Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter (and Westport resident) Sophie B. Hawkins first got the idea to pen a musical drama when she saw Fun Home on Broadway. That show, adapted from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of the same name, tells the story of a family dealing with and working through their trauma and dysfunction. “I thought: I have a story that is dynamic and moving, and I want to get it transcribed out of my heart and my brain and into a musical,” Sophie tells Westport Lifestyle. Though Sophie has written countless songs, including hits like “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” and “As I Lay Me Down,” putting songs together in a narrative structure was a new creative endeavor for her, so she took a workshop from Wicked’s music scribe Stephen Schwartz. “I learned a lot from him,” she says. “I learned I needed to write this musical.” And the musical she wrote? Entitled Birds of New York, it’s story about a woman and her 7 year-old-son, estranged from the rest of their family, who travel back to New York City to see her dying father. The show will be performed at the Westport Library on June 9 at 6:30 p.m. as a script in hand, directed by JoAnn M. Hunter and facilitated and promoted by Suzanne Krauss and Sue Westphal.
While initially writing Birds of New York, Sophie immediately embraced how the songwriting process for a show— with a cast full of varied, dynamic characters— differed from the intensely personal process of penning an album. “When I work on an album, I'm sitting down and saying, I want to write about my son, or a feeling about my son. I have a sense that the song is gonna end up on an album, and then I'll be playing it in front of my fans,” she says. “With this musical, it was completely different. It was more: how do I serve the bigger story? How do I be true to these characters who I love so much, but have so many aspects that are hard to justify?” The creativity exercised in inhabiting her characters’ motivations was invigorating, even when the characters themselves were making unsympathetic choices. “The mother— that character does so many unconscionable things, but she has reasons for all of it,” says Sophie. “I loved exploring her heart and soul and seeing things from her point of view in song—you're able to say things from this person that they could never say in spoken word. It made me fall in love with even the most difficult characters.” But despite the different writing style, fans of Sophie’s music will find much to love in the show. “My whole career has been based on the songwriting—that's why I still have the fans that I have,” she says. “That's what it's all about.”
This isn’t the first time Birds of New York has hit a Westport stage— it was originally performed in the Lucille Lortel Barn at the Westport Country Playhouse last June, which is where Suzanne Krauss and Sue Westphal saw it. “When we walked out, we were like: I don't know why this isn't on Broadway tomorrow,” says Suzanne. “It was the most incredible, poetic, beautiful journey of a story we’d ever seen.” And since then, Sophie has refined the characters and added new songs (in no small part thanks to input from fellow Westporters). “Every time you pick up a script to start rewriting it, something profound will happen, because you're opening yourself up to everything you've learned since the last time,” Sophie says. Performing it again, at the Library, is “the greatest chance in the world, because this town is just bubbling with creativity,” Sophie says. She made it her goal to work with “as many local people as possible” to continue to develop and enrich the work, and she can’t wait to share the newest version of Birds of New York with another Westport crowd. “The audience is going to see a musical in its developmental stages, and it's going to be so real,” Sophie says. “People are going to see something very raw: there’s no scenery, there’s no lighting, it’s just going to be the book and the songs and the great acting. And honestly? I like that part the best.”
Birds of New York will be performed on Monday, June 9 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in the Trefz Forum at the Westport Library, 20 Jesup Road. Tickets are $40. To purchase tickets or for more information, visit westportlibrary.org
“My whole career has been based on the songwriting. That's what it's all about.”