Seth Christenfeld.
Lyricist. Librettist. Dramaturg. Other Nouns.
THE BAD IDEAS OF JACK ANDREWS
Book and Lyrics by Seth Christenfeld
Music by Joseph Trefler
Night and rain and neon lights. A dead man lies on the floor of a bar, somewhere in the bad part of town. And now, he's gonna tell you how he ended up there. It's the story of a private eye, a femme fatale, and a whole lot of bad ideas.
The Bad Ideas of Jack Andrews is a darkly comic noirsical for three actors. The assignment was to take the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill," which has a beginning and an end but no middle, and turn it into a ten-minute musical with a complete story. We adapted it loosely--very loosely.
The Bad Ideas of Jack Andrews was initially conceived and developed at NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.
A revised version was a finalist for the 2014 Davenport Ten-Minute Play Contest. As part of the competition, the show had a staged reading at the Davenport Theatre on July 31st, 2014. The director was Jenny Leon, the music director was Britt Bonney, and the cast was as follows:
Jack: Sam Prince
Jill: Olivia Gjurich
Rick: Richard Binder
We recorded demos of two of the three songs (albeit in radically rearranged versions) in October 2013 with Jonathan Rayson as Jack, Madeline Fansler as Jill, and Emily Goldman on piano.