At Wilton Playshop: A new musical with a ghostly twist

Written by Jeanette Ross
Thursday, 22 October 2009 13:57

Is love stronger than death? That is one of the questions considered in Greenbrier Ghost, a new musical that explores love, death, and murder with the help of an eloquent ghost.

The play will be presented as a staged reading on Friday, Oct. 23. and Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Wilton Playshop, giving local theatergoers the opportunity to see the New England premiere of this promising production. Showtimes are 8 p.m. on Friday and 7 p.m. on Saturday. Following the Saturday performance there will be a question-and-answer session and reception with the composer Clay Zambo and the director Scott Brill. This will be a benefit performance for the Playshop. For ticket information, visit online at wiltonplayshop.org.

“It’s really important for local theaters to do new works like this,” said Zelie Pforzheimer, the Playshop president. “As a performer you are part of a new piece of work. As an audience member, you get to express an opinion,” she said explaining audience members will asked their views on what worked and what didn’t. “I think this play is on a trajectory to be produced in some good theaters,” she added.

Greenbrier Ghost is a true story that took place in West Virginia in 1896. A handsome young blacksmith moves to town and, after a whirlwind courtship, marries a young woman named Zona. Some time after, Zona is found dead. Her mother, Mary Jane, mourns for her and as she prays for an answer to why her daughter died, Zona appears and reveals she was killed by her blacksmith husband. Was it a dream or was it a ghost? Mary Jane insists on an autopsy and the doctor discovers Zona’s crushed windpipe. A trial ensues, at which Mary Jane’s testimony of Zona’s declaration is admitted as evidence.

Greenbrier Ghost was recently named the winner of the Academy for New Musical Theater’s Search for New Musicals. Composer Clay Zambo, who lives in Norwalk and is the music director of Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Wilton, came across the story when he was searching for a suitable piece for a children’s theater in New York. It was 2004, and he was given a one-page summary from a book of Appalachian ghost stories that he was ready to dismiss. “I said there’s no way we can do this with 11-year-olds because it would be too dark, too adult, and too serious for actors who can’t stay out late,” Mr. Zambo recalled. He went ahead with the children’s production but had no intention of doing anything further until he heard the children sing a song — “True Story” — that’s still in the show.

Things started to grow from there. Mr. Zambo continued to write music and lyrics for the play. He met Susan Murray, an actress and stand-up comedian, when they were both at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York City. Ms. Murray joined him in the project as librettist, which is essentially the playwright of the musical. She had already written a show called The Psychic Hour, which was performed at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival.

“I heard the gorgeous music,” she said, and she was hooked on the project. “It’s not strictly dramatic,” she said of Greenbrier Ghost. “There’s comedy in terms of behavior. There are interesting townspeople and there’s also the mystery of was the ghost that appeared to the mother real or a dream. Did the mother’s grief create it? That’s where we get our mystery.”

Ms. Murray is looking forward to the Wilton presentation. “It’s the most amazing thing,” she said. “When you’ve lived with these characters and finally hear them speak out loud, it’s very exciting. We will get so inspired. We’ll go away seeing things we’d never have seen if we’d read it to each other for a million years.”

The staged reading will be just that. There will not be much in the way of  costumes and the actors will have their scripts in hand. There will be some live music. The cast of the production includes equity performers Doug Shapiro and David Anderson, New York actress and Wilton native Kate Kozlowski and such well-known local talent as Kate Canary, Jorie Janeway, Danielle De Crette, Zelie Pforzheimer, Janice and Christopher Dehn, Michael Armstrong Barr, Bob Filipowich, Sharon Anderson, Anna De Masi, Sarah Lee, Natalie Michaels, Betty McCready, Donna Savage, John Wilson and Cami Shore, among others.

“We hand-picked the cast,” Ms. Pforzheimer said. “We reached out to people we knew had the chops to do the music.” Mr. Zambo described the music as folk and spiritual. “Every song should either sound like a folk song or a hymn that happens to be in a hymnal you don’t have,” he said. “None of it should sound like contemporary music or music of another culture.”

Following the folk vein is “Nothing More,” a duet between Zona and her blacksmith suitor. One of the most evocative songs is the plaintive hymn “Let There Be an Answer” sung by Mary Jane, Zona’s mother:  “Lord I’m a simple woman ... but if you can’t put things back as they were, I don’t ask for me Lord but for her. Let there be an answer ... What has become of my baby, Amen.”

From Wilton, Greenbrier Ghost will be performed in concert at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, Calif., early next year. After that, Mr. Zambo hopes to announce a full production next year. Information about the show and samples of the songs and music are online at Mr. Zambo’s Web site, web.mac.com/czambo.