The making of a new Texas 'Giant'

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Late in the afternoon on the first Friday of January, in a studio on the sixth floor of the Wyly Theatre complex in Dallas, a hundred or so people have gathered to put on a show.

At first, they huddle around a catering table, picking at the potluck spread: cheese cubes, a tray of homemade meatballs, all the Sam's Club bottled water you can drink.

Later they take seats, formed in two large, circular rows around the perimeter of the space and turn their attention to Kevin Moriarty, the artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center.

A boyish 45-year-old dressed in jacket, tie and cross-trainers, Moriarty is grinning from ear-to-ear as he welcomes the assembled group, which includes actors, technicians and a handful of the theater's financial supporters. He asks everyone to introduce themselves, and around the room we go, one by one, introductions exuberant and sometimes theatrical. Even the mousiest-seeming folks are compelled to shout their names from the depths of their diaphragms, just like their seventh-grade drama teachers would have taught them.

If you've ever been involved in a college or community theater production, you've no doubt experienced a similar scenario -- something overeager and unruly and a little bit patched-together. Usually in these circumstances, it's regarded as a minor miracle if everyone remembers their lines and nobody literally breaks a leg.

Except the casual atmosphere in the room belies some very high stakes: The Dallas Theater Center is about to mount Giant, a new musical based on the Edna Ferber novel, which in turn was made into the classic George Stevens film, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. With a seven-figure budget, a 23-member cast and a 15-musician live orchestra, it's the most expensive and ambitious production of the center's 50-plus year history. (Performances started Jan. 18, in advance of the official opening Friday. The Dallas run continues through Feb. 19.)

If it succeeds, Giant has the potential to travel to Broadway and become part of the American musical canon. The Dallas Theater Center would enjoy a major boost in its reputation, as a place where groundbreaking new work is being done.

Local theatergoers, too, will be able to claim bragging rights: They can say they saw an important new show before virtually anyone else and played a part in its development.

And if Giant fails, well, a company that's been trying to raise its profile -- by staging new shows and razzly-dazzly productions of repertory titles, like last summer's The Wiz -- could find itself with a considerable amount of egg on its face.

So as fun as this all might seem, a kind of modern-day snippet from one of those old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney "let's-put-on-a-show" movie musicals, well, it's time to set down that plate of meatballs and corral the actors to their rehearsal rooms and start getting them fitted for costumes.

This Giant of a production has to get ready for a paying audience.

Birth of possibilities

The business of creating a new American musical is a strange and perilous one -- and it's changed radically since the glory days of Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. Back then, New York-based producers would conceive a show and mount it out of town, where they could see how it played to an audience and tweak it accordingly. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, for instance, first played in New Haven, Conn., and Boston, undergoing significant revisions at each stop, before successfully opening on Broadway in 1945.

But over the last few decades, it's become almost prohibitively expensive to mount a new musical on Broadway, where the average production costs upwards of $10 million. Out-of-town tryouts still take place. But just as frequently the largest nonprofit regional theater companies across the country are generating new work -- shows which New York-based producers then transfer to commercial runs on Broadway. The La Jolla Playhouse, for instance, first mounted the likes of Jersey Boys and Thoroughly Modern Millie; the Alliance Theatre, in Atlanta, developed Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida and premiered The Color Purple.

The upside for a regional theater, beyond the pride of fostering emerging talent and the challenge of tackling new material, is that the originating company gets a modest share of all future profits. If a show runs for years and spawns multiple touring companies, like Jersey Boys did, those royalties could climb into the millions.

There is also the prestige factor -- and possibly even a Regional Theatre Tony Award, a coveted prize handed out to just one company each year.

"When you're a regional theater and you birth shows that are successful, people in New York pay attention," explains Blake Ross, editor of the Broadway bible Playbill. "And I think right now the people on Broadway are looking for good partners. Only 30 percent of shows make back their money on Broadway, so they're looking to share that risk."

"I certainly don't think that every regional theater company should be judged on how many of its productions are moved to New York City," adds Michael Greif, the director of Giant at the Dallas Theater Center, who in the 1990s was artistic director at the La Jolla Playhouse.

"But it's about defying expectations."

