‘Something real’
Life of ‘Dreamer’ is now a Phoenix Theatre musical
When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game Oh, you get love for it, you get hate for it
You get nothing if you wait for it
— Lin-Manuel Miranda, “The Room Where It Happens”
Overture: I Dreamed a Dream
Move over, “Hamilton.” A revolutionary musical promises to break down barriers and give voice to hundreds of thousands of young people fighting to be heard: the undocumented immigrants known as “Dreamers.”
Based on a true story, “¡Americano!” opens Jan. 29 at Phoenix Theatre as the
first step on the road to Broadway — at least if the wouldbe impresario who has invested nearly half a million dollars into the show has anything to say about it.
With no experience in the theater other than clapping at the curtain call, this first-time producer put together a diverse creative team and recruited a Broadway heavyweight (with the Tony hardware to prove it) to serve as chief strategist. There’s a concept album in the works, and there was even an ad on the jumbo screen in Times Square — right where the ball was set to drop on New Year’s Eve a few days later — to trumpet a Spanglish folk-rock musical opening 2,000 miles away: “¡Americano! Because we’re all Dreamers.”
At the center of this publicity storm is 29-year-old Antonio “Tony” Valdovinos of Phoenix. His real-life comeback story makes him an appealing poster child for all “Dreamers,” those undocumented residents who were brought to the U.S. as children (and who twothirds of Americans believe deserve permanent legal status).
Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, Valdovinos’ biggest dream was to fight for his country as a Marine. After discovering a family secret at the worst possible moment, he despaired for his future, but ultimately he decided to get to work, reinventing himself as an activist and entrepreneur doing the work of political activism at the street level.
One thing he never dreamed of, though, was watching the most humiliating 30 seconds of his life being recreated onstage by professional actors, backed up by an army of designers, stagehands and marketing pros, all on the same mission: to tell his story — and sell it to the world.
“It’s been interesting and hard, honestly, going through this and almost feeling like an outsider to the process when it’s about your life. And I feel like that,” Valdovinos says. “I’m not a theater guy. I’ve never watched a play in my life. … I just didn’t know what I was getting into, honestly.”
Jason Rose, the high-powered PR executive who’s sinking his Phoenix firm’s profits into this long-shot venture, says he didn’t know what he was getting into, either.
“The ambition for the project has grown,” he says. “I didn’t know 41⁄2 years ago how much frickin’ money I was going to be spending on this. Tony certainly didn’t understand how dynamic the creative process was, how many times you have to sit with the authors and the composers and explain your story.
“This is a roller coaster for me, this is a roller coaster for him. This is a roller coaster for everybody. We think we have something special, but ultimately it’s going to be the marketplace that tells us if that’s true or not.”
Act 1: There’s No Business Like Show Business
When “¡Americano!” premieres at the Phoenix Theatre Company, opening night will be the culmination of a journey that, at least in hindsight, began with an unlikely inspiration: the one-hit wonder behind the mid-’90s outlaw anthem “Banditos.”
That would be Roger Clyne, founder of the Tempe band the Refreshments, which disbanded in 1998 after releasing two albums of dusty, boozy jangle-pop in the wake of the Gin Blossoms’ rise to Top 40 stardom.
The singer-songwriter and guitarist never hit the big time with his comeback band, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, but he has carved out a solid indie career and maintained local-celebrity status with ventures such as Roger Clyne’s Mexican Moonshine Tequila and the band’s annual four-day party across the border in Puerto Peñasco, dubbed Circus Mexicus.
One of Clyne’s biggest fans happens to be Rose, a Phoenix public-relations operator whose clients have included former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Amy’s Baking Company and the briefly notorious Pink Taco restaurant. A partner at Rose+Moser+Allyn, his firm also repped the Special Olympics but got fired in 2011 after Rose tweeted a joke about “Midgets, special ed and axel rose wannabes.”
Rose has co-founded high-dollar events such as the Bentley Scottsdale Polo Championships and the Fiesta Bowl Rugby & Balloon Classic, and he has made tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions, mostly, although not exclusively, to Republicans. In 2016, he and his wife, lawyer Jordan Rose, paid $3.4 million in cash for their Paradise Valley home, which looks more like a modern art museum than a place people live.
“The original idea was kind of an ‘almost famous’ story about this artist here, Roger Clyne, and his music, which I had grown up with in my 20s, going to shows, drinking, having a great time,” Rose says. “So I asked (concert promoter) Danny Zelisko to set up a meeting with Roger Clyne.”
He was thinking of a jukebox-musical biography a la “Jersey Boys,” but as the meeting date neared, Rose decided the “almost famous” idea wasn’t fresh enough. So instead he pitched a fictionalized plot that would have Clyne’s life story intersect with that of an undocumented immigrant.
