SNAP! FEST 2004 presents BIG VOICE: God or Merman? June 3 - 20 2004 Call 341-2757 for tickets

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CAST & CREW

Jim Brochu (Book, Additional Lyrics,“Jim”)
On July 15, 2001 Jim Brochu’s caricature was hung on the wall of Sardi’s Restaurant in New York, a singular
tribute to a thirty-year show business career as an actor, writer, director and producer. A native of Brooklyn, Jim
produced his first show, a charity revue featuring the neighborhood kids, at the age of thirteen and four years
later was working on Broadway - selling orange drink at the back of the St. James Theatre during intermissions
of “Hello,Dolly!” After studying drama at Carnegie-Mellon University, where his classmate was celebrated Broadway composer
Stephen Schwartz, he returned to New York, got his BA in English from St. Francis College (Brooklyn) and made
his Broadway debut (on stage) as Christopher Sly in a revival of “The Taming Of The Shrew.” His off-Broadway
credits include Robert Lowell’s “Endicott And The Red Cross” at the American Place Theatre, Ephraim Kishon’s
“Unfair To Goliath” at the Cherry Lane,“Skye” at Lincoln Center and Frank Loesser’s “Greenwillow” for the Equity
Library Theatre.

While working as a stage actor, he appeared in two legendary commercials - first as a dancing raisin for Post
Raisin Bran and then as the “Lemon from Outerspace” with Madge the Manicurist for Palmolive. His television
work includes regular stints as Father James on “All My Children,” Judge Julius Weyburn on “The Young and The
Restless,”Officer Jerry Chandler on the cult-classic “Mary Hartman,Mary Hartman” and the befuddled bailiff on
NBC’s “Sirota’s Court” with Michael Constantine.

Although the part was small, he can also boast that he made his motion picture debut in “The Gang That
Couldn’t Shoot Straight” opposite another newcomer, Robert DeNiro. His acting career has taken him to
regional stages all over the United States, including the Washington Theatre Club, the Alliance Theatre in
Atlanta, two seasons at the Goodspeed Opera House where he originated the role of Flint in “Something’s
Afoot, and the DejaVu Theatre in Los Angeles where he won the Backstage West-Dramalogue Award as best
actor for his performance as Marvin in Robert Patrick’s “T-Shirts.”

While playing Tevye at the Waldo Astoria Dinner Theatre in Kansas City,Missouri - he bet the producer that he
could write a bad play in a week and won the bet.The play,“Cookin’With Gus” must not have been as bad as he
thought since it was immediately published by Samuel French and has since been performed all over the
United States and has been translated into several languages for productions all over the world. A huge hit in
Quebec, Canada; it was recently taped in French by HBO.

One play led to another and soon Jim was writing full time. For the theatre, he has written the comedies “The
Lucky O’Learys”with Helen Hunt and Kathleen Freeman,“Fat Chance” with Virginia Capers,“The Lady Of The
House”with Rue McClanahan and the off-Broadway smash hit musical,“The Last Session,” which he also
directed.

After “The Last Session’s”New York run (for which he received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations),
the show was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the ten best plays of the 1998-1999 Los Angeles
season, garnering him the Oscar Wilde Award and the GLAAD Media Award. Brochu won another Backstage
West Award for his direction of the show, along with the Los Angeles Drama Critic’s Circle Award as playwright.
In Hollywood, his comic writing ability came to the attention of Sid and Marty Krofft who hired him to write
their Saturday morning kid’s show “Wonderbug” and the prime-time NBC series “Pink Lady and Jeff,” which TV
Guide recently named as the worst TV show of all time.“It killed the variety form as we know it,” he says,“but it
was hard to write sketch comedy for two Japanese girl singers who spoke no English.”

He vowed not to write for TV until he got an offer he couldn’t refuse - a call from his idol, Lucille Ball, who had
read his play “The Lucky O’Learys” and thought it would be perfect for herself and Audrey Meadows. By the
time he finished writing the pilot for 20th Century Fox,Miss Ball was not up to doing the project and it never
developed.However, what did develop was a deep friendship between Ball and Brochu that resulted in them
spending every afternoon together until she died in 1989. Jim chronicled Lucy’s life as she told it to him over
the backgammon table in his book,“Lucy In The Afternoon,” published by William Morrow and named as an
alternate selection by The Literary Guild Book Club.

