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Merry-Go-Round producing director Ed Sayles said part of the inspiration for his new summer theater series called “The Pitch,” a collection of new plays and musicals presented each weekend, came from watching James Cagney playing George M. Cohan in the 1942 black-and-white movie musical Yankee Doodle Dandy on late-night TV. Despite being one of the great song-and-dance men of all time, Cohan regularly found that he had to sell each new idea for shows to skeptical potential backers.
Each attempt was a bizarre kind of dialogue. Cohan might be overflowing with new ideas, but he couldn’t go forward without a response from people who had to be won over. Cohan was dishing out entertainment, but he was speaking right through the fourth wall to the select audience, and he was looking for feedback. That’s what makes it a pitch.
The Pitch is the third tier of this summer’s Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival. Out at the Merry-Go-Round on Owasco Lake, the Broadway-style product is still flourishing as always. No one is going to tamper with that. At the in-town Auburn Public Theatre venue, the festival is running edgier, off-Broadway shows for risk-friendly audiences.
The Pitch, however, marks a new kind of entertainment, with Sayles and company at an entirely different kind of venue to present the shows: Theatre Mack, a remodeled turn-of-the-century carriage house, is a few yards off the main drag, even though it bears the address of 203 Genesee St., Auburn. Just west of downtown, near the Schweinfurth Art Center, Theatre Mack is at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art, and sits in the middle of what was once the city’s millionaires’ row. Strange to say, it has plenty of free parking.
Seating is cabaret-style. Four mobile, plush easy chairs form a semicircle around each of 26 tables, one for each letter of the alphabet. You’re encouraged to bring drinks (including wine) and snacks to your table and to schmooze with the three other people sitting there. Talking about what you see is an expected part of the evening. In a curtain speech (yes, he still throws a carnation), Sayles admitted that when aspiring Cohans and Stephen Sondheims make their pitches in Manhattan they do it in measurably more spartan surroundings that those in Auburn, and for listeners more likely to scowl than the ones found here.
The pitchers turn out to be people who already have lengthy lists of credits, even though they may not yet be the Cohans of our time. No Judy and Mickeys from the local parks and rec get this far. Hundreds of people who perform in New York City and regional theaters, maybe every single one of them, are thinking about making a breakthrough with a show of their own. Like any writer, they may have something significant to say, maybe a personal experience. Or, more often, they might be thinking of something that makes maximum use of a talent that brought them into show business in the first place. Tenors tend to write vehicles that call for demanding performances from tenors.
The Pitch’s first weekend included the comedy Flambe Dreams, featuring actor-writer Matthew Hardy, who may have been born in Houston, but has enough New York City credits to earn an Equity card. With him was composer-pianist Randy Klein who had already won three Emmys as well as a shelf full of lesser awards. Also on the same weekend was The Eulogy, with Rochester-born actress and playwright Rachel Carozziere and composer/lyricist Annie Lash, who both carry national credits and considerable critical recognition. Their Eulogy came with darker emotions. The festival flies the pitchers to Auburn, where it accommodates and feeds them.
The faces on the pitchers might be white, black or yellow, but the pictures from each performance are going to look pretty generic. We see a large, black Yamaha grand at stage right, black music stands, wires, microphones and light, movable chairs. The youngish players are dressed in street clothes. No sets, no costumes, no props. There is never a moment calling for the willing suspension of disbelief. Performers speak casually, without notes, about the guiding concept, with summaries of the action up to the introduction of a musical number. They are disarmingly candid about how many rewrites the song had undergone and whether more changes might be forthcoming within hours.
Sayles and other festival people might be unhappy hearing comparisons with American Idol and other reality TV shows. The Pitch’s appeal, however, will be that you’re not seeing an act. Rather, it is reality presenting an act in development. Things go wrong, such as a hanging microphone coming lose and falling down. No matter. Composers lose their places and change their minds about what to say next. These never slow the action. In reality there is no “mistake.”
The first weekend featured performers who had written nothing but instead took roles written for them. With the guys in Flambe Dreams came the sparkling soprano Jillian Louis, again boasting lots of credits for both stage and screen in the United States and abroad. With the somewhat dour women of The Eulogy appeared the high-spirited comic actor Harlan J. Alford, listed as a “script consultant.” In both instances they rather upstaged the creators beside them, which appeared to be their function. Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers were not the prime performers of their own music, even though both liked to sing.
The Pitch lured quite a few serious musical theater buffs in the audience during the opening weekend, with reaction being mostly polite rather than confrontational. There was never a vote of thumbs-up or thumbs-down and no one was asked to rank these offerings. Questions from the audience ran along the lines of, “Where did you get the idea for this show?” to “Is the portrayal of the girl’s relationship with her grandfather autobiographical?” Once the novelty of the concept wears off, we can expect much more assertive voices from the crowd.
The creators from the first week came away looking pleased that they had been in Auburn. Matthew Hardy and Randy Klein had already secured a slot in the New York Musical Theatre Festival, and let on at the end of the evening that they would welcome backers from upstate.
The Pitch will continue in the Theater Mack on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 5 and 8 p.m. for nine more weekends, through Aug. 18. Each show runs a bit more than 45 minutes, so the evening with intermission and conversation can last 2½ hours. Titles sound like the shows are coming from all over the map: The Life of a Mob Wife: A Mafia Comedy (June 28-30), That Time We Found Sasquatch in the Woods (July 19-21), Billionaire Vegans and SLAM: The Hockey Rock Opera (July 26-28) and Gettysburg (Aug. 2-4). Indeed, we ain’t seen anything like it before. Tickets are $20; call 255-1785 or (800) 457-8897 for details.