Through a family friend, Rose connected with San Diego playwright Jonathan Rosenberg, who agreed to write a script (or “book,” in theater speak) weaving Clyne’s songs together into a cohesive narrative. Then he pitched the idea to Michael Barnard, producing artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre Company, which had been looking to ramp up its efforts to develop new work with potential for success beyond the Valley.
The team got as far as a table read with a 115-page script, but everyone agreed it just wasn’t coming together. And that’s when Rose decided to pivot away from the jukebox musical and toward an original story about a “Dreamer.”
It wasn’t even an idea, really, just a concept. Not only did they need a new script, they had to find another composer. All they had to show for months of work was a possible title, taken from a 2004 Peacemakers album (starting with the inverted exclamation point, of course).
As it happens, it wasn’t hard to find a “Dreamer” with a compelling story.
Rosenberg hit the Google machine and identified several candidates. He heard Valdovinos talking on public radio about his failed quest to join the Marines as well as his Phoenix consulting business, La Machine, which hires undocumented immigrants to campaign for candidates who support legal protections for “Dreamers.”
Barnard, now signed on as co-writer and director, invited him to visit the theater and talk about his experiences. A couple weeks later, he and Rose called again to ask if they could turn his life into a musical.
Valdovinos agreed. There was no money on the table, just the promise of a slice of the royalties if the musical ever became a profitable reality.
“I thought it was a phenomenal opportunity to tell the story of what it’s been like for a lot of ‘Dreamers’, what the challenges and the fights throughout the years have been,” he says.
There were hours of interviews with the writers, and 480-345-6461
Austin, Texas, recording artist Carrie Rodriguez — another theater novice — was hired to translate dramatic moments from his life into songs that, like the characters in the show, had roots on both sides of the border. As the months passed, draft scripts and sample tunes popped into Valdovinos’ email box. Mostly they stayed marked Unread.
Finally, it was time for a public workshop performance, with a full cast singing at music stands, at Phoenix Theatre’s annual new-works festival last February. Valdovinos attended with his mother. At one point, he remembers his onstage alter ego singing a stirring chorus together with the ensemble: “United States we stand as one / And with mind, body and gun / I’ll defend our liberty.”
“It made me cold, because I recognized that damn, I (expletive) felt 100% that. That’s what it (expletive) felt like to want to join the Marines and want to be out there,” he says.
“They really ripped out my heart. I had never imagined music being able to articulate what I had felt so many years before.”
He was deeply moved, but at the same time, he was troubled. Why had the writers made up that fake happy ending, where the fictional Tony marries his high-school sweetheart and they have a baby and live happily ever after? They knew his actual ex was gay, right? And why had they invented that wild story about his mother crossing back over the border while she was pregnant because she suddenly decided she wanted him to be born in Mexico?
“I was like, that is (expletive) stupid,” he says.
Act 2: It’s the Hard Knock Life
Growing up, Valdovinos only knew the bare facts of his parents’ life before Phoenix. They told him where they were from but not how they met and fell in love. But he knew one thing: The decision to cross the border with two toddlers was a difficult one — and it was all his mom’s.
“We came to the United States out of being desperate. She couldn’t feed us,” he says. “My dad didn’t want to leave Mexico, and my mom gave him a choice: ‘I’m taking my kids, because they’re not doing well.’ ”
They moved into a run-down apartment near 36th Street and McDowell Road, the first home Valdovinos can remember. He was 2.
When he started school, he noticed that the white, black and Latino kids from the neighborhood tended to hang out with their own. But young Tony, small, light-skinned and speaking accent-free English, was taunted with the epithet “guerito” (“white boy”). He got into fights. He had to, he says, to prove he could stand up to the bigger boys.
His father was college educated, an accountant, but the only steady work he could find was in construction. He worked hard and earned the trust of contractors for his attention to detail. And on weekends, with two new sons at home with their mother, he brought along Tony and his big brother and put them to work.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Tony was in sixth grade. TV images of bodies falling from the burning towers were etched into his memory for life by the time he left for school that day. And when he learned that his history teacher had lost a sister in the attack, he took the threat of terrorism even more personally.
In the years that followed, he watched the Spanish news stations and idolized the U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. He noticed that many young men in Marine uniforms were Latino, some of them immigrants with backgrounds similar to his own.
A dream began to form. On construction sites with his father, he watched as his brother mastered a variety of valuable skills. Without the same aptitude for precision work, Tony was content to be “the grunt.” He dug trenches and hauled bricks, and he especially loved demolition work.
“I think I was really angry growing up, so giving me the 16-pound sledgehammer, I was ready to do some damage,” he says.
Not that he was a slacker. Far from it. “My dad’s voice penetrated my whole soul,” he says. “I was afraid of him coming back and me not being 3 feet deep.”
