I was looking for a synagogue to do an apprenticeship with," she says. Jennifer Kuvin was an attorney studying to be a cantor when she was cast as Ginnie. Tommaney and Adam-Ray weren't looking for a liturgical singer they already had one. Perhaps that's where the music comes in.Īdam-Ray describes the score as a melange of Top 40 radio, with "some romantic ballads, some jazz tunes, some standard musical-type tunes." Oh, and there's also a disco version of "Ave Maria." It's possible that setting the Catholic hymn to a dance beat might have occurred to more than one composer, but it's safe to say that Snake! will be the first show in which the song is performed by a Jewish cantor. "The trick is for the sky person to accept the earth person's nurturing." Another trick, it would seem, would be relating a philosophical construct to the story of Ginnie. "The sky people are the achievers and the doers, and the earth people are the nurturers and sources of wisdom," he explains. While Rosenfels labels the types "masculine and feminine," Tommaney calls them earth people and sky people. Our star is not plagued by substance abuse." Tommaney notes that Snake! was inspired by the writings of New York psychiatrist and author Peter Rosenfels, who says there are two kinds of people. What you can do, according to Tommaney, is "a play about recovery in redemption." Here Adam-Ray jumps in: "There are no twelve-step programs. It just means we can't do Agnes de Mille choreography." "Intimate dramas are hard to stage on a large stage. "To me a small stage is an asset," Tommaney asserts. Neither Adam-Ray nor Tommaney is daunted by the notion of staging a musical in a space that is 13.5 feet at its widest and 20 feet deep. Adam-Ray got the part and also assumed the duties of composer/musical director, eventually bringing in colleague Ron Bruni to help score the show. "He played me one of his CDs," says Tommaney, who then realized he'd struck gold. The Oregon-born Miami transplant, who grew up performing in a family gospel group on Christian radio and television, auditioned for the role of Steve, husband of the beleaguered entertainer. I had a third composer who worked on Snake! - then, two years later, nothing," he adds. "I had another composer who had the bad luck to pass away on me. "The first composer I tried wrote an interesting country-western song that was totally inappropriate to the lyrics," he recalls. The tale of how Tommaney tried to find a musical director might inspire a melodrama of its own. The story is about Ginnie, a musical-variety star who has a breakdown onstage and then confronts a tragedy in her past. Unlike his previous endeavors, which tended to be lower-key satires and social commentary, Snake! A Musical with Bite! will be the first full-scale musical - seven actors, nineteen songs - to squeeze itself into the tiny third-floor theater on Espanola Way.īut like many a theater project before it, Snake! almost didn't happen. The prolific South Beach multihypenate - who has written, produced, directed, and acted in "five or six" of his own plays since opening EDGE/Theatre in early 1995 - gives birth to a new project this month. If you were to turn Jim Tommaney upside down, chances are a play would fall out of his head.
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