For most of the past few decades, the expectations were that the Dallas Theater Center would chart a fundamentally staid course -- a respectable, but familiar mixture of classic plays and musicals and newer shows that had first been mounted elsewhere. But after being hired in 2007, Moriarty -- who had previously taught directing at Brown University -- set about raising the bar. In his first season, the company staged a production of The Who's Tommy using Denton band Oso Closo to perform the music. In the 2009-2010 season, it premiered a retooled version of the 1966 show It's a Bird, It's a Plane ... It's Superman, as well as a new musical called Give It Up!, written by playwright and screenwriter Douglas Carter Beane (To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar). The latter journeyed to New York, under a new title, Lysistrata Jones, where it had a successful off-Broadway run last spring, before transferring to Broadway in December.

Now with Giant, Moriarty is pushing the company even further into unchartered waters. The artistic director first encountered the show in 2009, at Virginia's Signature Theatre, which commissioned the work from composer Michael John LaChiusa (Marie Christine). That production received encouraging notices but was derided for its four-hour running time.

Yet Moriarty was struck by the possibilities of staging the show in Texas, where Ferber's 1952 saga of a cattle economy giving way to the midcentury oil boom takes place. In 1955, Oscar-winning director George Stevens famously traveled with the cast and crew to Marfa, where almost all of the film version's exterior scenes were shot.

Working in collaboration with another nonprofit, the Public Theater in New York, Moriarty struck upon a unique arrangement: The production would be retooled and premiered in Dallas, and then -- at some point -- play at the Public. Many of the biggest costs -- building the sets, making the costumes -- would be shared. (The DTC says its portion of the costs is just more than $1 million, but declined to cite a specific figure for the show's total budget.) The New York-based, thrice-Tony-nominated Greif (Rent, Next to Normal) was then brought on board, along with an almost entirely new cast, including rising Broadway stars Kate Baldwin (a Tony nominee in 2010 for Finian's Rainbow) and P.J. Griffith (American Idiot).

"There's a homegrown pride when one of our sports teams makes it to the playoffs on a national stage," Moriarty says. "That's what we're hoping the community feels with this show."

Except here's the really tricky part: You can give a new show plenty of room to breathe, develop it over a number of years in the most nurturing creative environment possible ... and still see it go poof. That's especially true over the past decade, where shows have usually needed either big stars (like Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz or Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane in The Producers) or a whole lot of shiny objects flying through the air (see Spider Man: Turn off the Dark or Wicked) to flourish with audiences in New York.

Another recent Texas-set new musical, Bonnie & Clyde -- which originated at the La Jolla Playhouse -- was a spectacular bust on Broadway when it opened last month, reportedly losing its investors the entire $6 million capitalization. Despite solid reviews, Lysistrata Jones struggled to fill seats on Broadway and closed this month after just 30 regular performances. (The DTC had no financial investment in that production, which cost a reported $6 million to mount.)

"There's so many elements, and they're all interconnected," Moriarty says. "In a play, the acting can go wrong, or the writing can go wrong. But in a musical it suddenly expands out to include choreography and orchestrations, and not just one writer, but a composer/lyricist and a scriptwriter, and then all of the collaborators. Any one of these things can go wrong."

He adds, "I feel as much pressure as I always feel, which is intense."

Lean, mean musical machine

"The gunshot could be a whole lot louder," a microphoned voice observes from the center of the Wyly Theatre.

It's the Wednesday afternoon after the initial production meeting, and the creators of Giant have settled in for two weeks of technical rehearsals. (Rehearsals actually began in New York, where most of the cast members are based, in early December.) Rows of seats have been removed from the theater, and in their place are nearly a dozen white tables. At one of these tables sits director Greif, delivering instructions in a cheerfully efficient manner. At the table to his left, LaChiusa and Sybille Pearson, who wrote the show's script, sit taking notes.

And on stage, a half-dozen actors are going over the same minutelong stretch of the show -- a scene from midway through the first act, just after ranch owner Bick Benedict (Aaron Lazar) has put down the horse that threw his sister Luz, killing her in the fall. A confrontation between Bick and his rival, Jett Rink (Griffith) ensues, as Bick's wife Leslie (Baldwin) looks on nervously. All of this plays out as the character of Lupe, played by Doreen Montalvo -- kneeling in prayer on a plankway that's suspended above the stage -- sings a song called Ruega por Nosotros, a kind of Mexican funeral hymn.

Greif asks that the gunshot be even louder. He tells Griffith to start talking sooner, the moment he enters the scene, and he instructs Lazar to exit the stage more rapidly. The scene is repeated, and repeated again, each time with another infinitesimal tweak. After a 10-minute break, they take it from the top, after which point Greif brightly declares: "This is all going to work if we can just make everything go a little faster."

