Tag Archives: Daniel Hight

COVID Kindred Behind the Scenes of Local Singles

Preview: Local Singles at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

Once you’ve scaled the summit and staged the legendary Sunset Boulevard at Booth Playhouse with a 40-piece orchestra – the pinnacle of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s achievement, or at least the K2 rivaling the Everest of Phantom –you might think that QC Concerts founder Zachary Tarlton would ask himself how can I top this? But when Tarlton formed his company in 2020, the Q stood for Quarantine, and the modest aim was to keep musical theatre going online via Instagram when actual theatergoing wasn’t possible.

So pianist/actor/musical director Tarlton can think small, no matter how wildly Queen City Concerts has grown and overachieved in less than four years. His idea of following up Sunset Boulevard is to take us from the macabre Hollywood mansion of movie icon Norma Desmond to a room at a Pittsburgh YMCA where Nancy and Richard host weekly therapy sessions that struggle to attract lovelorn clientele. That’s the main HQ for Local Singles (down the hall from Hot Local Singles), the new musical by Nick Navari.

Never heard of Navari? You are forgiven. While Lloyd Webber has been bringing hit musicals to Broadway since 1971, Navari is counting on his first Off-Broadway production to open in January 2025.

That’s the allure for Tarlton and his loyal QC Concerts fanatics: being in on a new creation from a new talent as the new organism develops. Instead of begging publishers and Broadway legends for the rights to produce their masterworks – or in the case of Parade, the stirring piece by Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry, going through the ordeal of having those rights suddenly snatched away – Tarlton had the less stressful experience of Navari coming to him.

Flashing back to the summer of 2022, when QC Concerts was readying to begin its second season with the regional premiere of Kinky Boots, Tarlton recalls Navari reaching out.

“He had somehow found us on Instagram and, through the power of social media, followed along with what we were doing,” Tarlton confides. “Then he reached out to me, presented his whole kind of sales pitch for the musical.”

And why not? Backed by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, Navari wrote the music, the lyrics, the script, and the six-piece orchestrations for Local Singles. Then he directed the stage premiere at the New Hazlett Theater in 2021 as well as the cast album and a pro-shot film version. Musicians in the promo video for the world premiere jammed the score in surgical face masks, and the first production of Local Singles in front of a live audience didn’t happen until February 2022 at the Lamp Theater in Irwin, PA. Actors caught on-camera in rehearsals for that production were still sporting N-95s.

That second premiere was midway through QC’s opening season, a mere five months before Kinky Boots gave notice that Tarlton had his eye on blockbuster productions like Titanic, Angels in America, and Sunset Boulevard. The prevailing Tick, Tick… Boom! template of Tarlton’s opening seasonmust have seemed rightdown Navari’s alley.

So while Tarlton was navigating beyond his comfort zone with his first company, taking his quarantine concept live, Navari was venturing beyond writing, directing and performing into the wild frontiers of publicity and promotion, hawking his own work. You could say they were kindred COVID spirits. Accidental entrepreneurs.

Nor are they averse to doctoring their creations. By the time Sunset Boulevard dazzled at the Booth, Tarlton had totally discarded QC’s script-in-hand format in favor of a workshop concept with costumes, lighting, barebones, scenery and onstage orchestra. Meanwhile, Navari has not been idle. After the Pittsburgh premiere and the cast album, one of Navari’s numerous videos proclaims that he has written five new songs and added a character to Local Singles.

You don’t need to go far in the playscript to see a difference. By the second scene – and the second track of the cast album – the script and Spotify diverge. The version we will get at the Arts Factory this weekend will be the closest yet to the Off-Broadway edition slated to open at Players Theatre in Greenwich Village for a five-week engagement next January.

“He’s made a few more changes for our production,” Tarlton reveals. “So I know that he’s excited to have this chance to get it in front of another audience just to see what still may need to be tweaked and changed before it goes to New York.”

When we first see them, Richard and Nancy have been life companions for nine years, not exactly flush with success. Not only are they competing with the Hot Singles group down the hall, they are tied into a six-year deal for this cursed time-slot for another 42 months. The group seems to have been founded in order to help their friend Jack, a good-hearted paranoid mess.

