The road to Broadway now passes through Palmyra via musician, songwriter, and composer Dan Weschler.
Together with his PigPenTheatre Company, Weschler co-wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical “Water For Elephants” (based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel), which is up for seven Tony Awards this year, including Best Musical. The awards air Sunday.
The show, which opened March 21 at the Imperial Theatre, has been called “the best new musical on Broadway” (Zachary Stewart, Theatremania). Charles Isherwood of the Wall Street Journal called its songs “flavorful and well-wrought,” while the New York TImes’ chief theatre critic said it was “gorgeously imaginative” and a “stunning, emotional production.”
“Water for Elephants” is PigPenTheatre Company’s second musical, following 2019’s “The Tale of Despereaux,” which premiered at The Old Globe and later transferred to Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
PigPen has also done two albums (“Bremen” and “Whole Sun”) and an EP (“The Way I’m Running”) and appeared in the 2015 Jonathan Demme film “Ricki and the Flash.”
Weschler, 35, went to Palmyra Area High School and the Capital Area School for the Arts; later, he majored in acting in the school of drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
PigPen started in 2007 when its members – Weschler, Alex Falberg, Arya Shahi, Ben Ferguson, Curtis Gillen, Matt Nuernberger, and Ryan Melia – were freshmen. Weschler plays accordion and has been writing songs “since at least high school.”
“I’ve always loved the sound of the accordion, which can be a much more versatile instrument than many people give it credit for,” Weschler said. “(And songwriting) became much more of a practice for me once I’d started writing with PigPen.”
He said in an initial email prior to a phone interview that PigPen had no “specific goal initially beyond giving ourselves a creative outlet for the skills we were honing in our classes.”
He said the CMU drama school has an annual festival during which they allow students to produce their own work. That’s how the seven came together.
“Once we were in a room together, we discovered our common interests and our aesthetic grew from there,” he said.
Their first show, “The Hunter and the Bear” – “a ghost story set in the Pacific Northwest of a bygone era” – was a huge hit at the festival, he said.
“It included all of the elements that have existed in our shows ever since – shadow puppetry, folk music, and ensemble movement and storytelling,” he said.
“As a company, we’ve always followed our collective passions and opportunities in equal measure, and it’s led us to some interesting places!” he added.
Like to Broadway.
The show
“Water For Elephants” tells the story of Jacob Jankowski, who as a youth in 1931 decided to join the Benzini Brothers Circus after his parents were killed in a car accident. The elephant of the title is Rosie, whom Jacob and his love interest, Marlena, try to train.
The story, which also became a 2011 film, is told in flashbacks; it uses circus performers and complex puppetry to adapt the tale to the stage.
Noted writer Rick Elice wrote the book for the musical. Back in 2013, he saw PigPen’s first official show, “The Old Man and the Old Moon,” which was running at the same time as his own show, “Peter and the Starcatcher.”
“We all got together and started to talk – we had a lot in common artistically,” Weschler said.
A few years later, around 2015, Elice agreed to do “Water For Elephants” as a musical and called upon PigPen to do the songwriting.
“That’s one of the things we definitely learned about Broadway is that it takes a very long time,” Weschler said. “We worked in that way, a couple workshops a year, for three years.”
Weschler and some of the other PigPen members were familiar with Gruen’s original novel.
“I had read it when it first came out and I was a big fan,” he said. “I remember really being drawn in by how rich the detail and the setting is laid out. I loved the story, but what I really liked was the world.
“I was the one who convinced everyone that this is a really good fit for us. It takes place during this really exciting time in music and the emerging of music in the United States. There were all these different genres that we could play with. It’s also a memory story, so that would give us (even more) freedom,” he added.
They are all huge fans of fantasy and folklore.
“Folktales and fairytales are this very communal tradition,” he said. “It’s a form of storytelling that until the last couple of centuries has existed purely as an oral art form – there were no authors, there were just stories that were shared between storytellers.”
“Beyond that, we’re all just big nerds who love dragons and magic and sci-fi – we’re all just genre people,” he added.
Weschler said the story has a mythic quality to it.
“It follows a kind of hero’s journey, but it’s very grounded in reality and a very real set of circumstances,” he said. “But the memory aspect lets you be a little bit more playful about the storytelling.”
Writing songs to accompany specific events in the story – choosing which parts of the tale were appropriate for a song – was “a major part of the process,” Weschler said.
“We spent maybe the first two years just deciding what the organizing principles for our adaptation were going to be,” he said. “We all had to come to terms with what’s really important in our version of the story. “
“Part of that was what they call sound plotting, where you go through the script and (say) well, I can see this scene, it sings, as they say, whether that be because it’s an important emotional theme for a character or there’s a musical montage you can envision happening on stage,” he added.
Weschler said his favorite song from the musical is the haunting midtempo ballad “Easy,” sung by the female lead, Marlena, in Act 1 to her injured circus horse, Silver Star.
“It’s been a favorite since very early; it was one of the first songs we wrote (with Elice)”, Weschler said. “It started off as an idea Rick had about a song that was just a woman’s voice accompanied by drums, nothing else.”
“We had already been listening to some Yma Sumac records and thinking about this character who has a strong connection to animals. So we wrote this song where it was the first time we as an audience meet her. It became this duet where she’s singing this soothing music and the drum set is kicking and bucking. The two of them combined are creating this real feeling interpretation of this non-human character,” he added.
The big night
Weschler and the rest of the company have been caught up in a whirlwind of Tony parties and rehearsals this week. He said he and the other members were tuned in to the early-morning announcement of the nominations back in April.
Tony Nominations
- Best Book of a Musical
- Best Scenic Design of a Musical
- Best Costume Design of a Musical
- Best Lighting Design of a Musical
- Best Direction of a Musical
- Best Choreography
- Best Musical
“We were all in our various apartments in Brooklyn watching our computer screens and TVs,” he said. “Afterwards, we all met up at a coffee shop to talk and celebrate. We didn’t get together for a viewing, because it was too early in the morning – it was 9 a.m., that’s too early for actors!”
He’s, of course, thrilled by the honor.
“I think the show’s being recognized for everything that we’ve really set out to do,” he said. “As a company, we aim to take all of these individual talents and tie them together in a way that makes it seem seamless and I think that’s what the show’s achieved.
“There’s never a sense that any of the spectacle is undercutting the storytelling – it’s always the music and the visuals and the performances are all there to serve the story. I think some of the nominations for all these different disciplines definitely felt like validation in a sense,” he added.
Weschler said he’s looking forward to the ceremony itself for several reasons.
“I’ve only had the chance to see one other musical this season, so I’m really excited to see all of the other musical performances,” he said. “I’ll be excited just to see the rest of the ‘Water For Elephants’ team again. There’s not been a lot of opportunities for us all to hang out.”
And of course, each nominated musical has its moment to shine on stage during the broadcast, so he’s excited to see what he called the “ambitious” number “Water For Elephants” will be presenting.
“It’s a big complicated show with all this incredible circus work – they’ve set the bar pretty high as to what they’re going to be transferring to the Tonys,” he said.
“The first couple of months of watching these circus performers do their stuff really frayed my nerves. I wasn’t quite accustomed to the level of their expertise. I’m not worried about them, but I will be worried at the Tonys!,” he said with a laugh.
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