While theatergoers around the U.S. have been able to get a country music fix from jukebox musicals like Always…Patsy Cline and Million Dollar Quartet for some time now, hearing new country music in a New York theater remains a novelty. Somewhere With You brings exactly that to the Off-Broadway New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) next month.
Nashville-based songwriter JT Harding has had his songs recorded by the likes of Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts, Jake Owen and Uncle Kracker. Harding and director Peter Zinn (an grade-school friend of his) together cooked up the new musical presented as part of NYMF July 8-13. It includes a batch of new songs Harding was inspired to write after meeting soldiers during a stint entertaining the troops with his band overseas. Together with some of Harding's pre-existing tunes, these new numbers coalesce to tell a story set in the rural South of love between a young country singer and a recovering meth addict against the backdrop of the Iraq war.
"I saw Jersey Boys the other night," Harding told Rolling Stone Country, "and it struck me like lightning: there's a Green Day musical, a Tupac musical, Spiderman by U2... It's time for a modern country musical! This is a story about our generation, with songs from our generation."
The cast of the Bleecker Company production at NYMF includes Emmy winner Jay Thomas (Cheers, Murphy Brown, Mr. Holland's Opus, Sirius Satellite Radio's The Jay Thomas Show), Graham Scott Fleming (Hair national tour, North of Nashville Star contest winner) and Lauren Hoffmeier (The Most Happy Fella!), and it's directed by Zinn, who also wrote the book, with choreography and vocal arrangements by Ricardo Rust and musical direction by Danny Tejera.
After brief earlier runs in Pennsylvania and New York, the NYMF is hosting the show's most high-profile production to date. Might Somewhere With You be destined for bigger things? A production of Always…Patsy Cline starring Crystal Bowersox was aiming for Broadway last summer but the lack of an available theater doomed it at least for now. Maybe Broadway could make room instead for a show centered on modern country music, with songs younger generations will recognize--like Kenny Chesney's "Somewhere with You" and Uncle Kracker's "Smile"--just as they know Tupac's raps when they hear them at Holler If Ya Hear Me.
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