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Lest anyone confuse The Chalks, the three sisters serving up a workshop performance of a new musical on Saturday at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, with a straight-up country act, director Tom Caruso has a one-sentence characterization ready:
“I always say it’s like the Dixie Chicks meet Spinal Tap,” the director said in a telephone interview last week.
The aura of satiric mockumentary was reinforced in a separate interview by Leenya Rideout, who plays one of the Chalk sisters, Belva. Upon hearing Mr. Caruso’s simple summary, she immediately offered, “It’s like the Judds meet Flight of the Conchords.”
In fact, the group’s, and the show’s, origins date back to a time long before the deadpan absurdist delivery on HBO of the Flight of the Conchords, two pop star wannabes from New Zealand.
Kathryn Markey, who becomes Judelle Chalk for the group’s performances, said in a separate interview last week that she and the third Chalk sister, Mary Brienza, who plays Judeen, started writing together in the 1990s. The two women had developed the Chalks concept and were playing different stand-alone songs at club dates with another performer, who left the group some five years ago.
Ms. Rideout, who had been playing fiddle in a band supporting The Chalks, was invited to become the third sister and has been writing and performing with the group, as Belva, ever since.
Ms. Brienza said that The Chalks were born of sketch comedy that she and Ms. Markey were working on back in the ’90s. The idea for the band “came out of one element in an evening of characters and sketches,” she said. “A song I wrote, ‘The Only Jew in Tulsa,’ played at the end of an evening of sketch comedy, and people loved the characters.”
Over the years, she and Ms. Markey—and now Ms. Rideout—have fleshed out the characters and added considerable finesse. The group now has its own website, thechalks.com, where fans and internet surfers can learn about some of the sisters’ checkered history, like the loss of their recording contract with Burning Bush Records:
“During the Burning Bush years, Judelle and Belva got into their share of mischief and misdemeanors, but it was Judeen’s infamous sado-masochistic affair with her minister of music that cost The Chalks their career in Christian music. But there was one thing The
Chalks knew for sure—when the Lord closes a door, He always opens a window. So as soon as they could hot-wire a pickup, they were off to Nashville, a town where a past filled with shame, poverty and disgrace could only help one’s career opportunities. Before long, they had turned lemons into lemonade when the incident-inspired song ‘Hog Wild & Hog Tied’ (LP: ‘Straight Laced By Day, Black Lace By Night’) put The Chalks on the Country Music map.”
Put-on or historical fact? In the celebrity/scandal-dominated culture of the 21st century, it can be hard to tell. So-called exposés that would have been ridiculed as the stuff of tabloid fiction in years gone by now rate headlines in The New York Times. And the shifting ground between farfetched absurdity and the nightly fare on “Entertainment Tonight” is where satirists and sketch comics ply their trade and mine rich veins of laughter.
As Ms. Brienza put it, “We always go about our comedy in a serious way … social, political … expressed through our alter egos, who are fairly beloved.”
When the earliest iteration of The Chalks was gaining popularity and garnering lots of laughter, Ms. Markey and Ms. Brienza wanted to go beyond some rough planning of what they would say to introduce Chalks songs that could then provide the jumping-off point for improvisation.
“We wanted something that was more of a musical book version,” Ms. Markey said, “more of a plot, story, situation: giving a reason for why we were playing what we were playing, to make sense of it.”
The two women created a script (or “book” ) for a musical, and eventually submitted it to the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, but “nothing happened,” Ms. Markey said. Their next thought was to find a director who could work with them and their script to develop a musical for The Chalks.
As luck, or fate, would have it, last summer, Ms. Rideout was in a show, “Eternal Anniversary,” being directed by Mr. Caruso, whom she had known for some 14 years but had never worked with before. She played some of the group’s songs for him, and he liked what he heard. In a matter of days, the director and the three writer-performers agreed to team up to create a musical.
“We got together at Leenya’s apartment,” Mr. Caruso said, “and they went for it. The first number, Leenya’s dog started howling along with them, and immediately I knew that they had something special.”
The director, who has a house in Sag Harbor and had directed shows at Bay Street in the past, included a CD of The Chalks when he sent a proposal to Bay Street for a workshop production of “Murder for Two,” which he wound up directing at Bay Street in January.
Soon after, he got a call from Murphy Davis, one of the two artistic directors at Bay Street. “He said, ‘I’ve been listening to the CD in my car,’” Mr. Caruso recalled, “‘Is there a script? What can we do?’”
Saturday night’s show, “The Chalks, An American Family in Three Chords,” is being presented as part of “The Workshops” series at Bay Street, sponsored in part by the Lucille Lortel Foundation. “The Workshops series brings artists, writers, producers and audiences together to collaborate on the development of a new piece of theater,” Mr. Davis said. “This shared experience is integral to the understanding of the process and is invaluable to all involved.”
Looking forward eagerly to their workshop presentation in Sag Harbor, all three of the creators of The Chalks had high praise for Mr. Caruso. Ms. Rideout talked about his strengths in terms of script development as well as shaping a performance: “He has a great way of listening to material, and if something needs to be restructured, he can help to achieve that while still keeping the core of the story,” she said. “As a director, he helps you as an actor get to where you need to be. He’s very helpful and really there for you, but not intrusive. That’s a very hard line to walk.”
To help prospective theatergoers get an idea of what to expect on Saturday, the director and the three Chalk sisters were asked to sum up the essence of the new show in three words.
Director Tom Caruso offered, “Lovable family fun.”
Kathryn Markey opted for, “Fun, irreverent, rollicking.”
Leenya Rideout came up with, “Irreverent, dysfunctional, Country.”
And Mary Brienza chose “raucous, smartass, high-octane”—with the last a compound adjective that she was assured could count as one word.
All three women agreed, separately, that the characters they play and the material they get to present offer the perfect intersection of their interests and talents, cultivated over a lifetime of training, writing and performing.
As Ms. Brienza put it, “I can only write successful songs if there is a comedic element. I tried to write other kinds of material and it doesn’t work.
“The Chalks is a great vehicle for me: All my life since I was young, I was always acting, playing an instrument, singing, writing. The Chalks provides a platform for all of these. At my core, it is an organic place to be performing,” she said.
“I just want to be funny.”
“The Chalks, An American Family in Three Chords,” will be presented in a workshop production at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Saturday, February 27, at 8 p.m. Tickets, at $15 per person, will be available at the theater the night of the show, beginning at 7:30 p.m. For information, call 725-0818, or visit baystreet.org.
Andrew Botsford on Feb 23, 2010