San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
23 A look at ACT’s musical version of “A Walk on the Moon.”
When Pamela Gray was a graduate student at UCLA film school in the early 1990s and developing the screenplay that would become her first major success — the summer-of-’69 romance “A Walk on the Moon,” starring Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen — she remembers “finally taking to heart the advice I’d been giving my own writing students over the years: ‘Pay attention to the stories in your life you tell over and over again. There’s probably something there you need to write about.’ ”
Gray, who grew up in Brooklyn (“in Flatlands, not the pretty part,” she says), and first taught writing at San Francisco State University, realized she had “constantly been describing all those summers at the bungalow colony (in New York’s Catskill Mountains) and my coming of age in this sort of fishbowl with my family. I always felt joy, and nostalgia, talking about this world that has long since vanished.” Now the midcentury particulars of that upstate New York world — a working-class Jewish resort just a few miles from Woodstock where Gray, 62, spent every summer from age 3 to 15, including the culturally explosive summer of 1969 — are being reimagined at American Conservatory Theater in a new musical adaptation of her popular 1999 movie.
“A Walk on the Moon,” directed by Sheryl Kaller (“Next Fall” on Broadway), with music and lyrics by Paul Scott Goodman (“Bright Lights, Big City”) and a book and additional lyrics by Gray, opens Wednesday, June 13, at the Geary Theater in what the creative team, including the cast of Broadway and West End veterans and newcomers, hopes is a Broadway-bound run.
As in the movie, young housewife Pearl Kantrowitz, played by London’s Olivier Award winner Katie Brayben (“Beautiful — The Carole King Musical”), yearns for more excitement and purpose than her conventional life of laundry and mah-jongg has to offer. At home, Pearl’s clashing with her opinionated, Vietnam War-protesting teen daughter, Alison (Brigid O’Brien) — the autobiographical stand-in for Gray, who was 13 during what she calls the “summer of change.” Marty, Pearl’s overworked TV-repairman husband, played by Jonah Platt (brother of Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen” star Ben Platt), drives up from the city to join the family on the weekends, leaving Pearl plenty of time to fall for the hippie heartthrob “blouse man” Walker, played by Zak Resnick, who sells clothes out of his minibus.
Pearl’s personal and sexual awakening coincides with the whole country’s being spellbound by cultural flux and promise. Apollo 11 is sending Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon. And Woodstock is happening just 15 minutes away.
“We wanted to capture the sense of wonder back then, which I don’t think exists in the same way anymore in this country,” said Goodman. “You know the image I remember most from that incredible summer?” said Gray in a quiet rehearsal studio at ACT. “Being at the pool during the week with my mother, and the bubbes and kids, and I saw all the hippies walking past the chainlink fence on their way to Woodstock. I wanted to throw myself through
Gray was too young to hop the fence and follow the patchouli to Max Yasgur’s farm, the site of Woodstock — “definitely not when my mother heard the National Guard was on its way,” she said.
In the fictionalized version, “Alison is playing me, except that I didn’t have the nerve to sneak off like she does,” said Gray. “It’s the daughter bringing the ’60s into the family, and watching her reminds Pearl of the adolescence she never had. The magnitude of the change was massive, and frightening to the adults.”
“The world spins round, till it’s upside down” goes the telltale refrain in the “Walk on the Moon” Act I finale song.
Although the new production hews closely to the movie’s plot, Gray said it’s “an entirely different level of collaboration” putting together a massive musical with “20 and counting” original songs.
She turned for inspiration to other “bookdriven” (as opposed to sung throughout) musical adaptations she admires, including “Waitress,” “Fun Home” and “The Color Purple.”
“Dirty Dancing,” another coming-of-age movie set in the Catskills and turned into a musical (however, one that flopped), was set in “a more middle-class hotel scene that’s a world apart” from the bungalow colonies where Gray’s parents, she said, “paid at the most $250 for the whole summer. I also felt like ‘Dirty Dancing’ was de-Jewed, and the Jewish milieu, the specificity of that, is really important to my story.”
So is Woodstock itself, since Pearl and Alison, unbeknownst to the other, both run off to the festival. “It was a big challenge for me, writing songs about an era that had such great singersongwriters, and an iconic sound,” says Goodman.
“It helps that I write on a 12-string acoustic guitar, so that Woodstock sound was always in place for me,” he says. “But I think it’s a cop-out to create a new musical like this and use other ’60s music, but to put our own slightly more modern twist on it.
“That said, I’ve wanted to start the show with a wail of (guitar) feedback, because for me that’s the iconic moment, isn’t it, when Jimi Hendrix played and burned the flag,” Goodman says. “I’m not sure if we’re going to or not. The more unexpected it is, the better.”
“It helps that I write on a 12-string acoustic guitar, so that Woodstock sound was always in place for me.”
Paul Scott Goodman