One Musical’s Epic Quest to Get to Broadway
From the moment she picked up Rick Riordan’s best-selling young-adult novel about a troubled 12-year old who discovers he’s the half-blood son of the Greek god Poseidon, Pasternack sensed she had something special in her hands. “I immediately started taking notes about how we could do this with a small cast, and the creative ways we could have a Minotaur and water,” she says. “But what I loved most about the book was its heart.”
Then the Greek gods smiled down on the theatre mortals: “Rick’s agent came to see a TheaterWorksUSA show and she fell in love,” says Pasternack. “She became an advocate for us and, little by little, we were granted the rights, first for a one-act musical and, eventually, a two-act version.”
Soon after TheaterWorksUSA got the green light, playwright Joe Tracz happened to be visiting his agent’s office and spotted a copy of The Lightning Thief on his desk. A huge fan of the book, he immediately asked, “Is someone adapting that? Please put me up for it!” He talked his way into a meeting with TheaterWorksUSA, where he was paired up with composer-lyricist Rob Rokicki to translate the story from the page to the stage.
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After that initial success, Tracz, Rokicki and director Stephen Brackett were asked to expand The Lightning Thief into a full-length musical. That incarnation ran at the Lucille Lortel in 2017, and later embarked on a 32-week national tour, stopping at cavernous venues such as Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center and New York’s Beacon Theatre.
Rather than adding more action sequences or flashy special effects, the creative team decided to retain the one-act’s low-tech charm while digging deeper into the narrative. “The idea was never about glossing up the effects, because stimulating the audience’s imagination was always such a big part of it,” says Tracz. “The larger format let us decompress the storytelling a bit. It let us give the characters a chance to breathe and live in the emotional stakes of the moment.”
Instead of racing from one obstacle to the next — what Tracz calls the “roller-coaster ride” of the one-act — the characters got to have moments of reflection, like a scene around a campfire, where the half-bloods all commiserate that “things couldn’t be worse, when your parents run the universe.” Annabeth, the brave and brilliant daughter of Athena, also got a crowd-pleasing girl-power anthem, “My Grand Plan.”
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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical. Go here to browse our current offers.
Marisa Cohen is a freelance writer in New York who can be heard singing show tunes with her two daughters at all hours of the day.
Top image: Jorrel Javier, Chris McCarrell, Kristin Stokes and James Hayden Rodriguez in The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical. Photos by Jeremy Daniel.
MARISA COHEN