He branched into directing with a production of “Can Can” starring Yvonne DeCarlo at the Tropicana Hotel in
Atlantic City and has gone on to helm over 35 productions,working with John Travolta, Carol Channing,Donald
O’Connor, Garry Marshall, Sid Caesar, Red Buttons, Jerry Lewis, Florence Henderson,Donny Osmond, Larry
Hagman, Rip Taylor, Carol Lawrence, Betty Garrett, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Edie Adams, Fayard Nicolas, Penny
Singleton, JoAnne Worley, Perry King and Robert Morse.

As a producer, he has presented sixteen shows including the World Premiere of Tom Dulack’s “Shooting Craps”
with Harold Gould; the American premiere of Ben Elton’s “Popcorn” with Maxwell Caulfield and David Faustino;
the Los Angeles premiere of “Over The River And Through The Woods” with Joseph Campenella and Carol
Lawrence, Ray Cooney’s “Out Of Order” starring Mr. Cooney, Anne Rogers, Robert Mandan and Ian
Abercrombie,“The Play’s The Thing” starring Hal Linden,“Save It For The Stage’ starring Charles Nelson Reilly and
James Prideaux’s “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln” with Marcia Rodd, both winners of the Artistic Director Achievement
Award as Best Production.

On November 6, 2000 Jim and his partner of seventeen years, Steve Schalchlin,were presented a plaque from
Mayor Richard Riordan on behalf of the City of Los Angeles for their contribution to the Arts and for improving
the quality of life to the city.

In May of 2002, he was chosen by John Kander and Fred Ebb to direct the 30th anniversary production of “70,
Girls, 70” starring Charlotte Rae,Marni Nixon, Jane Kean, William Schallert at the El Portal Center for The Arts.
Brochu’s professional relationship with director Anthony Barnao began in 1978 when they co-created “The
Ronnie Rainbow Show” which was picked up by Paramount and went nowhere fast. Barnao recently directed
the West Coast premiere of Brochu’s comedy “Fat Chance” for the Blue Sphere Alliance at the Lex Theatre which
L.A.Weekly’s Neal Weaver called “an unmitigated delight.”

Jim currently lives in Los Angeles where, between theatrical assignments, he travels all over the world lecturing
about Broadway, Hollywood and the stars with whom he has worked. He is an active member of the Dramatists
Guild, Actors Equity Association, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and remains, as the New
York Times called him, a true “Man Of The Theatre.”

Steve Schalchlin (Composer, Lyricist, Pianist,“Steve”)
Steve Schalchlin, who plays keyboard, sings and acts in The Big Voice, is best known as the composer/lyricist of
The Last Session, which won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Production and Best Writing. It also won
the GLAAD Media Award for Best LA Theatrical Production, 6 Backstage West Garland Awards, PFLAG-LA Oscar
Wilde Award and one Ovation Award. In New York the show received two Best Musical nominations from the
New York Drama League and the NY Outer Critics Circle.He is a singer and pianist who travels extensively
delivering AIDS education concerts to colleges and universities such as Harvard and Stanford. His home page,
Living In The Bonus Round has been awarded Landmark status by Yahoo/GeoCities. Steve (and Jim) have been
profiled in the NY Times, LA Times, People Magazine, Arts & Understanding, APLA and many other national
magazines.

