Beyond Déjà Vu

Jane Austen and E.M. Forster fire the muses of the San Francisco-based team of Joel Adlen and Leonard Moors

By Terry Berliner

In the spring of 2007, Joel Adlen called me from San Francisco. His new musical Emma had just been accepted into the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). Adlen said that he was looking for a director based in New York: Would I be interested? I took the job—yet for a moment I had to seriously consider the implication of his offer.

Jane Austen fanatics might wonder: Is the show in question the Emma that played at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, Calif., in the fall of 2007, and is currently playing in several professional theatres across the country? Or is it the Emma that Patricia Birch directed at NYMF in 2004? The answers are "no" and "no"—the former was written by Paul Gordon and the latter by Stephen Karam.

Adlen is not the first writer to face the special challenges of tackling a new show based on material in the public domain. Audiences, too, have experienced that particular sort of déjà vu: The Phantom of the Opera and Phantom; the Off-Broadway production of The Wild Party and the Broadway production of The Wild Party; Princesses and The Little Princess. What do you do if you have spent years working on a show and then you are beaten to the punch by one-two, in the case of Emma—other productions? Do you change the title? Do you persist in trying to send your own version out? Do you shift gears and claim that your show was "inspired by" rather than "adapted from"?

Understandably, artistic directors are confused about what to do when there are multiple versions of the same property in circulation—when hard programming choices must be made, the name value attached to a project can be crucial.

Emma No. 1's Gordon, the Tony-nominated writer of Jane Eyre, is a known quantity. Karam, who created Emma No. 2, has a lower profile, but at least he had the advantage of working with a director/choreographer, Birch, with a long and distinguished track record. Which version would you produce?

Adlen rests in an even more peculiar spot: Is the theatre world really ready for an Emma No. 3?

"The good news," I told Adlen, "is that the story of Emma is timeless, and if you put your version away for a little while, there might be a better moment down the road when those other productions are less visible."

In preparing to direct Emma at NYMF, I read and watched virtually every version of the story ever made. Adlen's musical adaptation was inspiring, and what he told me about this challenge is something for all writers to think about: "If you're going to bring a story 100 years old or older to the stage today, you need an absolute reason to do so," he avowed. "Sometimes you need to reshape the story, push certain ideas into focus, to help bring it completely through into the present."

"Why Emma?" I asked him. "I relate on a personal level to the character of Emma," he said right away. "You have to have something personal at stake. If you can find the truth of your past within the story you are retelling, as I do in this case, it can make your musical all that more compelling."

Each of the writers of the myriad of Emma musicals brought out something a little different in their adaptations. I'd like to see a festival made up entirely of Emma stage adaptations, if any producer out there is game. Such an effort would be informative, an excellent way to see how different writers and directors interpret the same story. This scenario is quite unlikely, of course, and given the long history of multiple adaptations of Emma, I actually found myself at one point suggesting that Adlen might want to start working on something else.

Well, he has, as it turns out. And it's a musical similarly based on a classic work in the public domain.

The 44-year-old Adlen lives in El Sobrante in California's East Bay area, far from traditional places (like New York City) where musicals are assumed to be born. His writing partner, Leonard Moors, who lives in San Francisco's Noe Valley, got to know Adlen first by acting in one of his earlier works, Tea and Crumpets, written with Steve Josephson and originally produced in 1997 by Allegro Music Productions in San Francisco. (That show won Adlen a San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award for best musical score. A later production at Laguna Beach Arts Theatre was named best original production by the Festival Theatre USC-USA, which subsequently produced it at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999.)

Though Adlen has been known to multi-task-he wrote Emma's book, music and lyrics—he decided the task of writing the music for his next project would be best handled by his longtime friend Moors, a 46-year-old actor and composer, nicknamed Len, who had served as Emma's arranger and orchestrator. And thus a new team was created for the current endeavor, a musical version of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View.

