Polyphone 2018 teaches students how to create

Most theater schools mount a big, well-known musical production in the spring, but for the fourth year, the University of the Arts blazes its own trail with Polyphone Festival, coming to two venues March 27 through 31.

As in past years, this “festival of the new and emerging musical,” helmed by artistic director César Alvarez, will feature a mix of professional talent and work from local undergrads you’ll want to watch out for. Four new shows, developed and rehearsed on campus in a collaborative six-week process, get staged concert performances, with a full band and lights but minimal sets and costumes.

Revealing a hidden process

“What if we created a whole different kind of step for musicals to be born through, that is not a reading and it’s not a fully staged boondoggle production?” Alvarez said when I interviewed him about the inaugural fest in 2015. Over the last few years, the festival has retained its flexible, cutting-edge spirit, as students participate in the creative process as a whole and let the works evolve right up to showtime.

“How is this process right now going to turn into your life? The idea of a creative education is one of the most valuable things in the world right now, because the last thing that technology’s going to outsource is the creative act,” Alvarez said of the first Polyphone.

According to UArts, musicals developed at Polyphone have gone on to 14 full productions, including two off-Broadway premieres. (One of the debut fest’s pieces, The Elementary Spacetime Show, went on to a slot in the 2016 curated Philly Fringe; here’s my review of that production.)

“The way to educate an artist is to get them in the room with other really great artists,” Alvarez says in a statement on this year’s event. “In order to teach students how to create, you have to let them make new work… We are showing young artists a process that is so often hidden from view.”

This year’s line-up

This year’s shows are Ancient Future (at the Caplan Studio Theater March 27, 29, and 31), Retrograde (at the Caplan Studio Theater March 28, 30, and 31), White Girl in Danger (at the Arts Bank March 27, 29, and 31), and Cowboy Bob (at the Arts Bank Theater March 28, 30, and 31).

Ancient Future, written by Storm Thomas, explores arts and activism over time for “a kaleidoscopic conjuring of remembrance” with music that awakens memories of places and people. It’s an homage to “the radical participatory communitarian and puppet-filled aesthetic of the Brooklyn-based theater collective To Rena, Love Us.”

Retrograde, with book, lyrics, and music from UArts seniors Sav Souza and Sarah Flaim, follows a young person with a devastating brain injury who has to ask the question everyone eventually faces: “Who am I?”

White Girl in Danger, written by Michael R. Jackson, riffs on '90s TV movies as it follows Keesha, “an ordinary black girl” proving she can hold a story just as well as any Lifetime Original Movie heroine, battling drugs, alcohol, abuse, and then a serial killer who begins picking off the local white girls.

Cowboy Bob, from playwright Molly Beach Murphy, with music and lyrics by Jeanna Phillips, follows Peggy Jo Tallas, “the scourge of Texas strip-mall banks, a tragic insurgent against the patriarchy, a bombshell outlaw exacting revenge on her banker ex-boyfriend” (it’s developed and directed by Annie Tippe). The show moves between 1990s Dallas and Hollywood today.

The University of the Arts presents 2018’s Polyphone Festival at the Caplan Studio Theater and the Arts Bank Theater March 27 through 31. Tickets (free for the UArts community and $15 for the public) are available online.