So there was once this cowboy who became an astronomer.
Sounds crazy, no? Or like a wild juxtaposition that's heading toward a punchline.
Actually, it's a fascinating story that Carl Sagan told in Cosmos, the PBS passkey to the universe that lingered in libraries as a best-selling book. Stan Peal checked it out in 1988 while he was performing summer theater in the Colorado Rockies.
The story gestated in Peal's imagination until 2005, when he turned it into a 45-minute musical. The embryonic work received a concert reading up in New York at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Now an expanded version of The Expanding Sky -- 90 minutes, with 14 songs -- is heading for a world premiere engagement at Actor's Theatre starting this Thursday.
Expanding Sky lives up to the unpredictable quirkiness of actor/playwright/composer/carpenter Peal's canon. Perhaps you'll remember Peal's last magnum opus, Scratchy Scratcherton's Revenge, where Spunky Punkerbunk dispensed pepperoni wisdom in the world's first sci-fi pizzeria comedy -- set in thrilling downtown Milwaukee.
Who better than Peal to invent the world's first scientific cowboy bio-musical comedy vaudeville romance? Lou Delessandro will star as Milton Humason, the astronomer whose observations led to the establishment of cosmology and Hubble's Law, the proposition that the universe is perpetually expanding at a constant rate.
All of Humason's scientific achievements occurred without the benefit of a high school education.
"He dropped out of school when he was in eighth grade," says Peal, "and he was basically a cowboy. This was the turn-of-the-century out in California, and he drove a pack of mules -- kind of like a tobacco-spitting ruffian."
Humason's packtrains brought the building materials for Mount Wilson Observatory and the scientists' quarters. But his ascent to eminence in astronomy began when he fell for Helen Dowd, the daughter of the head electrical engineer on the project. Just exactly where you might expect young Milty to break out in song.
"In a way, the story is a kind of mythological civilizing of him," Peal remarks. "He fell in love with her, decided to stick around and became a janitor. Started working on odd jobs at the Observatory, became a night assistant and then worked his way up to being an actual astronomer -- without ever going back to school. He turned into a regular scientist from being this ruffian cowboy. So I just thought that was a cool transition, a really cool story."
The idea to add music jumped into Peal's head when he heard about the $2,000 commission being offered by the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a science-based stage piece.
"I thought, 'If it's a musical, well that's really quirky. That's out there,'" Peal recalls. "I would have a better chance at getting the commission money if I made it a musical. It's something that I'm capable of doing, and it just seemed to sweeten the proposal."
Watching the concert reading at Ensemble Studio's First Light Festival in May 2005, Peal realized he had a lot of work to do if The Expanding Sky were to make the leap to a full staging. So did his production company, Epic Arts Repertory Theatre. Co-founded with his wife, actress Laura Depta, Epic Arts (or EARTh) burst on the scene in 2003 with a prodigious artistic success, Peal's The Friar & the Nurse at SouthEnd Performing Arts Center, followed by a big financial success, Peal's A Mad, Mad Madrigal.
But the company flamed out after Madrigal was revived at Actor's Theatre in December 2004. Citing burnout, Peal and Depta announced the cancellation of the remainder of Epic Arts 2004-05 season. When Catherine Connor dropped angelically out of the sky and plopped a thick pledge of money onto the table, EARTh was suddenly exhumed from its premature burial and striding toward Big Bang financial vitality. Budget for the fully-staged Sky was set at $15,000 -- nearly twice as much as any previous Epic Arts enterprise.
Meanwhile Peal and Depta, together with choreographer Annette Saunders and director Julie Janorschke, huddled on how to upgrade the Humason/Hubble musical. Obviously, there needed to be more music than the seven songs Peal had written for the EST/Sloan money.
What else?
"Laura suggested that, if you're attracted to the love story, 'where's the relationship?'" Peal reveals. "There really wasn't a development of the relationship. So I had to develop the relationship and the love story -- that was my first task."
Peal admits that he felt tethered to historical and scientific accuracy when he was composing his first draft. Audiences who come to the world premiere will be happy to find that Peal has broken loose in characteristically zany style.
Ragtime music flavors the score as Humason and Edwin Hubble form their seminal partnership. Equally appropriate to the era of Humason's meteoric rise to astronomical stardom, vaudeville routines help us digest the science. Mr. Interlocutor trading quips with Mr. Copernicus? One-liners on Cepheids? Believe it.
At first, Peal confides, he resisted Janorschke's prime suggestion. CL's 2002 Theaterperson of the Year (Peal took the title in 2003) kept hearing about how much the playwright loved the philosophical aspect that Sagan had brought to his storytelling. Yet that spiritual dimension, so vivid in Cosmos, was totally missing from the new musical. Didn't belong in the Humason story, Peal surmised.
But he changed his mind. Eventually, he recognized the kinship between Sagan's high-tech spirituality and a key element of Epic Arts, what Peal calls its "metaphysical window" -- the lens through which we're meant to see their productions.
"The thing that really blew my mind about Cosmos is that all of the elements that create what we are and all we see around us are all created in the stars. And because the universe is expanding, which is what Humason and Hubble discovered, that infers that it all comes from a common point. That was what led to the Big Bang theory. So this idea that we all come from the same source and we're all created from the stars is all very moving to me. So I wanted to make sure that that was in the play as well."
More mundane star power in The Expanding Sky will come from Delassandro and Cindy Barringer as Milton and Helen Humason. Barringer is best remembered as the star of CPCC Theatre's State Fair in 2003. Delassandro is a newer arrival, coming to the forefront this past spring in Theatre Charlotte's otherwise ill-starred revival of A Little Night Music.
Other stellar folk onstage will include Jim Esposito, Meghan Lowther, and the irrepressible Peal himself.
How to prepare for this musical onslaught of comical cosmology? Think about what lengths Peal will go to deliver improbable rhymes for Hubble. And Humason!