Finding Right Shade of ‘Violet’

It was in 1981 that Jeanine Tesori first learned the tale of Violet, a disfigured young woman from North Carolina who journeys to a flamboyant televangelist to be made beautiful.

“I was so attracted by this woman’s point of view; Violet just jumped off the page for me,” Tesori said of the character at the heart of Doris Betts’ short story “The Ugliest Pilgrim.” “I became obsessed with doing something about her.”

It took several years, but the 37-year-old composer’s fixation led to “Violet,” the musical she created with Brian Crawley that won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best musical for 1997. “Violet” gets its California premiere tonight at Laguna Playhouse.

The evolution of “Violet” took the New York City-based Tesori on her own journey, from Broadway, where she was a busy conductor, to a meeting with Betts, then to write at an isolated lighthouse near Montreal. Next she traveled through the South, assimilating music styles that would propel her score. She recalls swaying to the spirit of backwater church revivals and Memphis jazz sessions to find the best way to tell Violet’s story.

“I went to concerts, Pentecostal churches and faith healers,” Tesori said in a recent telephone interview. “I wanted to form the narrative [with] mountain music, gospel, all of it.”

The result was 17 songs that critics have lauded for their creativity and sweep. Tesori said that it wasn’t easy melding the styles or finding the right tone for “Violet” and that her musical background didn’t really prepare her completely for the challenge. Having lived and worked in the New York City area much of her life, the rhythms of the South seemed distant.

“I knew from my experience that I could only visit the music, that it wouldn’t be fully authentic,” she said.

While Tesori had wanted to work on “Violet” beginning in the early 1980s, other projects took up her time. Then after graduating from Columbia University with a music degree--she had earlier been a Barnard College student headed for medical school until she rediscovered her love of music--she embarked on an active career conducting on and off Broadway.

Tesori was the associate conductor for “Tommy” on Broadway in 1994 when she decided that “Violet” had waited long enough. She gave her three-month notice.

“I wanted to reinvent myself in the old American way, by taking a big chance,” she explained. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be one of those people who will be frustrated [because they didn’t take the chance] or I will succeed.’ And, of course, I had needed to do ‘Violet’ for so long.”

She rented a 19th century lighthouse on Lake Champlain, installed a grand piano and began working on a score. Crawley--who wrote the book and lyrics for “Violet”--joined her, and soon, the musical began taking shape.

The southern trips added to the shape, especially a visit with Betts at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where the author was teaching. Betts helped to clarify what Violet was all about, and Tesori brought her own feelings to an understanding of the character.

“We walk around with scars, some seen, others unseen, and that affects our lives,” she said. “Some remain unhealed, others we can heal. From [a women’s perspective] it’s always been fascinating to me to consider the issue of beauty, the expectations of how you should feel and look. Like with my daughter (2-year-old Siena), I wonder if she’ll be satisfied with her face, her size.”

Violet’s quest for a miracle to heal the scar, the result of a car accident, is what sets the musical in motion. What happens on the bus trip is telling.

The year is 1964, and Vietnam is raging and racial tensions are in the air. Violet becomes friends with a couple of soldiers who, it seems, are destined for Vietnam. Monty, who’s white, is surprised that he’s drawn to her. Flick is the first black man Violet has ever become close to.

Flashbacks, woven with Tesori’s songs, reveal more of the three characters and their place in the world. Violet’s father and the preacher enter the narrative as well.

Laguna Playhouse Executive Director Richard Stein said they were drawn to the musical because of its complexity and sophistication, tackling issues, especially racial ones, with style.

“The main characters are both believable and sympathetic,” Stein said. “I love their complexity; these are interesting individuals.”

Some critics have faulted “Violet’s” having an obvious message and too tidy an ending. But Stein believes there is “a valuable parallel between the prejudice the black soldier feels and what Violet feels because of her scar.”

Also appealing is the size of “Violet,” which has been described as a chamber musical because it has fewer characters and less technical demands than many Broadway shows. That fits in with the Laguna Playhouse’s strategy to stage more intimate musicals with fewer costs, Stein said.

“We’ve found over the past five years that if we don’t overreach into the realm of big Broadway-style musicals, we can do better,” he said. “We’ve been concentrating on small to mid-sized [musicals], that seems to be our niche, and it’s helping our reputation.”

Tesori--whose songs also can be heard in “The First Picture Show,” which continues at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles through Saturday--said she purposely kept “Violet” smaller in scale to fit the sensitive story. Besides, she believes, if a musical is good, it doesn’t need a lot of pyrotechnics.

“I think a musical should work with just a piano and a lightbulb,” she said. “If it doesn’t, you obviously have a troubled show.”

BE THERE

“Violet,” Laguna Playhouse at Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. $31-$40. Ends Oct. 10. (949) 497-2787.