Auditions are being held at the beginning of next week for Love Songs in Traffic, the controversial spring musical by Paly choir teacher Michael Najar.
The bumpy road to this production began nine years ago when Najar came up with the idea of the musical. Mostly inspired by his childhood in a suburb of Los Angeles, Love Songs in Traffic has a sentimental value for Najar.
"Growing up in Los Angeles you end up spending a lot of time on the road," Najar said. "And I was struck one day with the thought that you have all these people moving in the same direction alone, but dependent on each other."
Love Songs in Traffic centers around a love story about a man, Dave, who has come to build a freeway through an LA suburb, and a woman, Sarah, who is strongly opposed to the freeway’s construction.
When Najar first came to Paly in 2003, he told Paly’s theater teacher, Kristen Lo, about his work in progress.
"At first I thought, ‘Yeah, everyone writes a musical,’" Lo said. "But then he started playing me some of the songs and talking about the characters and I realized this was a really developed piece of work."
Lo did not consider Love Songs in Traffic for the Paly theater department until after announcing last year that Les Miserables would be this year’s musical. Conflicting schedules between the Paly band and musical performances made it impossible for Les Miserables to be a Paly production.
"I started looking for something smaller and much less epic than Les Miserables," Lo said. "I knew I wanted to do something new and less dance-intensive than A Chorus Line, with a diverse cast, and something that the kids could identify with. So I had Najar print me out a rough draft of what he had been doing, and I loved it."
When Lo and Najar announced the musical in a lunch meeting on Oct. 12, they encountered a generally negative reaction toward doing an unknown musical, according to Lo.
"I was surprised because people usually go with the flow with me," Lo said. "There were a lot of people who were excited, but the ones who weren’t took a very vocal stance on the subject."
An article in the Nov. 21 edition The Campanile titled "Drama department to perform controversial spring musical" focused on the negative slant of the situation.
"I feel like The Campanile made it seem like it was the teachers against the students, and that is not how I feel the [visual and performing] department is," Lo said. "So I feel like we were misrepresented and my [students] agree that our situation was skewed."
Despite the small group opposed to the choice, Najar hopes that the students can learn more about the production of a musical from this experience.
"They are going to see the creative process of this whole thing and they are going to have a hand in it," Najar said. "And that has already begun in the workshops."
In the workshops that have been taking place over the last couple weeks, Najar has read through a few scenes with interested students. He hoped to get a feeling for what works and what does not, so he can make the dialogue run more smoothly.
Acting and vocal auditions for Love Songs in Traffic will take place Monday, Dec. 12 and Tuesday, Dec. 13 after school in the Haymarket Theater. Lo will prepare scenes to be read cold at auditions. Students are asked to prepare 16 bars of a song and bring sheet music with them, according to Lo. Musicals written after 1970 and other than Steven Sondheim are requested, according to Najar, because they have a similar sound to the songs of Love Songs in Traffic.
Dance auditions will be held on Wednesday, Dec. 14, after school.