Village Theatre: Mother of Musicals

The local playhouse has built a pipeline for show development like no other

By Gavin Borchert February 19, 2019

Practically all local theaters develop and premiere new works alongside old, but none have built the pipeline that Issaquah’s Village Theatre has, especially as regards musicals. Each August a Festival of New Musicals gets shows (in 2018, five of them) up on their feet and before an audience for the first time. The ultimate goal is a mainstage regular-season production, and VT allots a slot to one such returnee each year: for example, this year, Million Dollar Quartet (May 9–June 23) is back in Issaquah 12 years—and a Tony-winning Broadway production—after its early VT development. Probably VT’s highest-profile success is Next to Normal, workshopped at Village Theatre in 2002 and 2005; it went on to win a Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010.

The intermediate step—the sophomore class, so to speak—is VT’s logically named Beta Series, a laboratory which allows for workshopping and tinkering. The Passage, first seen at last August’s Festival, is the first of three shows in this year’s Series, running Feb. 15–24. “My family went through a huge crisis when I was younger, and this show is what came out of that,” says writer David Darrow. He allegorized that crisis as a monster-in-the-basement mystery that VT describes as “Stranger Things meets Pan’s Labyrinth.”

Beta Series shows get “full, but purposefully minimal, sets, costumes, lights, and staging,” says director Brandon Ivie, and there’s plenty of room to try things out. In fact, VT encourages people to see the show more than once to see what’s changed. “The Beta Series is such a unique opportunity for a creative team to collaborate with an audience, test out what’s working, discover what’s not, and attempt to fix it with time to test it out again,” says Ivie. “This process is especially useful for The Passage—there have been four new songs written for the show in its last eight months at Village and we will probably have a fifth new song written after performances have started.” Still to come in the Beta Series are The Homefront (March 30–31), from the 2018 Festival, and Hart Island (June 7–16), from 2018.

The Passage. Through 2/24. Times vary. $25–$30. Village Theatre, Issaquah, 303 Front St.; 425.392.2202; villagetheatre.org