ABOUT CHARLIE

or -- 

How the "King" became a Queen

After the 1999 production of  "Be My Love: The Mario Lanza Musical" I never imagined that I would return so quickly with another original musical production.  To be honest, I also never imagined to work as either Author or Director.  5 years before “Mario Lanza”  I was simply just one of the 5.000 success-hungry Operatic Tenors looking for work in Europe.

 In 1997, I had my first big success in German-speaking Europe, "ELVIS: A Musical Biography".  Until that time, I had basically been an opera singer and starring as Elvis turned my career life on it’s head.  After playing the King, the opera houses in Europe no longer considered me a „serious“ artist.  For them, I was an entertainer.  At the same time, the European Musical producers still see me as a "Pavarotti in Training"

 Stuck in the „No-Man’s Land“ between High Art and Entertainment,  no one really knew what to do with me.  However, necessity is the mother of invention.  My career situation happily forced me to develop my own projects.  It was a decision I have never regretted.  Given my operatic background, my first two musicals “Be My Love: The Mario Lanza Story“ and „The Chamäelon Concert“ (both of which were based on classical music) were the most natural things in the world for me to do.  “Charlie” however, had quite a strange, and rather difficult birth.

 At the end of November 2000, after having toured Japan as Orpheus in "Orpheus in the Underworld" one of the dancers in the company, asked to introduce me to her husband.  Her Husband, the composer Béla Fischer, presented some of his compositions to me and asked me about recording a few of his songs on my next CD.  Amoung the songs was a melody that simply would not leave my mind.  The song was called "Girls and Boys".    Instantly, I said "Béla, I want to sing that song." However, that wasn’t as simple as it now sounds.  

 An original German muscial called "Charlie" had been written by the marvellously-talented Author, Rolf Rettberg.  "Charlie" was to have been played by the German Travesty Star George “Mary” Preuss at the Vienna Festwochen.  Luckily for me, that production never happened.

 Rolf’s original version of "Charlie" concentrated on the life of a homosexual born in the DDR who longed to break through all the barriers in his life, physically and psychologically speaking.  (The Berlin Wall played a large role in the setting of the original musical, both onstage and metaphorically).   Rettberg's "Charlie" was a study of modern German society in general, and of the East German mentality  in specific.   The theme of Rolf's script was the search for an individual existence in freedom and with integrity.  This is a subject that has occupied me personally and professionally quite a bit over the past few years.  It was that theme, that inspired me to arrange a meeting with Rolf Rettberg.

 Rolf and I met.  I explained to him that as an American, I felt I could never convincingly play his version of "Charlie".   Having never experienced life under a communist regime, I felt ill-equipped to convey the longings for "western" freedom that were the basis of Charlie's escape from his family home in Bitterfeld to Berlin.  I told Rolf that though I could not use his script, I thought the songs and his lyrics were brilliant.  We went through the script and I presented him a number of my own ideas.  It was clear that I was looking to take the music from "Charlie" and place it in a story very different than he had envisioned. 

 To his credit, he very generously and selflessly allowed me to write a new, completely different script for Charlie that used a great deal of his original song lyrics.   Rolf even translated my English Script into German for the 2001 World Premiere Production in Vienna.   The version of  "Charlie" that I wrote is a combination of events directly out of my personal life and observations that I have gathered through my 37-year long stage experience. 

 The integrity of a human existence is a subject due endless exploration.  Charlie's demand to be able to create his own private life -- free of society's interference or expectations --  has never been a more pertinant theatrical subject matter than it is today. Homosexual Marriage and Gay Rights are a major social issue in the United States right now.  Stories of Child Abuse in both religious and educational institutions are filling the headlines on a weekly basis.  In the intervening 3 years since I first performed "Charlie" in Vienna, the subjects addressed in  this Musical have become more pertinant than ever before.