As Shane Peterman, WaterTower Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director, reflects on the theater’s 2022-2023 season, he can sum up the experience of creating theater in a post-pandemic world in four words.
“Great to be back,” Peterman said.
The Addison theater company’s season concludes with Goin’ Hollywood, a world premiere musical by Stephen Cole and David Krane, now playing through July 30. As the season ends, Peterman feels the theater is in its strongest position since he joined the company in 2019.
“We’ve got a little bit of money in the bank, we are completely debt-free, and we’ve got this beautiful world premiere happening right now,” Peterman said.
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He credits the theater’s current stability to his staff’s hard work, the dedication of the theater’s board and the Town of Addison.
“The Town of Addison really believes in WaterTower Theatre, in professional theater, and it always has,” Peterman said. “My hope is that other municipalities, other governments, other towns, other cities pay attention to that because our relationship is akin to what some of those relationships are like in the United Kingdom. It does become a part of a great city’s culture.”
The theater is contending with the same challenge as many nonprofit regional theaters around the country: audiences have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“Everyone is still down double-digit percentages. Single tickets are outselling subscriptions,” Peterman said. “I think the key for us is just high, entertaining theater and that’s what Goin’ Hollywood is.”
WaterTower Theatre initially announced Goin Hollywood as part of its 2020-2021 season, following a reading in New York City in 2018.
“Life got in the way of that,” said David Krane, the musical’s composer.
The delay gave the show’s creative team more time to further develop a show based on nothing but the creators’ imagination, including a workshop and revision at WaterTower Theatre in 2021.
“It came from my fertile, crazy brain because this is a totally original musical, not based on a story or a book or a novel or play,” said Stephen Cole, the musical’s book writer and lyricist.
While working together on several musicals including Aspire, The Road to Qatar! and Inventing Mary Martin, Cole and Krane would complain about the state of 21st-century theater and wonder what their careers might have been like had they lived and worked in the golden age of movie musicals.
Cole and Krane created a musical that fulfilled that fantasy. Alice Chandler, a writer who doesn’t feel like she fits in her own era, makes a birthday wish that transports her and her writing partner, Garson Stein, back to 1949, the heyday of Hollywood’s movie musicals. Alice and Garson end up working as writers for L.B. Meyer at MGM Studios, surrounded by Hollywood’s brightest stars.
The time-traveling writers discover not everything is as glamorous as it appears. They find themselves navigating the era’s problems including a crumbling studio system and the increasingly threatening blacklist.
“They get to achieve their dream and find out what it costs and how every time is exactly the same as another time, just as dangerous, just as interesting and in the end, you had better just live your own life in your own time,” Cole said.
Alice and Garson learn a lot about themselves and end up leaving their mark in 1949.
“Because our characters are from the future, they have no past, so when all the big people or the FBI or L.B. Mayer are interested in who they are, who do you think they are if they cannot trace them? Who could they possibly be?” Krane said.
Krane crafted every aspect of the score.
“It’s truly a jazz-inspired score. I’m not making a pastiche. I’m not making new versions of the same tunes people know. I’m creating my own version of a modern jazz score through the 21st-century aesthetic because the entire show is through our 21st-century characters’ eyes.,” Krane said.
Peterman considers the show the crown jewel of the theater’s season.
“This is what a Broadway musical should be. It’s a really great entertaining piece. It’s very sophisticated,” Peterman said.
Workshopping new works like Goin’ Hollywood is part of Peterman’s mission for WaterTower Theatre. The theater typically workshops at least two new works each year.
“I really firmly believe that especially in this post-pandemic world of ours that if we’re not investing in the future of our art form, we may find ourselves in a place where it doesn’t resonate,” Peterman said.
As he watched rehearsals for Goin’ Hollywood, Peterman recalls walking alone through the silent theater during the darkest days of the pandemic.
“I would walk into that space and hope and just be there and feel it. You could not hear a sound,” Peterman said. “To get from there to the other evening when I heard this lush, beautiful score and I’m cracking up at this very witty writing, I think, ‘We’re doing this.’”
The theater currently operates with a $1 million annual budget that is growing, is rolling out educational efforts, and is planning to produce four shows with two-week runs. Challenges still exist, but with shows like Goin’ Hollywood, Peterman is talking less about managing a crisis and more about creating theater.
“My job is fun again,” Peterman said.
Learn more: WaterTower Theatre
