Album to musical

I attended a delightful evening of theater yesterday. The show will take a little bit of explaining. In 1991 musician Matthew Sweet created the hit album “Girlfriend.” I don’t know Sweet and had never heard of the album (my tastes are classical, not pop). Recently Todd Almond wove a story around the love songs of the album to create a musical with the same name. Yeah, this is backwards to how most musicals are created, but it sounds similar to shows like Mama Mia (which I haven’t seen).

There’s one more detail that attracted my attention. The story Almond wrote is about gay love. I don’t think that was Sweet’s original intent – the original album title is Girlfriend, after all – though he would have had to give permission for his songs to be used this way.

There are only two characters – Will, a bit of a nerd, and Mike, a jock. The story begins the day Will and Mike graduate from high school and lasts the summer. The two young men are very awkward with each other at first, then growing closer. A big problem is that at the end of the summer Mike leaves town to go to college.

We were told the two actors are recent graduates of the UM School of Music, Theater, and Dance. They did a fine job in both singing and acting. For such a small theater I was disappointed that they used microphones, though I suppose with the band behind them that was the only way they could be heard. The rest of the production was quite well done.

The Max and Marjorie Fisher Music Center in Detroit has three performance spaces. There is the outstanding Orchestra Hall where I go listen to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform 15-18 times a year. There is the Cube (formerly the Music Box) where less formal concerts and events are held. The third space, much smaller than the other two, is Allesee Hall. The Detroit Public Theatre uses that hall for its productions.

The whole Music Center was busy yesterday. An orchestra from Oakland County, just north of Detroit, had rented Orchestra Hall for a performance. So there was a huge crowd waiting to get in with their line snaking in front of the box office. But since that wasn’t a Music Center run event, their ticket sales were handled separately. But those of us attending the play had to slip in and out this line to get to the box office.

This time I didn’t see the show the last weekend of its production. It will run two more weekends.