"Ever since we played at the Signature Theatre, Giant's been on a diet," jokes Pearson, who teaches graduate musical theater writing at New York University, where she first became friendly with LaChiusa, who taught as an adjunct there.

Indeed, one of the reasons the Dallas Theater Center's Giant represents such a unique opportunity for local theatergoers is that they get to see a potential Broadway blockbuster in embryonic form -- a would-be diamond still a few more cuts and polishes away from sparkling.

When it was staged in Virginia, Giant featured three acts and -- according to the critics who reviewed it -- came off as bloated and overstuffed.

"We were thrilled with it," says Eric D. Schaeffer, the co-founder and artistic director of the Signature. "But there was a sense that, with today's audiences, their attention span is so short, and would be an issue going forward."

(Schaeffer says he wasn't disappointed that none of the principals of the Signature version was kept on for the Dallas version. In response to an interview request, Jonathan Butterell -- who directed the Signature's production -- wrote in an e-mail: "I think I might not be the best person for you to speak to objectively about Giant. I wish it all success.")

After a series of New York-based workshops and readings, however, Giant is down to two acts and an expected run time of three hours. The whittling process was expected to continue through the first week of previews, as Greif, LaChiusa and Pearson watch it with a live audience. Even after the production has been "frozen" here in Dallas on opening night -- meaning that no further changes will be made -- the creators expect it to undergo still more retooling before its New York debut. (As of now, the New York dates are unscheduled.)

"It's a horrible pressure cooker to open your show in New York if you haven't seen it elsewhere," says LaChiusa. "You look at it, and you rewrite. But in New York, you don't have the freedom to make a mistake."

North Texas theatergoers, of course, might rightly bristle at the prospect of paying nearly $100 for the privilege of witnessing someone else's workshop process; afterall, you likely wouldn't pay full price to eat at a restaurant where the chef still hadn't perfected his recipes. But that attitude doesn't entirely take into account the fact that the 10,000 or so audience members who will see Giant during its Dallas run get to play the role that usually only theater critics and Tony voters get to play -- that of tastemakers, who determine whether or not this show has legs.

"I imagine somebody is going to tell us, 'You don't hold a cowboy rope like that,' or 'A Texan wouldn't use that word,'" says Pearson. "All I can say is, please tell us what we've got wrong. I'm not afraid of being corrected."

Reinventing a classic

So will Giant come off? Can the creators successfully shake off audience members' strong associations with the film version and reinvent this iconic tale as an old-fashioned, yet modern-feeling musical?

Theater industry observers remain optimistic. "We follow these shows in their out-of-town tryouts, and this one is an opus," says Playbill's Ross, who goes on to add that even negative reviews for this version of Giant shouldn't necessarily spell commercial doom.

"The shows benefit from that critical eye," she says. "I point to The Addams Family, where they benefited from those reviews in Chicago, and the show got better."

The Signature's Schaeffer suggests that the team behind this current Giant should be careful about cutting the show too aggressively. "The story is so layered and complicated, with all these great characters, and siblings, and it goes generation to generation," he says. "It's epic. I told Michael John it's his Angels in America. There's a danger if you cut too much, that you lose that sense of it."

For his part, Moriarty isn't worried that if Giant doesn't play well he will quickly be run out of town. He feels like the company has built up new reserves of goodwill with the community in recent years, so that -- to extend the sports metaphor -- audiences will keep rooting for him even if the company endures a few uneven seasons or has an off game. (Moriarty's contract with the DTC runs through August 2014.)

Still, there's no mistaking that he'd love for Giant -- the highest-profile effort thus far of his tenure -- to prove triumphant. On the night of Jan. 18, at the first performance of the show, he was set to be poised in the balcony of the Wyly, along with Greif, LaChiusa and Pearson, watching the show, watching the audience watching the show, taking notes. Trying, in effect, to tame a giant. (Members of the press were not invited.) Casual as he might look -- sometimes he swaps out his cross-trainers for a pair of bright green Converse that he pairs with a jacket and tie -- this would be no lighthearted matter.

"There are definitely things that to an outsider might seem like small parts of the journey, but that to the writers and to the director and to us feel important," he says. "I spend a large amount of time thinking about it, and talking to friends and colleagues, trying to figure out why something is not working, or why something is working. When you're developing a new show, you're trying to hold on to the things that work."