Musically, Steve began his career playing piano for his father’s Baptist congregrations beginning at the age of
10. As a kid, he fell in love with the Top 40 radio of the time. His family had moved to Southern California and he
grew up listening to The Beatles,The Monkees, Crosby, Stills,Nash & Young, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater
Revival, plus artrock bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer,YES and Moody Blues. Plus, he loved California bands.
Then, when he was in junior high, his family moved back to southeast Texas, where he fell in love with the local
Gospel blues of bands like Edgar Winter’s White Trash and Janis Joplin. He then spent two years at Jacksonville
Baptist College in Texas where he majored in Music Education (earning an AA degree), thriving in the Gospelbased
music department. By his second year, he was arranging for the male quartet, mixed vocal ensemble,
female trio and grand choir. Pianistically, he learned a Bach Three Part Invention and several Chopin Preludes,
but classical performance was not his passion. He loved songwriting, composing pieces for the choir.
After college he stayed in East Texas traveling in a “Baptist rock and roll band” for five years.Then, he drifted to
Dallas by way of waiting tables and was introduced to theatre music in his 20s when he began singing and
dancing (and waiting tables) at the Gran’ Crystal Palace in Dallas.

Soon, he moved to New York City where he began rediscovering theatre music.He waited tables up on
Columbus Ave. until he wandered into a piano bar on West 57th Street and got a job singing and playing, which
caught the attention of legendary literary agent,Mitch Douglas.

After met Mr. Brochu and a new partnership was forged, together they moved to Los Angeles.
The music of The Big Voice represents a fusion of grass roots Gospel and Blues, acoustic piano-based ballads,
rock and roll and musical theatre.

He currently volunteers as Board Chair for Youth Guardian Services which provides peer counseling to GLBT
youth.

Media appearances include MSNBC,“Extra!”, the syndicated “Talk Or Walk,”Michael Jackson’s radio show on
KABC in Los Angeles, the syndicated news insert “CyberGuy” and many others.

Anthony Barnao (Director)
Trained under Jose Quintero, Anthony’s New York directing credits include Come Back Little Sheba,Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Wolf?, Aria Da Capo, Lovers and Other Strangers,Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Jaques Brel. Los
Angeles credits include the world premieres of Being of Sound Mind,The Last Chance CafÈ, Clone, Peep Show, In
the Bargain (with Catherine Keener) and the revival of Bullpen (with Patrick Warburton). As the Artistic Director
of Blue Sphere Alliance, Anthony directed its first studio production of Chamber Music, its first main stage
production of Nagasaki Dust, Indian Wants the Bronx in its evening of one acts entitled New York to Nashville,
the thirtieth anniversary production of Lovers and Other Strangers, the world premieres of Jim Brochu’s Fat
Chance,The Great Experiment?, Children of Shame, Home Sweet Hell, (LA Weekly Award Winner), Souls In Flight,
Fifth & Spring,Dance Upon Nothing, the west coast premieres of Tennessee Williams’ Something Cloudy,
Something Clear, Louise Page’s Tissue, an evening of Tennessee Williams one acts entitled Six By Tenn and
revivals of Being of Sound Mind,Neil Simon’s Fools,David and Lisa and several pieces in the Solos in Harmony
series. Film directing credits include the feature Annie’s Garden starring Yancy Butler and Grace Zabriskie and
the comedy short The Home Branch. As a member of Immediate Theatre, Anthony produced The Ghostman and
the critically acclaimed one-woman show Spirit Awakening. He has also worked extensively as a casting
director for film, television and theatre and cast the original workshop production of The Last Session. In
addition, Anthony also teaches acting, cold reading and coaches privately.

Big Voice deals with religion, love and laughter
Julien R. Fielding, PerformanceOmaha.com

This article was originally printed in the May 26, 2004, issue of Performance Omaha

When Jim Brochu was a boy, he dreamed of becoming the first pope from Brooklyn. Steve Schalchlin grew up the son of a Baptist minister. Both men had a religious upbringing, but because they are gay they also experienced a crisis of faith.

“I’m still very spiritual,” Brochu said from his Los Angeles home. “But I don’t believe in religion.” He’s also had a religious experience but not in a church. His came at the theater. His father, who was a friend of Ethel Merman’s father, had house seats to see Gypsy, which he took his 13-year-old son to. “She was a force of nature,” Brochu recalled. “She planted her feet on the stage and sang over the orchestra. When I heard her I thought, ‘What is this?’”

