There's a pretty good argument to be made that Southerwestern Ohio is the heart of the heartland. TV ratings assure us we loved Survivor and the Olympics more than most cities. We love touring Broadway musicals so much that the Fifth Third Bank Broadway Series enjoys one of the highest number of subscriptions in the nation.

        We're a new product testing ground because of our “everybodyness.” Now regional product testing is extending to a pair of Broadway-bound musicals: Everything's Ducky, opening this week at Playhouse in the Park, and Summer of '42 playing at Dayton's Victoria Theatre.

        Ducky's creative team has Broadway credits including Dreamgirls and Side Show. Both casts feature Tony Award nominees and a full complement of Broadway vets. Both already have been optioned by Broadway producers.
       

Pulse of America

       

        One of the key reasons these shows are being fine-tuned in our region is best explained by the show's creators. “We wanted more opportunity to work on the show in front of a real audience,” Ducky lyricist Bill Russell says.

        “We want to feel the pulse, the reaction, from an American audience,” composer Harry Krieger adds.

        Summer of '42 book writer Hunter Foster, a University of Michigan grad, says, “The hardest thing is that you have to please the cynical New York audience, which are about 1% of the people who see a show. The audiences who come to Broadway musicals are from the Midwest, the South. Those are the people who matter.”

        What might mark this as the beginning of something big is that the years spent investing in young talent are starting to pay off. Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who won the 1993 Rosenthal New Play Prize for Scotland Road, introduced the Ducky team to the Playhouse.

        University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music has graduated some of Broadway's biggest names, including Kevin McCollum (producer of Rent) and Stephen Flaherty (composer of Ragtime and Suessical). This year CCM is inviting some top creative names to its campus.
       

A perfect-size theater

       

        Dayton theaters in particular are being aggressive about new musicals. Victoria executive director Dione Kennedy pursued Summer of '42. The Victoria's 1,200 seats, “the size of a small Broadway theater,” Mr. Foster notes, is an exact fit for the chamber-sized musical. “If we have any plans for Broadway, this is the perfect venue to test the show.”

        The adjacent Human Race Theatre started a musical workshop series last season (which continues this fall) overseen by the theater's managing director, Kevin Moore. A series of composer-lyricist teams have been slipping into town to work on shows out of the spotlight.

        All this serious intent may never develop into a straight line from southwest Ohio to Broadway, but there's already a huge pay-off for regional audiences.
       

Lining up another project

       

        Ducky is inspired by rather than adapted from the fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling.” The converging fact is that the duckling is, of course, a swan.

        It was late 1994, during a lull in the pre-production of Side Show, that Mr. Russell and Mr. Krieger were kicking around ideas for a new project. Side Show was simmering, but Mr. Krieger has always taken the advice that Michael (A Chorus Line) Bennett offered when they were working on Dreamgirls: “Whatever you do, always make sure you have another project ready to go.”

        They were looking for something light after Side Show, which was based on a true story of joined twins who earned some small, freakish celebrity earlier in the century.

        “I was interested in doing something lighter, more fun,” Mr. Russell says. “I wanted to put the "comedy' back in musical.”

        He also wanted to know what happens when the denizens of the barnyard figure out the duck is a swan.

        They created a story line by early 1995, with heroine Serena becoming a super-model and taking up with a wolf and a drake. They wrote five songs. Then everything went on hold for a couple of years as Side Show headed to Broadway.

        In late '97 they returned to the duck. Serena's adventures, including finding herself almost literally in the soup, took on the break-neck pace of a '30s screwball comedy. The authors tapped director Gil Hoppe to direct, after seeing his work on Jackie: An American Life.
       

Room for everyone

       

        In Ducky, they agree, they are trying to create a hybrid, a real comedy in a real musical that is “hip to the current culture — a musical comedy for our time,” Mr. Krieger says.

        Mr. Russell finds that Ducky is suddenly part of a larger trend. “When we began, there was nothing, now musical comedies are everywhere — Suessical, The Full Monty, The Producers.”

        “We're happy for everyone to do well,” Mr. Krieger adds. “There's plenty of room for everyone.”

        After a year of readings, Ducky's first production was at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, Calif., the same theater to first stage Side Show after its Broadway run.

