New musical based on a Mark Twain story
WESTPORT — How do money and power affect how people interact with those who have them?
It’s a question Mark Twain explores in his short story, “The Million Pound Bank Note” and one the Westport Library will examine in song with the performance of “My Millionaire,” an original production based off Twain’s work. The premier of sorts will be at 11 a.m. Sunday and will be followed by a conversation.
“It’s been a long time in evolving,” said Barbara Backlar Reis, the show’s composer and a Westport resident. “But that’s musicals.”
Nancy Becklean Tobin wrote the lyrics and Reis wrote the music. The duo started working on the show back in the 1980s, even performing the songs at New York Public Theater once.
It then sat on the shelf after that performance in the 1980s until the pandemic hit. The two were housebound and decided to pick it up again and have been working on it for the past two years.
Tobin had started on it even earlier. She got the idea from Lehman Engel, a famous composer, at one of his BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshops. She had started working on it with someone else, but when it didn’t pan out, she turned to Reis to craft the music. The two had previously written a number of shows together, Reis said.
“Barbara has a lovely ability to create such beautiful, sentimental tunes,” said J. Clayton Winters, the show’s director and an Easton resident. “I think the performance is a love song to Twain’s story.”
The show’s latest revision came a few months ago when Winters heard some of the music and met Reis. The library was looking for a 45-minute program and so they reworked the 21⁄2 hour musical down into the window, which Winters said brought it back to closer to the source material.
He estimates about 85 percent of the show is new, though the 10 songs are the same. The original show has about 20 songs.
“It really is a collaboration that spans decades but has been shaped in the past couple months for the Westport Public Library,” Winters said.
Twain’s original story was published in 1893 in between the periods he lived in Connecticut — first in Hartford and then in Redding, where he would go on to found the library, which still bears his name.
“It’s very exciting, but it’s kind of musical theater meta,” Winters said, of performing the Connecticut author’s works in a Connecticut library.
He and Reis said the story is still one that resonates today and one people should see. They said it’s a love story about how people can find value in each other, even in the presence of wealth and power.
“The appearance of wealth can be a subterfuge for who someone actually is,” Reis said. “My daughter always called this work ‘currency of love.’”
Winters said Twain explores these themes so well.
“In Twain’s comedic way, he pokes and plays with the appearance of wealth and how you can exchange that,” he said.
Winters said the Westport Library is a great venue itself with its lights, cameras, stage, LED screen and grand piano that helped them share the production they wanted.
“It’s just a remarkable location,” Winters said.
The music will be performed by a cast of six and Chris Coogan on the piano. Coogan also serves as the musical director.
With Coogan playing, this will be Reis’s first time as an audience member at one of her own shows, something she’s looking forward to.
“I believe that musical gift was a gift from God that I received as a young child and that gift from God will be shared with the audience,” Reis said.
Both Winters and Reis are thankful to the library for the opportunity to show this performance.
Reis had been taking an exercise class at the senior center over the summer and speaking about what she was working on with Dick Lowenstein, whose friend Andrew Wilk serves not only on the library’s board but is also the executive producer for “Live at Lincoln Center.” He then got her in touch with others and between multiple conversations and sharing the recording of the Public Theater performance, this upcoming show was made a reality.
“I am so grateful,” Reis said. “It’s been the work and the heart and the soul of so many people to allow this production to take place.”