It was a 1992 production of Candide at the Skylight Opera Theater's former space that first caught Josh Schmidt's attention -- and set him on a career in theater. "I can point to that particular experience," recalls the Milwaukee, WI native, talking by phone from his home in Brooklyn, which he shares with his wife of five years. He's leaving the next day to sound design The Merry Wives of Windsor at Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Then it's off to the Alley Theatre in Houston to work on Pygmalion before heading back to his hometown of Milwaukee.
However, these days, the 35-year-old Schmidt is better known as the composer and co-writer of the highly acclaimed Adding Machine - A Musical, which he wrote with the Skylight Opera in mind. Given the acclaim and accord Schmidt has received, he credits his Milwaukee experiences working with Skylight for where it has brought his work today, both as a composer and as a sound designer.
"Watching Jamie Johns, Richard Carsey and Mike Lorenz create the sounds that they did using two pianos and percussion influenced how I composed the orchestrations," he recalls. By 1996, Schmidt was working with Skylight, accompanying local veteran actors Tony Clements and Ray Jivoff (Mr. Zero in Skylight's current production) in their cabaret show. Carsey went on to hire the young Schmidt to be assistant musical director as well as to program synthesizers on the production of Wings.
His music composition and technology work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (he graduated in 1999) played a key role, as well, especially his chamber-music studies. There he saw how "one instrument could create five different sounds. You could glean a lot from that process," he says.
Schmidt and co-librettist Jason Loewith created a one-act musical adaptation of Elmer Rice's 1923 play of the same name. Adding Machine is an Expressionist drama centering on Mr. Zero, a workaday, everyman drudge who goes to the same job every day for 25 years. Rather than being rewarded for his years of service, Mr. Zero is replaced by a mechanical "adding machine." He murders his boss in a fit of rage.
So, how did Schmidt, a sound designer, get involved with composing music for a show like Adding Machine? "The show actually found me," Schmidt says. That, plus being in the right place sound designing at the right time.
Working at the Next Theater Company in Evanston, Artistic Director Jason Loewith (his future collaborator) asked Schmidt to compose the score. Loewith discovered that another Rice play, Street Scene had been adapted into a musical by Kurt Weill.
For someone who had not composed before, Schmidt did more than extremely well his first time out, given the critical acclaim and that they wrote the music in 19 days! "There's a saying among a lot of the people I work with that the first thing we should do is do the play and what's on the page and not change the play to do what you want the play to do."
Schmidt chose wisely and followed that sage advance in composing what's been a called a difficult score. Perhaps that has more to do with, as he points out, "every scene [being] written in a different way purposefully."
Adding Machine premiered at the Next Theater in 2007 under the direction of David Cromer, who also directed the highly successful off-Broadway production that opened the following year on February 25, 2008 at the Minetta Lane Theater, featuring many of the original cast members. The show was nominated for a slew of awards during the 2008 run and won the Outer Critics Circle Aware for New off-Broadway Musical as well the as the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, among others.
The show has been subsequently produced in Washington D.C., Boston, and Los Angeles. Schmidt's second musical, A Minister's Wife, recently opened in New York City at Lincoln Center to positive reviews (this musical is also based on a play, George Bernard Shaw's Candida).
And now, the theater that influenced the composer, Skylight Opera, will stage the most recent production, bringing the show and its composer full circle back to his "first" hometown. Despite his increasingly busy schedule, Schmidt will be in Milwaukee for Adding Machine's opening night May 20, 2011.
What does Schmidt hope his hometown audiences take away from his first show? "It's a cautionary tale, a dark, romantic comedy," he says. "What life is like when you live life based on what you think you deserve and are entitled to versus the status quo where you haven't risked anything beyond that. Hopefully you don't end up like Mr. Zero."
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