![]() ![]() Looking ahead, she says, "I'm composing a musical, Justin Love, with David Elzer, partly based on his experiences in Hollywood as a publicist. Scarlett says there are efforts afoot for a New York production, and she believes that the current flurry of awards recognition will help. Someone supposedly has written a lesbian musical called Lilac Rose, but I think that is just an urban myth." We were working in an essentially new genre. Another great collaborator was David Manning, my arranger and orchestrator. "Many people have remarked that Patricia and I kind of write in the same voice, which I think is true. "When you turn a play into a musical, you have to do some hacking up of the script, and Patricia was very open-minded in allowing me to do what I wanted," says Scarlett. ![]() She says the work flowed easily because the collaboration with Hamilton and Cotter worked so well. Scarlett says she had never seen the original nonmusical play but was able to watch a tape of it. ![]() "It took about a year to get the script and music finished, and then we put up a staged reading, developed it some more, and then obtained a producer. "Patricia and Sue came to see Sneaux, then I had a meeting with them, we really clicked, and they hired me," Scarlett says. Sound designer John Zalewski mentioned to Scarlett that some people were seeking a female composer-lyricist for a project they were working on. Cotter and director Sue Hamilton conceived the idea to create "the first lesbian musical" when Sneaux was running. Scarlett was led to her Break Up break by word of mouth. "This was around the time I started doing musical theatre, and I was into the alternative-rock scene." The Break Up score has the flavor of girl groups of the '80s, such as the Indigo Girls, mixed with a Broadway sound reminiscent of the pop style of such musicals as the Burt Bacharach-Hal David Promises, Promises. "I started my passion for music in the '80s when I was a kid," she says. Scarlett, an Ohio native who moved here in 2002, originally pursued an acting career, attaining a few stage and film credits, but says her field of choice is now songwriting and score writing. This victory is especially sweet for tunesmith Scarlett, who only four years ago wrote her first original score for a musical, the wacky satire Sneaux, which played at the Matrix Theatre, in collaboration with librettist Tim Garrick. Now the Garland Awards joins the parade of accolades with five wins for the charming show (Scarlett's score, Conrad's choreography, Bristow's performance, Heidi Godt's performance, and David Manning's music direction). The new version has shattered boundaries between gay-theatre audiences and general audiences and is becoming an awards favorite, winning for world premiere musical at the 2006 Ovation Awards and earning three 2007 nominations from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle (for Lori Scarlett's score, Patrick Bristow's featured performance, and Gail Conrad's choreography). In Back Stage's review, we called it "a stylishly crafted confection.a four-star crowd pleaser." When the mildly sardonic piece resurfaced in December 2005 as The Break Up Notebook: The Lesbian Musical - with an ebullient veneer of Broadway uplift - it was a gentler but no less entertaining experience. When Patricia Cotter's play The Break Up Notebook premiered locally in 2001, it was a Woody Allen-esque romantic comedy about post-relationship angst in the lesbian social scene, sort of a Sapphic variation on Annie Hall. ![]()
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