show in a church?

"There aren't any churches in town that would rent to us," Katie says, and Katie always knows best. "I don't think it's the right kind of show to be done in a church in Santa Barbara. It has to be done in the theater. Our technical capabilities will be better at Center Stage that they would be anywhere else."

Despite our continual emphasis on food and stage blood, we somehow manage to maintain a good relationship with Center Stage. Better to take advantage of an actual theatre space.

"The licensing company didn't write back when I inquired about the show in New York," Samantha says, "but one of the writers contacted me saying, 'we really appreciate your interest but we can't release it in New York right now because we're really hoping to get it back on or off Broadway.' And they kept trying, and it wasn't working, but that was why they couldn't license it to me."

Bare is a strong story, but equally important is the fact that the music stands on its own as an opera. The story is tight and the concepts and sentiments are well presented. A huge problem with most shows is the inclusion of unnecessary scenes that do not move dramatic action forward. Bare maintains a high level of fundamental conflict while still being lively and entertaining.

"Something I really love about the music," Samantha says, "is the reprise of musical themes from earlier songs. There's always a reason for it, it's never random. It's smart, well-organized music. We've done a lot of shows where the music is fun and it's great, but it's not planned out strategically. The interesting thing about the music in Bare is that there's a little bit of everything. You have rap, you have contemporary musical theatre, but you also have contemporary pop. And we have vocalists who have a very contemporary rock/pop style. The show doesn't lose that theatrical sound, but our singers are making their own choices with it, particularly Gabe Reali, who plays Peter, and Luana Psaros, who plays Nadia."

The show is moving toward fruition. Kacey runs music rehearsal like we all live at Juilliard, which brings out the best in the vocalists. Almost the entire show is sung, so beyond being challenging for the performers, the music and audio-heavy technical aspects of the show provide both Kacey and Katie plenty to manage. The sets are minimal and the church windows and details will be created with lighting.

"I don't want Bare to be corny," Samantha says. "I don't want it to be cliché. It's easy to make these characters into stereotypes; the script does that for you. It's more interesting to see these kids as vulnerable, as real people, to see what's underneath the basic persona given in the character description."

Character descriptions aren't absolute, and while it can be helpful to label characters as "the nerd," "the fat girl," "the drug dealer," "the slut," "the academic," etc., Bare gives the director and actors the opportunity to throw the stereotypes aside and create characters who are not basic caricatures. Gay, straight, or somewhere in between, these characters are based in emotional reality. Their triumphs and defeats aren't centered on their sexuality-they're grounded in the experience of life as a teenager. Out of the Box hopes to present Bare as a production that highlights the confusion and pressures of the high school years as passionate and wrenching, yet relatable and unapologetic. Bare: A Rock Opera is a musical dynamo of young characters grappling with questions that may not have answers. It tackles love, sexuality, faith and religion, feelings of inadequacy and confusion, and hope for the future: matters of certain importance.

Out of the Box Theatre presents Bare: A Rock Opera

November 6th -16th

Center Stage Theater, Santa Barbara

Directed by Samantha Eve

www.outoftheboxtheatre.org