In hindsight, Valdovinos calls his father his “first drill sergeant.” As a teenager, he used the work to prepare for the rigors of Marine recruit training — basically, dreaming up ways to make hauling bricks even harder on his body.
In his spare time, he lifted weights at the gym. He even bought .50-caliber ammunition cans, because he saw recruits exercising with them in internet videos about “The Crucible” that awaited him when he turned 18.
After breaking his collarbone in a car accident his freshman year, he stopped hanging out with his grade-school friends, some of whom were getting into gangs. He became a different kind of misfit, listening to heavy metal and getting to know the streets of Phoenix from the deck of a skateboard, even if he would never attempt the aerial tricks his new friends were mastering.
“I was always just the grunt behind the pros, and I loved rolling with them,” he says.
Valdovinos couldn’t talk to his parents about his plan to join the Marines. But he talked about it all the time with his friend, and later girlfriend, who was in the class behind him at Camelback High School. G.C. said maybe she would follow him into the military, “for the discipline.”
Just weeks from graduation, he met his first real live Marine in dress blues, a recruiting officer on a campus visit. It was the moment he had been dreaming about, and it didn’t take long to summon the courage to start a conversation. They made an appointment to visit the recruitment office.
The Marine picked him up after school in a beat-up sedan that made for a striking juxtaposition with his pleat-perfect uniform. As he eased the car into the line for the exits, he asked where the 17-yearold was from. Valdovinos said he was born in Mexico.
“His demeanor kind of changed,” he says. “And he goes, ‘Are you a citizen?’ And I said, ‘No, we’re in the process.’ And he goes, ‘Get out of my car. You’re wasting my time — and you’re wasting your time.’ And in my heart and mind, there was no questioning a Marine order. I remember almost mechanically reaching for the handle. It was over.”
They hadn’t even gotten out of the parking lot.
Wait a minute. “We’re in the process”? What the heck was that?
In hindsight, it’s easy for Valdovinos to see through the silences and evasions that his parents used to paper over their undocumented status. After walking home in 90-degree heat, electric guitars raging in his ears, he confronted his mother. He yelled. She admitted there was no process, no papers. He yelled some more. His father walked in and the fight was over. But the cold war was just beginning.
At 18, he wasn’t ready to give up on his dream. He even tried to enlist a second time, rationalizing that maybe a more sympathetic recruiter might help him find a loophole.
He had been avoiding a difficult truth his entire life. It’s a hard habit to break.
Act 3: The Room Where It Happens
This might have something to do with his panic while watching that first full workshop of “¡Americano!” last year, Valdovinos acknowledges.
“They had sent me the music, and for some reason I was reluctant to listen to it,” he says. “I was still afraid of what was happening, where everything you’ve ever tucked away now was going to be shown to everybody.”
He wasn’t expecting such a big audience for the workshop. He sat in the back with his mom, but the actors couldn’t stop themselves from glancing in his direction, or at least that’s how it seemed. It made him squirm inside. And as overwhelming as it was to hear his deepest, truest emotions sung back to him by strangers, those moments made the fictionalized elements feel more and more like lies.
“It’s hard for me to have people come up to me and be like, ‘Wow, this must be amazing.’ I’m like, ‘(Expletive) no, it’s not.’ I remember being interviewed, like, ‘How do you feel about,’ and I’m like, ‘Homie, there’s a lot of young Marines that didn’t come back. So that’s what’s important to me out of this whole thing.
“This is not a celebration of my life. This is a snippet of one story of many (”Dreamers”), and we’re still in a bad place. I want to be clear that this hasn’t been an exciting process to be famous or anything like that. It’s been a very critical process for me to represent my community.”
Valdovinos knew he would never be a Marine. But he still had duties, and it was time to stop shirking them.
“I felt that I had not done a good enough job telling them my life story,” he says.
He called Barnard and said he had some concerns about the script. The creative team had a three-day retreat planned, in Austin this time, to give Rodriguez a break from airport hopping. So “I self-invited myself to the meeting,” he says. He paid for his own ticket, and bought one for his girlfriend for moral support. (No, not the one in the show.)
Rosenberg was just a face on a computer screen, but Barnard was in there along with Rodriguez and the Tucson musician she had found to orchestrate her score, Sergio Mendoza.
Valdovinos told them he didn’t want a wedding scene, not even in a fantasy sequence. He was uncomfortable with his story being portrayed as a triumph, because as far as he’s concerned, his journey is just beginning, and it won’t be over until there is a permanent replacement for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which currently protects him — but not all “Dreamers” — from deportation, at least until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on President’s Trump’s efforts to end the Obama-era policy.
He also tried, probably awkwardly, to explain that his mother, who had sacrificed so much, should not be portrayed as unintentionally sabotaging him because she was too emotional to see her own child’s best interests.
