By Shelly Randall, KCP Publicity Coordinator
Port Townsend composer David Schroeder can tell you the exact day—it was Dec. 28, 2003—that he received the phone call affirming his hopes for his original musical based on Dickens’ Great Expectations.
The call was an invitation to participate in the prestigious ASCAP Foundation/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop “to nurture new American musicals.” Based on Schroeder’s submission of four songs from his work-in-progress, his was one of four musical teams selected from hundreds of applicants to benefit from professional critique by a panel of the most prominent theatre producers, directors and composers. In Los Angeles, no less!
Schroeder, 52, was thrilled. He’d just begun submitting demo CDs of his second musical to contests around the country. And while his first musical—“Alkmena,” first performed in 1998 in Port Townsend and produced in a number of regional venues—had in past years received an honorable mention here, a semi-finalist recognition there, ASCAP’s call was a swift and affirming response to his new musical.
“And, boom! Four weeks later I’m sitting in the cafeteria at Walt Disney Studios listening to complete strangers singing and performing 20 minutes of my show,” says Schroeder. “It was an extraordinary experience.”
Schroeder’s twist on Great Expectations is a gender switch. In his musical version—which is set in London in Dickensian times—the main character, Pip, is female, and Pip’s romantic interest, Estella, is male.
By the end of the two-month-long ASCAP/Disney workshop, Schroeder had more than a fistful of reviewers’ notes. He had also lined up a director for his musical and given it a name: “Expectations.”
“David’s ‘Expectations’ is a wonderful twist on the original tale,” says Randy Brenner, the California-based director who has been working with Schroeder since 2004. “With the genders being switched and a subplot that is historically accurate, very funny and engaging, he has created a musical with a unique new voice that can easily play regional theatres across the country, if not Broadway itself.”
Brenner’s credentials validate Schroeder’s work-in-progress, which has yet to be staged in a full production. Brenner has directed dozens of plays and musicals in Los Angeles and Off-Broadway in New York, and has won several Dramalogue, GLAAD, Robbie and Phoebe Awards for his direction. Having received rave reviews for his recent production of Stephen Sondheim's “Marry Me A Little,” Brenner is currently directing workshop productions of “Snapshots,” a new musical by Stephen Schwartz (whose show “Wicked” is playing to full houses on Broadway).
Schroeder has traveled to L.A. four times in the last four years to meet with professionals to move his project forward, and to do what he calls “sanity checks.” One such check was a local reading of his work-in-progress at The Paradise Theatre School in August 2004. The theater world is beginning to take note of “Expectations”: at the most recent reading one year ago in L.A., Schroeder was cheered to be approached by an interested producer—who must remain nameless for now.
“It looks like it has a reasonable shot at being a real show with real theaters and live audiences,” Schroeder says of “Expectations.” “It’s far from being a sure thing in this business they call show, but it’s got good associations, it’s got good supporters.
“It seems like I’m getting my shot, however painfully slowly, at the old wheel of fortune.”
Schroeder’s father was a playwright in his later years, self-published and self-produced, so the young Schroeder was exposed to the theater while growing up in a small Ohio town. “I’ve always vaguely had in the back of my mind that I’d like to try my hand at a screenplay or a theater script,” he recalls.
Schroeder studied composition as a Yale undergraduate and earned a degree in music. As a student, he wrote mainly traditional orchestral music, but he was inspired by the sounds of old-time radio, which led to his first job in radio production.
Being a techie in the dawning age of Apple computers, Schroeder wrote his first computer game in 1981, then made his living writing home computer games for the next 10 years. (Crisis Mountain and Dino Eggs were his two best-sellers.) Having moved to Seattle shortly after college, it was perhaps inevitable that Schroeder eventually became a Microsoft employee, joining his wife at the Redmond campus for five years before they decided to move to Port Townsend in 1994.
