In Celebration Of...
Jeanine Tesori
If I had been musing online a decade ago about arts and culture, a fairly significant percentage of those posts would have been about the theater in general musicals in particular. As far back as a half-century, in both my college years and my brief professional radio days, I had a radio show where each week I explored the story and music of a specific musical. I’m pretty sure that I was the first person to play Evita in New Hampshire, or perhaps anywhere, when WLTN, Littleton, received a promotional copy of the Evita concept album, which I then almost immediately played in its entirety on air on my late night show.
Right through the first two decades of this century, as my children appeared in preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and professional shows, I found myself attending theater pretty much every month. There’s no important musical from the early 1940s right up until 2020 that I haven’t seen in some form or another, and that I don’t own a recording of.
And then came Covid, and suddenly, I got out of the habit of attending live theater, even when live theater returned. It’s gotten to the point that at best I’ll check out what all the area theaters are planning to stage in a particular theater season and pick out one play or musical that I’ll endeavor to see.
This year, it’s Kimberly Akimbo, 2023 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, and the latest Broadway production from a name more people should know, Jeanine Tesori.
When I set myself the challenge of naming every composer for the Broadway stage since 1941 that has six or more first-rate musicals to their name, Tesori is on that short list, indeed is the only female on it (Here’s the list: Rodgers, Sondheim, Kander, Herman, Lloyd Webber, Tesori). Her musicals generally feature high-quality source material, with stories that pack an emotional punch, and music that delineates character, more than just tunes for tunes sake. Here’s a quick look:
Violet: Tesori’s first notable work opened off-Broadway in 1997, a fairly typical starting point for someone new to the Great White Way. Once Tesori distinguished herself with some Broadway successes, Violet was deemed worthy of a Broadway revival in 2014. I happened to catch it in a front row seat in a theater with no aisle separating the first row from the stage. I could have literally reached out and touched star Sutton Foster from my seat. The role was not a typical one for Foster; Violet is a disfigured North Carolina woman who hears about an Oklahoma televangelist promoting a miracle cure and travels there by bus, interacting with passengers along the way, including two possible romantic attachments. Here’s Foster and company at the 2014 Tony Awards:
Thoroughly Modern Millie: Sutton Foster first came to stardom in this Tony Award winning musical from 2002, which was adapted from the 1967 film with Julie Andrews. Michael Mayer directed; we’ll see his name again later. This is a show I’ve never seen, even though the opportunity to do so arose when Newton North (MA) high school put it on about ten years ago. By that point in time,, a broadly stereotypical Chinese character in the show and the negative reaction to said character, took all the attention away from the catchy musical numbers, including this one, “Forget About the Boy,” shown here on YouTube as my way of reminding you that entire Broadway Cast albums are often available there:
Caroline, or Change: Tesori’s place out of the spotlight is most evident when this show is referred to, as it often is, as a Tony Kushner musical. Sure, he wrote the script that Tesori set to music, but that score, (oh that score!) with musical sounds ranging from Motown to spiritual, from classical to klezmer. The show ran for only 136 performances on Broadway in 2004, but still earned 6 Tony Award nominations plus a Broadway revival in 2021. Here’s Sharon D. Clarke, from the revival cast:
Shrek - The Musical: Yes, the source material here is the same William Stieg children’s book that fueled all those Mike Myers animated films. Tesori’s take ran on Broadway for more than a year, and once again reunited her with Sutton Foster. The entire show is available on multiple streaming platforms, including BroadwayHD, plus on a DVD release. Here’s Foster with a song that clearly emanates from a richer sound world than the Shrek movies:
Fun Home: If Jeanine Tesori is our most underappreciated Broadway composer, the modern day graphic novel remains one of our most underappreciated art forms. I promise in a future Musing to talk more about this, but in the meantime:
If you’ve seen the show, but not read Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, go buy or borrow it now
If you’ve read the memoir but not seen the show, how could you have possibly allowed that to happen?
If you’ve only seen the show in a Broadway theater, but not in a more intimate setting, you need to “see it small”
If you want to know what I’m talking about when I use “Graphic Novel” and “Art Form” in the same sentence, read Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women or her Why Comics? both of which include a chapter on Bechdel
If you want to do a deep dive into a single superb example of how to adapt a literary source for the musical stage, you couldn’t do better than Fun Home
Sometimes my favorite song in a show is far down on the list of usual suspects, and that’s the case with Fun Home. About midway in the show, the Bechdel family, which by this point we know is irretrievably dysfunctional, sing a number inspired by peachy keen, kaleidoscopically joyous TV family fare such as The Partridge Family. We in the audience are both swept up in the joy and caught short by its distance from the reality of the Bechdels. Here’s Michael Cerveris and company from the 10th anniversary concert:
Kimberly Akimbo: A one-sentence description of this show will either draw you in or make you wonder why you would want to put yourself through the experience of seeing it: A young girl with a rare genetic disease that has her age rapidly, with the presumed end result being her premature death, navigates family, friends, and young love, all in the body of a sixty-year old woman. All I needed to know is that Jeanine Tesori was the composer. If you’re sold already, try to see it at the Colonial Theater in Boston between May 6 and May 18. If you want to enter a lottery for $39 seats, go to Google and type in “Kimberly Akimbo Boston Lucky Seat.” If you want a sampling of the music (and a chance to meet Jeanine Tesori), here’s their Tiny Desk Concert (What? You don’t know about Tiny Desk Concerts? Prepare to find hours of your favorite music live):
Post-Script: Just this fall, Tesori’s opera, yes, opera, Grounded premiered at the Metropolitan in New York, directed by Michael Mayer, who hemed a Tesori show on Broadway twenty years earlier. Based on a one woman play by George Brent that starred Anne Hathaway at the Public Theater, Grounded tells the story of a female fighter pilot in Iraq who becomes pregnant while on leave and has to leave the war zone and instead navigate an armed drone over Afghanistan from a base near Las Vegas. The opera was recently telecast on PBS, and while the reviews were mixed, the pleasures to be gained from opera in English are considerable and the lead performance from Emily D’Angelo is excellent: