Summer Play Festival
Playwrights Blog

Tio Pepe is, among other things, about musical theatre and the dreams they encourage in those of us who love the form.  One of the earliest musicals I came to know as a child was South Pacific.  The summer that I was six, my mother taped an airing of the film on HBO (remember VCR’s?) and I watched it every day, over and over, from start to finish and then back again.  There were other musicals that joined the rotation over the course of that summer: Oklahoma! and Carousel chief among them.  But it was South Pacific that I kept returning to.  I listened to original cast recording on my record player (remember record players?) in my room and pretended I was Emile de Becque, Joe Cable or, my favorite, Luther Billis.

That was a practice that I assumed was particular only to myself and was, therefore, to be kept secret.  Of course, when I went to school to study theatre and moved to New York to work in it, I realized that I was hardly the only kid giving bedroom performances of shows from the canon.  There is something about musicals in particular that sparks the imagination of those of us who love them.  Few people put down Madame Bovary and pretend to be the doomed doctor’s wife.  Yet so many kids, both boys and girls, secretly believed that their version of “Rose’s Turn” was one for the ages.  (Complete disclosure: I finally retired those fantasies once I saw Patti LuPone’s volcanic performance in Gypsy. I bow to my better.)

The family in Tio Pepe does what everyone else of their ilk does: they internalize those moments and make them deeply personal, as if they created them, themselves.  It is, of course, the Candelaria’s good fortune that they get to see Ethel Merman play Rose and get to usher at the Winter Garden Theatre, which, when the play is set is currently housing West Side Story.  They live in a time that we now mythologize.  On several occasions, I have had the odd sensation of being supremely jealous of my characters.

I was recently reminded of how powerful those moments can be when I took my parents to see the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center.  From the moment the Overture started, the three of us were transported back to our childhoods: my parents, who were born just before the show premiered on Broadway and my own, to the days of our VHS copy of the movie and the crackling LP playing on the stereo.  It was tremendously moving sharing this experience with them.  As Paolo Szot sang “Some Enchanted Evening,” I looked over to my parents (lump in throat) and saw my father reaching over to take my mother’s hand in his.  Tears were rolling down her face.  Then they quickly started rolling down mine. And as we settled in for the rest of the evening, I thought, “if only Inez Candelaria could have seen this production.”