Broadway musical fans and supporters of LGBT-themed theater welcome a new musical theater concept album. Released last month, Ken Howard's (music/lyrics/libretto) "On The Boulevard" Original Cast Concept Album, is available on Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube, and all music streaming services. "OTB" is a fresh take on George Bernard Shaw's classic 1914 play, "Pygmalion" (which was later adapted into "My Fair Lady"), but with an LGBT twist by having two gay male protagonists in the former Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins parts (now "Eli Dillingham" and "Robert Riggins"). In a re-interpretation that is both progressive and often sentimentally poignant, instead of Shaw's Edwardian London flower girl learning to speak like a lady to gain social prestige with the help of an expert phonetician, an obese gay nerd from the Midwest goes from zero to hero when he is transformed into a hunky actor worthy of Hollywood superhero movies with the help of a celebrity personal fitness trainer and his sidekick acting teacher ("Christine Picard", a twist on the original "Colonel Pickering"). With themes of LGBT self-love, self-respect, and personal realizations, the story is narrated by a fierce black drag queen named "Elphaba." It takes place in West Hollywood, California, the gay haven neighborhood (and its own incorporated city) in greater Los Angeles, and its historic "Boys Town" venue of Santa Monica Boulevard, home to numerous LGBT bars and clubs, "where your night begins." With twenty-nine tracks, the album tells the full story, with the hopes that this tuneful score entices support from a producer or theater company to earn a fully-staged live theater production. Other musicals started out as concept albums, such as "Evita," Chess," and "Jekyll & Hyde," before their successful debut staged productions.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif., July 12, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The new "On the Boulevard" Original Cast Concept Album is the labor of love product of Los Angeles psychotherapist and life/career coach Ken Howard (music, lyrics, libretto). Howard created the album over years of composing, casting, and recording on weekends after a week of providing psychotherapy and coaching as a specialist in working with gay men for over 30 years in a full-time private practice in West Hollywood. Musical theater is in Howard's blood; he is the great-grandson of 1920s Broadway music director J William Howard II ("My Maryland, "Blossom Time"), as well as the great-nephew of actress Esther Howard, prominent in Broadway musicals of the 1920's such as "Sunny" (Kern), "Tell Me More" (Gershwin), and "The New Moon" (Romberg) and later a character actress in countless Hollywood films from early talkies to the 1950s, playing a rotation of playful flirts, glamorous comedic dowagers, and boozy hags. Howard earned a degree in Theater from UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, and later an MSW (Master of Social Work) from the University of Southern California, where he later taught LGBT Social Work and Couples Therapy.
Howard gave up an acting career in the eighties but held a place in his heart for Broadway musicals, performing with the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles in the early nineties at the height of the AIDS crisis, which inspired him to become an expert in HIV mental health and support the quality of life for gay male individuals and couples. He also became one of the few gay nationally Certified Sex Therapists from AASECT, the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. His work with gay male clients struggling with body image issues and gay men's cultural pressures about appearance led to Howard observing how the local currency of West Hollywood was focused on gyms and competitive physiques, and reminding him of Shaw's sardonic social critique in "Pygmalion" about how society bestows prestige, social status, and popularity with rather dubious qualities such as how one speaks or how one looks, currently ubiquitously observed in the proliferation of visual social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
"We all know the platitudes and themes: don't judge a book by its cover, it's what's inside that counts, 'only bad witches are ugly', and so on, but when was the last time you saw a guy with anything other than an idealized masculine physique playing a superhero? The heavier or nerdier guy is always the sidekick in the lesson from Hollywood. That, and Hollywood's frequent hypocrisy of being of, by, and for gay men, yet still pressuring its closeted gay male heartthrob actors to stay hidden or mysterious, all informed the somewhat exaggerated but still timely story of the show," Howard explains. "With all the invalidation that LGBT people go through, both growing up and certainly even currently with civil rights being undermined, and the negative long-term effects of those on self-esteem that I see in my clients, I wanted to tell a story about how gay men really know what love is, for the self and for others. That's the message show. All set to music and narrated by a fierce drag queen, of course."
