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MUSICAL MAN

By Aimee Larrabee |

Dallas has all the elements for a booming theater life: We’ve got the talented and renowned Adrian Hall at the Dallas Theater Center; we’ve got several new, innovative theatrical companies; we’ve got the facilities; and we’ve got a young, upwardly mobile population to comprise a healthy, active audience.

Now we also have Tom Key, the latest-and perhaps one of the best-boosts for Dallas theater.

Key is the man who brought us Cotton Patch Gospel, the longest-running musical in Dallas history-that “odd” musical with a religious theme that brought scores of Dallas-ites to their feet. When Cotton Patch Gospel closed after almost eight months on stage, Key wrote his adaptation of John Bunyan’s 300-year-old classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a musical that some critics predict will garner the same positive response as Key’s first production. Once Pilgrim’s Progress begins its road tour, Key has another project in the wings: He’s writing a musical about George Washington that will premiere in Dallas during the Republican National Convention.

Key and his family moved to Dallas when Cotton Patch’s tour ended here. But his decision was no accident. Key is a sort of one-man public relations firm for Dallas theater. He believes that Dallas is the perfect place to nurture a form of theater that has been dead for years: theater with morals -theater with a heaven and a hell.

Today, Key says, theater has become materialistic, and “if you’re [a] materialistic [playwright], you’ve eliminated 80 percent of your material- you’ve left out so much of the picture. When psychiatrists started taking the word ’sin’ out of our vocabulary, they took away something for us to work with.” Key quotes one of his favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor: “Evil isn’t interesting; sin is.”

Key, 32, believes that American audiences are hungry for this good-vs.-evil, right-and-wrong type of theater. He takes that theory one step further by saying that Dallas is the place to revive it, something he realized after Cotton Patch’s Dallas run, when scores of Dallas-ites phoned him to say that his production was the first theater they had seen in years.

Key thinks that the appeal of his theater productions reaches audiences beyond Dallas, too. Cotton Patch ran for 200 performances off-Broadway; The Pilgrim’s Progress will move to New York and London; and his uncompleted work may even go to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts when it leaves Dallas. After that, the play is destined to run on Broadway.

“It’s very wrong that a play has to be in New York before it can ever win an award,” he says. “Why not Dallas or LA? Numerically, we have the audience here. Dallas has a huge market, and audiences here should demand quality. There’s a healthy audience here that wasn’t being tapped. The problem with New York is that you get zeroed in on reaching the ’New York’ audience, but there’s a common way of thinking here.”

Key’s fans include some heavy hitters, too. Leaders in local Republican politics approached him several months ago with the idea of creating a musical similar to his first two that might catch national attention during the Republican Convention. Ironically, someone approached Key about Stephen Bransford’s new book (as yet unreleased), Riders of the Long Road, a story about the struggles of George Washington. Key began researching Washington himself, and thus was born the basis for his next show.

Key says that he will be involved in extensive research for about a month and then will spend about two months writing the piece. He says he hopes that composer Ken Medema, who wrote the music for The Pilgrim’s Progress, will also collaborate with him on his new project.

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