Pictured from left: Julian Fleisher, Kristen Sieh, Stephanie Hayes and Eric Lochtefeld. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.
Pictured from left: Stephanie Hayes, Kristen Sieh and Julian Fleisher. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.
poser and lyricist, Gabriel Kahane. “Gabe was the right first person to commission,” Sperling feels. “There was something about his music that felt downtown and hip, but also sophisticated, complex and theatrical.” A native of California, Kahane grew up in a musical household, the son of concert pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane. His relatively brief career as a composer has already been incredibly varied, ranging from creating instrumental concert pieces for the likes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos
Quartet to recording his own eclectic albums of indie-rock/art songs. Kahane has also performed with a spectrum of other contemporary singer-songwriters, including Chris Thile, Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright. “My musical education was sort of on-and-off in terms of formal training,” Kahane admits. “I studied jazz piano at the New England Conservatory. So, when a fellow student at Brown University approached me about writing a musical I wasn’t really interested in the form. But, it kind of served to get me started writing music down, as opposed to improvising. That was my entrée into putting music on the page.” Since then, Kahane has had an ongoing relationship with the musical theater. He served as the music director for the boundary-pushing shows A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant and the West Coast production of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. And he wrote the score for an alt-country musical about the Prophet Muhammad, Caravan Man, for the Williamstown Theatre Festival. “Caravan Man was the show where I wrote my own theater lyrics for the first time,” Kahane adds. Kahane met book writer Seth Bockley when he arrived at Brown as a sophomore. “We graduated the same year and became fairly close friends in the last year and a half,” he says. “Seth and I had worked fleetingly
Bockley and Kahane’s portrait of unconventional young artists trying to make a new family for themselves has a timeless feeling… often as funny as it is touching. on a project or two that didn’t take shape and we’d been talking about other possible collaborations when the Public commissioned me to write February House. So, I mentioned the piece to him and he was very enthusiastic.” The two began writing together early in 2009. As a playwright, Bockley is perhaps best known for his work with Chicago’s sitespecific Redmoon Theater Company. He’s no stranger to literary adaptations, having written and directed stage versions of two short stories by bestselling satirist George Saunders. From time to time, Bockley also pens his own lyrics – as in his 2008 Depression-era CONTEMPORARY CULTURE//MAGAZINE
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