'On The Boulevard' was originally entitled, 'PygMALEon', referring to its adaptation from Shaw's 'Pygmalion', with the creative spelling emphasizing its male leads. While Howard produced the album, as a non-musician, he had a lot of help from collaborators who provided arrangements, scores, orchestrations, and multi-track accompaniment that sounds like a full orchestra that the actors sang against in the studio. "It was classic Hollywood 'let's put on a show' collaboration, with the miraculous skills of arrangers like Stuart Wood, Silvio Buchmeier, and Michael Van Bodgeom-Smith, all composers in their own right. Howard recruited actors by asking for friends of friends, or recruiting from other local LA theater productions he saw. He found the lead, Michael D'Elia, playing the title character in "Dorian," a musical adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and expanded the network from there, with some recastings over time but always with the stalwart talent of D'Elia, a vocal powerhouse that drives the score like Idina Menzel mastered "Wicked".
"Beyond the project as such, recording the score of an entire new full-length musical, I learned a lot about the labor of love that happens among theater people. The abundance of, first of all, talent in the cast, but also the skill, commitment, perseverance, and boundless energies that each song required of the team, with actors, arrangers, and recording studio engineers all taking the songs on paper and breathing life into them like they've been playing these parts for months, before the show even has its first production. Plus, it was a lot of fun to make something new. In these times of crazy news and stress, musical theater offers an escape into a better world where people sing it out," Howard adds.
Howard's army of collaborators included some of the best of local Los Angeles theater and music professionals, such as Kristopher Gee, Stuart Wood, Alex Meade, Wayne Moore, Silvio Buchmeier, and Michael Van Bodegom-Smith. Young but highly-skilled recording studio engineers were Brandon Bustamante and Trevin Clay at Temple Base, and Chris McMasters of Crystal Digital Music and Mix Recording Studios. Early readings and recordings from the evolving workshop cast featured both talented veterans like Lloyd Gordon, Tracy Powell, David Pevsner, Jake Novak, and Rickie Gole, and newcomers like Teresa DeGennaro, Austen Rey, Scotty-Miguel Sandoe, Max Herzfeld, Ronen Bay, Meghan Grinczel, Kim Carlson, Chris Etscheid, Steve Goodwillie, Alex Morales, Jemma Wiliamson, Rachel Kellum, Alex Beneski, Quinn Domalaon, Ethan Gillmore, and Landon Stovall. Principle roles were enlivened by the generous contributions of Ryland Shelton (in the former "Henry Higgins" part, as the celebrity trainer), Gina Torrecilla (in the former "Mrs. Pearce" part, now a wisecracking Latina housekeeper), DeLandis McClam (the black drag queen, with a nod to the Emcee in "Cabaret"), Carol Barbee (in the former "Colonel Pickering" part, now a Hollywood acting teacher in the mold of Stella Adler or Uta Hagen), Giancarlo Garritano (in the former doe-eyed "Freddy Eynesford-Hill" part, now a West Hollywood restaurant server), and the always-inspirational and the breakout star, Michael D'Elia (in the former "Eliza Doolittle" part), who recently wowed showing off his rock/pop talents touring the East Coast with "Dirty Dancing in Concert."
Early critiques, contributions, and moral support came from generous friends such as (writer) Malcolm Heenman, (writer) Dan Kael, (super-fan) Carol Tyler, (director/choreographer) Tor Campbell, and most of all, (director) Rob Iscove ("She's All That"). Family and friends listened to early songs, read various drafts, and guided the shape of the story's evolution, in part to reflect the changing values of the times. Howard counts his "when I becomes we" husband, Michael Ryan, as the soul of support. Howard and Ryan were among the first 18,000 couples to marry in California when same-sex marriage became legal. They have been together navigating the colorful world of West Hollywood since 2002, a rare long-term relationship in transient Hollywood.
Further support came from assistants Jenn Jones, Robert Decker, Lauren Sweetser, Kelly Shaw, and Alan Wethern; plus Erin Rae Miller of Screenland Studios, (producing consultant) Gabrieal Griego, (producing consultant) Laura Hill, (videographer) Rob Watt, and the wise, inspirational teachings of Stephen Schwartz and the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop in Beverly Hills.
The 'On The Boulevard' Original Cast Concept Album can be streamed on music services like Spotify, with more information on the show's history on Facebook, and YouTube. The show awaits its first production.
Media Contact
Ken Howard, On the Boulevard Original Cast Concept Album, 1 310-339-5778, [email protected], https://www.facebook.com/OnTheBoulevardTheMusical
SOURCE On the Boulevard Original Cast Concept Album
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