By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Whenever you wonder if the Fringe losing its experimental zest, along comes a project that embraces the original risk-taker’s proposition of the festival. A show that’s all about having a bright idea rather than a finished theatrical product, exploring a possibility to see if it might work and take hold with an audience, changing it on the fly. 

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This is the story of an award-winning playwright and a startlingly accomplished young composer who’d never met: how Collin Doyle and Matt Graham got together to create a new musical.   

At least by the modest disclaimer of half this new musical-writing team, there is a certain improbability attached to Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina). “I always claim I don’t like musicals. But when I go to them I really enjoy them,” says playwright Doyle. “I have no musical talent whatsoever,” he declares. “I don’t know how you make musicals. And I have no ear.”

But somehow, for reasons he can’t quite explain, the idea came to him of making his 2012 play Let The Light Of Day Through, which premiered at Theatre Network, into a musical.

This is a trickier proposition than it might seem. For one thing, how many two-character musicals are there in the musical theatre repertoire? OK, start with Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, and after that, we all have to give our brains a squeeze. The structure of Doyle’s funny, heartbreaking play is built on “two characters trying to create the world onstage.” They play their younger selves, and everyone else, too, at various times past and present.

Jenny McKillop and Garett Ross in Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina – a new musical, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Rob and Chris are a married couple of two decades standing. They were high school sweethearts, each other’s first love, whose world changed when Chris got pregnant before they even graduated. And now in order to close the door — and keep it closed — on a great tragedy they’ve reinvented themselves. They’ve created for themselves new characters to be, in a playful world of denial, a sort of comedy where they have assignations for sex in trashy motels. Can that door to a painful past and a haunted room stay closed? They’re not the same people any more. Will they stay together? Should they? “Who are we now?” one asks.

When he got the idea of making Let The Light Of Day Through into a musical, Doyle approached Kate Ryan, the artistic director of Plain Jane Theatre and a musical theatre expert, for advice. An exciting prospect, she thought. “It’s such a strong piece rhythmically. So many twists and turns. Dynamically, so heightened: tragedy, passion, all the extremes of life…. I think Collin just wanted it to be elevated musically.”

Ryan asked him if he wanted a sound designer or a score. And when it was the latter, she instantly thought of pairing him with the 20something songwriter/lyricist Graham. “I thought Collin would really admire and understand my friend…. Just like Collin, Matt is an unedited kinda guy — exuberant, kinda joyous, optimistic, highly sensitive, highly aware of the huge downs and ups of life. They both get it; they’re both unafraid to talk about it. Head-smart and heart-smart.”

Ryan found compatibility in their mutual understanding that “what can be so painful one moment can be hilarious the next,” a quality that’s such a part of Doyle’s dialogue in all his plays. She laughs, “Matt and Collin even speak the same way.” Which is to say in loops, as Ryan says, trying to re-create a typical conversation. “I think it’s this (pause), but it might be that…. But I’m thinking we have something here. What do you think it is? I dunno…. Cool. Let me play with it.”

Graham was just finishing an MFA in musical theatre creation at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. But Edmonton audiences had seen his work before then, as a musical director (Ryan’s production of The Drowsy Chaperone for the Citadel Young Company, for example) and as a songwriter. His beautiful song In Fifty Years, a reflection on the uncertainties of the future, was part of Plain Jane’s 2020 COVID revue Scenes From The Sidewalk.

Graham had written musicals before, including the 2018 Marnie Day with his friend Sue Goberdhan (the co-artistic producer of Azimuth Theatre). That musical’s finale number, “we don’t have forever, but let’s have a go,” was part of Scenes From The Sidewalk II.

The three had their first meetings in the winter when Graham was in New York, wrapping up performing on an Off-Broadway musical BARBA: A Brazilian Body Percussion Musical. “We Zoomed in to Matt’s bedroom/ recording studio,” says Ryan. And since it was always late-night, they tried their best to create quietly. “He was renting a tiny room, and his desk was under his elevated bed, the top half of bunk beds. That’s where he worked.”

“We’ve learned how to work together,” says Doyle of his new creative partnership. “And I’ve really loved it. He’s such a positive guy, super-talented! When he sends me the songs he’s working on, it’s like getting Christmas presents…. A lot of the time it’s me staying out of his way.”

“Matt really locked into the structure of the play,” says the playwright. Graham turned the first scene, in which the characters hook up in a motel, into a song, The Plan Is… now called (at the moment) The Pizza Boy Fantasy. Some of the original dialogue became lyrics; sometimes Graham’s lyrics are originals. The song Public Property is spun from a line in the play.

Since Graham is here from New York for the summer, he and Doyle can be a musical-writing team in person. “He lives a five-minute bike ride away from me,” says the latter happily.

Doing the Fringe was Ryan’s idea. And it’s given them a deadline (“I panicked,” says Doyle), and access to an empathetic audience to help them find out what it is they have. “This is us, using the safety of the Fringe. We’re taking a risk, and we don’t know how it’ll turn out,” he says candidly. “For the audience it’s an invitation to come and take this risk with us… This won’t be the final product. But this is the journey….”

They’re adding, changing, editing, all the time, which is bound to be a challenge for Ryan’s cast, Jenny McKillop and Garett Ross. Last week Doyle said “one song we haven’t finished yet; one song we just finished today…. But hey, we finally have a script! With proper numbered pages.”

And, Ryan laughs, “we do have an actual door.” It’s borrowed for the occasion from Teatro Live!’s recent production of Private Lives. And since it’s withstood a barrage of slamming, it’s good and solid. That’s something to rely on.

Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – A New Musical opens Friday at the Fringe, Stage 11. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.