Writing last week about the upcoming Donna Summer musical, I said I’d “slip past the rope line” to check out another disco musical in the works, Stephen Trask’s “This Ain’t No Disco!” at the Atlantic Theater Company.
I regret to say I wasn’t VIP enough to get in. Luckily, a few of the people who did filled me in.
Trask wrote the score to “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and everyone’s been waiting, since 1998, for his next musical.
“This Ain’t No Disco!” is set at Studio 54, and its cast of characters includes Steve Rubell, who with Ian Schrager created the fabled nightclub, and an artist clearly modeled on 54 regular Andy Warhol.
In the workshop staged by Trip Cullman, Michael Esper, who starred in Sting’s “The Last Ship,” captured Rubell’s flamboyance (tinged with sleaziness) to a fare-thee-well, says someone who knew Rubell — so much so, he threatened to upstage everybody else.
But Rubell is a secondary character. The script, by “Jersey Boys” co-writer Rick Elice, centers on a cute couple from Queens who get swept up in the world of Studio 54. The girl becomes a pop celeb in the Warhol-like character’s orbit. The boy inherits the family home in Forest Hills, and is torn between the party life and a more traditional one.
Some people were surprised at the amount of country-style music in the show.
Lindsay Mendez and Gideon Glick played the leads, and my sources say they were excellent. (They’re about to star opposite each other on Broadway in “Significant Other.”)
Trask’s music evokes the disco era, though not consistently. Some people were surprised at the amount of country-style music in the show.
“There’s Donna Summer and then some ‘Hee Haw,’ ” a source says, with some exaggeration.
Several big-shot Broadway producers were in the house, including John Hart (“Once”), Jeffrey Richards (“Fiddler on the Roof”) and Tom Hulce (“Spring Awakening”). No one wore a white polyester leisure suit.
“This Ain’t No Disco!” is “promising,” says a source, but still unfocused.
“I wish there were more characters from Studio in it,” one person says. “I wanted to see Truman Capote, Bianca Jagger, Diana Ross.” Who doesn’t? I hear the show will be in development for at least another year.
In the meantime, keep your eye on “The Band’s Visit,” a new musical that begins previews at the Atlantic in November. Based on the 2007 movie, it’s about a police band from Egypt that, through a mix-up at the border, winds up stranded in a small Israeli settlement in the Negev desert.
The score is by David Yazbek (“The Full Monty”) and there’s quiet Broadway money behind it. It might slip onto the Great White Way in the spring.