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“Breaking Through” Premieres at The Playhouse

Published on Monday, November 2, 2015 | 4:56 am
 

“It’s been a long slog,” Cliff Downs admitted Sunday night, a little ruefully. Downs, co-creator of the new stage musical “Breaking Through,” looked around at the large and boisterous opening night crowd, jammed into the courtyard entrance to the Pasadena Playhouse, and smiled.

It has, more precisely, been a five-year-long slog for Downs and Katie Kahanovitz, pop songwriters and friends. The idea was to use their experiences and songs to chart the travails of trying to break into the modern music business.

And so, on stage Sunday evening, a ragamuffin young singer-songwriter named Charlie Jane (Alison Luff) is put through the modern music industry mill. We see her first in an opening shaft of blue light, sitting on a stool center stage with only a guitar and her husky, soaring voice. She’s a naive kid, really, despite the fact that her estranged mother was once a minor pop sensation and she had seen saw what fame did to her.

As it happens, an old friend of her mother is a senior executive at Solo Records. Amanda (Nita Whitaker) decides to pair Charlie with Scorpio (Matt Magnusson), the labels raging young sex symbol, which would seem to be her Big Break. Well, except that music mogul Jed (Robert W. Arbogast) decides her first single will be a song someone else wrote and also, by the way, we’re going to change your name and your hair and everything else about you.

It’s all a crushing blow to Charlie Jane who, in one pop-rock number after another, is “longing for the truth” and hoping “the answer’s in the song.” The lyrics, as well as Kirsten Guenther’s book, tug at the heartstrings and occasionally offer a comic respite, mostly in scenes with Charlie’s passionate lesbian roommate, Teya Patt.

“Breaking Through” was picked up 30 months ago by the Playhouse’s artistic director Sheldon Epps and nurtured through workshops and rewrites. Epps has also directed this world premiere, which features a live bass-heavy six-piece rock band and a lot of dramatic rock concert style lighting.

Present, and thrilled, for Sunday night’s premiere was Nia Sioux (Dance Moms). “I’m a huge performing arts and musical theater fan,” she said. It was Sioux’s first time to the Pasadena Playhouse and she pointed out that it’s a “beautiful venue.”

Other familiar faces included Vanessa Lee Chester (The Lost World: Jurassic Park), French Stewart (3rd Rock from the Sun), and Debra Wilson (Over the Hedge).

According to Wilson, “what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than seeing art and theater.”

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