Toward a more magnificent ‘Seven’

Regional theaters can often seem like feeder schools to the big New York houses, funneling their best and most promising shows eastward in pursuit of awards and box office glory.

Strange then is the new play or musical that searches for its destiny by traveling westward.

Will Power’s “The Seven,” a Greek-tragedy-meets-hip-hop musical, opened in 2006 at the prestigious New York Theatre Workshop, where it ran for nearly two months. Now the show is making its West Coast debut at La Jolla Playhouse in what the creators intend to be its definitive version, having revised the book (entire scenes rewritten, new scenes added) and updated the music, including new songs.

New York was the out-of-town tryout for “The Seven.” Southern California has become the destination.

“This is really ‘The Seven’ 2.0,” says Christopher Ashley, artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse. “It’s not the same play people saw in New York.”

Loosely based on Aeschylus’ tragedy “Seven Against Thebes,” the musical tells the story of Oedipus’ two feuding sons -- Eteocles (Benton Greene), who rules as the king of Thebes, and Polynices (Jamyl Dobson), who assembles a band of seven warriors to take down his despotic brother. The show updates Aeschylus using hip-hop music, street slang and quintessentially urban phenomena like poetry slams. The production makes heavy use of video projections to conjure an era that feels contemporary but also timeless.

“It went really well in New York, but we ran out of time and money,” says Power, 37, who wrote the book and lyrics and composed some of the music. In conversations in La Jolla and Los Angeles, he recounts the show’s journey in tones that are at once anxiously uncertain and cautiously optimistic.

“We didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do. So coming here has been great,” he says. “We have four more weeks to rehearse the show.”

Reviews of “The Seven” generally praised the show’s energy and verbal alacrity but faulted some of its execution. Particularly critical was the New York Times, which dismissed the show’s fusing of hip-hop with the classics as a gimmick that “wears thin,” especially in the second act when the actors’ high spirits clash with the tragic grandeur of the original play.

Des McAnuff, then-artistic director at La Jolla, saw “The Seven” in New York and invited Power to bring it to the West Coast. As part of the deal, Power was able to reassemble his hot-shot creative team, including Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones and Obie-winning director Jo Bonney.

The most significant change in the show occurs at the end, when Eteocles and Polynices finally confront each other after spending nearly a year apart. They still die -- this is a Greek tragedy after all, Phat Farm apparel notwithstanding -- but the manner in which they do so has been radically altered.

In the New York staging, the brothers immediately launch into a complex dance-combat number choreographed by Jones. But Power felt there was something missing. “It was too quick, they just saw each other and started fighting,” he recalls. “And then they were dead. There should be more there.”

In the revised finale, Power added a sequence that’s designed to convey a sense of recognition, physical hostility and emotional ambiguity all at once. “I have this really ritualistic chant, kind of like the Wu-Tang Clan,” he says. When the brothers meet, they begin to exhale rhythmically using heavy, audible breaths, getting louder and faster as they circle each other. The breathing gradually escalates to a kind of chanting that segues into the full-on fight sequence.

“I’ve been working on it the last couple of months and I think we’ve finally got the right vibe,” says Power.

The creators also wanted to overhaul the music, which was written more than two years ago -- an eternity in the fast-changing world of hip-hop. They brought back the show’s original music producer, Justin Ellington, who works frequently as a composer for Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

“Sonically the music needs to play like an album,” says Ellington in a phone interview. “Some of the songs aren’t at that place yet.”

For most of the numbers, Ellington will keep the original score and lyrics but revise the instrumentation and mixing to give it a 2008 sound. He says today’s hip-hop listeners are used to hearing simpler sounds that are less live-influenced and contain less sampling than in the past.

“Music changes every three months,” he explains. “For this show to translate, the music has to change.”

The emphasis on keeping everything new and fresh comes from Bonney, who has taken her original staging back to square one and rebuilt it piece by piece. “The joy of Greek storytelling was that it was so contemporary,” she says. “These plays were written for competition, all honoring the gods. I think Will is speaking in the same contemporary terms and relating them to what he sees as his community.”

Diversifying the audience

One of the biggest unknowns in bringing “The Seven” to La Jolla is whether this urban-rooted musical will find an audience in a distinctly non-urban setting. The shores of San Diego County are a far cry from downtown Manhattan.

“It’s going to be an older audience,” Power says. “There are some who might really dig it -- those ‘granola bohemian cats,’ I like to call them. But that’s enough for only one or two nights a week. When you start doing eight shows a week, that diverse audience thins out.”

During the early part of the New York run, most of the audience consisted of traditional theatergoers -- middle-aged to elderly white professionals. But as word got out, audiences became increasingly diverse, adding to the amount of interaction between viewers and the stage.

“I remember this one young guy in the audience was talking back to the stage and the old lady next to him was telling him to be quiet,” Power recalls. “It was great. I like the mixing of different age groups like that.”

The dialogue between generations -- whether polite or rancorous -- is a running theme in Power’s work as well as his life. Born William Wylie, he adopted his current stage name partly because “my last name belonged to my father’s stepfather, so it doesn’t mean anything. ‘The Seven’ deals with that -- what are you born with, and what can you change?”

In “The Seven,” Oedipus (Edwin Lee Gibson) is a ‘70s-style, James Brown-esque musician who bequeaths “the curse” to his sons. “It’s the belief that as a black man, you are destined to fail,” Power says. “You ain’t [nothing]. Your daddy ain’t [nothing].” The sons are convinced they can break the curse, but fate in Greek tragedies is not an easy master to elude.

It’s a theme Power explored in his one-man rap music show “Flow,” which was part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival in 2004. The writer-performer spent the early part of his career in Bay Area hip-hop nightclubs and poetry cafes, and he still considers himself something of an interloper in the theater world. “This is a big issue for myself -- a lot of our generation don’t go to the theater,” he says. “I’m a theater artist now and I don’t even go that much. How can I make it more accessible?”

By conjoining Greek tragedy and hip-hop in “The Seven,” Power hopes to bring together two vastly different kinds of audiences, but he also realizes it may end up alienating both camps in the end.

“It’s a tricky balance,” he says. “My efforts have always been to get younger people into the theater. But I’ve discovered that the more I learn about this profession, the less I know.”

Bringing the show to Southern California adds one more challenge to his pile. “Here, you’re competing with the beach,” he says. “It’s hard to compete with that! At the end of the day, I’ll be happy if anyone comes to the theater.”

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david.ng@latimes.com

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‘The Seven’

Where: La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 16

Price: $28 to $60

Contact: (858) 550-1010