“It took me like two wine cups to say, ‘Nope. That’s not happening. You’re not going to write that my mom went back,’ ” he says.
To his immense backed him up.
“Oh my God, I’ve been feeling this way the whole time,” she said.
For Valdovinos, the truth mattered more than poetic license. Definitely more than box office.
“It was important to me to be authentic, and it was important to me for them to be authentic,” he says.
The plot twist? Barnard barely remembers this part of the conversation at all. Far from an important point, the weird back-and-forth across the border had been partially a timeline convenience, but mostly it stemmed from a misunderstanding about something Tony had said in an interview.
“Tony talks fast, and somehow they got that misinformation,” Rodriguez recalls.
It was easily fixed. Barnard and Rosenberg were far more concerned about the plotting of the second act. In their search for real-life drama, they had tried to capture some of the ups and downs of relief, Rodriguez
Valdovinos’ experience as an entrepreneur. But they knew from watching the workshop performances that it just wasn’t working.
“We dumped like 85% of the second act of the script,” Barnard says.
In fact, he says, Valdovinos’ decision to start participating in the creative process may have saved the show.
“He was really adamant about having this Ruben character involved, and that met and matched what we were hoping to discover, which was how do we take this second act forward from the end of the first act,” he says. “The Ruben character and the Marines were that trajectory.”
“This Ruben character” is Ruben Gallego, Arizona Democratic congressman, Marine combat veteran and the man Valdovinos calls “my commandant.”
It’s true that Valdovinos is a fast talker, and that he tends to leave out some details here and there. But during a 2 ⁄2-hour interview, almost every answer 1circles back to his passion for the Marine Corps and the new life he found in politics with Gallego. It’s central to his story, and he made sure it was central to “¡Americano!” — under a pseudonym, of course.
Finale: Putting It Together
After the disaster in the recruitment officer’s car, Valdovinos fell into a depression. G.C. broke up with him, then surprised him by enlisting in the Marines. He wished her well on a new path without him, knowing that he wouldn’t be going anywhere.
At his mother’s insistence, he took some classes at Gateway Community College, but it didn’t seem worth the expense, especially since Arizonans had voted overwhelmingly to deny in-state tuition to undocumented residents in 2006. He earned some cash as a janitor and dishwasher, then went back to work with his father. He couldn’t afford to get his own apartment.
“I’d lost my integrity through that fight with my parents,” he says. “I’d lost my integrity in who I wanted to become, and I really felt worthless for a long time.”
After a few years, though, he decided that even if he didn’t have the right to vote, he still had the right to free speech. He had a voice, and he had legs he knew could carry him for miles, even in an Arizona summer, so he got involved with Poder in Action, a neighborhood nonprofit. By chance, he was assigned to knock on doors with Gallego, then a state representative, pounding the pavement to get out the vote for Democrats in 2012.
“(Phoenix City Councilman) Michael Nowakowski gave us a speech and then he left. Ruben gave us a speech and then he stayed,” he says. “He walked with us, and I had my first glimpse of what I believed leadership was.”
Gallego, who won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014, served with the Marines in Iraq, where he lost his best friend in combat.
“When I met Ruben, I joined corps,” Valdovinos says.
After a brief stint working for the city of Phoenix, he turned his activism into a career, opening a business that hires “Dreamers” like himself to do the vital but unglamorous street-level work of political campaigning. He named his company La Machine, in a nod to his relentless work ethic.
“We’ve never run a negative campaign,” he says. “We don’t take on those kind of projects. Our Number 1 objective is to educate voters, especially voters of color that have been registered for years but have never had a reason or understood how to vote.
“I take a lot of pride in knowing that some of these other consultants are Yale educated and had mentorships from national groups,” he adds. “I’m not the most brilliant (expletive) debater. The way I debate is I just work harder than the rest of them.”
Still the grunt.
Valdovinos still isn’t sure about some of the liberties that “¡Americano!” takes. And he knows that if Rose succeeds in taking it all the way to Broadway, there will be more script consultants, more revisions. But for now, well … the show must go on.
“Time’s up,” Valdovinos says. “It’s about to be put out. For me it’s a big throat swallow before it happens. I came from a really tough upbringing, a very tough professional world, and all of a sudden I’m in a different ecosystem of artists and music, and I don’t feel like I belong.
“I don’t know what kind of result I want from this, but I feel the responsibility of doing my best to represent my community, and especially the “Dreamers” that didn’t qualify for DACA because they were too young. They’re literally 18 now, in the same exact position where I started my story, a couple years before I met Ruben.”
He’s especially excited about a partnership with the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation that will offer discounted tickets to veterans and others as well as send a share of royalties from the concept album to the fund.
“This whole thing becomes about that for me,” Valdovinos says.
“Now it’s tied to something real.” his