We don’t meet them right away, likely because we need to be prepared for Jack’s eccentricities and for Nancy’s arsenal of therapy tools – including pairs of yellow rubber gloves, a bubble gun, a portable park bench (with an important plaque), and Morgan. In rehearsal photos, she is portrayed by a piece of hard-sided rolling luggage and the head of a mop. But she may evolve – or devolve – before performances begin at the Arts Factory later this week.

A couple of messy breakup scenes pave our way to the Y.

“So the show opens with Penny, who has just discovered that she is pregnant,” Tarlton explains. “Then we meet Wes and then Wes’s ex-girlfriend. There’s a great [new] song where she’s, like, throwing all these clothes out of the apartment. It’s the whole breakdown moment. It’s lovely.”

And it’s fair to say both Penny and Wes are hurting.

“Then we travel into the support group,” says Tarlton. “Over the course of the first act, we find how Wes and then Penny makes their way into the group, one of them on purpose, one of them by accident. And then basically it tracks their continual journey with the group where they both end up continuing to come back week after week, getting to know each other more, getting to be a part of each other’s lives.”

The musical’s through-path is the support group bonding with Penny along the journey of her pregnancy. Navari tosses in some goofy detours, including overtures to Morgan and Jack’s daring adventure with his personalized park bench.

“There’s kind of a big twist at the end of act one with Jack as he’s trying to put himself out there and meet the person of his dreams.”

One advantage of turning down Local Singles for QC’s second season would be Tarlton’s ability to increase prep time for its upcoming run. Hitching onto the CharlotteShout Festival last April gave QC the opportunity to preview Season Three in a revue-style concert – and for Tarlton and director Kel Wright to cast all the younger roles. By the time Titanic was staged in the fall of 2022, Wright and all four of the younger players had already worked with QC: Mary Beth Ritter would sing the preggy Penny; Patrick Stepp would be Wes, our leading man; the versatile Lamar Davis would be the pitiful Jack; and Hannah Risser would belt and bellow The Ex, the key cameo.

Thinking big had allowed Tarlton to test-drive a multitude of singers and musicians.

But what about the adults in the room? Those decisions weren’t cinched until last fall in the weeks following the Sunset Boulevard run at the Booth – when Wright and Tarlton saw Nicia and Charlie Carla on Eastway Drive at VisArt Video in a deathless PaperHouse Theatre production of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.

Turns out that Wright and Tarlton wished to emphasize the acting skills of their therapist partners, especially the zany Nancy, and the Carlas fit the bill perfectly. So let’s forget that we can’t remember the last time Nicia performed in a musical!

“I am super excited that we’re getting to work with Nicia on the show,” Tarlton gushes. “Just the acting presence she brings to the role of Nancy is astounding. We crack up in rehearsal every day – just her line delivery and the way she handles all these moments is perfection. The stuff that Nancy sings in the show is definitely very much still that talk thingy vibe, and she is owning it and comfortable with it.”

Sitting at the keyboard as music director, Tarlton will have a prime vantage point as the Carlas and their castmates work their magic. Maybe a few in the audience will recognize the vestiges of COVID as the musicians play along. The show is scored for keyboard, guitar (Daniel Hight), bass (Ben Stewart), drums (Mike Charlton), violin (Nikki Redman), and cello (Peter Case).

No winds and no brass. Remember those days?

Navari himself plays piano, guitar, and “a few other instruments,” Tarlton reports, explaining the composer’s facility in handling the chamber-sized orchestrations.

He savors the flavor of the strings. “It adds a little mix of more classical string music,” Tarlton observes, “with your very contemporary rock band feel of a traditional kind of modern contemporary, musical theater, off-Broadway sound.”

The idea is for this kooky Y therapy to go beyond the little support group and become contagious. For us.

“Hit the Wall” Reminds Us of the Continuing Relevance of the Stonewall Riots

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Review: Hit the Wall at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

August 19, 2023, Charlotte, NC – On the eve of the annual Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade, a series of LGBTQ+ events spread across the city in the coming week, Queen City Concerts has chosen a perfect moment to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969, a watershed moment for gay liberation and empowerment. Best known for their resourceful reductions of big musicals to a more bare-bones concert format, Queen City has previously shattered their own template with a fine script-in-hand production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2.

