"Painting" becomes "Waterfall", still bound for Broadway
A full year after we first heard about ambitions to take the musical "Khang Lang Phaab" ("Behind the Painting") to Broadway, we have a little further progress to report.
Director Takonkiet “Boy” Viravan earlier this month did some staging – albeit just a press conference – alongside Tony Award winner Richard Maltby (who’s moulded the script) and Oscar-champ composer David Shire (who’s done the score). They announced that the musical now re-titled “Waterfall” will open at the Pasadena Playhouse in that California city on May 29, with the run planned through June 28.
Takonkiet later told Siamtown, a newspaper for Thais living in the US, that the show would then trek north to Seattle. Between those two engagements, a decision will come down as to whether the play is good enough for the Great White Way in Manhattan.
The name change, he explained, is due to alterations made to the story. The musical he took to America was solidly based on Sri Burapha’s classic novel “Khang Lang Phaab”. The book still inspires the play, but it’s now set at the Mitake waterfalls in Japan.
The Pasadena Playhouse’s own website adds that the tale is set in Bangkok and Tokyo between 1933 and 1939. It was a turbulent time when the Thai monarchy was undergoing an epic shift and Japan was at war with China and would soon turn its forces against Southeast Asia and finally the US.
As in Sri Burapha’s original, a young Thai student falls in love with the American wife of a Thai diplomat. Their “forbidden” romance parallels history as Siam’s newfound democracy is swept up in the vortex of increasingly anti-American Japan.
The theatre site notes the “gloriously romantic score” and calls the play “a modern love story of timeless scale”.
Takonkiet has described the hero of the yarn, the lovesick Nopporn, as “a young Thai bored with his country and dreaming of leaving Siam to settle in the West. Katherine [the object of his affections] has everything he dreams off, yet she is able to convince him to see the beauty of his own country”.
Despite all the alterations lately, Sukrit “Bie” Wisetkaew remains in place to reprise the role of Nopporn. Also capably hanging onto their jobs are production designer Sasawat Srimahaban and Scenario music director Sarawut Lertpanyanuch.
Bie is set to fly to Pasadena for rehearsals in April and will stay in the States for the duration of both runs. The identity of his female co-star is supposed to be announced soon.
The amount of time this project is consuming shouldn’t dampen anyone’s hopes for its success. It routinely takes several years for a musical to move from first pitch to the Broadway stage and that magical moment when the curtain finally rises before an illustrious (and high-paying) audience.
“Behind the Painting” had its first reading a year ago last month, followed by “lab presentations” in February this year. The arduous “off-Broadway” journey among smaller cities is necessary to gauge audience reaction, make adjustments where necessary and build up credits and a head of steam that can propel the play to Broadway.
The scouts will be out in Pasadena and Seattle, and hopefully they and the critics will enjoy “Waterfall” enough to carry it in triumph all the way to the Big Apple – sometime later in 2016.
