Over the past two decades, Broadway has increasingly turned to film for its source material, and the best of these adaptations do something more interesting than transferring a movie to the stage: they hand a beloved film to a composer and ask for an entirely new score. The Outsiders is not the Coppola movie with songs added; it's Jamestown Revival writing an Americana score for a story audiences already carry with them. The same is true of The Notebook, Waitress, Death Becomes Her, and the rest of this program.
Evynne Hollens has built this 12th edition of her Contemporary Songbook Project like a film festival, moving from one genre to the next: the tearjerker, the romantic drama, the tall tale, the coming-of-age story, the spoof. The tonal range is wide by design, from Jason Robert Brown's aching score for The Bridges of Madison County to Andrew Lippa's Big Fish, from the small French charm of Amélie to The Rescues' rock score for The Lost Boys, which opened on Broadway earlier this year and makes its regional debut here! And there's Spamalot, Eric Idle's gleeful send-up of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and one of the funniest scores ever written for the Broadway stage.
Evynne is joined on her journey by Adriana Ripley, Siri Vik, Calen Joseph, Bill Hulings, Peter Hollens, a talented young chorus and a fabulous band under the direction of Vicki Brabham.
This remains the one night each year The Shedd gives the stage entirely to contemporary Broadway, and this year's program is among the newest we've assembled, with the majority of the material written in the last twenty years.
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