"I love period music, meaning the 1920s and before," Adlen says of his own musical style. "But the soul of my musical muse is in the wrong century"—by which he means neither the 20th nor the 21st. "It's been a lifelong struggle of mine. In fact, once when I tried to write a pop song—a hip/rock/funk piece—it came out sounding very 1890s. It was rather embarrassing."

In fact, Adlen says that his learning experience was "trial by fire." He explains: "I grew up in Los Angeles where I played in pits in high school and shows on the side. I went to the University of Southern California and studied music composition there. At that time, there weren't any musical-theatre writing programs on the West Coast, so I hooked up with friends who were producing shows. They were looking for music, and I was writing. I had no formal training." Later, on he did manage to take some classes and workshops at ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) in Los Angeles.

On the other hand, Adlen's partner, Moors, started listening to musicals as a child and grew up singing jazz—his father is a professional jazz pianist, arranger and bandleader. He has studied orchestration and conducting and has a master's in classical voice, which serves him well in his pop and contemporary songwriting. Given this sort of background, Moors's challenge lies in attempting to collaborate on a piece that does not follow his own natural music-making style. As he says, "The best way to learn an idiom is to immerse yourself in it."

And the best way to feed the dream, especially if you come from an unlikely place in the country, is to find the right partners. Adlen and Moors asked David Hegarty, an organist/composer/arranger and Moors's life-partner, to work on the arrangements for A Room with a View. It's no surprise that close-knit relationships and artistic endeavors often intermingle in the musical-theatre world, as friendship, history, trust and aesthetic alignment are essential in making such creative challenges work.

"Joel and I speak the same language," Moors confirms. "We're like a married couple—I know Joel's feelings when it comes to music and what he's trying to go for. Sometimes the lyrics of a song are just in their beginning stages. He might have in mind a completely different idea musically than what I actually end up with. I might want to bring out more syllables and reshape his words, adding a word here or changing a line there. Right now, we're working via e-mail. We also get together at least once a week."

The space to create and cultivate ideas independently in this particular kind of marriage is also essential. As Adlen says, "When Len and I are apart, we've given each other marching orders about what we need to do next. Spending time apart gives each of us the opportunity to delve into our own realms and explore within our comfort zone. We share the results when we come together, and those results are always weighed with one major element in mind: what serves the piece best."

Adlen continues: "There aren't many venues in San Francisco dedicated to new musical shows. Occasionally a new musical work will be included as part of a season, but that's few and far between. The preference is to program established works." Moors chimes in that it's difficult to find in-town professional actors to collaborate with as well. "Maybe one percent of the actors here manage to scrape out full-time work—but acting is not their number-one priority. The good thing about San Francisco is that people are into experimentation—they love to explore. That being said, finding a rehearsal space with a piano in this city is like having a root canal."

Adlen agrees, "People do their jobs and then they have their other lives." Moors's day job is as a music editor, re-notating the entire works of Mozart and putting them online for the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, Calif. He's also a cantor for a Catholic church. During his free time he is working on A Room with a View.

For his part, Adlen has in recent years been commissioned by Berkeley's now defunct Fine Arts Cinema to compose original film scores (for Peter Pan and Rin Tin Tin), and has composed and performed his own music for more than 40 silent films for the Pacific Film Archive and Castro Theatre, both also in Berkeley. These days, he spends his time running an office and a department for Levi Strauss & Co. while writing musicals on the side.

Even though Adlen and Moors aren't making a full-time living out of writing musicals, they both say that they thrive in environments that have allowed them to hone many of the skills a musical-theatre writer needs to learn. In a culminating song in A Room with a View, when the characters finally arrive at their titular destination, the two writers have managed to express their own struggles when Lucy, their leading lady, sings:

I've dreamt of many places
Many lives in many moments
Now the moment's here and what I fear
Is that I'm passing through it
Not knowing
Where I'm going
Where am I going—and why?
And why?

Like Lucy, Adlen and Moors might now know exactly where they are going, and yet they continue to follow their bliss. "We crawl into a personal space and write," as Adlen puts it, with the hope that they, too, will create a stage-worthy and unique new musical.