The Young and Restless Broadway Journey of Glory Days
Musical Therapy
Until very recently, Maryland natives Blaemire and Gardiner were average, if musically gifted, kids emphasis on kids. Nick, an active child who declared at nine he would be a professional ball player, tossed baseballs with his father before catching the theater bug and taking up music. An enthusiastic, articulate teen, he wrote songs—mostly about girls, attained and unattainable—and dreamed of performing on Broadway; standard fare for a young optimist in the suburbs. Meanwhile, just a few towns over, an equally talented but more introverted James worked as a child actor with twin brother Matthew while indulging his own love of music.
Blaemire and Gardiner met at age 16 as part of the local performance ensemble Young Americans of Washington. The new colleagues, each a predictable yin to the other's yang, didn't immediately hit it off. "We didn't become friends until we went to college," Gardiner says, "but we had a mutual respect." The two went separate ways after high school but kept in touch via the internet, Blaemire from the University of Michigan and Gardiner from the University of Maryland, where they both studied theater. Life was good—maybe even glorious from time to time.
In 2003, Blaemire was freshly home from freshman year when his idyllic "glory days" abruptly ended in the form of a traumatic fight among his closest high school friends. Emotionally bruised and youthfully baffled, Blaemire found himself alone at a piano, exorcising his demons. "This was my way to deal with how I felt about losing a couple of friends," he explains now. When the exorcism was complete, Blaemire had written a song titled "Open Road" which Broadway audiences will hear for themselves. More songs followed, as did a treatment for a slice-of-life tale about—what else?—four young men discovering their differences after their first year at college.
Feeling he was on to something, Blaemire reached out to Gardiner: "He played me a couple of songs and I thought, 'Wow. This is really good.' There were some scenes that weren't as fleshed out as others, but I thought it could work." Blaemire asked Gardiner if he would jump aboard as book writer, and Glory Days was born.
150 F-Words and Counting
Just three weeks later, Blaemire and Gardiner stood in a packed room of friends and family ready to present the first draft of their collaboration, then a crudely titled portrait of four friends that included more th an 150 uses of the f-word and eight pop-inspired songs. "We did our first reading of Ass Backwards [the show's original title] at a children's theater in Bethesda," Gardiner recalls almost witheringly. "Looking back, there was a certain level of immaturity that was truthful. When you put four guys together, for lack of a better phrase, it is about who has the biggest dick in the room. But that was also a little off-putting."
"We thought, 'We're brilliant! We figured out how to write a musical in three weeks!'" Blaemire adds, laughing. "Everyone told us quite the opposite." Gardiner's twin brother, Matthew, a directing student at Carnegie-Mellon who helmed the reading, admitted the story was good but didn't understand the point of it all. The criticisms were largely constructive however, and the boys were encouraged. Both returned to college invigorated by the process, eager to learn…well, everything.
They would get their first structured chance to do so a year later when both enrolled in Overtures, a summer theater intensive at The Kennedy Center. The program culminated one afternoon in a master class with venerable lyricist and director Richard Maltby, Jr. [Ain't Misbehavin', Fosse, The Pirate Queen]. In a roomful of students and professionals, Blaemire asked his partner about playing one of Ass Backward's songs for Maltby. "He replied that it was not a good idea," Blaemire says. "Of course, I did it anyway."
"I was embarrassed!" Gardiner exclaims now. "You know that fear. I was afraid that Richard would go, 'Well, that was terrible!'" Maltby did not think the song called "After All," another number Broadway audiences will hear was terrible. Rather, he pronounced the simple, straightforward tune an example of a perfect musical theater song. Aside from inspiring the pair to continue working, Maltby's validation and Blaemire's youthful composition caught the ear of director Eric Schaeffer, Overture's program head and the artistic director of Virginia's Signature Theatre. The director reached out, offering to shepherd the project as they developed it. "Nick and I, being the naive guys we we re, immediately thought, 'Oh! This means he wants to do it at Signature!'" Gardiner recalls. Schaeffer didn't—not yet, anyway—but became the volunteer mentor for the show, triggering three years of rewrites, readings and generation-gap-closing luck.