He uses this experience in his and Schalchlin’s musical The Big Voice: God or Merman, which the men will perform at the SNAP! Theatre, June 3-20. The couple of nearly 20 years had a hit with The Last Session at the Laguna Playhouse in California during its 1998-99 season, so Brochu was asked to submit something else. “It was going to be one-night only,” he said. “I’m not good at improv, so I wrote it out. (Steve) had been working on about 10 songs for 18 months – they are wonderful story songs – and we modified them and reworked them (for Big Voice)”

The fully produced, staged reading debuted in early August 2002. The response was so positive that one month later, the show moved to the Lex Theatre in Hollywood where it was workshopped for three weeks. “Things really started to happen,” Brochu said. In October 2003, the two-man show next went to the Zephyr Theatre, where it was extended three times. The reviews were effusive; the awards forthcoming. The highest accolade was earning the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical Score. In L.A., the audiences were initially comprised of older Jewish couples who told their friends, Brochu said. As word got out, the house was a 50:50 mix of straight and gay. “That’s been the pattern,” he said. “The Big Voice isn’t about being gay, it’s about a relationship.”

“With so much in the news about gay marriage, people are curious to see what it looks like,” Schalchlin said. (He recently attended a conservative Christian conference, where he talked about his sexuality and history, and he said people’s mouths fell open when he said he tried not to be gay until he fell in love. “They didn’t realize that gay people fall in love,” he said. “It’s because there has been a dehumanization of gay people.”)

Since the show was destined for bigger things, The Big Voice left California for Houston, where it was mounted at the Stages Repertory Theatre. In March it opened in Chicago, and next week it has its Omaha premiere. Although this will be Brochu’s first time to Nebraska, it won’t be Schalchlin’s. He came to town in 1999 when SNAP! presented The Last Session for SNAP!fest. “They brought me in to do some educational programming for church and school groups, and I oversaw the staging,” he said. “It had a young cast and we all fell in love with each other. I fell in love with the city, and the people.”

The Big Voice is an autobiographical piece with minimal set and costumes. “We play ourselves,” Brochu said. “I had to gain 50 pounds to play the character.”

“He’s much, much older than I am,” Schalchlin said. “We kid each other a lot. People can relate to us differently. He has been in the theater his whole life, and has the quick wit and repartee. I have the rock ‘n’ roll gospel background.”

“I’m the lovable one and he’s the obnoxious one,” Brochu said. “In between the sparkling (dialogue), you hear Steve’s incredible music.”

Brochu was born in 1946. His mother died when he was two years old, so his father, who worked on Wall Street, raised him. “My father was a good friend of Ethel Merman’s father,” he said. “I grew up wanting to be the pope, but after Gypsy I wanted to be a stripper.”

At 16 years old, Brochu was selling orange drink at the back of the St. James Theatre during intermissions of Hello, Dolly! (He got his Equity card for acting in the Robert Lowell play, Endicott and the Red Cross, which also starred the late Spalding Gray.)

My father wanted to be an actor, and he could have been,” he said. “He was very handsome and when he was a young man, he looked like Jimmy Stewart. He was engaged to Joan Crawford. He was very supportive of me.” When it was time to attend college, Brochu went to Carnegie-Mellon University to study drama. When he found it was “all theory bullshit,” he quit and returned to New York. He eventually got an English degree from St. Francis College. Of acting, he said, “You have to get up and do it.”

Brochu started writing for television in 1975, and even contributed to Sid and Marty Kroff’s Wonderbug, a program about three teen-agers who ride around in a dune buggy. This "Schlepcar" helps them stop evildoers when they honk a magical horn. “I did pilots for Disney and wrote one of the ‘worst television programs ever’ called Pink Lady and Jeff,” he said. (The 1970s variety show featured two female Japanese singers who didn’t speak a word of English and a stand-up comedian.)

