For the first time, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts has co-commissioned a theater project.
The new fully staged musical, designed for younger audiences, is called “North.” Written by Irvine-based playwright and jazz singer/musician Ashli St. Armant, the tale is set in the 1850s and tells the story on enslaved Black people escaping north via the Underground Railroad.
The show was rehearsed in donated space at Segerstrom, with a workshop presentation in June. Four other venues around the country helped underwrite the work, which is expected to tour through 2023.
This week, “North” is being staged in several weekday performances for area school classes. It will also be presented to the general public as part of Segerstrom’s Family Explorer Series, but both performances in Samueli Theater are sold out.
In separate interviews, playwright Armant and Casey Reitz, the President of the Segerstrom Center, talked about the play and what lies ahead.
Q: Ashli, how did you come to write a musical for young people?
Armant: First, almost everything I do artistically is for kids, my niche. I have a band called Jazzy Ash and Deleting Lizard, singing and playing jazz. Beyond music, I also write a series of fiction books for children.
Ashli St. Armant, a playwright, jazz singer and musician who lives in Irvine, has written the children’s musical “North,” which tells the stories of enslaved people seeking to escape the South via the Underground Railroad. (Photo by Steve Lorentzen)
Q: Why a story about the Underground Railroad and of slaves and their attempt to escape?
Armant: In school, the history I learned about the 1800s before the Civil War could feel too one-dimensional: it was basically that people were slaves and then they died, while the heart and soul were elsewhere, in real-life experience. Digging deeper, what emerged for me was enslaved people having multifaceted lives with complications and many complicated experiences and feelings.
I mean, before, I had never thought somebody who was enslaved even having the audacity to laugh. But Black American musical samples from this time are playful as well as painful. And so, as sort of a musical nerdy deep dive for myself and also an homage to my ancestors, I wanted to convey a broader story of lives.
Q: How did the “North” project come to the Segerstrom Center?
Armant: My band and I were at Segerstrom in the fall of 2021. Meantime, music and narrative were happening, and my agent Sarah McCarthy came in as the show’s co-producer. She felt this could work on larger stages and reached out to other performing arts spaces where I’d been to see if they were interested in underwriting the work.
Reitz: Talena Mara, heading our education department, heard about “North” and we already really admired Ashli who has a lot of creative strengths, an actress and a singer as well as a writer. Also, her living in Irvine … that’s big for us forging ties with local artists, a goal going ahead.
With life opening up from the pandemic shutdown it seemed we could give a platform for something new and help support it and partner with other institutions … It was very exciting sounding.
Q: Beyond the study guides students and teachers bring back to their classrooms, what do you hope those seeing North will take away from the experience?
Armant: I poured my heart and soul into it, of course, but I’m interested in what people walk away with. These are fictional characters but based on real accounts that real people experienced. And I hope people who come out of it share with each other. what’s said over the dinner table and back in the classroom.
Reitz: At the most basic level, even just helping children understand what, say, the Underground Railroad was, because kids might think it was a literal railroad. But more than that, I’d hope that kids now, obviously very different life circumstances, share the commonalities of being human: “Oh, I can feel like what it’s like to be a boy trying to be free.”
Q: In the age of iPad and other electronic devices, how is live theater important in the lives of young people now?
Reitz: I could talk for hours about this. Screen time is nowhere as potent and immediate as when you are in the present, with others.
Beyond the intellectual and emotional growth that comes, for younger children particularly, “live” also teaches social norms and manners and when it’s OK to yell out and when you shouldn’t yell out, what it means to clap politely, respecting a quiet moment.
Plus, just the joy of a big outing that is shared, you can’t even compare that to sitting at home watching something on a screen.
Armant: I find social media and our connection to the internet and our disconnection from each other to be really draining and concerning. But theater is a safe haven because it requires us to really engage with one another and get in touch with ourselves.
A little different than theater, but my family recently went to a Kendrick Lamar concert, and the people sitting in front of us who we didn’t know kept turning back to us in the moment, reacting, like “Man, that was crazy, right?” Or, “Wasn’t that amazing?” And in this communal experience we were almost friends in the moment, together. … You can’t really experience that when you have it in your headphones.
Q: Going ahead, will Segerstrom, largely a presenter of performing arts created elsewhere, be more involved in creating things?
Reitz: Yes! My background in New York (Reitz had management roles at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Public Theater and Second Stage Theatre) was producing plays. This was one of the things when interviewing here in 2019 I made a point of, that Segerstrom could be successful at shepherding new work. Of course, life intervened so ideas went on hold.
So, this is another level of kind of artistic satisfaction and, frankly, an opportunity for us to gain some recognition outside of Orange County.
Casey Reitz, president of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, says the children’s musical “North” is the center’s first foray into new play development. (Photo by Todd Rosenburg)
Q: Is the Center going to concentrate on commissioning just young adult projects?
Reitz: Not solely. We intend to focus on adult theater and other possibilities. A key part will be to explore and develop creative partnerships with other institutions around the country, like what is happening with “North.” I believe partnerships are great in a lot of ways for the art itself.
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Q: Are there risks involved into transitioning into developing new works?
Reitz: There is a lot of risk taking involved with it. It’s a tough process. I mean, it’s basically, research and development and is usually very time consuming. And quite expensive.
It’s our long-range plan to, over the next five years, really bear down and figure out how to make this work. It’ll involve a pretty significant shift at the center, human resources as well as budgetary.
Q: When will we know more about this?
Reitz: My hope is within six months to a year — maybe longer, things don’t always happen in a straight line — we’ll announce programs involving new works.
With “North,” we’re proud to be a part of the creative journey Ashli is giving us.