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03/21/2019 12:01 AM“Oh, my God,” says composer-writer-actor Todd Almond, “first love is so scary when you’re a teenager and so hard to figure out. But I think it’s also a subject that everyone can identify with, which is why this show resonates with audiences.”
Almond is talking about Girlfriend, the two-character musical that will be produced Friday, March 22 to Sunday, April 28 by Hartford’s TheaterWorks—but presented at the Aetna Theatre at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main Street, Hartford, while TheaterWorks’ Pearl Street space is being renovated.
Teenage first love is the basis for this rock-pop chamber musical where a mixtape is the beginning of a romantic relationship between two young boys. Girlfriend takes the music of Matthew Sweet’s ’90s album of the same name and creates a show of hidden desires, romance, and longing.
“The story I wanted to tell is so tied up with that album because I listened to it so frequently,” says Almond. “That record was really a soundtrack for that time for me.”
But the coming-of-age story of two young men in the tentative early stages of a relationship in small-town Nebraska is not autobiographical, says Almond, who was also composer and co-lyricist of the 2010 Yale Rep musical, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
“I was such a late bloomer I never had any gay high school romance,” he says. “I never fell in love until I was much older. But I did give someone a mixtape once—but that’s the end of that story.”
Still, he remembers being a vulnerable teenager “where your emotions are running wild and you don’t have enough experience about relationships—and heartbreak. Everything like that is brand new and a huge event.”
David Merino plays the character of sensitive-but-awkward Will, who offers up the tape to his friend, college-bound jock Mike, played by CJ Pawlikowski in the show, which is staged by Rob Ruggiero, producing artistic director of TheaterWorks.
“I relate to the character in how he grapples with his sexuality,” says Merino, “though for me I went through that journey in middle school in Pasadena. Both characters are exploring their sexuality, but they’re at different points in their admission of it.”
Merino recalls remember the first blossoming friendship from middle to high school “when I was just coming to terms with being gay and learning the vocabulary of how to communicate that with this other friend. We felt we were both different, and coming from a family environment which didn’t quite understand it. We explored it together and we sort of dated but we navigated into a friendship.”
As to Sweet’s music, Merino describes it as “very-sensitive man music. Teens listening to this pop-rock music in the ’90s would really relate to the emotions of the album.”
Almond says upon having the idea to write a musical based on the album, he approached Sweet’s management in 2000 with the aim of getting the singer-songwriter’s OK.
“I went online, found the phone number of Sweet’s manager, and called him, saying, ‘Hey, I’m an unknown, struggling writer but…’ [The manager] thought it was interesting idea and said, ‘Go ahead, and if it gets to a place where we have to sort out rights because you’re doing a production, we’ll do that then.’”
But it took several drafts of the show and many years before the musical came together.
“It took a while to figure out the music is actually of these young peoples’ world,” says Almond. “Before I was treating it like a typical musical where the characters don’t know they’re singing. In Girlfriend, they now know.”
And others who have similarly been affected by the album when they were younger might share the same feelings.
“I think the music we listen to at that age is the music that gets into us the deepest, and stays with us for our entire lives,” says Almond.
More information is available at theaterworkshartford.org.
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.