Gypsy Playwriting
Under Schaeffer's tutelage, Blaemire and Gardiner's generation-next project began to thrive. "The first script didn't know what it was trying to say," the director says in hindsight. "The boys [thought] the show had to have a huge message or event to work. I kept making them go back to telling an honest story with honest characters—as long as they stayed true to those characters, they could make the rules." The boys themselves, still separated by several states and collegiate obligations, worked via e-mail, phone and internet, reworking the script and adding a half dozen songs to the score. Every four months, Blaemire packed three volunteer U. of Michigan theater students into his car and drove east to meet Gardiner; the motley crew staged readings in Schaeffer's living room, where the director offered critiques and lessons in structure as the show began to take solid form.
The process wasn't always easy. "Every time we did it, we thought it was the ultimate version of the script," Gardiner says. "And Eric would go, 'Okay, this is on the right track —now think about this.'" Both young men admit there where times they wanted to quit, or at least work on something else. But Schaeffer proved to be the ideal mentor. "He wasn't trying to make the show speak to him," Gardiner explains. "He allowed us to discover our own voices and write the show we wanted to write." Ass Backwards, retitled Glory Days and shorn of dozens of curse words, progressed to a formal reading at Signature in 2006, paving the way for a concert performance at New York's Joe's Pub. Meanwhile, its creators studied, graduated college and went on to perform professionally as actors in regional and off-Broadway productions, Blaemire on the coasts and Gardiner in Virginia. Then, one day in 2007, their show was ready.
"I gave the finished draft to [brother] Matthew," Gardiner recalls. "By then, he was sick of reading drafts. I came into his room and he was crying. He said, 'Now I understand what this show is about.'" Glory Days, Blaemire and Gardiner's 85-minute slice-of-life piece about growing up, debuted at Signature Theatre in January 2008, directed by Schaeffer and assistant directed by Matthew Gardiner, by then a full-time member of Signature's staff. The show, starring Steven Booth as narrator Will, Andrew C. Call as macho Andy originally played by Charlie Brady, who was stolen by Lincoln Center's production of South Pacific, Jesse JP Johnson as sweetly empathetic Jack and Adam Halpin as peace-keeper Skip, attracted sold-out crowds. Reviews crowed success, audiences gushed and the creative duo had finished what they started. Or so they thought.
Broadway Babies
Schaeffer ticks off the rest of Glory Days' fairytale story: "The show was great at Signature; audiences responded to it in a universal way across all age brackets. Producers came in to see the show a nd embraced it. Two months later, it was in New York." The producers he mentions, including John O'Boyle and Ricky Stevens A Catered Affair, Is He Dead?, Richard E. Leopold and Lizzie Leopold, helped make Glory Days Signature's first direct-to-Broadway transfer. Blaemire beat his own creation to the Great White Way as a cast member in Cry-Baby, and Gardiner recently joined his partner in New York to be closer to the project.
Preparing for opening night, both remain, in true Blaemire/Gardiner style, a combination of audaciously positive and cautiously realistic. "My goal in writing this show was to commemorate this experience and get my generation down on paper, my frustrations and love for it," Blaemire explains. "But it's not just my baby anymore, it's a lot of people's baby."
The original friends whose fight inspired Blaemire's story have all made up, reunited…and work in show business. Ryan Watkinson, who inspired Andy and is now Blaemire's roommate, can currently be seen in Xanadu, while Brian Spitulnik, the basis for Jack, is appearing on Broadway in Chicago. Zak Kilberg, who inspired Skip, works in film—he can be seen devouring former porn star Jenna Jameson in the 2008 flick Zombie Strippers. Blaemire explains that the roles have been fictionalized and combined with people from Gardiner's childhood. But the original crew will be there opening night to support their friend, for better or worse. And Blaemire is ready. "As much as I welcome anyone's opinion, I have to stick to my guns. I'll survive. Because at the end of the day, it's just a musical."