It was a fluke that he started writing for the stage. He was playing Tevye in Kansas City, Mo., when he bet the producer that, “I can write a bad play in one week.” The result was Cooking With Gus, which he sent to Samuel French in 1980. To his surprise the company published it. “It gets done all over the place,” he said. “It’s even been translated into French; it’s a huge hit in Quebec.” In the last 20 or so years, he has scripted eight plays and one best-selling book, Lucy in the Afternoon, which is a biography of Lucille Ball. “I became Lucy’s best friend during the last years of her life,” he said. He also maintained contact with Merman, who he bumped into off and on throughout her life.

Schalchlin’s story is a bit more low key. He began his musical career at 10 years old, playing piano for his father’s congregations. After high school, he attended Jacksonville Baptist College in Texas where he majored in music education. He stayed in Texas after graduation, traveling in a Baptist rock ‘n’ roll band for five years.

He was introduced to musical theater at the Gran’ Crystal Palace in Dallas, where he sang, danced and waited tables. He moved to New York and was “discovered” by literary agent, Mitch Douglas. This lead to another move, this time to Los Angeles. He and Brochu met on a cruise ship in 1985 and they have been more or less together ever since. In the Big Voice, they tell their story of how they “pursued religion, found theater, fell in love, fell apart, put their lives back together, and sang about it.”

“It is respectful; we don’t have an agenda,” Schalchlin said. “If you want to bring a friend who’s not totally accepting to something that’s gay oriented, it’s very safe. Everybody likes us.”

After the show leaves Omaha, it eventually will land on off-Broadway. According to their Web site, www.thebigvoice.com, “the Broadway production will star John Lithgow and Harry Connick Jr. (Not that we've asked them yet, but it's time to get the rumor mill cranked).” With their run of luck, this prediction might not be too far off the mark.

The Big Voice: God or Merman? will be at the SNAP! Theatre June 3-20. For tickets, call 341-2757.

REVIEWS

Review: 'Big Voice' proclaims theatrical salvation

BY BOB FISCHBACH
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Jim Brochu writes rip-roaringly funny dialogue. And the gifted comedian knows how to use a look, body language and comic inflection to work an audience from a chuckle to a rolling laugh to a roar.

And why not laugh? It isn't every boy who believes his destiny is to be the first pope from Brooklyn, only to switch his hero worship from Pius XII to Ethel Merman.

Steve Schalchlin writes melodic, engaging tunes. His autobiographical lyrics are so seeringly honest about his journey from evangelical Southern Baptist boy to closeted gay to near-death from HIV to success on the musical stage, that his audiences share the emotional roller coaster in indelibly personal ways.

How the two of them met, fell in love and created musicals together is an improbable tale. How they tell that tale onstage is, it turns out, theatrical dynamite - all the more powerful because the writers perform the two-man show themselves, in fine tenor harmony.

"The Big Voice: God or Merman," heads to off-Broadway later this year, having won critics' awards in Los Angeles. Schalchlin and Brochu are still tweaking songs and dialogue, though it's hard to imagine the show getting that much better.

SNAP!Fest has already sold out three of the show's 12 nights in the Shelterbelt's tiny 55-seat venue. One reason, of course, is "The Last Session," another musical written by Schalchlin and Brochu that swept Omaha's 1999 Theater Arts Guild awards and won accolades on both coasts.

In an audience forum after Thursday's preview, Brochu said he wrote "The Big Voice" in about 10 days when a Laguna Beach, Calif., theater asked the pair to do an evening on how they created "The Last Session." Petrified of impromptu speaking, Brochu wrote a script. Schalchlin added songs. What was intended to be a one-night stand grew from there.

Schalchlin's tunes range from a Billy Joel-like sound on "The Closet" to the angry "One New Hell" to the plaintive and poignant "How Do You Fall Back in Love."

Enthusiasm for Thursday's preview was clear, marked by long, loud applause after songs, sustained periods of laughter and hushed moments that brought out the hankies. At final curtain, the crowd was on its feet before the duo hit center stage.

"The Big Voice" weaves threads of the partners' faith lives, their love lives and their stage lives into a moving and entertaining evening that swallows two hours in a heartbeat, then lingers in your head long after.

Schalchlin said he wanted not just to entertain but to take audiences to the depths of living with HIV, then serve up the healing power of hope. More than once the pair have been told their show has quashed suicidal urges.

