The National Ledger
Dart Has ‘People in the Picture’ Opening, ‘Beaches‘ on the Way
May 1, 2011
“Beaches,” the Broadway musical, is “very close to being finished,” reports Iris Rainer Dart, whose beloved 1985 novel was adapted into the hit 1988 feature starring Bette Midler. She owns the rights to her novel and has been working with composer David Aaron Austin on the stage musical for “about four years. He’s half my age. When I work with him, I feel I’m half my age,” adds the esteemed writer with a laugh.
Dart recently has been focusing her considerable energies on her “The People in the Picture,” which gets its official opening tonight (4/28). The original musical, written by Dart with songs and music by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler, has two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy playing a woman both in her prime and as a grandmother – in her 1930s life as a member of a Yiddish film company in Poland and in her 1970s life as a New York-based bubbe. Theatergoing bloggers have been lavish in their praise of Murphy’s performance and her transitioning back and forth between youth and old age as her saga comes to life.
Dart says she brought “Beaches” musical material along with her from her Monterey, Calif., home to New York, “naively thinking” she would have time to work on it there. Instead, she’s been caught up in a whirl of “People” activities, including a pre-opening night party she and Stoller planned for last night and an opening night party put on by the Roundabout Theatre Company tonight.
Works like “The People in the Picture” are “the reason we have to support” nonprofit theaters, Dart feels. “They’ve reached out and taken a risk. This is not a movie adaptation, not a cartoon character – but actually an original story. (Nonprofit theaters) are the ones that are able to (take) and should be taking those risks. Our experience with Roundabout has been A-plus.”
“People in the Picture” winds its limited run June 19, and Dart is hopeful, of course, that it will do well enough to find its way into a commercial theater. “I’d like to be strong enough to not pay attention to reviews, but I know I’m not,” she admits.
She recalls that Stephen Schwartz was her earliest musical collaborator – when she was a 19-year-old theater student at Carnegie Mellon and the multiple Oscar-winning composer of “Wicked” was merely a promising 16-year-old tunesmith. And “‘Wicked’ is still running five years later after bad reviews. So who knows? We’ll hold a good thought and hope they give us good points for originality and all the things Broadway says that it wants.”
Dart started “The People in the Picture” when her daughter was 10. Now she is 25, and Dart says she told her, “No matter what the outcome, I wouldn’t trade a minute of this experience.”
And once the show is launched, she’ll turn her attention back to the musical version of “Beaches.” She says she stays in touch with Bette Midler, by the way. “In fact, she’s coming to see ‘The People in the Picture’ next week.”
