Adventure, Spectacle, Mystery! This will be an adventure that is the culmination of years of contact building and relationships that I cultivated while I was a career musical theatre performer. I had the good fortune to work on this piece as an actress in an earlier incarnation. Some music remains, the book is completely different. The spirit is the same. The soaring spirit of the show is what has haunted me since that earlier time of developing it with Rob and Liv. Developing New Works musicals is exactly what excites me as a director now. The Vanishing Point creative team of Rob Hartmann (Book, Lyrics, and Music) and Liv Cummins (Book and Lyrics) has committed to be artists in residence for some of the project and tailor it to Carnegie Mellon under my direction. I am excited to announce that Rob plans to come to Pittsburgh in end of April, early May to tailor keys for our actors and begin work with me on an alteration to Act I that will debut here in October.
The project also has ties to my roots as a Vocal Performance undergraduate work at CMU. With involvement from Dr. Robert Page as mentor, a graduate student will be Conductor for the 3 or 4 piece pit. We will all work together to define the instrumentation that will best serve us. Rob then can begin the Carnegie Mellon orchestration based on that determination and add actors’ instrumental talents to a few moments in Act II. Dr. Page will work with me as a liason to the Music Department to engage the instrumentalists we need. Finally, I will be utilizing my background of vocal performance as the Music Director under the talented Thomas Douglas’ mentorship. With all of you on board now as well, I am ecstatic to begin!
Now, let’s talk about the story that encompasses Adventure (Amelia Earhart), Spectacle (Aimee Semple McPherson), and Mystery (Agatha Christie).
THE VANISHING POINT STORY
A musical comedy-fantasy, Vanishing Point brings these three strong women together on a road trip through time and space, as they recall their past and explore their future. They step in and out of one another’s lives to tell three unique stories and illustrate how everyone is ultimately connected.
Act One biographically theatricalizes each woman’s personal struggle through the chain of historical events that forces their subsequent disappearances: the moment of inception of their big dream, their thrilling rise to fame, their disillusioning loss of agency in the in the drive toward success, their despair over their exposure in the press, and their complete feeling of isolation from everyone around them.
Act Two delves into a performative fantasy of what possibly could ensue when three strong-willed and fascinating women are thrown together in a void of time and space. They methodically search for a way back to their lives, but by making the same mistakes, history repeats itself and they end up back where they started. It is only when they play each other’s parts and teach each other that it is healthy and fun to break the rules can they reclaim their individual agency. With the newly found support system and broadened outlook, they find their way back, control the chaos that once shattered their lives, and rewrite history.