Schroeder initially got a job at the local software company Medifor (recently bought by AllScripts), but both he and his wife, Margaret McGee, took time to explore latent passions. McGee published a book, Stumbling Toward God, and has recently branched into playwriting herself, with her one-act play “Baptizer” receiving an honorable mention and a staged reading in this year’s Playwrights’ Festival.
Schroeder chose to get involved with community theater, even though performing was an enormous challenge at first. “I was just frozen with stage fright,” he recalls, crediting friends and stage mentors Gale Wallis and Richard Clairmont with “getting me unfrozen.”
The first musical to which he contributed was the 1996 production of “Cinderella, The Real True Story” by Bare Boards & Passion, a theater group that is now on hiatus. On a lark, the directors asked Schroeder to write a closing musical number. He ended up writing three songs and some incidental music, all of which was included.
In an epiphany of sorts, Schroeder realized he could write musical theater.
“I was impressed with his ability to ‘hear’ music in a static script,” says Wallis, who worked with Schroeder on “Cinderella.” She was also struck by his openness to critique and revision. “His lack of ego and eagerness to examine the script in a different light was remarkable.
“The fact that he has gone on to work with professionals and learn from them is no surprise to me—he is in service to the project first,” says Wallis, a founding member of BB&P and a well-known local actor and director. “That is the greatest compliment I can pay any artist in the collaborative venue of live theater.”
Fired up by his success with the “Cinderella” songs, Schroeder sat down at his synthesizer and wrote his first full-blown musical, based on Jean Giraudoux’s revisionist telling of the classical myth of Jupiter falling in love with a mortal woman. “Alkmena” was first performed in 1998 by Bare Boards & Passion at Sightlines Theater at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds.
The debut musical contained half a dozen songs. When a concert version of “Alkmena” was performed by the Peninsula Chamber Singers in 2000, Schroeder doubled the number of songs, and by the time Port Townsend High School staged the musical in 2003, Schroeder had tweaked it even more. “I by no means considered it a completed work, and I still don’t,” says the composer. “Alkmena” continues to delight area audiences, and was produced at The Changing Scene Theatre Northwest in Bremerton just last year.
Schroeder went on to work as musical director for Key City Players’ “Quilters” in 2003 and “The Threepenny Opera” in 2006. With Catherine McNabb, he co-created KCP’s “A Golden Age Radio Christmas” in 2005 and has performed in that recurring holiday show as well as the Victorian Chamber Singers’ production of “H.M.S. Pinafore” and BB&P’s smash hit, “Angry Housewives.”
Currently his talents are being put to use as musical director for KCP’s, “The Spitfire Grill,” which opens Sept. 28 at Key City Playhouse.
Schroeder, who plays keyboard and conducts the orchestra, can’t wait for the curtain to open on “The Spitfire Grill.” “It’s got wonderful, wonderful warm music, the orchestration is fresh and unique, and we’ve got really top-flight instrumentalists. They truly are the best in town,” he says.
“I wish we had the new theater, because we’d fill it up,” he adds, alluding to the planned Key City Public Theatre in uptown Port Townsend.
But even with opening night looming, Schroeder’s mind is always on “Expectations.”
“Even now, today, when I’m not working on Spitfire rehearsals, I’m in the process of writing the sixth song that is filling a particular plot moment in the story: when Pip the girl meets Estella the guy,” he says. He’s already written five songs and they’ve all been discarded “for some reason or another.” Now he’s writing the sixth, and hopefully final, song.
“And I think I’ve nailed it! But, of course, I’ve thought that before,” Schroeder says soberly. “In fact, five times before!”
When this round of rewrites is complete, Schroeder predicts that “Expectations” will be ready for either a workshop production “off-the-record, meaning no reviews,” or a full production at a small theater “with small reviews.”
“If that gets good buzz, then we tackle a production in a larger city,” says Schroeder, who with cautious optimism maintains the highest of expectations for the musical he’s calling “Expectations.”
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