"We started out wanting to save people in church," Schalchlin said. "We ended up saving them in the theater. And the theater saved us."

Big Voice is theater event of the summer
By J ulien R. Fielding, PerformanceOmaha.com

This review was originally printed in the June 17, 2004, issue of Performance Omaha

Every year SNAP! Productions brings new works to Omaha for SNAP!fest and, when possible, also has the playwright(s) on hand to answer the audience’s questions. This year, instead of presenting several shows the powers-that-be decided to stick with one show, The Big Voice: God or Merman, which the creators, Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin, perform.

According to the program, “the show was born in 2002, in a fully produced ‘staged reading’ at the Laguna Playhouse in California.” The show then opened at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood, for a three-week workshop. It transferred to the Zephyr Theatre in October 2003 and was extended three times. It has also been performed in Houston and Chicago. After it leaves Omaha, it’s onto New York where it will be performed off-Broadway.

This 2003 winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle is pure entertainment from beginning to end. Not only do you get witty one-liners and great stories full of truth and heartbreak, but you also listen to Billy Joelesque songs, as performed by the sensitive Schalchlin. It’s an amazing experience. And if you haven’t been “converted” to the power of the theater, this show will do it.

This material covers so much ground that it’s unlikely that anyone would go away unaffected. Both Brochu and Schalchlin were raised in religious households. Brochu dreamed of becoming the first Brooklyn born pope and was so devoted to this “calling” that he listened to Pope Pius XII’s greatest hits, practiced dispensing forgiveness in his bedroom and begged his father to take him on a pilgrimage of Europe. Schalchlin was the son of a Baptist preacher who at 10 went to be saved by the evangelist James Robinson

.
Both were left wanting, wondering “where is God?” Brochu’s flash of enlightenment didn’t come from the church, though, it came via the booming voice of Ethel Merman who he heard on a cast album of Annie Get Your Gun. (After all, you’re either a Judy queen or an Ethel queen, he said.) Schalchlin found his inspiration through music and pursued that by joining a Christian rock ‘n’ roll band.

Through words and song, The Big Voice chronicles the two men’s lives as they struggle with their homosexuality (“The Closet”), as they have a devastating brush with AIDS and how they meet, fall in love, break up and come back together. Watching this couple interact demonstrates why they’ve been together for two decades. They provide us with so many wonderful moments that are alternately funny, tragic and uplifting. It’s fitting that the Playhouse is still showing Annie Get Your Gun, because the two shows provide a great opportunity for cross-pollination. If you’ve seen Annie, you’ll understand why Brochu became so enamored with Merman.

Throughout his life, Brochu would bump into the big voiced star. Not only did she become for him a spiritual figure, but as he lost his own mother so early in his life, she also provided him with a mother surrogate. The moment that he shares with her at the end of the show is so touching that I could feel myself tearing up.

The Big Voice is the kind of show that brings the audience closer together. Even though I didn’t know the person who sat across the aisle from me, he and I would share little glances during the very funny parts. And the added benefit is that at the end of the show, the performers go to the front of the SNAP!/Shelterbelt lobby, where they shake hands, give hugs and chat. They are the most genuine guys that I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to. And you know what they say? The most talented are usually the nicest.

Once they hit New York, The Big Voice is going to take off and I wouldn’t be surprised if you see it getting a Tony nod one day. Tickets are probably sold out at the SNAP! theater, and I think they were after the first week, but get yourself on a waiting list. This is the show that you can’t miss. People will still be talking about this two years from now.

Thanks need to be directed at SNAP! for having the insight to bring such a tremendous show to town. It’s written so well that it has you laughing until you’re sick one minute – the moment of enlightenment had me nearly out of my seat and there’s a costume change that will kill you – and then your eyes are brimming with tears over the more tragic moments. This script keeps you on a roller coaster of emotion, so the best thing to do is to strap yourself in and enjoy the ride. And how could you not?

The Big Voice: God or Merman ends June 20. For tickets, go online to www.snapproductions.com.