Moments Awake
Sun., July 10, 7 p.m., The Studio@620, 620 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg, 727-895-6620, thestudioat620.org.
Matthew Schwartz was starting to make it in Hollywood.
He and three friends, all recent grads of Skidmore College, had moved to L.A. together five years ago, hoping to translate their campus talents at music and sketch comedy into commercial success.
They did improv shows together. They sold a pilot to the Jim Henson Company and met with Stephen Spielberg’s producing partners about making a musical based on a character in Hook. Three years in, Schwartz started booking roles in commercials, first for Jack in the Box, then Target, Staples, Nintendo — usually as a stoner. “Almost across the board I was on a couch.”
(He thinks the typecasting had something to do with his coiffeur: “I have funny hair — big and Jewish and curly.”)
But something else was taking precedence, a project he was working on with his friend, actor Danny Tieger, that compelled him more than any of the others: a musical, Moments Awake, that will have its world premiere Sunday in a staged reading at Studio@620, directed by Bob Devin Jones.
“All this stuff happened that was exciting and cool,” the 30-year-old composer remembers, “and then we sat down and wrote the first song from Moments and I learned the difference between excitement and passion. I had more passion for that than for any of these things people long for.”
Commercial acting was just a job, and not a very dependable job at that. "Booking a commercial is like winning a small lottery."
But "sitting with wonderful people at a shitty piano and just writing music” — that, he realized, was the best thing in the world.
Moments was put on hold for a while when Tieger booked the role of Matilda’s brother in the national tour of Matilda The Musical (seen this season at the Straz). Then, last year, Schwartz's life took a turn: his grandmother died, his longtime girlfriend broke up with him, and he decided to move to Palm Harbor, where his parents had retired from their home in New Jersey. His plan was to take courses in coding at Iron Yard in St. Pete, then move to NYC, having heard that coding was becoming the new “go-to day job” for artists, “particularly musicians, who use similar parts of their brains to code as they would to write a song.”
But with Iron Yard’s accreditation on hold till July, that plan had to to go on hold as well. He took a phone sales job selling orthodontic braces to senior citizens, but rarely made quota “because I always wanted to tell them they didn’t need to spend $100 on a knee brace.” And then he heard from a friend of a friend of his mother’s about a guy who did theater in St. Pete: That guy was Bob Devin Jones, artistic director of The Studio@620.
“A few conversations later,” Schwartz was out of phone sales and in as the Studio’s new house manager. A few months after that, while stage managing and composing the music for the Studio’s production of a new play called Life is Mostly Straws, he pitched the idea to Devin Jones of a staged reading of Moments.
“As is his fashion,” says Schwartz, “the answer was ‘yes’.”
In the musical, a man and a woman see each other on a train platform, and the audience watches as their respective fantasies unfold (his about a life together, hers about a one-night stand). The what-if scenario may sound familiar; indeed, several friends who saw early readings of the musical in LA texted Matthew when word started to spread about If/Then, the Idina Menzel starrer which posits two opposing lives for its central character. But Schwartz, although he admits the "elevator pitch" for both might be superficially similar, says “ours is a very different show.”
Moments tells “two different stories [about two characters’ lives], and we play with time — his fantasy takes place over 30 years, hers over 22 hours." For example, he explains, "In one song, 'Baby Steps,' we bounce from moving in together, to marrying, to having a child. It's kind of like a relationship highlight reel."
In one of the two songs Schwartz shared with CL, "Penny's Crazy," the spiky rhythms and rueful wit vividly convey the self-doubt and "Oh, fuck it!" bravery of the female protagonist. And in the finale, both the man and the woman examine the distance between caution and courage, between dreaming and doing: "I've been afraid of starting," he sings, "because starting leads to ending."
One suspects the start that Schwartz is making on Sunday will lead to a very happy ending. He and Tieger are not only songwriters of great promise, they've teamed up with some highly pedigreed talent for Moments Awake. The script is by Annie Mebane, who writes for the acclaimed new sitcomThe Goldbergs and has written for such critical faves as Community and Happy Endings. A stellar local cast has been assembled to bring it all to life: Allison Burns, Justin Lore, Kylin Brady, Charlotte Pickard, Sharon Scott, and Jim Sorensen. And the Studio@620's Mr. Jones has been indispensable.
"I can’t overstate the importance of Bob," says Schwartz. "He’s been wonderful. The energy of that space, combined with the energy of some of the people I have met in that community and St. Pete as a whole, has been wonderful."
Who knows? He might just wind up reconsidering that whole move-to-New-York thing.
This article appears in Jul 7-14, 2016.