Adam Monley and Natalie Hill are the comic, star-crossed lovers in the Paper Mill-Coconut Grove Playhouse co production of the new musical, Romeo and Bernadette, starting Jan. 7, 2003, in Miami.
The musical comedy — featuring book and lyrics (to classic Neapolitan tunes) by Mark Saltzman — plays Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse to Feb. 2, 2003 and then moves to Paper Mill: The State Theatre of New Jersey Feb. 19 March 23, 2003.
Joining Monley and Hill in the musical that mixes Shakespeare and Italian-Americans are Andy Karl as Dino, Rosie De Candia as Donna, Charles Pistone (of Broadway's The Most Happy Fella) as Sal, Emily Zacharias as Camille, David Brummel as Don Del Canto, Vince Traini as Lips, Andrew Varela as Tito Titone and John Paul Almon in multiple roles. Mark Waldrop directs.
What's the plot? Here's how librettist-lyricist Saltzman puts it: "It starts with an actual production of Romeo and Juliet, an extremely stodgy, overly-reverent production, and our guy who's watching it has brought a girl on a first date to see it. She's so overcome with tears with Romeo dying that he can't get anywhere with her. So he starts spinning out his own version of it, in which Romeo doesn't actually die from drinking poison, it was just more of the sleeping potion that Juliet took. He wakes up a few hundred years later and he's in modern-day Verona, and sees a girl who looks remarkably like Juliet (she'll be played by the same actress) and Romeo sizes her up and decides Juliet is somehow still alive and follows her back home from Italy to Brooklyn, where it turns out she's the daughter of a Mafia don and he gets involved with the wrong family. But this time it works out! This is spun out by our narrator, who is basically trying to impress his date with his knowledge and his humor."
* Saltzman (Tin Pan Alley Rag) previously told Playbill On-Line the music is comic and romantic and rich. "Being that Romeo and Juliet is an Italian story, I used Italian music — Neapolitan songs, and higher grade songs: Italian art songs I guess they're called. They were pop songs of their day. Even the big opera composers, like Bellini, wrote their pop tunes too. I'm using some of these. Some are kind of familiar and some are pretty obscure. I had to dig into the back of the Bellini book. I wrote lyrics to these tunes. Some of them are pure, throwing-your-heart at-the-moon romantic songs. Some of them are kind of 'gondolier tunes' that are extremely romantic and appropriate for this."
The not-for-profit Coconut Grove and Paper Mill co produced I'm Not Rappaport with Ford's Theater in the 2001-2002 season. The Ben Vereen-Judd Hirsch vehicle moved to Broadway for a brief summer 2002 run.
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Mark Saltzman wrote the CBS television production "Mrs. Santa Claus" starring Angela Lansbury, with songs by Jerry Herman. For the movies, he wrote "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" and screenplays for Disney and Tri-Star. In New York theatre, he was a co-writer of the musical revue, A...My Name Is Alice and, as a musical composer, scored several plays at the Soho Rep. For many years he wrote songs and scripts for "Sesame Street," where he earned seven Emmy Awards. The Tin Pan Alley Rag, a musical play about Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin that received an L.A. Ovation Award nomination for Best Musical, was Saltzman's first full-length work for the stage.
