Oregon Music News

Beam me up! Kurt Crowley and Aaron Kirk Douglas, co-creators of "Planet Eden"

Aaron Kirk Douglas, 48, knows a good subject when he runs across it. A documentary filmmaker for many years, the native of Springfield, OR., who has also performed in musicals since his high school years, first thought the subject of the coming of UFOs and the end of the world relating to the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, might make an interesting documentary.

Then he thought again. Why not take the subject and turn it into a musical? He’d recently met Kurt Crowley, a musician/composer/arranger, on Craigslist, of all places, where he’d advertised for an accompanist; he planned on singing in bars around Portland. But the idea of singing just didn’t light his fire–he’d already done that kind of thing. Instead, he found the perfect collaborator in Crowley, a Harvard man originally from Montana who has worked around town as a music teacher, pianist and musical director. After a year’s worth of work, the two came up with Planet Eden, with Douglas as writer/lyricist and Crowley as composer. The work in progress is a satirical musical with serious philosophic overtones about UFO followers waiting for the end of the world according to their interpretation of the Mayan calendar. The musical has recently been workshopped in Portland with great success, and it will be available for viewing again soon. The show, directed by Bruce Hostetler, will be presented in workshop form 6:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday, June 7, at CoHo Theater, 2257 N.W. Raleigh. The event is free, and the public is invited.

We talked to Douglas about his collaboration, his first-ever musical, what audience members have to look forward to, the process of building and shaping a musical, and more.

How did Planet Eden come together?

I decided I hadn’t done a lot with my musical background. I’d appeared in acting at Lane Community College. I hadn’t done much acting or singing in the last few years. I met Kurt through an ad I put in Craigslist because I was looking for a piano player–I was thinking I’d try to sing in some bars around town like I used to do. My last singing was in Seattle. Then I started thinking, “You know, that’s so much work. You have to learn all that music, you rehearse all those times, then you have to beg your friends to come and see you.” Kurt’s so talented that I thought it would be a lot more fun for us to work on something together that might have enough interest that people would come and see it.

So anyway, we started down the road. The story started with people living in this UFO sanctuary, waiting for aliens to show up at the end of the Mayan calendar. The Captain (played by James Morgan) has set up this sanctuary. He doesn’t necessarily believe aliens are going to come in a spaceship and take them away, but he doesn’t tell the others, nor does he tell them what to believe. He’s our equivalent to Moses, basically, and he’s leading these people through the desert to their final destination. That’s why they’re actually in the desert, in West Texas, near the mountains.

Aaron Kirk Douglas

After I had named the show Planet Eden I was trying to find a place where it gets warm enough in December where these people could actually be. And it turned out there was a John Eden Mesa in Texas, so I just set them there. Isn’t that funny?

What drew you to the end-of-the-world theme?

The fact that there have been over 200 end-of-the-world predictions we know of, and there are probably far more. I was also drawn to that quality that causes people to want to believe in the predictions.

And so we also built a whole other layer on top of the story: Why do people choose to believe the end is near? What’s the whole motivation behind that? Besides being a fable for modern times, the show is kind of a call to social action, sort of taking off on the populism of today, and the argument that greed is the major thing that causes all our problems today.

So there’s a bit of a morality tale here.

Yes.

What about the music? How did you come up with it?

We mapped out the kinds of songs we wanted to have. Once we had the characters created, we figured out the types of singers we would need. Then we came up with the style of song we wanted each of them to sing. For example, we had this character named George (played by Nick Cesares) whom we wanted to be a tenor. He’s kind of the geeky, nerdy type. My idea for his song was sort of a Disney pop style piece, which ended up being called “Ambassador to the Stars.”

You’ve got 11 actors and 14 songs, which is generous. Describe some of the other characters and more of the story.

The Captain and his wife have been 30 years in this West Texas town, and as we see the story unfold, random people show up. His wife Bonnie (played by Carrie Rambo) is starting to doubt the whole thing . She’s followed different leaders: She’s been a Jehovah Witness, and they believed the world was coming to an end several times,  then she joined the Rajneeshies, and then she met her husband. So she’s like waking up and saying, “Why am I doing this time and time again?” She’s having a crisis of her own.

Each of these people have something they’re running from, or have something they need that they’re not getting in their everyday lives. The sanctuary is built on top of an old missile silo. The show’s main character, Tom Douglas Played by Robert Winstead), is a documentary filmmaker, and he shows up at the beginning there to document the story. Eventually the others agree, OK, he can stay. He is, unbeknownst to them, feeding his video back to this TV station which is broadcasting all over the world. So everyone knows about these people and what’s happening there. His taped interviews are kind of a Colbert-Daily Show type thing, he’s edited them to look really crazy. Rick Emerson plays the TV newscaster.

So you use some video onstage?

Yes.

When and where will the show go up?

We’re hoping for some time in January or February 2011, but we don’t have a venue yet. We want to try to make it part of the Fertile Ground Festival of New Plays. We’re looking for a suitable black-box venue with 5-week availability so we can produce the show sometime in 2011. Maybe someone reading this article has suggestions.

Give me a  further taste of the show.

So a bunch of crazy madcap stuff happens, everybody sings a song about why they’re there, their obstacles and conflicts with the documentary filmmaker. At the end of the first act, there’s this big commotion, and you’re not sure whether it’s the federal government coming to raze the compound or the space ship showing up.

Some of your musical styles in the show?

Pop music, ballads, Vegas style…We have a spy song, a vampy torch song, a show-stopped number, which has kind of a patter to it. There’s a soft shoe, and a couple of really big choral pieces. It’s very Broadway-sounding.

Watch a sampler from the show:

Tell me more about yourself.

I grew up in Springfield, and started singing when I was really little. I’d plug my piano player in in the backyard and listen to Disney records and sing along while I was swinging. As soon as I could, I sung in a choir and did drama all through junior high school and into college, then after college, community theater. When I lived in Seattle for ten years I sang vocal jazz in a quartet. I haven’t done anything in that field since I moved to Portland 10 years ago.

But I still love it, and feel like I have this innate sense of when the characters should sing, and what they should sing about, that kind of thing. It’s the first musical for both of us, for Kurt and me, and he’s really been great to work with. He has virtually no ego.

What’s your process of working?

Typically, we’ll talk about a character, kind of what their song should be about, and then I’ll spend a couple of weeks working up the lyrics, but he’ll throw in some pretty good zingers. At the end, when he’s fitting the lyrics to the music–that’s how we’ve been working it–we’ve read that different collaborative teams do things different ways. I rewrite the lyrics a few times, we have a meeting and he’ll go through them, and say, “This doesn’t make any sense to me” or “Shouldn’t we approach it this way?” Then I take another crack at it, sometimes two or three tries, before we get to the point where he says, “OK, I can do something with this.”

Did you help with the music?

Kurt has done virtually all of it. There are about three songs where little fragments of the music were mind. One day I asked him, “OK, Kurt, it takes me literally weeks to write the lyrics to one of these songs; how long does it take you to write the music?” And he says, “Oh, a couple of hours.” That’s just how he is.