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The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

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The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

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Playwrights bring workshop to City College

The theatre arts department at City College is helping out playwrights Cheri Steinkellner and Jeff Rizzo by performing a workshop of their upcoming musical “Hello! My Baby.” The workshop will run for free on April 30 and May 1 in the Interim Theatre on West Campus.

The process of performing a musical or play at this stage of its development is used to help the writer and composer further develop their work into a final product, ready to perform professionally. This is what Steinkellner and Rizzo hope to accomplish with their musical.

“We will do a kind of workshop, largely with students, so that Steinkellner can hear the music in context,” said Tom Garey, chair of the department.

With “Hello! My Baby,” Steinkellner and Rizzo are attempting to turn an old-fashioned music score into a fresh musical comedy about song-pluggers, gangsters, immigrants, socialites and sweatshop workers. The plot is full of love triangles, gender-swapping and ukulele-playing in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1916. Back then, a song-plugger was a piano player employed by music stores to perform new sheet music to encourage customers to buy it.

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The musical is based around a group of people who sell sheet music, director Rick Mokler said.

The workshop at City College features 25 songs from the era of Tin Pan Alley, a group of New York City-based music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music scene in the United States in the early twentieth century.

“This will be the second reading [of the musical],” Mokler said. “The first reading was held at Rubicon Theatre in Ventura.”

Both Steinkellner, who wrote the new lyrics, and Rizzo, who has composed new music and arrangements for “Hello! My Baby,” are prominent and successful writers.

Steinkellner contributed several songs to “The World Goes ‘Round,” the last show performed at the Garvin Theatre before its ongoing renovation. During their collaboration with that musical, Steinkellner told Mokler about the script she was working on. That script turned out to be for “Hello! My Baby.”

“She has been a friend of the theater for years,” Mokler said. “She lives in Santa Barbara.”

The Theatre Arts Department is in the process of auditioning for all of the roles. Because most roles are for teenagers, the Interim Theatre will use City College students for all younger characters, according to Mokler. There are also four principal roles for older characters in the musical. They will look for those actors in the community, he said.

Mokler is not only directing the piece, he’s also serving as a producer. His task is to coordinate how the writers want the performers to sing and read the lines.

“He does everything in this production,” said Pam Lasker, theater operations assistant at City College.

“There’s not much movement in a staged reading,” Mokler said. “From a director’s point of view it’s much easier. You try to accomplish what the writers want to do. They want to hear the words read in accordance with what their intentions are.”

The purpose of the workshop is to fix problems, but also to expose it to a new audience and give it a fresh approach, Mokler said. He doesn’t want to talk too much about the future, but he admits, “The hope certainly is that the musical would go all the way to Broadway.”

Garey at first seemed to share this vision. “To say that I think it ‘would go all the way to Broadway’ is a good bit of an overstatement,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “Certainly it might, but that would be a long way off. Should it happen we would be very pleased, but such discussion is very, very premature – ranking as little more than a pipe-dream.”

In a public relations document, Steinkellner and Rizzo stated that they want “to create a new-fashioned musical that will go the distance commercially on its way to the ultimate goal – joining the canon of musicals that schools and communities can produce with the sure-fire success of ‘Grease,’ ‘Little Shop,’ and ‘High School Musical,’ while adding a big, bright, authentic dose of cultural literacy, theater legacy, history, and fun to the mix.”

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