Hello, this is Brad Bond, and I'm very excited to be speaking to you today
a little bit about my adaptation of La Celestina, Celestina, a Tragic Musical
Comedy. My great pleasure to be addressing a group of people today who
share my passion for the wonderful, incomparable obra maestra
La Celestina. Over the past three decades, I have been working with this
piece with the lofty goal of creating a vehicle for this story that will make
it widely appreciated in the English speaking world. Everyone knows Don Juan.
Everyone knows Don Quixote, but very few English speakers recognize Celestina.
And that is a terrible shame. My relationship with the piece began in 1988.
I had just graduated from the University of Wyoming with two bachelor's degrees,
one in theater and dance, and the other in Spanish. And I had been accepted
into the graduate program in Spanish. And one day I sat down with my wonderful,
brilliant thesis advisor, Carlos Mellizo. He said to me: "Brad, have you given any
thought to what you might want to do for your thesis? And I told him no, I had no
idea. And he said, I think you should do something very serious. I think you should
do something with La Celestina". And he went on to explain this idea that
I would write a producible English stage version with a critical introduction.
And that is exactly what I did. I graduated with my Master´s in 1991,
and having completed the stage adaptation, which I had titled for some reason
Shades of Green. I was very eager to get my new play up in front
of an audience. I was still living in Laramie, Wyoming, at the time and made
arrangements to rent a nice old theater and put on the play. The production was a success
and everyone that saw it had good things to say. But one comment rankled me.
As I was greeting people leaving the theater after the performance, I asked one man
if he enjoyed the show. And he hesitated a minute and then he said I enjoyed it,
but I kept thinking it should be an opera or a musical or something. Now, this
is not at all what I wanted to hear. I wanted it to be ready to go to Broadway
right now, just as it was written. I was a little irritated. But in the days
after we closed, that comment kept coming back to me. Musical. What would that
Be like? Where would the songs be? Well, they would have to be a "puta vieja" song.
(Music). And of course, there would have to be a Sempronio misogyny song. (Music).
And of course, there would have to be a song when Celestina conjures the devil.
What if she had backup singers? All of a sudden, I wanted to hear those songs
and I started humming tunes and writing some lyrics, but I just didn't have any
way to actually get the music in my head onto paper. Now, a few years down
the road, the technology arrived that would allow for writing music using
the computer. And I taught myself how to do it. Now, by this time, I had moved
to New York City and eventually, after several years of work, I had adapted
my play, Shades of Green, into a full scale musical, which I called
Celestin a Tragic Musical Comedy. The development process included demo
recordings of string stage readings, concert readings to test the piece
in front of an audience. And finally, it was time for a real production.
Scraping together what financial resources I could, I produced an off off Broadway
production, in 1999, exactly 500 years since the original manuscript. (Music)
It was very well received the show, selling out most performances, but not
having any big names associated with the production, we were unable to attract any
major Broadway producers to see the show. So it did not move on to Broadway at that point
Now, this is not surprising since the usual process for developing
a Broadway show is. first to do a production out of town, at a reputable
regional theater to get the buzz going. And if it gets critical acclaim, it can
get picked up and moved to Broadway. To be very honest, I was devastated when
The New York production ended. I had invested so much time and effort and money
into the show, only to have a close. I put it away for a few years and just got busy
with other things in my life. But, as she always does, Celestina started knocking again,
I went back and listened to the demo recordings. I was reminded how great
the music is if say so myself. And then I started to imagine working on show again,
thinking about what I might change if I would start again. One big change
was to get rid of the narrator. I had always used that device
since the beginning as a way to help tell the story. Now the story tells itself,
which is much stronger and more engaging. This new and improved version has been
debuted here in Phoenix, where I live now, Phoenix, Arizona. In a staged concert
reading that went over beautifully and it was showcased in Phoenix Theatre's
New Works Festival. In retrospect, I am very, very happy that the original old
off-off- Broadway version did not take off back in 1999. It's so much better now. If that old
version had moved to Broadway, it would never have had this metamorphosis. As
for the future of the show, I do have a good lead on a potential regional theater
that debuts new works and has shows moved to Broadway, so, fingers crossed
for the next steps. Now, while I am on the subject of adapting the piece, and I have
a group here, in you guys, that is devoted to this amazing work as well, I thought
I would share some of my challenges and processes in bringing this thing to life.
Of course, the first big challenge was just to condense the story into two acts
and just a few scenes telling the story in the most efficient way possible.
