Working class heroes returned

Publish date: 2024-08-08

'Heights' composer helps Schwartz musical

“Working” is getting reworked.

The 1970s tuner about the daily grind is getting a high-profile update in a new incarnation, with original creator Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) overseeing a streamlined, updated version that includes two new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, already a hot property as the tunesmith and star of “In the Heights.”

Bowing May 16 at the Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, Fla., the latest revision of “Working” looks poised to drive the title to new popularity — if it works.

The show is a regular presence on the regional circuit, and many legiters have a deep affection for it. But the musical originally didn’t work on Broadway.

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Based on the 1974 Studs Terkel book of interviews with working stiffs, the show began life at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Schwartz, with “Godspell” and “Pippin” already on his CV, adapted the book and enlisted other songwriters — including James Taylor, Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead — to contribute tunes and lyrics in addition to his own.

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In spring 1978, the musical — a plotless but thematically linked collection of monologues and songs in the voices of everyday workers — went from the Goodman to the Rialto. Starring Patti LuPone and Joe Mantegna, the Schwartz-helmed production lasted just a month.

“When it opened on Broadway, it really was not quite ready,” Schwartz says. “It was too long, and there were certain structural problems. It wasn’t in the state to be a full-out hit — and it wasn’t.”

Soon after that engagement, the creative team continued to hone the piece until it, in Schwartz’s words, “got finished,” going on to be embraced by regionals as well as stock and amateur companies.

Since then, “Working” has undergone a series of revisions, yielding a 90-minute adaptation for a 1982 PBS telecast and an updated version in the late 1990s that played at theaters including the Signature in D.C. and the Long Wharf in New Haven, Conn.

For the ’90s version, the creatives did rounds of interviews with modern-day workers and made updates to reflect new details of working life. “At that point, we weren’t trying to fix something that didn’t work,” Schwartz says. “But I felt it would be good to get more contemporary to reflect more contemporary realities.”

That’s also the main impetus behind this latest version, which grew out of discussions between Schwartz and helmer Gordon Greenberg.

Greenberg, who worked with Schwartz on his tuner “The Baker’s Wife,” envisioned the retooled “Working” at small Manhattan venue Ars Nova — and so imagined a stripped-down production with just six actors. (The Broadway production had a cast of 17.)

“From that sprang the notion that you start to really focus on the actors’ craft itself, because the actors are actually working in front of you,” says Greenberg. “The set is basically all their dressing rooms.”

For the latest revision, the creatives did another batch of interviews to bring in contempo details. For instance, a female telephone operator — an occupation nearly obsolete 30 years after the show preemed — has been switched to a tech support man in India. New characters taken from the book include a flight attendant and a publicist.

Other songs and segments have been cut, with the entire show now running an intermissionless 90 minutes.

Work on “Working” began in earnest about a year ago. “We started talking about a composer who would add another flavor, something contemporary and something Latino,” Greenberg says. With that in mind, Schwartz asked Miranda to participate.

The composer-lyricist contributes two new tunes, a song about a man who works at McDonald’s (based on his own first job at an Upper West Side Mickey D’s) and another about immigrant senior-care workers.

“It’s a job no one else wants to do,” Miranda says. “Those are basically the jobs immigrants do in America. That’s how we start.”

This latest version of “Working” looks likely to turn heads in New York not just because of Schwartz and Miranda but also because of Asolo, which last fall attracted attention by launching the tuner version of “A Tale of Two Cities” that will land on Broadway late this summer.

Asolo a.d. Michael Donald Edwards snagged the project after he saw Greenberg’s production of “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” and approached the director about working together.

“It feels like a cultural moment for it, as we’re wrestling with terrible economic developments,” Edwards says.

He touts Sarasota as a perfect tryout town, with its surplus of older, wealthy residents matching the prime theatergoing demo. With a total operating budget of $7.2 million and around 6,000 subscribers, Asolo is producing “Working” without commercial enhancement — although producers will be checking it out once it’s up and running. The tuner plays through June 8.

Still, when the creatives consider a future life for this “Working,” they aren’t necessarily thinking Broadway. A Chicago run is a possibility, and with six actors and a relatively uncomplicated set, the musical could potentially land in Gotham somewhere off the Main Stem.

“I think this version has a chance at an Off Broadway run,” Edwards says. “There’s room for this.”

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