Three months later, after a return to form with Diana: The Musical late last month, the company has shown us that Angels wasn’t a fluke, staging the local premiere of Ike Holter’s Hit the Wall, a 2012 play with music that premiered in Holter’s hometown of Chicago before director Eric Hoff restaged his original Steppenwolf Garage production with a New York cast. That Off-Broadway production opened in the spring of 2013 at the Barrow Street Theater, not far from Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, where much of the original action went down.

Directing this concert version at The Arts Factory, J. Christopher Brown isn’t quite as resourceful or ambitious as he was with Angels in utilizing projections and costumes. Scenery and props are also less lavish, and there are no stage directions at all read aloud. With a rowdy rock trio roaring from one corner of the black box space, the experience remained richly visceral, though our awareness of where we are or who is speaking was sometimes delayed. We get an abbreviated staircase for the proverbial sidewalk stoop, where the “Snap Queen Team” of Tano and Mika hang out, and a couple of chairs occasionally appear.

Projections could have transported us inside the Stonewall Inn gay bar, but we only get the exterior, and a lamppost or a park bench could have transported us to Christopher Park more emphatically. It doesn’t take long to get the gist after scenes at these locations begin, but who is telling us in the opening tableau that “The reports of what happened next are not exactly clear”? Without a simple cop’s uniform on actor Nick Southwick, it takes a long while before we know how to digest this declaration.

Of course, a long while in a production that zipped through Holter’s script in less than 90 minutes wasn’t uncomfortably long. What Christopher continued to do extremely well was cut down on key moments when actors read from their scripts. For most of the production, actors were off-book and the booklets they clutched served as reminders of their cues rather than reading material. We were aware of the scripts onstage, but the flow of the action and the actors’ lively energy grabbed nearly all our attention. If anything, the occasional peep at a script reminded us how quickly and thoroughly this cast had mastered its essence with just a few rehearsals.

We should also understand that the sanctification of Stonewall over the past 54 years has partly happened as myth rushed in to fill in a vacuum of determined facts. It’s interesting to see the strategies Holter used to recreate Stonewall, chiefly by inventing a compacted community of fictionalized gay, lesbian, queer, and crossdressing people, from the neighborhood and from elsewhere, who gather at The Stonewall, owned by the mob but catering to this eight-person crowd.

As the Snap Queen Team, Lamar Davis as Mika and Zelena Sierra as Tano have attitudes, sometimes confrontational, about anyone who passes by. When Zachary Parham arrives as the queer Newbie, the Queens are not at all welcoming. But Holter’s style of hostility isn’t mean-streets raw or even ‘60s bohemian. Combats and putdowns come at us in the form of rap rhymes and poetry slams.

Aj White, arriving in high heels and a low-cut dress as Carson, is too much for the Snap Queens to handle despite his grieving over the recent death of Judy Garland. Yet he is visibly floored by the advances of lanky Neifert Enrique as the self-confident, draft-dodging, pot-smoking Cliff, a fatalistic drifter who assumes he will be dumped into the Viet Nam War the next time he is picked up in a raid. None of these core characters appear ripe for radicalization, though the tough Carson and roving slickster Cliff have agreed to meet at The Stonewall. Eric Martinez as the arrogant A-Gay further convinces us of the submissiveness that bonds the Newbie and the Queens. The Harvard grad lords it over all three.

Two catalysts for change are deftly stirred into the mix. Shaniya Simmons as Peg will combine with Carson in fomenting the police brutality at The Stonewall, and Valerie Thames as Roberta, an activist perpetually straining to draw a crowd, will finally be gifted with a galvanizing cause. Besides Southwick as the Cop, friction comes from Iris DeWitt as Madeline, a character who morphs from a concerned citizen to a disapproving sister. Music blasted by guitarist Daniel Hight, bassist Harley, and drummer Paul Fisher was most appropriate when we convened at The Stonewall and the bulk of our cast began to party.

Ironically, the music was most effective when it suddenly stopped as police commands triggered the raid. The music vibe and the slam poetry styling were shattered simultaneously. Soon we were in the ladies’ room watching the grim brutality. A little less riveting – but perhaps more emotionally fraught – was the climactic confrontation between the sisters after the raid.

Reports of what happened afterwards are unclear, but we do adjourn to the sidewalk stoop where the main point impacts the Queens who sit on it: there’s no turning back. Paired with Angels within three points, Hit the Wall reminds us that Kushner’s epic ended with a similar takeaway. The feeling that both dramas remain timely urgently underscores the fact that the Pride movement has more work to do.