The opportunity: Take a 16th-century work of Elizabethan prose and mingle it with popular 20th-century pop rock girl-band songs to create a tuneful tale of love, family and self-discovery. The result: Head Over Heels—a union of disparate genres morphed into that popular art form, the American musical.
How did this mash-up happen? Playwright Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler) had heard from an attorney friend that the song catalogue of the chart-topping female band the Go-Go’s was available in case he wanted to do a jukebox musical— one that uses hit songs from the catalogue of a famous pop artist or group. They often tell the story of the artists (Jersey Boys; Beautiful: the Carole King Musical) or tell an original contemporary story (Mamma Mia!).
Whitty: “And I said, oh no, not me. I work with composers and all of us working from the ground up. And then I reconsidered. What if we didn’t do the expected jukebox musical? I set it in Elizabethan times and used Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, which I fell in love with at the University of Oregon.”
Enter Carmel Dean
The initial idea to enhance Arcadia with music of an entirely unrelated century led Whitty to reach out to Carmel Dean, with whom he had worked on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City at the American Conservatory Theater. She would be the playwright’s bridge to the music as the music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator.
Dean’s career started with a solid classical foundation honed at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in her hometown of Perth. Head Over Heels is Dean’s first project as orchestrator after years of vocal arranging, conducting and piano work. Her New York career has focused primarily on new musicals, acting as musical director, vocal arranger or conductor on such Broadway musicals as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, American Idiot (songs by punk-rock band Green Day), Hands on a Hardbody and If/Then.
The Go-Go’s blazed onto the pop music scene in the 1980s as the first all-women band to compose their own songs and play their own instruments. With some changes in personnel, the band continues to draw crowds. Band members gave Whitty carte blanche to use their music to serve the storytelling; Dean joined Whitty’s vision in shaping the Go-Go’s songs he had strategically placed within his Arcadia script to enhance the characters’ emotional journeys. The group‘s permission gave Dean free rein to adapt and massage the vocal and instrumental arrangements. With her perfect-pitch ability, Dean transcribed the Go-Go’s songs by ear, writing down the notes and chords, guitar and bass lines, and drum grooves she heard while delving deep into the music, pulling it apart in order to put it back together.
Early in rehearsals, Dean spoke to the OSF company at the Head Over Heels show introduction: “The Go-Go’s are obviously an all-girl group. We have a very diverse cast; it is not just girls singing the songs. So we have been playing around with different keys, modulations in and out of songs, adding a million vocal parts for the cast to come in on, turning a solo into a duet, that sort of thing.”
But more than that, she decided to shake up the genre and expand beyond the original ’80s rock songs. “Every subsequent reading we’ve had,” she said, “I’ve pushed the musical boundaries further and further—just a whole lot of different genres that people will relate to and hopefully connect to. The reason for doing that is to help the characters’ journeys make sense—to bring the characters to life and to have each character find their own musical voice and not just sing a Go-Go’s song for the sake of singing a Go-Go’s song.”
The upbeat “Vacation” has been rendered into a plaintive ballad that some audience members don’t recognize until deep into the song. Two songs, “Insincere” and “Unforgiven,” comprise the biggest musical mash-up. Dean blended these thematically and musically similar songs, allowing all six main characters to vent emotions at each other while, as she says, “belting their faces off.”
Collaborating across the globe
In Head Over Heels, the Duke of Arcadia takes his family on a road trip to avoid the prophesies of an oracle. Along the way, he, his wife and their two daughters make sometimes stunning discoveries about who they are and whom they love—all conveyed through song.
The collaboration among the Go-Go’s, Whitty and Dean resulted in one new piece, “The Prophecy,” that the Oracle sings. Starting from a Sidney/Whitty lyric that Dean set to music, Go-Go’s members Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin offered a musical setting and a guitar riff for the prophecies. Each time one comes true, Dean reprises this musical theme.
With Whitty, Dean and the Go-Go’s in various places over the last year, they collaborated largely through email and electronically shared audio files. Dean finally met her musical collaborators when the Go-Go’s except Belinda Carlisle attended the Head Over Heels opening.
The musical vision mostly remained intact throughout workshops and rehearsals, Dean says. While new musicals usually involve cuts and rearrangements, tweaks and changes, there were few remarkable structural changes to the musical life of the production. Two major cuts were a scene-setting preshow performance of songs from the mid-1500s and a long halftime show—a stop at “The Village of Interval”—during which the cast and band would mingle with the audience, entertaining them with even more songs.
During the show, the band is placed in the “inner above,” the small second-story stage of the Allen Elizabethan Theatre. The five-piece rhythm section—two guitars (Jesse Baldwin and James Fletcher), bass (Bruce McKern), keyboard ( Matt Goodrich) and drums (Tom Berich)—is the same configuration the Go-Go’s still use. Three musicians covering violin and viola (Kimberly Fitch), cello (Nancy Martin) and oboe, clarinet, flute and piccolo (Lorin Groshong) round out Dean’s vision of the musical accompaniment.
While the story arc culminates in a gentle rendition of the song “Apology,” the curtain call romp that gets the audience to their feet is “We Got the Beat,” intentionally hitting the right note for the end of the journey that is Head Over Heels.
For more information about Head Over Heels, click here and here.