        Ducky lands in Cincinnati courtesy of playwright Hatcher, who joined the team as co-book writer about a year ago. He recommended Playhouse and often-partner Repertory Theatre of St. Louis as good places to work on the show. Artistic directors Ed Stern and Steve Woolf green-lighted a co-production, which opened in St. Louis in September.

        The Broadway-worthy cast includes Natalie Toro, who toured here in the title role of Evita two years ago and Tony nominee John Herrera (Edwin Drood).

        Ducky is still a work in process. There will be at least one new song for the Playhouse run. Then it's on to Anaheim, Calif., for a three-week run.

        The show has been optioned by three producers, which honks of a bright future. The thinking is the 2001-2002 Broadway season, but, Mr. Russell warns, “you can never predict in this business.”

        After a tiny pause he remarks speculatively, “There are several theaters open right now ...”
       

A learning experience

       

        Summer of '42 moved into the Victoria Theatre on Oct. 7 and began work on a major overhaul. Its first successful production was in a 200-seat theater with a stage to match. It is spending its time in Dayton “re-sizing and re-working three or four moments in the show,” Mr. Hunter said by phone from New York, just before flying here.

        The goal is to make the musical bigger without making it too big. What the creative team would like, Mr. Foster says, “is the smallest theater that's economically feasible,” preferably one that seats 800 to 1,100.

        “There are some rewritten scenes, and we'll spend time doing small things. We plan to adjust according to audience response. It's going to be a great learning experience.”

        Summer of '42 was a hit for movie audiences in the summer of '71, as they watched young Gary Grimes enjoy a coming-of-age through his crush on war bride Jennifer O'Neill.

        Mr. Foster was barely born when Summer of '42 was in its first run. He discovered it as a young teen “when I was going through the same adolescent haze,” he says, laughing. “It was sort of a taboo thing to watch at my house, my parents didn't like the younger boy-older woman stuff. So it was doubly enticing to sneak down to the TV.”

        Cut ahead to 1997, when '92 Michigan grad Mr. Foster had already performed on Broadway in a series of musicals including Grease!, Les Miz, King David and Footloose.

        He would never be so rude as to bite the hands that feed him, so when he says “I was getting tired of bad musicals,” he wouldn't dream of including the ones he has been in as examples.

        Mr. Foster did think he could write something just as good. He “sat down one day and wrote out the complete rough draft of how I envisioned it. Now there's hardly anything left,” he says, laughing.

        He optioned the rights to adapt the movie script and called his university buddy David Kirshenbaum, a composing major, who had been musical director for several shows at New York's off-Broadway York Theatre.

        Mr. Kirshenbaum rented the movie and they went to work for the next year and a half.

        Mr. Kirshenbaum wrote a score that weaves popular musical styles of the period, including boogie-woogie and swing, together with songs written “in a contemporary style that audiences can relate to.” He's a Jonathan (Rent) Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award winner for Summer of '42.

        After a reading in spring 1999, Summer of '42 was accepted by the New Works Festival in Ann Arbor, Mich., and the National Alliance of Musical Theatre annual festival in New York.
       

"Summer' stock

       

        The artistic team of Connecticut's famed Goodspeed Opera, which has already transferred 15 shows, including Annie, to Broadway, saw the show at both festivals and offered a summer 2000 slot at its experimental theater in Chester, Conn. Audiences loved Summer,and its run was extended by a week.

        The cast is Broadway ready, with Idina Menzel (a Tony Award nominee as Maureen in Rent) in the Jennifer O'Neill role and Bret Tabisel, a Tony nominee for big,leading the cast.

        “We'll sit down after Dayton,” Mr. Foster says, and weigh options. “The climate right now,” he says, makes a new York opening “look like late summer or fall 2001” but there have been “a lot of other offers including off-Broadway, London and regional theater.”
       

If you go
        Everything's Ducky

        When: 7 p.m. Tuesday (preview), then 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 17.

        Where: Playhouse in the Park Marx Theatre, Eden Park

        Tickets: Previews (Tuesday and Wednesday) $28; starting Thursday, $31-$43. Any unreserved tickets are half-price day of show when purchased at the Playhouse box office from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 421-3888.

        Summer of '42

        When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Oct. 22.

        Where: Victoria Theatre, 138 N. Main St., Dayton, Ohio

        Tickets: $26-$51. (937) 228-3630

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