Let That Slipper Fly

The new musical at the Pasadena Playhouse, “Sisterella,” shouts and mugs its way relentlessly from curtain to curtain as though worried that a moment’s relaxation will result in the audience’s flipping the remote to another channel. It’s a sign (or sound) of the times that this Michael Jackson-backed rewrite of the Cinderella story--said to be bound for Broadway a year hence--roars and preens like a Jackson music video stretched to two hours. Its creator, composer, lyricist and de facto director, Larry Hart, says this was exactly his intention.

“I wanted to get the MTV generation into the theater,” says Hart, 33, who until recently was best known as a custom songwriter for Engelbert Humperdinck (“Then You Walk Into My Life”) and other Las Vegas-associated nightclub singers. When Hart and choreographer Raymond G. del Barrio started putting “Sisterella” together three years ago, they found that television history, more than Broadway history, provided a common language between them.

“We always talked in TV terms or movie terms,” Hart says about the campy scenario he laid out based on his original idea to follow the thread of “Cinderella” into a story of a rich songwriter’s family torn apart by greed upon his untimely death in early 20th century Manhattan. “I thought, ‘What if this were real life and there was no magic and it wasn’t a fairy tale?’

“At first I described the show to Raymond as ‘Dynasty’ meets ‘In Living Color,’ then as we started to break it down song by song, I think the reference became ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ meets ‘Rhythm Nation.’ It’s MTV, it’s sitcoms, it’s ‘Bewitched,’ it’s ‘I Dream of Jeannie.’ It’s all the stuff that, being the insomniac I am, I stay up and watch on ‘Nick at Nite.’ I wrote this for the millions of people like me who grew up watching great bad TV.”

“Sisterella’s” music, almost 30 songs in all, might be described as Whitney Houston meets Kool & the Gang, a combination of chest-baring sugary soul and disco insistence. “My family motto was and probably always will be ‘Every song’s a closer, and everything’s a big deal,’ ” Hart says. He is credited with the show’s book, which is little more than some transitional dialogue between numbers. This, too, is by design and points to further evidence of “Sisterella’s” nontraditional goals.

“I wanted to keep everybody singing as much as possible because these are singers who act, not actors who sing. One of the things I’ve learned is that when you have singers as the principals in a show--recording artists, studio performers--when they’re singing, they’re relaxed. But when you give them a lot of dialogue, a lot of times they’ll become rigid and uncomfortable, myself included.”

Hart has a leading role in “Sisterella” as an avuncular friend to the ingenue Ella (Della Miles) and shows off his rich, gospel-trained tenor in two duets with her: “I Will Be There for You” and “Stand Strong.” As if this weren’t enough, he also helped direct the show, although he prefers to give credit to Australian David Simmons, who could not be reached for comment, and consultant Sheldon Epps.

“Where we sit in 1996, people are so used to sound bites on TV,” the composer says, “and on MTV there’s a scene change every, what, three or four seconds? So people are moving so quickly that to attract a new audience to theater you have to make it look and sound like something that our generation is going to recognize and appreciate.”

At the same time, it’s possible to say that “Sisterella’s” cartoon characters and head-pounding aural dynamics place it in another category altogether from the musical dramaturgy of “My Fair Lady” and “West Side Story,” not to mention “Hair,” “Dreamgirls” or Randy Newman’s recent rocking update of “Faust” at the La Jolla Playhouse. The steadily increasing amplification of musicals during the last 20 years has now brought us to a stage full of people wearing headset microphones and singing over a prerecorded score created on a synthesizer. Other than a musical director perched in the balcony at the controls of “Sisterella’s” sound machine, there are no musicians in the house.

Some of this, the composer explains, is by design and some of it may change as the show continues to develop.

“No one is a bigger believer in live music than I am,” says Hart, who came of age in a touring family gospel group and later performed in a Van Nuys piano bar for years. “But technically and artistically, what has taken three years to record and process in the studio with compression and all the effects is really difficult to try to do live. So maybe what we can work out [in time for Broadway] is a partial marriage of rhythm tracks that are prerecorded with a live string section and live horns.”

The obtrusive headset microphones, which stretch from temple to mouth across each performer’s face, were added only after smaller lavaliere mikes commonly used on Broadway (as well as in television) interfered with stage monitors in a New York workshop production last fall. Even Hart doesn’t like them (“When I see everybody in those microphones, it’s like you’re at Burger King waiting to order”), but he explains that they are necessary because of the demands of his songs, which average 1 1/2 to two octaves in range. “The people don’t have to strain to sing,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Walt Disney Co., an investor in the show through its Miramax Pictures division, is working on a better microphone that can accomplish the same thing without presenting a hazard for two principals who must kiss at the climax of a song.

“And part of what we’re looking at,” Hart says, “beyond the musicians, is what kind of sound system to create--like a surround system, where you can have the presence of [the music] without blowing people’s hair back. Because obviously a theater audience is different from a concert audience.”

