INTERVIEW: ‘Two Strangers’ is the ultimate NYC musical
Photo: Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty star in Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by Vivacity with permission.
NEW YORK — Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) is a remarkably intimate and powerfully resonant musical that wowed audiences in London and is now set up for an extended run at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. The show comes to the Big Apple courtesy of writers Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, whose vision for this story is brought to life by director-choreographer Tim Jackson and two cast members: Christiani Pitts playing the character of Robin and Sam Tutty playing the character of Dougal.
The romantic comedy’s premise is hinted at in its unique title. Robin and Dougal are strangers to each other, but familial circumstances have brought them together. Dougal is in New York City, having traveled from the United Kingdom, because his father is marrying Robin’s sister, and Robin has been tasked with getting him set up in the city. Together, they decide to head out and experience the city while also picking up the wedding cake for the pending nuptials. Adventure ensues.
Jackson, who also choreographed the Tony-winning revival of Merrily We Roll Along, became attached to this property in quite the unique way. The original idea was not for him to be the director.
“We’re going back to 2018, so I got brought on as a dramaturg for the project,” Jackson said in a recent Zoom interview. “I was asked to come on board because one of the producers knew me from a while back. I’d music supervised Floyd Collins for him several years previously, and then we stayed in each other’s orbit. He had seen that I’d been getting involved in new musicals in any way I could. I was clearly passionate about it, and so he said, ‘We are not looking for a director at the moment, but would you come on board as a dramaturg and just shepherd the show through its first few workshops?’ And so, I was like, ‘Well, send me the material.’”
When Jackson received approximately 20 pages of the script and a few songs, he started reading what this adventure would be like. By page five, he stopped reading and called the producer: “‘Please, please don’t show this to anyone else. I love it so much. I really want to do it. Please let me do it.’ And the rest is history, I guess. That’s where we started off.”
The production started at the Kiln Theatre before it transferred to the West End and now Broadway. What enraptured Jackson seven years ago when he read the script was how clever the book was, which he said is a rarity with new musicals.
“I think it’s really unusual, especially in early drafts of musicals, to have a book that is so strong and jumped off the page,” he said. “The characters felt so fresh and real. They spoke like how people speak, rather than how sometimes we find people on stage speaking. I loved the ease of that, so I read those couple of pages, and after about two pages, there’s the song ‘New York.’ And I listened to that, and it was one of the biggest ear-worms and remains one of the biggest ear-worms that I know.”
That song finds Dougal enthusiastically singing about his love of New York and why he wants to savor his limited time in the city. Jackson said he loves that the character of Dougal can so easily find joy in everything and everyone, and the director can identify with those feelings of happy abandon.
“I just love people who have access to joy, and just seeing a character who seemed to put out exactly how I felt really when I first came to New York, that feeling of utter amazement and awe and the thrill of your expectations of what New York would be as a Brit, and then when you come here it’s even bigger and better and more special than you thought it could be,” the director said. “So I really connected to the script first, and then once I heard that first song, I was in.”
Jackson appreciates that the show has two different perspectives of living in New York. While Dougal is enamored of the sights and sounds, Robin is a local and not that interested in the tourist attractions. The director wanted to tap into both of these feelings, which will hopefully welcome tourists and locals to the audience of Two Strangers.
“I could see the show through both perspectives very easily because I feel like they’re really relatable characters,” he said. “My job as a director is to throw out as many tendrils to the audience of ways to make a show relatable and connectable, and then hopefully certain audience members will hook in one thing or hook in with another thing. I felt like there were endless possibilities with this one because these characters felt really human, so we all know what it’s like to live somewhere and grow a little jaded with it. And then someone visits that place, and then you begin to see the city through someone else’s eyes and get swept away with it. And equally we all know what it’s like to arrive somewhere and feel originally like it’s one way, and then by spending time around it, you see it in a different perspective. That felt really relatable to me.”
Jackson has a particular love for shows about families. He has a close relationship with his loved ones, and so he wanted to explore how Robin relates to her sister and how Dougal relates to his father (both of these family members remain off-stage in this two-hander).
“I’m also interested in stories about people finding a chosen family and different family dynamics and surrounding yourself with the people who love you and who you love, and making sure you’re making the right choices about who you are surrounding yourself with,” Jackson said. “And both of these characters are in a place in their lives where they need to take stock of what they have and not necessarily be looking for the greener grass, and I found that very relatable. And I think in a world where we are forever very concerned about what other people are up to, it’s sometimes hard to stop and take stock of what you already have. So in that way, it really spoke to me.”
Jackson added: “It’s so exciting to be seeing it with a New Yorker audience because there are lots of people who have said it’s made them fall in love with their city, and it’s reminded them why they moved here in the first place and why they stuck around for 20 years. I think it is a love letter from some Brits, but the writers have taken a great amount of care to do their research and spend a lot of time making sure that they are trying to represent the city in the best way possible. So, the tourists could hopefully come and watch it and feel like they were seeing the city that they’re experiencing, but also a New Yorker could come and also see the city they are experiencing as well. That’s what we hope for anyway.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), directed by Tim Jackson, continues at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
