Special workshop musical coming up at Village: Cloaked | Arts & Culture

Issaquah’s Village Theatre is celebrating the 11th annual Festival of New Musicals, the weekend of August 12, 13, 14. As usual, there will be five emerging musicals presented “concert-style” (like a staged reading of a play but with musical accompaniment). But a sixth, Cloaked, will have a developmental workshop. It will be a fully-produced play, with sets, costumes, musicians, and substantial rehearsal time. It will play the next weekend, as well.

Cloaked is open to the public through normal ticket sales, and is the first production staged in Village’s newly remodeled First Stage. To see the other emerging musicals, you’ll need to join their Village Originals membership program.

Michelle Elliott and Danny Larsen are the creators of Cloaked. It was actually already presented as part of the 2010 Festival, so it’s a high honor to earn this higher level treatment. Michelle says, “I love the people in Issaquah and it feels like a second home (to New York) in a way. We’re so excited that Village has chosen to do our musical as a developmental production.”

Michelle recently won an enormous musical theater award, the 2011 Kleban Prize (named for Edward Kleban, the lyricist of A Chorus Line, who established the prize in his will). She won $100,000 for her “book” (script) of Cloaked. “I’m sharing this with Danny,” Michelle says, “because he is just as responsible for Cloaked as I am.”

Michelle hopes that the money will enable both of them to write more intently in the near future. “That’s the only way you become able to support yourself as a writer,” Michelle explains, “when there’s enough (of your work) out there being done that people want your shows.”

Danny and Michelle have collaborated on two musicals, so far, both on very unusual topics. The Yellow Wood, their first, was produced last summer by Contemporary Classics, a young musical theater company in Seattle. It’s about a high schooler with ADHD who tries to memorize a Robert Frost poem without his medicine. The yellow wood of the poem springs to life in his imagination.

Cloaked weaves together the cautionary fairytale Little Red Riding Hood with fantasy internet lives people create for themselves partly to distract themselves from the pains of living. That show also has magical woods in it.

Danny says that they are trying to do something really different with the musical theater form. “(Cloaked) is a psychological thriller, which we’re told couldn’t be done in musical theater. Music tends to release tension and in a psychological thriller you’re trying to build tension.

“What we have tried to do to help maintain the tension is to play with the structure of the show, chronology, and the internet where people can pretend to be who they’re not.”

Danny laughs as he rushes to say, “Not all our musicals have woods in them.” In fact, ideas for future intriguing musicals include one focused on the rash of young suicides we’ve heard about recently. That one “is not really being written for the stage,” Danny says.

Danny’s background growing up as a Mormon in Utah informs his understanding of deeply conservative populations where being different can be very stigmatizing. He says, “When I was a teen dealing with being gay, I thought I was never going to be able to express myself as a homosexual man.

“We thought of a bullying stage musical, but we were feeling frustrated – even if a show like that would get to somewhere (as big as) Broadway, it’s so limited in reaching the communities we’re trying to reach. People who need to see this may not be able to come to New York City or afford a ticket.”

So, they’re thinking about some kind of webisode, maybe. Danny says, “We want to delve into the background of bullies and what it is that makes them feel like bullying. Do they have a father who is bullying them? So it’s the world of the bully and the bullied and kids who identify as being gay or LGBT and wanting to reach out and help them in some way.”

Another future idea is an intriguing story about the last Aleutian whale hunter, a real story about a powerful tribal figure who decided that whale hunting was wrong and he didn’t want to continue this age-old tradition. Who writes musicals about these sorts of stories? Danny and Michelle.

They met as students in New York University’s graduate musical theater school, where they found their extensive backgrounds in theater as performer, director, or composer, helped them focus on what theater does best to portray their stories.

Michelle says, “In a fantasy world anything can happen. In The Yellow Wood, a kid is memorizing a poem and a wood comes to life. In Cloaked, online conversations are completely theatricalized by setting them in the legendary forest of the Little Red Riding Hood story. We could have done that with two people sitting at a computer and saying (their words) out loud, but instead the conversation is transported somewhere else.”

They are both eager to come out to Issaquah to see the workshop. “We are feeling confident how the show is now and feel good about it,” Danny says.  “We think this show can do a lot of good.

“A big compliment we’ve heard is that people can’t stop thinking about it. We want to entertain people, but we (also) want to make people think and become better versions of themselves.”

For tickets, go to Village Theatre or call 425-392-2202.