Information

Show Credits: Music by Gary William Friedman
Lyrics by Herb Schapiro
Book by Herb Schapiro

Description: As they did a generation earlier in THE ME NOBODY KNOWS, Herb Schapiro and Gary William Friedman have fashioned an inspirational revue. Based on writings sponsored by Poets in Public Service and other material, BRING IN THE MORNING chronicles the lives of a multi-racial ensemble of adolescents and near-adolescents from age 13 to their early 20's - the joys and desires as well as the pressures, burdens and all-too-early lessons in heartache.

With humor, pathos and an eclectic contemporary score of reggae, rap, gospel and pop, BRING IN THE MORNING is an educational, relevant and socially conscious-celebration of the amazing resilience and vitality of a generation that is growing up faster than ever.

Insight from the experts Casting Tip: Children in cast

Staging Tip: Unit set of your choosing, to serve for a variety of unspecified locations. The characters have not been over-defined and are left largely to your development and creativity. The off-Broadway company attracted a lot of extra business by soliciting school groups, who bused in to see the show on special field trips and evening events. Make it known what the show is about and what the script is based upon; educators find this kind of self-expression and subject matter to be a positive role model.

As the central character, COUGAR, announces at the outset, "This is the ghetto of my mind." As such, the work represents a collage of impressions, a montage of emotions, evoking more of the inner lives of our characters, and taking us beyond the familiar literal realities of the TV Late News, and audience preconceptions.

The set, accordingly, offers optional possibilities, fom the spare and trim to the well-furnished. Whatever the directorial and design choice, the emphasis should be suggestive of the literal, but not bound by it, since what we have of actuality is filtered through the minds of the characters, for the most part, their special or their private moments. Conceivably, with lighting and some special effects, inventive and moving productions can be developed from using what is essentially a bare stage. In a more elaborate and visual presentation, set design should be angular and suggestive, rather than literal; frames and platforms, and well-placed, representative props, or figurative visuals - scenes, individuals - as hanging, hovering backdrop, can be especially effective. For a tryout at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the latter were simple, basic, and at the same time colorfuland imaginative in terms of contrast to any familiar stage action or suggested drabness in the general environment. For another, off-Broadway, a more complete set of projections worked out of a bare angular set to create more of the different moods, and add another dimension to the action

The band can, and should be on stage, since everything here is part of the same ghetto of the mind. The stage movement largely ignores their presence, and the action should work with complete fluidity, from one playing area to another, often with something reminiscent of cinematic cutting and montage.

More basically, the script itself moves in general sequences, developing its own thematic and emotional logic 'line.' The songs usually mark the beginnings and endings of sequences, and the interludes between - monologues, dialogues, scenes -take us, as we go on, into the deeper, darker concerns of the latter part of ACT II. The language itself should be treated wherever possible with more sense of its suggestive quality, since it is not meant to reproduce straight ordinary and literal speech, but thoughts and feelings through the special filter of these individual lives and private despairs, hopes and dreams. The acting, especially, should reflect a pervading sense of irony, the double edge of things here - of kids in the morning of their lives thinking night thoughts, of life promising and bright and death hovering and nasty; of the bitter and the sweet in constant friction - the harsh reality of things, and the vitality and hope and the reach of imagination.