A new musical by Duncan Sheik & Kyle Jarrow
Premiering at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, starting January 13th!
Buy tix here.
More info at www.duncansheik.com/whisperhouse
January 11, 2010
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Family Entertainment
Family Entertainment by Kyle Jarrow
It’s Day Two of tech. I’m my hotel room, getting ready to head back to theater. Trying to soak in a couple more minutes of sunshine through the window before I sit in the dark for ten hours.
This morning, I’m thinking about what it means to make “family entertainment.” This is on my mind because I did an interview yesterday with one of the local papers here, and the reporter asked me if Whisper House included “edgy content.” She explained that the backgrounds of the creative team gave her the expectation that it might. After all, Duncan’s Spring Awakening had bared boobs as well as some onstage spanking; Peter Askin directed Hedwig and many of John Leguizamo’s F-Bomb laden solo shows; and my movie Armless, going to Sundance this year, is a pitch-black comedy about a man who wants to cut off his arms.
So, this reporter’s expectations make total sense. But despite our backgrounds creating R-rated entertainment, Whisper House is decidedly kid-appropriate. (I’d say anyone above the age of ten or eleven should be fine with it.) There’s no profanity, no sexual content, and an eleven-year-old boy is the protagonist. Sure, it’s a ghost story, so there’s some spookiness, but there’s nothing truly frightening in it.
From the very beginning, Duncan and I talked about creating a show that would be appropriate and entertaining for audiences of all ages. Is that what it means to make “family entertainment”? Maybe. For me, it was a new kind of challenge. The “appropriate for all ages” part of the equation is easy—just don’t use swear words and don’t have references to sex. The “entertaining for all ages” part is tougher. How do you make a piece that feels relevant to people from age 10 to 90?
Part of the answer, I think, is having characters of different ages for audience members to connect to and sympathize with. Another part of the answer is dealing with thematic material that isn’t age-specific. Issues of fear and love and loss, the central themes of Whisper House, certainly fit this qualification. Having music certainly helps—who, regardless of age, doesn’t like a good tune? And Duncan’s music has always had a broad age appeal, both in his pop career and his theater work.
In conclusion: Whisper House is family entertainment, at least that’s what we’re going for. But that said, we’ve tried to make it stylistically daring and theatrically exciting. Those goals, we’ve found, can co-exist goal of being kid-appropriate.
