The sound of Penelope’s voice, of course, is open to invention. That makes me feel like we hopefully tapped into something that sounds like Penelope’s voice, not just Grace’s or Alex’s or Eva’s.” “But what I’m hearing from Alex and Eva,” McLean said, “is that it’s not necessarily just bespoke to Grace McLean - that it’s translating to Tatiana as well. Then professional and personal scheduling conflicts kept her from taking on the role at Hudson Valley Shakespeare. Through improvisation, they found what she called “the connective tissue” between the songs. If the character was Bechtel and Steinmetz’s when they brought her on, the three of them tailored it to fit McLean, who ultimately wrote the musical’s book with them. McLean borrowed Bechtel’s copy - “He tends to carry all of his little source material books around,” she said by phone - and in it she “saw the influence of this strong, witchy woman that they wanted to invoke in their Penelope.” The book that spoke powerfully to McLean was Madeline Miller’s novel “Circe,” in which Penelope and her loom figure vividly. To workshop the show, they asked the actor and writer Grace McLean - of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” and more recently of “Bad Cinderella” - to play Penelope. He and Steinmetz started shaping the songs into a musical. As the reopening of theaters started to seem possible, Bechtel had reason to keep writing. That’s not how the heart works.”īut hope was also in the mix. Like, you can’t just decide you’re done healing from a heartbreak. “Partly,” he said, “that was the cyclical, unpredicted and nonlinear nature of healing. What surprised him, after he had sent the tracks into the world, releasing them digitally on Bandcamp, was that new “Penelope” music kept showing up. The phrase that Bechtel uses to describe music appearing unbidden in his mind is “showing up,” which is how the album project had begun. “As it grew,” she said, “and we realized that there really was a character here and this really was a story, then office hours became the sort of dream time when we imagined what it would be like to live in a world where we could do live theater again, and where we could turn it into a show, but kind of couldn’t imagine what that world would look like.” “I never sat down to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to do an adaptation of “The Odyssey” from her point of view?’ It’s just, I was going through this large experience, and that character was within arm’s reach.” “I started writing songs from the point of view of Penelope,” he said. The music, then, was also fed by what he called his “terror and confusion and grief and longing for this thing that I have chosen to do with my life.” Bechtel was at home in Philadelphia, far from his partner in Boston, as their relationship fell apart - and as he wondered, with the nation’s stages shuttered, whether he would ever be able to work in theater again. A breakup album, really, begun in 2020 during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. The composer and lyricist Alex Bechtel didn’t go looking for Penelope, the mythical character in “The Odyssey” famed for her clever weaving and steadfast endurance of long abandonment.Īt a low moment in Bechtel’s romantic life, Penelope came to him, inspiring music that developed into a concept album.
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