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musical adapted from the Whoopi Goldberg movie. “
Sister Act
was an absolute
natural for a stage musical,” Cheri says. It premiered in London’s West End
before being staged on Broadway, taken on tour, and put up in several theater
capitals across the world.
Cheri’s own musical,
Hello! My Baby
, is her passion project: “It’s in the
front of my heart and the front of my mind.” Cheri thoughtfully designed it to
do well almost anywhere. Because the characters are teenagers, “you don’t have
kids trying to be something that they clearly are not,” she says. “They can have
a transformative experience, play somebody entirely different from themselves,
but still be believable in that role.”
She conceived of
Hello! My Baby
while directing a Goleta Valley Junior
High School production of
Anything Goes
. “I tailored it to what the kids could
present most successfully, and found that I love doing that,” she says. The cast
had never heard any of the music from the play, and Cheri enjoyed the process
of exposing the kids to the classic songs. “So, I had this idea to create a musical
for young actors with old songs,” she says. In doing so, she’s helping to preserve
a part of history that’s at risk of being forgotten: “Every time I introduce this
music to a new young cast, they’re hearing it for the first time and push these
songs forward into the future.”
The songs she uses are late 19
th
and early 20
th
century standards like
“Swanee” by George Gershwin and Irving Caesar and “I’m Just Wild About
Harry” by Eubie Blake. They were all written before 1923, placing them in the
public domain. This gives Cheri the freedom to adapt the songs as she sees fit.
“It’s not like a jukebox musical in the sense that when the song comes up, we
stop and sing the song as written,” she explains. “I adjusted lyrics so that we
could keep story moving through the song.”
Hello! My Baby
is entering into its life as a licensable property. Cheri’s
working, she says, to “get involved with the finest producers I can.” To do
that, she’s using the strategy that’s worked so well so far: “to let people see it
and let it speak for itself.” One way Cheri and her team are providing that
exposure is by putting together a cast of young California actors and staging
the play for audiences across the state and
nation. They’re holding statewide auditions
via the internet for a production next year. It
will be “California’s first all-state-high-school
musical,” she says.
As if she weren’t busy enough, Cheri plans
to work on more of her writing – this time in
a different medium, a book. “I’m returning to
the novel that I began writing at this time last
year with new eyes,” she says, “and getting it
right and getting it into the world.” It’s a bit of
a departure from her previous work, but she
gets encouragement from her kids, who, she
says, are “leading the way.”
Spoken like a proud mom. A playwriting,
musical-making, TV-show-producing,
Montecito mom.
Profiles
:
76
winter
|
spr ing
When Cheri and Bill moved with their three kids to Montecito in
January of 1996, they made a quick stop on their way in to
make sure this sign reflected the new additions to town
Cheri and Bill are co-creators, along with Phoef Sutton
(top row, second
from left)
, of
Bob
, the Bob Newhart starring show that Cheri worked on
after
Cheers