Photo by Christopher Mueller.
The end of the world, Wolf Blitzer and a fish named Herschel—not exactly the typical kind of stuff you would expect to find in a musical, but then again Nick Blaemire’s “Soon” is striving to be anything but typical. After debuting his first musical, “Glory Days,” at Signature Theatre in 2008, Blaemire returned in March with the world premiere of “Soon,” a fresh take on the apocalypse and what to do with the time we have left.
“Soon” takes place during the hottest summer in human history, which causes all the water on earth to evaporate in just a few months. Twenty-something Charlie has decided to spend her remaining days on her couch, though her mother, roommate and new boyfriend attempt to get her to enjoy the time she has left.
“Her crisis of faith is what the show is really about,” says Blaemire, whose opinions on what we’ve done to our planet helped inspire him to write “Soon.”
“It’s something I’m very insecure about in terms of my level of responsibility I take in the way the world is changing,” he says. “I think there’s a big part of my generation who sort of watched the bad news pop up all over Facebook about what we’re doing to this planet and what we’re doing to each other.”
To take on this unique view and challenging production, Blaemire found a willing and supporting collaborator in Signature.
“It’s part of Signature’s mission statement to take risks, and I feel so safe with them; I don’t feel judged, I feel supported, I feel challenged,” says Blaemire. “They want to do the thing that is going to challenge people while still coming from a collaborative, open-hearted place.”
Among Blaemire’s collaborators are his cast and crew, including director Matthew Gardiner and actors Josh Morgan and Alex Brighton, who plays the male lead. Playing Charlie is Jessica Hershberg who provides “magnetism that is really exciting and honesty that is rare,” according to Blaemire. Also returning to Signature as part of the cast is Natascia Diaz, who previously earned rave reviews for her performance in “The Threepenny Opera.”
“The show itself is incredibly unique,” says Diaz. “The stuff it deals with people never talk about; they never talk about the dynamics between people quite in this way.”
Facing the prospects of deferred dreams and falling in love against a ticking clock are certainly not the first things audiences think about with musicals, but Blaemire is making it work. “I want to write things that are not necessarily immediately easy ideas to imagine as musicals,” he says. “Hopefully people will be able to both see themselves in these characters as well as have a bit more adventure than they will be able to expect from a 90-seat musical.”
“Soon” concludes its run at Signature on April 26. —Michael Balderston
(April 2015)