An original musical has its premiere in Sioux Falls this month. The show explores the relationships co-workers develop from spending 40 hours together every week.
Eight people sit in a circle rehearsing songs and dialogue. Members of Goodnight Theater Collective are working on pieces from their new musical titled David and Lucy. Luke Tatge is the composer and of the writers.
“It’s a comedy. It’s sort of almost a send up of sitcoms as a genre. It all centers around the concept of having a work wife or a work husband.”
He says a work spouse isn’t a romantic relationship.
“It’s sort of that idea that you have a spouse at home that you see in the evenings but really the person that you are closest to at work, you see for 40 hours every week. And so it’s really easy to get creepily close and have inside jokes and have little nutty tendencies and so it sort of played off of that.”
Tatge writes music as a hobby but still has a day job. He created this musical with a coworker. It took them nearly a year to write. He says their work relationship inspired the play.
“The idea loosely came from mine and Ruth’s kooky relationship at work. Everything else is completely fictionalized but that whole central concept is sort of born out of our own relationship where we finish each other’s sentences. And we have all these inside jokes with each other.”
Tatge says Sioux Falls is receptive to zany new ideas like this so the theater group is able to bring in an audience.
The Goodnight Theater Collective has been together for two years. They average a performance a month. Those usually involve a lot of music. Martha Stai is one of the four founders. She says the group started from a backstage conversation.
“We were at a show and we just started thinking about how cool it would be if we could design a show and cast it ourselves and hold auditions. And that tiny little backstage conversation suddenly resulted in some meetings at each other’s houses and those ended up in us creating a business plan and then a name and then a location. So it just kind of spiraled out of one tiny little backstage conversation.”
The group typically writes and performs cabarets. Stai says this original musical is their first big production.
“When we were planning our first cabaret, I remember us throwing around the idea that maybe we’ll get 50 people if everyone’s whole family comes. That would be really great. And then at our first cabaret we had about 200 people and then at our Christmas cabaret we had about 300. And it kind of stayed in that two to three hundred rage.”
There are four main characters in David and Lucy and up to four course members. Stai says most parts aren’t played by professional actors.
“There are a lot of people here who work their nine to five job and are just searching for some sort of musical or theatrical outlet. In preparing for this next round of auditions I’m seeing a lot of people who are saying that ‘you know I haven’t done a lot of performing since high school.’ But seeing this event advertised, it struck something within them.”
Stai says their collective hopes to expand the number of cast members. Kristy Kayser is an actress in the musical. She’s done cabarets with the theater collective before. This time, she’s the main character.
“When you watch movies and stuff you obviously see the character in front of you so you kind of base your character off that even if you try not to. For this production, it’s been really interesting because you get to bring your own character into it.”
Kayser says developing a character for an original musical is more challenging for an actor. She says she noticed many similarities between that characters and the writers that created them.
“It’s also fun because you get to see just how much alike you are to the writers of the story just by how you perceive the character and how they perceive the character. So it’s been a very interesting experience.”
The Goodnight Theater Collective primeres its new musical, David and Lucy, this month in Sioux Falls.