All That Jaws premiere May 26
All That Jaws will close the Out of Bounds West Improv Festival on May 26 in Los Angeles. I am very excited about this show, which I wrote with my friend Brian Descheneaux.We are both fans of the movie Jaws, which led us to read the book by Peter Benchley. We both have lived on the island of Martha's Vineyard, which is the "Amity" of the film.
Brian and I last worked together on a play called "Domestic Disturbance", which premiered in 2004.
Fans of the movie who haven't read the book would be surprised to find that Amity wasn't originally an island, that Mayor Vaughan had some Old World motivation for keeping the beaches open, that Ellen Brody was a former rich girl with a life of her own, and that Chief Brody and Matt Hooper were not the fast friends the movie made of Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss.
We call it a "meta-musical" because we take apart some of the characters and also compare them to their counterparts in either the book or the movie. We make Hooper a supernatural character, question Quint's grasp of history and Ellen Brody's morals, and pay tribute to everything from "Jesus Christ Superstar" to Phil Ochs.
But the biggest change is in The Shark. The book and film don't give him a real reason for his murderous actions, and both are so entertaining that it takes repeated viewings and readings to start wondering why. We give him a reason. He's a little like Lenny in "Of Mice And Men" - a Lenny who can sing.
We have partially cast what will be a staged reading of the musical on May 26, but we'll be sending out an extended casting call in early May for singers comfortable with rock and for musicians comfortable with not getting paid.
See also: All That Jaws site, Out of Bounds West
Labels: "all that jaws", performance
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by Marty Barrett at Wednesday, April 11, 2007
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