NEXT STOP Celebrates Love, Equality, and Chicago

One of the best things about doing theatre in Chicago is the many opportunity to collaborate with different artists and theatre companies. My latest collaboration is the new musical NEXT STOP with Route 66 Theatre Company which enters its final workshop this Thursday, April 11th as part of Steppenwolf Theatre Garage Rep After Party. I could tell you about all the awesomeness myself, but I figured I'd let my friend, collaborator, and director of NEXT STOP Erica Weiss do that:

Danny Bernardo (DB) So tell us about NEXT STOP?

Erica Weiss (EW) NEXT STOP is a collaboration between eight Chicago-based playwrights and one amazing singer-songwriter-composer. Eight stories that take place in different Chicago neighborhoods off different stops on the El, transformed from short plays into short musicals, each with a unique style and voice, but every one of them elevated by the addition and incorporation of music and lyrics by the brilliant Diana Lawrence .

DB: What was the inspiration for the piece?

EW: The original idea for the piece when it began in 2012 was the idea of "mutual inspiration" - playwrights would be inspired by the music of Diana Lawrence, and then she in turn would be inspired to write a song for the plays they wrote. Now it's developed into so much more - an exploration of Chicago through the eyes of different local writers as if we're riding the Diana Lawrence train all around the city.

DB: What has the process of working with eight different playwrights and one composer been like?

EW: The process is insane - so many emails! It started by introducing Diana's music in general to the playwrights, soliciting plays from them, and then having Diana write a song that would fit into the play somewhere. Then we tried to create as much of a back and forth as possible to integrate the music into the story and structure of the piece. We're still in development and there have been rewrites even between performances - our goal is to find the way that all the individual pieces work and how they can work together. The first NEXT STOP piece was written by Caitlin Parrish before there even was a NEXT STOP - She wrote a play about two young girls at a wedding, talking about what their dream weddings would be like, and over the course of the play you realize, they're talking about getting married to each other. And there was an adorable scene that involved Jesus showing up playing the ukelele to substitute for any other kind of religious ceremony. Caitlin and Diana and I were all huge mutual admirers of ech other's work, and got the notion into our heads that we all might want to write a musical together. So Caitlin sent Diana this short play to give her a sense of her style. Within a few days, Diana sent the play back to us, but she had transformed it into a musical and written a song for Jesus to sing and play on the ukelele. The song, called "We Got The Love," is a pretty universal favorite - and now that piece ends the show!

DB: A good percentage of the piece has gay characters in it. I know as we talked about my piece "Roshambo" it was important to both of us to show a gay/straight bromance set in Wriglyville. But there are so many more very heartwarming and hilarious parts of the piece with LGBT characters. Why was that important to you?

EW: The fact that there are so many GLBT characters in NEXT STOP is, believe it or not, a happy coincidence. We wanted to explore specific areas of Chicago, and so the Boystown/Wrigleyville border was a great thing to dramatize as a friendship in Roshambo. The fact that so many other writers, gay and straight, decided to write gay characters into their stories was a happy surprise to us. Happy, I think, because it tells me that when our playwrights look around Chicago and their lives and think about who they'd like to write - it's open and inclusive and varied, and you can see that in the fact that no two GLBT characters in any of the pieces are written as a similar "type" or focus. The mere fact that gay characters are such a part of this web of stories without that having been set out as any kind of parameter for the writers is precisely what makes it so meaningful, to me.

DB: What do you think the next stop for NEXT STOP is?

EW: You're punny.

DB: I should be punished.

EW: Route 66 intends to keep developing this musical with the goal of creating a cohesive show - putting the pieces together like a puzzle, figuring out where you need glue, taking advantage of the amazing talents involved, making sure that all the writers and especially Diana get a fantastic showcase, not only for their work, but for our city to have its very own, unique, original musical!

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The final workshop performance of NEXT STOP will be on Thursday, April 11th at 11PM, after Buzz22Chicago's production of SHE KILLS MONSTERS. Tickets are available now for $5 on the Steppenwolf website. I highly recommend getting tickets now: the first performance was sold out with a waiting list.

NEXT STOP is...
Written by Alice Austen, Danny Bernardo, Aaron Carter, Ike Holter, Alex Lubischer, Brett Neveu, Caitlin Parrish, and Emilio Williams

Songs by Diana Lawrence; Conceived with and Directed by Erica Weiss

features: Adrian Aguilar, Harmony France, Emjoy Gavino, Immanuel Guest, Zach Kenney, Geoff Rice, and Blair Robertson.

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Photo credit: Wesley Bushby.