Working: The Musical
In the early 70′s, A man named Studs Terkel published a booked called, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.” The books includes many stories and interviews with people who would talk about their work. Terkel found out many people who hated their jobs but some how found enjoyment even in the simplest of tasks. Years later, a musical version of Working made its debut on Broadway. The show was two acts long, and had a cast of seventeen performing numbers of stories, and features song by a number of different composers and lyricists.
Now, Working is being brought backed by audiences in a completely different spotlight. Other than the orginial number of songs, Stephen Schwartz and Lin-Manuel Miranda we’re brought into the picture and together added a couple more songs to the show. The stories have been rearranged and the cast has been cut down to six, three men and three women, and is now a 96 minute show without an intermission.
Today, The San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre was the current home for this revised production and has been give a first-class production. The Director Gordon Greenberg had an interesting concept to have the cast and crew as working people, so the dressing rooms were onstage on a two levels, while the third level contained the band and the stage manager (the person who calls the shows). The Stage Crew or the Dressers would come on stage to do a quick change with the cast, and all of the running crew get bows at te curtain call (which in theatre etiquette is prohibited, the crew is to never be seen unless other wise noted).
While watching the show I noticed that Greenberg paid close attention to detail when it came to placement of each character. When first finding out that there were only 6 cast members I was kind of skeptical about watching the show because there are over 20+ roles in the show itself, I thought it would lose the creativity if there were only 6 people playing a number of different roles. However, after watching the show I have to appluad Mr. Greenberg for making it work and take out the fact there were more characters than actors.
I’m sure every audience member who saw the show will have their favorite scene or song; a couple of mine were Marie-France Arcilla’s flight attendent monolouge, Adam Mosley being the arrogant hedge fund manager and hearing the new song written by Lin-Manuel Mirada “A Very Good Day” sung by Nehal Joshi and Marie-France Acilla. And Donna Lynne Champlin who did an amazing job singing the show’s big number written by Stephen Schwartz “It’s An Art” was completely magnificent.
Being that I have experience in the theatre world and have a good amount of knowledge about the technical aspets of a show I must say I did enjoy the lighting because not only was it harsh like a regular broadway musical would be but a lot of the lighting was subtle everyone who needed to be lit was lit at some point or another. And the projection design features when an actor would come on stage saying a monolouge or singing they’re solo. I thought that design aspect was really creative and helped give an understanding as to what was going on in the scene.
While Working has now had it’s final curtain call in San Diego. I wouldn’t mind seeing it tour in other major broadway bound cities. However, I feel that the show is not really set of a 3,000-seat San Diego Civic Theatre. How it would connect with audiences in a 1,000+ Broadway house is still in the air. Yet, Working is still working, so we’ll see.
..Until next time, check back often for more updates from the theatre world! 
