“We kind of have like an internal challenge that, you know, anything we do, the next one has to be more of a challenge to us,” says Alchemy Theatre artistic director Michael Cooper, “and we truly live by that."
Alchemy’s latest challenge is the musical Grand Hotel, which opens May 30 on the ZACH’s Wisenhunt stage. “Grand Hotel the Musical has always held a fascination with me because of how it's constructed and how challenging a piece it is,” Cooper says.
Producer Marnie Near says that internal challenge isn’t necessarily about always trying to do something harder – it’s more about always doing something different. “It's challenges in a different way,” she says. “It's more that Michael's always looking for something that's a [new] challenge because of whatever it might be. So, you know, one year it might be because there's a large cast, [or] the music's complicated. We need a lot of actors that are triple threats – that sing, dance and act. So there's all sorts of different ways to be a challenge, and I think it isn't necessarily building on itself, it's just building in a different way that we've never done before. And we're also performing this in the round. So this is for the first time we've done this.”
For this production, Cooper says he’s going all the way back to Grand Hotel’s roots. “Grand Hotel the Musical has a very interesting history,” he says. “I don't know how many people know that it started as a novel by Vicki Baum in 1929, and it came full circle because the last rendition of it went back to that novel, as I did for most of the inspiration. Soon off the success of her novel came a play in the same year of 1929. And then that play did OK. Then in 1932, there was a famous movie, so we can't forget that. So most people do know the movie, but the theatrical history is a little bit more interesting. In 1958, they adapted the play into a musical called At the Grand. And it was hugely unsuccessful, didn't do well at all. After that 1958 [failure] that story sat dormant and Tommy Tune and Maury Yeston then picked it up in the early ‘80s and went back to the original novel and drew all of their inspiration from that to kind of reinvent what that story was and how that story is being told. And that's another reason I was interested in the piece, because one of the Alchemy’s kind of goals when picking musicals to do, we choose things that are seldom done, or we would reinvent them. And then I had to add my own reinvention on top of that, like taking a cast of 30 from the Broadway version and doing it with 17 people in the round.”
Performing in the round on ZACH’s intimate Wisenhunt stage creates another connection to the original novel, Cooper says. “Vicki Baum had a really, really astute sense of following people and eavesdropping on them,” he says. “I mean, that was her whole style in that book. So it does have that whole sense of eavesdropping on people.”
At the Wisenhunt, Cooper says, “we do get a lot of people saying, oh, it's like peering over your neighbor's fence and listening in on their conversation, you know, and that's exactly what we want… with the type of things that we do. And even in a musical that sounds and feels this big, there's still a lot of that intimacy.”
Near agrees, saying “the audience is really gonna feel like they are in that hotel with these people experiencing along with them.”
'Grand Hotel the Musical' runs May 30 - June 15 at ZACH's Wisenhunt stage
