Desha County natives team up on familial 'musical journal'

Though they're a generation apart, both creators of a new musical drama premiering tonight at the Argenta Community Theater came from the tiny town of Watson in Desha County.

The south Arkansas county is the setting for During Wind and Rain, A Delta Family Album: 1895-1900, based on a true story and partially inspired by the Thomas Hardy poem of the same name, described as "the musical journal of the Joseph Hubbard Jones family" that overcomes hard times just before the turn of the 20th century.

Michael Rice, who created the music and lyrics and is conducting a nine-piece orchestra, graduated from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, before moving to New York in 1977. He was the original music supervisor for the off-Broadway hit Nunsense and conducted national tours, including one of Peter Pan starring Cathy Rigby.

The libretto is by Margaret Jones Bolsterli, whose ancestors populate the piece. She is professor emeritus of English at UA, where she taught for 25 years.

Rice says he was acquainted peripherally with her before, but didn't know her well until now.

"I'm 63, and I don't want to tell her age, but she's -- well, she's [considerably] older," he says. Ironically, perhaps, Rice says, Bolsterli's sister, Pauline, now deceased, was his Sunday School teacher at the Methodist church both families attended.

Bolsterli has written seven books, all published by the University of Arkansas Press. Six of them are about Arkansas, and three of those are memoirs about life in the Delta.

"In my mind, Margaret was a famous person who had gone off and been educated in the North and was teaching at Fayetteville," Rice explains. "I started writing her when she started publishing that series of books about Desha County. One is called Born in the Delta; one is called During Wind and Rain, but it's the history of the farm, it's not the story of our piece."

"Because I'm drawn to literature and the history of our roots, we just started communicating, and one day, she said, 'I have this story, if you ever want to look at it.'

"I was drawn to it -- it was a story from home, and the little children, even though it's set in 1895, I knew them when they were older adults."

Rice looked for a venue, and deemed the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, where he had done two shows in the 1980s with founder Cliff Baker -- the musical adaptation of Bertold Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and a pastiche about pageants called American Beauty -- to be too big.

So he connected with Argenta Community Theater and co-producer Vince Insalaco, who, through a working relationship with the Rep's former artistic director, Bob Hupp, re-connected Rice with the Rep. That, in turn, enabled the production to get a collaborative grant from the Arkansas Arts Council that is helping finance the production.

Initially, Rice called the piece an opera. "At times, it still feels like it," he says. "My roots are so musical theater, but you can hear my operatic influence. I just let the music take over and wrote what was inside."

Now, as director Judy Trice has added a few lines of dialogue here and there, it has become more a hybrid.

"I found that my writing is a lot of patter songs, melismatic, not concert aria stuff," Rice explains. "It's a cross between opera and a musical. That's why we decided to call it a musical drama."

Rice says he has tweaked Bolsterli's text here and there, "because our challenge is, Margaret is an academic writer of history, and that doesn't always make for the best musical book," he says. "I, in turn, have tried to be very good about warning her about everything I did."

Weekend on 04/20/2017