1844 ‘DRUNKARD’ REVIVED AT OCC

Can an 1844 American melodrama be reborn as a 1986 musical? Writer Alex Golson and composer Peter Odegard think so. Their musical version of “The Drunkard” will open tonight at 7:30 for a three-weekend run at the Drama Lab Theater at Orange Coast College.

“The original was not that funny,” said Golson. “But our version is a comedy, definitely. We play it fairly straight three-fourths of the time, and a fourth of the time we spoof.”

Golson, a drama professor at the college, said his task was “to find something that was inexpensive but still crowd-pleasing.”

“I had the assignment to do the summer musical, which OCC has been putting on for the past 30 years,” he said. “Usually we do a Rodgers and Hammerstein-type of musical. This is the first original we’ve ever done.”

According to Golson, who also directs the work, “The Drunkard” was “an extremely popular play not only in its time but later. It became real popular again right before Prohibition came and played in Los Angeles for 25 years.”

The plot concerns a “noble but weak hero” who succumbs to the lure of alcohol and “through everyone’s efforts, is saved at the end,” Golson said.

Golson and Odegard spent three months paring down the original 3 1/2-hour script to about two hours, rewriting the plot to bring back characters who were simply dropped after the first act and adding “a lot of jokes,” Golson said.

“We gave it the subtitle ‘Don’t Shoot the Piano Player’ just because it’s a musical,” Golson said. “The original subtitle was ‘The Fallen Saved.’

“The original is an extremely moral play,” he added. “People treated it pretty seriously at the beginning. But there also was controversy: Half the audience thought it was extremely serious; half thought it was a farce. There were fist fights at the original performances.”

The original play was credited to William H. Smith and “a Gentleman.”

“The gentleman was P.T. Barnum,” Golson said. “He was a strict anti-alcohol person.”

Odegard wrote 17 new songs for this production, “plus some traditional melodrama underpinnings.” (Odegard is professor of music at UC Irvine and has composed music for many UCI productions, including “The Love Apple,” “Marat/Sade” and “Le bourgeois gentilhomme” over the last 20 years.)

“Whenever the hero enters, there’s a little fanfare,” Odegard said. “And whenever the villain comes on, there’s a familiar silent movie kind of motif. So in addition to the songs there are little snips and snaps of incidental commentary from the pianist all the way through.”

The music runs through a variety of popular styles, “copying pop music from the early part of the century and progressing up through rock music,” Odegard said.

Odegard found “much opportunity for spoofery in the play itself because of its very stilted language and its--I don’t want to say one-dimensional--but very sharply defined characters.

“Take the mother and the daughter. They are unfortunately lonely women cut off from the economic support of society by the death of the father. So they’re in dire straits--and yet they are so sweet, you can’t stand it. And there’s a certain militancy in their resolve to endure.

“So I’ve written their duet, ‘We Will Endure,’ to reflect that by including little musical jokes. For instance, a tango just wants to creep in, even though they’re singing about how hard it will be to get along.

“Or take the do-gooder who finally saves the hero from the depths of despair and ‘demon drink.’ He is a former alcoholic himself, he tells us, who has become a raving success. But there’s something a tinge hypocritical about the whole thing.”

In addition to composing the music, Odegard will play the role of the villain, Squire Cribbs.

“I didn’t want to be in it at all,” Odegard said. “But Mr. Golson said that he saw nobody at the audition who was as nasty and disgusting as me, and would I do it?

“I thought long and hard about it. I haven’t done anything like this since college. But I love the play. So I said yes.”

“The Drunkard” plays today and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 6:30 p.m., with a matinee Saturday at 2:30 p.m., through Aug. 24. For information, call (714) 432-5527.