Writing the Musical "Jack the Ripper"

Thursday is the premiere the new musical, Jack the Ripper. The writer of the show is Dan Kehde, who created the show with composer Mark Scarpelli.

Both of them took the time to talk about the show in an e-interview, and we'll start with comments from Dan.

Q: Tell our readers a little bit about your theatre background...

Dan: It's a long and checkered past indeed. Actually I graduated from college in 1973 with a commission to write the libretto for a rock opera for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC., and it's been downhill ever since. So, except for the years when my son was growing up, I've been at this for 35 years. I've been fortunate enough to have nine plays of mine published, plus a few books of monologues and short scenes; wrote songs with Bob Whitmore and his production company up in New York back in the '70s; won a bunch of awards for the videos of some of my shorter works, including a Telly and screenwriting award from the New York Film Festival back in 2000. I've been collaborating with Mark Scarpelli for the past 12 years, writing the librettos for an insanely eclectic portfolio ranging from a fantasy opera Griswold and the Goblin King to Lincoln an opera on the last day in the Lincoln's life. We've also set Romeo and Juliet and the Blob to music, and have run our first piece Mary, a rock opera based on days and months before the birth of Christ every Christmas for the past eleven years. I've lost the actual count of the number of musicals and operas we've written so far, off the top of my head I count eleven or twelve.

Q: Your latest project is hitting the stage this week - tell us about Jack the Ripper.

Dan: This is a pretty wild piece. We've always written for multiple voices - lots of duets and trios - over the years. This seemed to lend itself to going even further. The libretto was actually written in three, sometimes four columns, so we could work in voices from multiple settings, in this case Jack's studio, the tavern in Whitechapel where the whores congregated, and Inspector Abberline's station several blocks away. It's a very challenging piece, dark at times, funny at others. Very weird.

Q: Jack has been a source of fascination for a long time, and there's an incredible number of books out there about him. Was this a difficult show to research?

Dan: Impossible. Everybody has a pet theory. I liked the character that Patricia Cornwell theorized was the ripper - the artist Walter Sickert - but the facts don't really prove her or anybody else's case. Still, I thought the Ripper as an artist was intriguing. The Ripper Encyclopedia was invaluable, and the websites are truly obsessive, if not absolutely accurate. If I had a theory, I'd say an awful lot of the
characteristics of the ripper killings were used to sell newspapers - maybe too much so.

Q: Jack seems an odd subject for a musical - it's not exactly the usual upbeat feel-good topic. What made you choose this as a topic?

Dan: We wanted to call it High School Musical 4: The Ripper Goes East, but we thought Disney might have a problem with it. Actually, that's all my fault. I have a tendency to write dark pieces and this seemed challenging to me, though Mark never disagreed. It gave us a chance to explore a whole new range of techniques.

Q: It must be a difficult undertaking, to create a new show and bring it to the stage for the first time. What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced? Also, which comes first - the story or the songs?

Dan: The idea comes first: sometimes from me, sometimes from Mark, but that's how it all starts. Then I'll write a scenario and run it by Mark. He'll either agree or make changes, or we'll hash it out for a while until it sounds right. After that I'll begin the libretto and e-mail him portions as they get finished. We rarely see each other while we're creating a piece - maybe once in a while he'll play me what he's working on, but that's usually when we're not sure how a particular moment in the libretto is going to work musically. Creating a new show is a real bear. Especially one as difficult as this one. Who knows if the thing is actually going to work - what the real moments are - and whether an audience is going to tolerate our experimentation.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the cast and how they've managed, working on a new show.

Dan: We got lucky on this show - for reasons far beyond all understanding, we've ended up a group of true artists as castmembers. Principals Ryan Hardiman, Kevin Pauley, Melanie Larch, Tanya Dillon Page, Nick Curnutte, Donnie Smith, Niklaus Tidquist all know the trials of living as an artist and so are personally dedicated to this project. Our chorus is amazingly tolerant of the monumental amount of work staging an original piece entails. Between shortages of scores and inaccurate librettos, they've had to claw their way through some of these scenes by their fingernails. I really can't say enough about our cast. We're proud of this piece and the folks who are in it.

Thanks, Dan! Tomorrow we'll hear from composer Mark Scarpelli!