Fall Springs: A Groundbreaking World Premiere Comes To Barrington Stage
The funny musical about fracking features a toe-tapping score and stories about hope and greed, love and angst.
When Niko Tsakalakos and Peter Sinn Nachtrieb began writing the musical Fall Springs seven years ago, they envisioned a spoof on melodramatic disaster movies (think The Poseidon Adventure) set in a “sinktown.” They developed a story about an economically ambitious and geologically imperiled town that risks its soul — and, literally, its stability — for the promise of riches from hydraulic fracking to unearth “the essential oils found in more than 65 percent of American cosmetics.” As they put together early workshop performances, the bedrock of the show shifted — just like the ground in the fictional town of Fall Springs — and they realized that they were writing what may be the first musical comedy with a climate-change consciousness.
“I never imagined there could be a funny musical about fracking, but Niko and Peter have written one,” says Julianne Boyd, the founder and artistic director of Barrington Stage Company (BSC) who is producing the world premiere of Fall Springs on its main stage (August 9–31). “What I love is that it’s a wholly original story — it’s not based on a book or movie like so many new musicals.”
Tsakalakos and Nachtrieb have crafted a score that combines pulsing indie-rock anthems and catchy, toe-tapping show tunes with nuanced vocal arrangements by Angelique Mouyis, who happens to be Tsakalakos’s wife. “Niko’s music is so joyful, and that permeates the show,” says Boyd. The songs in Fall Springs are short stories about hope, greed, fear, love, angst and the fraught relationship between adolescents and their parents. “It’s a really a heartfelt story,” says Nachtrieb, who wrote the show's book and collaborated on the lyrics. “There is so much soul in Niko’s music, and it pulls out the deep soul of the characters.”
The playwrights marvel at how life imitates art. The show’s heroine and conscience is the teenage geology geek Eloise Bradley (played by Amelie’s Alyse Alan Louis) who implores the adults in town to cease fracking or suffer the consequences of a man-made natural disaster. Last year, Tsakalakos and Nachtrieb discovered that Eloise has a real-life doppelganger: 16-year-old Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg who made worldwide headlines when she began protesting outside the Swedish parliament last year and will participate in the U.N. Climate Action Summit next month in New York. The men have mixed feelings about the tsunami of life-threatening climate events in the past year alone — from wildfires in California and floods in the Corn Belt to record-setting heat waves in Europe and melting glaciers in Greenland — which are poignant proof of the show’s timeliness.
PITTSFIELD PROTEGE
Tsakalakos is a homegrown talent. He spent his first summer in Pittsfield with BSC in 2007 as the personal assistant and driver for his NYU professor William Finn, who runs BSC’s Musical Theatre Lab. The following summer, he was performing a cabaret act at BSC called “Songs of a Night Owl,” and Finn featured him in an evening he curated called “Songs by Ridiculously Talented Composers and Lyricists You Probably Don't Know But Should.”
In 2009, by the pool in the Pittsfield backyard of BSC trustee Reba Evenchik, Tsakalakos began writing the cult musical comedy Pool Boy, which BSC presented in 2010 on its Stage 2. Pool Boy (written with Janet Allard) was based on the New Jersey-born composer’s experiences in Los Angeles waiting on the rich and famous at the elegant Hotel Bel-Air while also writing songs and performing with the rock band he’d formed with his brother and best friend. The garage band in Fall Springs is dear to Tsakalakos’s heart and essential to the show’s message. “The indie rock sound captures the nexus of teenage angst and an approaching apocalypse,” he says.
In 2012, Tskaalakos, who lives in New Jersey, and Nachtrieb, who lives in San Francisco, began collaborating long distance on Fall Springs. Every staged reading they’ve held since then has included three actors who are still with the show — Louis, Sam Heldt and Ken Marks. Ellen Harvey, who plays the villainous frackster (and who performed the role of Joanne in BSC's revival of Company in 2017) has been with the show since the 2016 workshop at the York Theatre. (Full disclosure: I was co-producer of that staged reading.)
THE CHOSEN
In 2017, Fall Springs was selected for a staged reading of its first act at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s annual Festival of New Musicals, which is the equivalent of speed dating for producers and composers. In the lobby after that performance, I ran into BSC’s Boyd, whom I’ve known for 15 years, and she was as ebullient as I’d ever seen her; it was clear that she’d been blown away and decided that BSC had to produce Fall Springs. So last summer, she hosted two staged readings in Pittsfield to gauge audience reaction, and the enthusiastic response confirmed her gut feeling that it was a crowd-pleaser.
BSC is giving Fall Springs everything it needs to succeed — a five-piece rock band in the pit, scenic design by Timothy Mackabee, costumes by Emily Rebholz, and a director, Stephen Brackett, who helmed Broadway’s Be More Chill. The inventive marketing includes a music video and SoCo Creamery’s special edition “Fall Springs Mudslide” ice cream, which will be sold at intermission.
The musical is more funny than preachy, but it is a morality tale. “It’s about generations that ignored warning signs,” says Nachtrieb. Adds Tsakalakos, “We know we are not going to change the world through a musical, but we do hope the show makes audiences reflect on their own choices.”
Dan Shaw is the co-founder and former co-editor of Rural Intelligence.
