The 63-year-old Broadway producer Kevin McCollum is of the age when one starts to wonder about one’s legacy. Then again, producers, an optimistic crew by trade and existential necessity, always have to be looking forward. No producer wants to be tagged a nostalgist. And so, at a bar on Navy Pier, one can see McCollum’s famously restless mind flit back and forth between past and present, defining his oeuvre and shying away from the task.
McCollum’s past includes “Rent,” “Avenue Q,” “In the Heights” and “Six,” to name the biggest titles upon which his reputation and financial well-being most fully rest. In the immediate future, there is “42 Balloons.”
That’s the title of McCollum’s latest tryout at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the same theater that launched both “The Notebook” (with a short Broadway run that still stings the producer) and “Six,” a blockbuster hit despite having the most affordable of Broadway musical budgets.
“42 Balloons” is a musical about the quixotic Vietnam veteran known as “Lawnchair Larry” Walters, who took to the air in 1982 above Southern California while seated in a lawn chair lifted by more than 40 helium-filled weather balloons. Walters reached as high as 16,000 feet, which meant he entered the sights of commercial pilots in airspace controlled by the Los Angeles International Airport. He came down by popping his balloons with a BB gun, a metaphor waiting to happen.
The Federal Aviation Administration did not appreciate the stunt, eventually charging Walters with violating controlled airspace, operating a non-airworthy craft (surely debatable, given the success of the flight) and flying without a balloon license. But Walters’ lawnchair, replete with its jerry-rigged frame and attached water bottles, is still on display at the National Air and Space Museum as part of an exhibit aptly titled “We All Fly.”
The core of Walters’ audacious story has long interested others. In 2009, Steppenwolf Theatre Company produced Bridget Carpenter’s “Up,” a moving play that imagined the life of a man named Walter, who once had been famous for attaching balloons to his lawn chair but then spends his days fiddling in his basement trying to re-create his moment of fame. The Disney movie “Up” from the same year also had some similarities, and Walters has been the subject of podcasts and articles aplenty. But the possibilities for a musical from the story are pretty self-evident, given the long Broadway history of flight as a metaphor for escape, a willingness to take risks and the ever-popular craving for self-actualization.
All of that pretty much describes “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked,” one of the most popular Broadway numbers of the 21st century: “So if you care to find me,” Elphaba sings, “Look to the western sky.”
A broomstick? 42 balloons? The pneumatic ascent to the “Heaviside Layer” in “Cats”? All very much a shared metaphor.
Those shows, though, were the work of a highly experienced writing and composing team. That’s far from the case with “42 Balloons.”
To say that the show’s sole writer and composer, the 32-year-old Jack Godfrey, is a newcomer to the musical theater is to understate. “42 Balloons” is not only his first musical but his first foray into the professional theater. His director and dramaturg, Ellie Coote, is a childhood friend with whose brother Godfrey played rugby. Until recently he had a day job in London teaching English as a foreign language.
Born and raised in Oxford, England, the earnest, modest and likable Godfrey says he came from a family that did not have any connections to the theater, beyond attending tours of “Les Miserables.” But his dad wrote him silly songs as a kid and he picked up that mantle. “I wanted to write songs for Beyoncé,” he says.
Godfrey studied religion at Durham University as an undergraduate, with a year abroad at Boston College, but eventually found his way to a musical theater course at the University of London and remained, having decided to pursue a career as a writer of musicals. His only other real experience prior to “42 Balloons” has been penning music for his brother’s short movie and writing a musical history of the Methodist Church (“kind of an 18th century ‘Book of Mormon,’ he says, “only much less funny”).
But then, some eight years ago, he came across the story of Walters on the internet and he says, “I could relate to a story about a man who had a dream.” He started meeting with Coote and putting together a score.
By happenstance, Coote knew a member of the creative team behind “Six” and Godfrey played his score for him. That led to a meeting with Andy and Wendy Barnes, a British married couple who became late-in-life developers of new British musicals and are well respected for having discovered “Six.” That led to a few Monday night workshops in London at the Vaudeville Theatre, staged on top of the set for “Six,” which led to a call to McCollum, which led to a first full staging of “42 Balloons” at the Lowry Theatre in Manchester, which has now led to the show’s North American premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
“We love working on new musicals here,” says Edward Hall, Chicago Shakespeare’s relatively new artistic director, as he watches rehearsals. His company has already put a lot of development work in the title alongside McCollum, whom Hall has known for years.
Should “42 Balloons” follow a similar trajectory to those “Six” queens, it’s fair to say that everyone involved would be delighted.
After the run at the Lowry, Godfrey got a call from McCollum. At Navy Pier, he showed he can do a pretty good impression of the producer’s voice: “Jack, it’s Kevin McCollum. I want to take your show to America. How does that sound?”
Ergo, “42 Balloons” has its official liftoff on Navy Pier on Tuesday night.
“I really love this country,” Godfrey says unprompted and rather touchingly after recounting the show’s brief history alongside his own. “I have this fascination with American culture and I picked an American story because I wanted to write sort of from an outsider’s perspective, very much like Bill Bryson has written about Britain. I really want this show to be my love letter to America.”
Fascinatingly, one of Godfrey’s lyrics points out that although Walters had a camera attached to his chair, he never took one photograph; such was the difference between 1982 and today.
“42 Balloons” appears very much in the McCollum aesthetic. Its physical scale and cast size is relatively modest (like “Six”), a sampling of Godfrey’s songs suggest a melodic, soft-core romanticism (like “Rent’s” Jonathan Larson), the show aims to have a certain insouciance (like “Avenue Q”) and the central character is a misfit like Man in Chair from “The Drowsy Chaperone,” another McCollum title. Such comparisons are, of course, wildly premature and may prove ridiculous.
Or apt.
Such aspirations are why producers take risks on the unproven. “42 Balloons,” McCullom says, “is about what musicals are so often about: ‘How do you fly against all odds?’”
Through June 29 in The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand Ave.; www.chicagoshakes.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
