The Boys from Nantucket
2016 · Playhouse on the Square
The Boys from Nantucket is a two-character musical comedy with a script by Ken Bradbury and original music by his former student and co-author John Love. The whole evening rests on two men in one room: Oscar Kanter, a seasoned New York playwright with a Broadway past, and Richard, a young writer who has talked his way into Oscar's office. Together they try to wrestle Herman Melville's Moby Dick into a stageworthy musical — and in the bargaining, the needling, and the late-night flights of invention, they keep colliding with the thing that really matters to both of them: the sheer, private joy of creation.
The show moves between bruising comedy and sudden tenderness. Oscar deflects with one-liners ("You took a homeless guy's only pair of pants?"); Richard reaches for something honest under the gags. The script's emotional spine surfaces in two big moments Bradbury returned to again and again in rehearsal — Oscar's "Damn you, Oscar, I need you" and Richard's quiet "I'm scared, Kid" — set against running riffs on whales, canaries, and the absurd machinery of musical comedy itself. In one of its sharpest scenes, Oscar improvises an entire over-the-top musical out of thin air ("Eat your heart out, CATS, we got Birds!"), skewering the very form the two of them are trying to write.
Bradbury wrote the part of the playwright for actor Jim Yale and the part of the young writer for John Love — two performers he describes as bringing out the best in each other. "The cool thing about Jim and John," he wrote in his program note, "they make each other laugh." In the same note he traced how the show came to be: leaving a performance of Genesis one night, Jim asked, "Why don't you write a show for John and I?" Bradbury, who had heard John "slam around on the piano a bit over the years," asked whether he thought he could write a musical — and the answer was the score for this one.
Musical Numbers
Act I
- "Oh, Where Did It Go?" — Oscar
- "Beyond the Horizon" — Richard
- "Give Me Adventure!" — Richard
Act II
- "Sing Your Canary Song!" — Oscar
- "The White Whale Blues" — Richard and Oscar
- "Beyond the Horizon" (reprise) — Richard and Oscar
Cast
- Richard — John Love
- Oscar — Jim Yale
Production Notes
- Script by Ken Bradbury; music by John Love, who also performed as Richard.
- Director: Ken Bradbury.
- Stage managers: Maryjane Million and Brenda Yale.
- The show was staged at the Playhouse on the Square and later toured, with announced runs at the Salem on Seventh Theatre in Petersburg (July 8 and 9) and the Hoogland Center for the Arts in Springfield (July 29, 30, and 31), where Gus Gordon produced. Rehearsal space was provided by the Jacksonville campus of Lincoln Land Community College.
- Bradbury's collaboration with both actors stretched back years: he met Jim Yale at auditions for Behind the Curtain and worked with him on Couplings, Genesis, Memories of Mom / Thinking of Dad, and Stoops; he first cast John Love as a grade-schooler in a Triopia production of Samson, then watched him grow into a leading actor and musician across central Illinois theatres.
- The program included a tongue-in-cheek "Glossary of Nantucket Terms," with mock-scholarly entries for Ahab, Ishmael, the Pequod, Queequeg ("does not appear in tonight's show since his name is too hard to spell"), and a whale defined as "a really big fish."
- Bradbury's directing notes from the run are unusually warm, full of small adjustments and open admiration — "such a joy to direct two guys when I do so little directing" — and a recurring reluctance to let the show close: "I'm really going to miss sitting on the front row of this one."