Jackson himself has thus far not put a glove on “Sisterella” other than to wave encouragement from the sidelines and underwrite its $1.5-million development thus far, based on a six-song demo provided by Hart. As of last week, Hart had yet to even meet Jackson.

“Michael wanted to let Larry do his thing,” says Doris Driver, an executive with Jackson’s company, MJJ Music, which is headed by record company veteran Jerry Greenberg, who produced a workshop version of an earlier Hart musical, “Larr!Bear,” in Las Vegas in 1991.

Jackson, it might be remembered, danced down a modern yellow brick road (as the reanimated scarecrow) with Diana Ross in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film version of the Broadway hit “The Wiz.” Whether Jackson will want to get more closely involved as “Sisterella” aims toward New York and possibly the big screen is anyone’s guess, but presumably some story doctoring would be required. As of now, the character best suited to him, that of an African Prince (Jimmie Wilson) who rescues Ella from her odious stepmother (Yvette Cason), doesn’t show up until Act II.

But Jackson’s spirit is in some way already present in “Sisterella” in the familiar “pop-locking” dancing on view in Del Barrio’s busy-to-the-max choreography that rushes the show’s sizable ensemble through one speed-of-sound hubbub after another. (There is also one moonwalk.)

The son of a conductor, Del Barrio, 31, grew up in Las Vegas and has worked extensively as a dancer in television specials as well as onstage with singers Whitney Houston and Barbara Mandrell.

“I spent my childhood in Vegas watching the shows,” Del Barrio says. “I was always influenced by ‘more.’ ”

“Sisterella” is his first full-fledged musical as a choreographer. He and Hart met eight years ago after he saw Hart star in a cabaret revue called “Rocket of Love” at the Roxy in West Hollywood.

“I was dressed as an astronaut and the backup singers were dressed as planets,” Hart recalls.

Del Barrio describes himself as a “freestyle” dancer: “That’s when you put on the music and start moving and stuff comes out. Then the people that you’re working with, you teach them that, and then it’s about getting them to do something that came out of you.

“But there’s every influence in here from everything I’ve seen and done, from [Bob] Fosse to ‘West Side Story’ to Michael.

“Kids today are very second-oriented. There are 60 seconds in every minute, and they’re very much moving that way. When I was feeling the music and coming up with the movement, I had no idea that some of the most intricate little things that were designed just to support--you know a shoulder here, a finger there--would be the things that people are pointing out.”

The choreographer notes approvingly that after the fashion of the midnight cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” some early patrons of “Sisterella” have emerged from the theater mimicking the moves they’ve seen onstage.

“I like to think of the show as interactive,” Del Barrio says. “Ultimately it would be brilliant to have the house, you know, workin’ with you.”

Unlike “Randy Newman’s Faust,” which was released last fall as a CD recorded by an all-star cast completely different from the singing actors heard onstage in La Jolla, an album of “Sisterella” highlights is being issued by Jackson’s MJJ Music using the identical tracks now being played at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Also, Miramax has commissioned Hart to write the music for a stage musical based on the 1990 Italian film “Cinema Paradiso.”

For Hart, the vote of confidence from Jackson and Miramax has rescued him from a period so bleak he was surviving on cups of noodles and had sublet the second bedroom of his North Hollywood apartment. “The 99 Cent Store and I became very good friends,” he says.

This after winning a Grammy Award as a gospel singer and having songs recorded by Humperdinck, Kenny Rogers, the Spinners and others. How is it that with such success, he ended up playing in a piano bar in Van Nuys one night a week for $100?

“Bad management,” he says. “And some bad choices in publishing agreements overseas.”

His first venture into musical theater came when actor James Best, who played the sheriff on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” hired him to write the music for a show of his called “Jukin’ ” that was presented at Burt Reynolds’ theater in Florida. Hart never even saw the show but says, “That was the bug that bit me. . . . Then people approached me to write for them and I started writing people’s nightclub acts.”

Hart says that his revisionist theater technique is not deliberately anti-Broadway and that, in fact, he has hardly seen a Broadway show that he didn’t like.

“I am the biggest fan of traditional musicals in the world, and I would love to write that kind of stuff, but when I write it, it just comes out the way it did in ‘Sisterella.’

“ ‘The Wiz’ is one of my all-time favorites. And maybe it’s not popular to say it, but I think ‘Phantom of the Opera’ is a really cool show--brilliantly written and directed. I love ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and I’ll say that without shame or embarrassment.”

Neither is he bothered in the least to have the music of “Sisterella” described as it has been by some as imitations of the factory-made post-Motown soul stylings of Peabo Bryson and Whitney Houston.

“I love Peabo Bryson and Whitney Houston,” Hart says. “It may not be art, but it hits home for me.”

* “Sisterella,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends April 28. $55. (818) 356-PLAY. A move to another area theater is under consideration.