Another thing I've done for efficiency is to have the same two actors who play
Sempronio and Pármeno, also play Tristán and Sosia. The costume changes
are minimal, and there is tongue in cheek humor about how much that the new servants
looks like the old ones. Another double casting choice was to have the actor
playing Calisto also play Centurio, who only appears in one little scene and has
one fun comedic song called "How Do You Want Him to Die". It gives the actor
a chance to go from the lofty, legy Calisto style, and then to the raunchy,
grungy role to play. Now, I hope none of you will judge me too harshly when I tell
you that I cut two characters altogether, Crito and Alisa. Now early on,
I had a wonderful musical number between parents, but there just wasn't a time
to introduce and develop so many characters. Each character you introduced
really should have a song, and it was just too long. So Pleberio is the only parent
that appears in the show. It's a small role, but he does have one sweet lullaby
song that he sings to Melibea called "No More Words". And then in a sad twist,
she sings that lullaby back to him just before she jumps to her death (Music).
One thing I did that actually adds to the number of characters in the cast
was to give Celestina backup singers. They're called the Celestina Boys,
kind of a barbershop quartet of creepy chorus boys that appear whenever she is working
some of her machinations. None of the other characters seem to notice them
or question why they are there. In the scene with in which Celestina puts Pármeno
and Areúsa in bed together hoping to watch them make love, the Celestina boys appear
from under the bed (Music).
My core principle has been to try to stay true to the spirit of the original work and tell the story in a way that speaks
to a modern audience, fits the music theater genre, but still holds,
still honors the source material. Now, I ran into a conflict at one point many
years ago when some New York agents told me that I couldn't kill off Celestina
in the middle of act II. There's a spectacular murder song called "Promises".
Anyway, my answer to them was, well, that's part of what makes the story
so amazing and shocking, is that Celestina gets killed. And their response was, well,
if you're gonna get a big name play the part, since the show is obviously a star
vehicle, you can't ask her to get killed, and then sit in her trailer for an hour
waiting for a curtain call. Can you just bring her back as a ghost or something?
Of course, I was adamant. I said, you don't mess with a story like that.
This is a classic masterpiece. I said, well, I'm sure it is, they replied,
but we are just telling you, you will never get a star to play it this way.
Now, like so many things that have irritated me during this process, the question
of bringing back Celestina, turned into a hugely important addition to the show.
In a prior version, the show ended after Melibea´s suicide, then Pleberio say no,
as you remember from the clip I played earlier. Sad music plays and the curtain
drops. And that was the end. It was a real downer. So I had this idea that at this
moment when the curtain is closed and everything seems to be over, the actress
who plays Celestina, peeks out from the curtain and asked the audience why they're
still waiting around. What are you still doing here? Everybody is dead, she says,
then she has an epiphany. What are you waiting around for? The moral
of the story? And then she has them open the curtain back up and calls the cast
onstage and she sings a number called "The Moral", which turns out to be a huge
show stopping group number, which is a lot more fun than just death. which is no way
for this show to end. The best part about it, from, well, she sings "You want
a moral? Who needs morals? I tell you honey, that morals are overrated.” Now,
the best part from being true to the stories standpoint, remember when I said
I loved deciding which famous passages should be made into a song. Well, the one
passage that I just could not bring myself to write into a song was Pleberio´s lament
at the end of the story. Now, obviously, it's a very, very important speech
with all the big questions and the philosophical comments on life and death
and God and injustice. Of course it just cried out for a song, but it was just
so depressing. And as far as the dramatic action, the arc of the story, the action
of the evening of the theatre, once all the leading characters are dead,
just seemed really anticlimactic to ask people to sit around 10 o'clock or 10.30
at night while an old man goes on this big lament about how horrible life is,
right. So I just bit my lip and just skipped the thing, and never wrote
the song, however bringing Celestina back after the final curtain, allowed me to put
those philosophical questions that Pleberio had, put them out there not as
a lament, but as a wry, slightly pessimistic critique of the way the world
works. The message is still pretty dark, but the energy is upbeat and ends with a bang
rather than a sob. So I was still able to get the Pleberio sensibility in there,
but just through Celestina´s curtain number. Now, another major conceptual issue
through the whole process, has been the question of time. This slide here. There are,.. it's sort
of between times in some ways, there's lots of references to cars and phones,
one musical number takes place via a series of conference calls.
And the effect is kind of anachronistic blend of a 16th century
scenario in a modern environment. Audiences seem to accept it without
question. One number that references modern technology is a song called "Life
Goes On", which is Alicia's lament the morning after Sempronio was killed.
(Music)
Thank you very much for letting me share some of my process, and just a little bit of music with you.
Many of the demo recordings are availableon the website celestinavisual.org. You can click on the songs and hear the demos.
And also, I have I reserved the domain name, Celestinamusical.com, and I'm
in the process of building a website for that. So it's not really yet,
but it will be hopefully soon. So that should be a valuable tool for promoting the show
going forward. You know, it's funny, when I was a 23-year-old college student,
just like Rojas, my goal was to finish this show and have it be a huge success.
But having spent so many years working on it, I realize that the real pleasure has
been the journey, not the destination, although of course I hope eventually
to reach the broadest audience possible and a big Broadway smash.
But in the meantime, what a pleasure this story is. And I'm so happy to have enjoyed
so many years exploring.