Lead actor William Romain ’26 displays the 15-year-old protagonist’s entire range of emotions throughout the musical. Harrington said that though working with graduate students has logistical challenges, the older, more experienced students deepen the production’s quality. The director, Kayodè Soyemi MFA ’23, is about to graduate from the Drama School, having directed and produced at Meadows School of the Arts, Yale Cabaret, House Party Theatre, Shakespeare on Draught and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Harrington and the rest of the production team worked with a director, choreographer, dramaturg and projection designer from the David Geffen School of Drama and orchestrators from the School of Music. “The show is about rules, and family, and living up to expectations, and grief, and growing up, and everything else in the wake of a community tragedy.” “Jason has a skill of knowing exactly what music will make the words be heard and received exactly as they should be,” Harrington said. According to Harrington, many of the lyrics were taken directly from Reynold’s prose. When it came to adapting the book into a musical, Kisare had to carefully lift some of the words off the page and into the sheet music.Įlsie Harrington ’25 co-produced the musical.
Lyrics to x and o free#
Kisare’s biggest challenge when creating the score was making sure “it didn’t conform to the ‘rules’ of conventional musical theater” - the songs deviate from traditional song structure of the genre, lacking rhyme and following regular speech patterns - and maintaining a sense of “urgency” within the character’s stories even though the entire story takes place in an elevator.Ī lot of the songs are free from rhyming and follow the regular speech pattern of the characters in order to integrate the music and lyrics, according to Kisare. By putting them to the forefront with this show, I hope to help people better understand their thought processes during these moments of violence.”
“Kids stuck in an endless cycle of violence within these crime ridden neighborhoods are rarely given a voice. “To me, this story is about Black masculinity and the notion that mere seconds can decide whether a Black man lives or dies,” said Kisare. This struggle is summed up in the musical’s tagline: “SIXTY SECONDS. Ghosts of his past visit him as he takes an elevator down from his apartment in order to kill the man responsible for his brother’s death, and he must decide whether or not to avenge his brother and continue the cycle of violence.
The hip-hop score explores the protagonists’ internal conflict. Kisare began adapting the book this past summer, which proved to be a difficult task because of the nature of the story - the entire plot takes place within a 60 second elevator ride. With this adaptation, I aim to breathe new life into this story by using music as a lens to uplift these marginalized voices.” “My goal is to help fill that gap by writing us into the narrative, and this show is only the beginning. “Having grown up in the theater world, I’ve become accustomed to the lack of stories centered around people who look like me, “ said Kisare.
Lyrics to x and o full#
Now Kisare’s original show is appearing for the first time as a full production from Thursday, April 6 to Saturday, April 8 at the Off Broadway Theater. Kisare adapted it into a musical, writing all of the music in time for a preliminary reading in December.
Jason Reynolds’ 2017 young adult novel received the Printz Honor Book, Coretta Scott King Honor Book and Newbery Medal Honor Book awards.
Originally a New York Times bestselling novel, “Long Way Down” has been transformed by Jason Kisare ’25 into a 90-minute musical exploring endless cycles of violence to be debuted this weekend.
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