About
A news reporter, a cop, a minister, an ex-gang leader, a social worker, a lawyer, an illegal immigrant – in downtown Los Angeles, the lives of seven twenty-somethings become intertwined as they strive for justice and search for love.
But when a catastrophic earthquake strikes, the seven are forced to face unavoidable truths and make tough choices as their lives are changed forever and they discover that true love isn't always found in the obvious places.
Taking its title from a quote from a survivor of the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California, John Adams' music theatre show mixes pop, jazz, gospel, blues and funk into songs that are rich in the sounds and rhythms of American urban life.
A young cast of rising stars from the worlds of RnB, pop, gospel and music theatre give authentic voice to characters who reflect the tense, multi-cultural reality of 1990s LA.
Kerry Michael and Matthew Xia directors
Clark Rundell music director
Sean Green assistant music director
Adam Wiltshire designer
Jo Joelson Lighting Design
John Leonard sound
Tal Rosner video design
Jason Pennycooke Movement
Time and Place
1990s, Los Angeles, California
In a poor neighborhood of Los Angeles, the lives of seven young characters become entwined when Dewain, a former gang leader, is arrested by a policeman (Mike) for shoplifting two bottles of beer. He had been hurrying home to see his girlfriend Consuelo, an undocumented political refugee from El Salvador who is the mother of his baby. Dewain faces a harsh mandantory sentence if convicted of this petty crime, his third offense. Mike's arrest of Dewain is captured on videotape for a local TV station program hosted by Tiffany, an anchorwoman. Tiffany is attracted to Mike, but her interest is not reciprocated. Meanwhile, David, a charismatic local preacher, is romancing Leila, a community activist. Rick, the public defender assigned to Dewain's case, makes an impassioned plea in court for releasing Dewain. An earthquake hits the city, and the crisis causes much soul-searching. David realizes he is truly in love with Leila. Mike acknowledges that he is gay; Tiffany turns her attention toward Rick, who was dazzled by her at the trial. Consuelo tries to convince Dewain to run away with her to El Salvador, but he decides to stay.
Dewain is a young black man. Today he's feeling especially fine beacuse he's out of jail and on his way to see his girlfriend Consuelo, the mother of his little baby girl. Dewain's brushes with the law have been pretty minor stuff, and after this most recent lockup he's determined to clean up his act and get his life back on the right track.
Played by Leon Lopez.
David is in his late twenties, the minister of the neighborhood African American Baptist church. Always smiling, smooth-talking, confident, handsome, he doesn't hesitate to enjoy the favors of the more attractive young women in his congregation, no matter what form those favors may take. But try as he can, he can't seem to make those charms work on...
Played by Jason Denton.
Leila is a black graduate student, now employed in a local Planned Parenthood clinic, where she's working, somethimes in near desperation, to counsel young kids of all ethnic backgrounds about birth control. Among her clients is Consuelo.
Played by Cynthia Erivo
Consuelo, an undocumented immigrant mother from El Salvador, where the father of her four year-old boy was murdered by the death squads. Now she ekes out a hand-to-mouth existence in Los Angeles, an ‘illegal alien' whose only bright spot in life is her love for Dewain, the father of her newborn second child.
Played by Anna Mateo.
Mike is a white rookie cop in the Los Angeles Police Department. He hasn't yet developed the cynicism and abrupt bearing that will be expected of him by his cop collegues. In fact he's something of an activist, viewing his job as a way of helping to turn the neighborhood around and getting the kids on his beat out of gangs and off drugs. He's even worked with Dewain to develop a boys' neighborhood basketball league. But his inner conflicts, both social and sexual, are making his life an unbearable mass of contradictions, not the least of which is his relationship with Tiffany.
Played by Stewart Charlesworth.
Tiffany, a prim, pert, airbrushed anchorwoman for a local TV station. With her matching purse, shoes and dressed-for-success business suit she's the model of televised perfection. A consummate professional, Tiffany's career is on course for even bigger things. The best part of her job, though, are those hours when she can ride around with Mike in his police car, watching him patrol the neighborhood and do occasional busts on its inhabitants, all of which she captures on camera for her weekly ‘crime-as-entertainment' show.
Played by Natasha J Barnes.
Rick was born in LA of parents who were Vietnamese ‘boat people'. He's just finished law school and is working as a public defender. Like Mike, he too hasn't lost his sense of idealism and still believes in the ability of the law to change things for the better. He's spent his last dollar on a snazzy Brooks Brothers suit (that he can ill afford) in order to look good in court. Rick is about to receive a lesson in how the legal system really works and an even more important lesson on how love does and doesn't work.
Played by Colin Ryan.
John Adams
John Adams, one of America's most admired and respected composers, is a musician of enormous range and technical command.
His groundbreaking compositions include City Noir, Chamber Symphony, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and the Graweymeyer-winning Violin Concerto, as well as the stage works Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, A Flowering Tree, and Doctor Atomic. On the Transmigration of Souls, a tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and won three GRAMMYs, including Best Classical Contemporary Composition.
Adams is an active conductor: as a guest in the U.S. and Europe he has conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra, among others.
Adams has also received critical acclaim for his creative programming at the most important music venues in the world. As the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall from 2003-07, Adams conducted the first public concert in Carnegie's Zankel Hall and founded the annual "In Your Ear" festival. In 2006, he curated the hugely popular "Minimalist Jukebox" for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Adams has also served as Music Director of the Cabrillo Festival and Creative Chair of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and is currently Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The official John Adams website is www.earbox.com. The music of John Adams is published by Boosey & Hawkes and Associated Music Publishers.
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
June Jordan
Born in 1936, Jordan was the child of West Indian immigrant parents. In her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, she described a childhood full of verbal and physical violence. In her teens she left home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn to attend the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, where she began writing poetry. In 1953, Jordan enrolled at Barnard College. Two years later, she married a white student despite little public tolerance for interracial marriages. They divorced in 1965 after having one child. In 1967, she began her teaching career at the City College of New York, the first of a series of positions, including jobs at Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College, that led eventually to her appointment as a tenured professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She left that campus in 1989 for a post at the University of California at Berkeley and from 1998-2002, she was Professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, where she founded Poetry for the People.
Called the most published African American writer in history, Jordan was the author of more than twenty-five major works. Her books of poetry include the collections Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991–1997 (1997), Haruko/Love Poems (1994), Naming Our Destiny (1989), Living Room: New Poems 1980-1984 (1985), and Things That I Do in the Dark (1981) and Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon, 2005). Her essay collections include Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (1995), Technical Difficulties (1992), and Civil Wars: Selected Essays 1963–1980 (1980). Jordan also wrote the libretto for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995), a music theatre show by John Adams.
Jordan earned numerous honors and awards, including a 1969–1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo residency (1979), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1982) and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists (1984). Jordan also won the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award (1995–1998), the Ground Breakers–Dream Makers Award from The Woman’s Foundation (1994), the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship from the University of California at Berkeley, the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991) and a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement.
Reviews
Evening Standard (4****)
Kerry Michaels and Matthew Xia’s bare-bones staging balances stylised movement and detailed observation, and provides all the requisite energy....
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The Times (4****)
Hypnotic, romantic with a fine crashing atonal psychedelic earthquake in Act II....I loved it....
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The Independent ****
"The cast is exceptional... Cynthia Erivo and Anna Mateo are bursting with richly voiced talent."
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The Arts Desk
"We'll never know how hard music director Clark Rundell must have worked on getting the co-ordination perfect, but perfect it was last night. I only hope Adams, who says that this one-off score in his output contains some of his favourite music, got to see it."
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