Roger Bean

Roger Bean, creator of the long-running hits The Marvelous Wonderettes and Life Could Be a Dream, directs his latest musical, Summer of Love, in a Musical Theatre West production opening Saturday.

Summer of Love marks Bean’s third collaboration with MTW, following Wonderettes and The Andrews Brothers, but it is the first of Bean’s shows to have its world premiere at the theater’s venue, the Carpenter Center in Long Beach. With three collaborations with the company under his belt and more on the way, Bean has found a home at MTW.

As Bean discusses his latest collaboration in the MTW offices, he seems at ease. “So far it’s been a great partnership,” he says. “It’s been a good process and they really put their money where their mouth is. They said, ‘This is what we want to do’ and they have really supported it. This is the largest place I have opened a show [ the Carpenter Center seats 1,074]. Mostly I have opened in little 99 to 150 seat houses.”

Opening at a larger venue, instead of the small NoHo and Hollywood theaters where he worked with producers David Elzer and Peter Schneider, enabled Bean to create Summer of Love on a larger scale, with a cast of 12 actors. “This is my biggest show. It’s been fun to write for more people. I get to really flesh out the characters,” he says. “It’s been great having enough people to create a family onstage. Not a small family but a tribe. And it’s nice to be able to fill the stage.”

Set in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, Summer of Love follows the story of a runaway bride named Holly. Bean explains, “We discover through the course of the play why she is running away, what she is running away from.” Holly arrives in Golden Gate Park, where she finds a surrogate home in what Bean calls a “tribe” of hippies. “They have created their own family in the park and they are trying to draw her into it.”

Christine Horn, Eric Anderson, Melissa Mitchell, Victoria Strong, Doug Carpenter

The musical is set in 1967 or 1968, around the time that the actual summer of love took place. This setting allows Bean to branch out not just in terms of the size of the production but also in terms of content. “Most of the shows I’ve done in the past are fairly lighthearted. But this gets a little deeper because the stuff that happened in the late ’60s—I mean it was real. People were dying in the war and there was a lot of experimentation with drugs, and the civil rights movement; it’s all very serious stuff I haven’t touched on in my other plays. And I don’t shy away from it at all.”

Rather than focusing the plot on historical events, Bean uses the era as a backdrop for the action of the play. “We’re not surrounding an assassination or the huge election of ’68. And it’s not surrounding the actual summer of love. It is a story of an era as opposed to actual points in time.

“It’s still fairly safe for families,” he adds. “I would think twice about bringing a very young child.” He says he does not use any profanity in his shows. “It is the drug references that parents would probably want to think, ‘How old should my child be?’ It’s probably a PG-13 type of show.”

Although Bean covers more serious content in his new production, theatergoers can still expect to laugh. “It is comic. My stuff is always comic,” he says. “It is a coming of age story told with humor. But it’s definitely about a young girl and her coming to grips with what’s going on in the society around her, with her and her fiancé, and what’s happening in the world.”

When Bean creates a show, he is first inspired by music rather than ideas for a plot. “I fall in love with a specific era or type of music. For this, I started gathering everything from the late ’60s, some early ’70s, anything that had flower power or the hippie generation type of music.” Instead of CDs or cassettes to compile songs, he now uses iTunes to create playlists. “That’s how old I am,” he jokes.

Once Bean has created a playlist, he sits with the music and listens to it repeatedly. Through this process, he begins to come up with a plot. “After I begin listening I decide, ‘OK, what is this show? What could this show be about?’ I listen to it over and over, and pretty soon certain songs start to feel like they’re in the show.” One of the factors Bean takes into account when selecting songs for the score is whether or not they can easily be dramatized.

Christine Horn, Eric Anderson, and Victoria Strong

Unlike some other jukebox musicals, Bean does not alter the lyrics to the selected songs in the style of parody. He leaves the songs as is. “If they weren’t the same lyrics, then they wouldn’t have the same type of memory experience for the audience. So I am trying to re-create the way the lyrics are presented.”

It seems this is an ongoing process for Bean, who is running through ideas for new musicals even as he works on his current project. “My focus right now is really on this piece and how to give it what it wants. But there are probably three or four shows bubbling in my hopper,” he says. “It may be something for Musical Theatre West, if they still want something new from me. Or I might take it to a smaller house and do something with three or four people. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

Fans of Bean in the LA area won’t have to wait long for another one of his creations. In December, MTW will produce Bean’s popular follow-up to The Marvelous Wonderettes, entitled Winter Wonderettes. The show will mark his fourth collaboration with MTW. “And then we’ll see if they are going to keep me, if they’ll bring me back again. They may have had their fill!” Bean laughs.

Summer of Love, presented by Musical Theatre West, opens April 2; plays Thur.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat., 2 and 8 PM; Sun., 2 PM (and 7 PM April 10); ends April 17. Tickets: $30-$60. Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach; 562.856.1999, ex. 4 or www.musical.org.