Doug Peck, music director for Candide—the current hit at the Goodman Theatre, already has four Joseph Jefferson awards for best musical direction to his credit. The list of venues he has worked for reads like a Who's Who of Chicago regional theater. This is particularly impressive because the energetic, talented and effervescently out Mr. Peck is 29 years old. "But," he said, "when you're working on a Leonard Bernstein show you feel old because, what was he—24, when he conducted the New York Philharmonic?"
An Evanston native and graduate of Northwestern University, Peck said that he chooses projects "that are fun and have great scores; it's a waste of my time to work on something that's not great, great music. I also don't like to work on projects where the job is for me to re-create something. I like to be creative and find a new sound for something and work with brilliant directors. I want to make sure my collaborators are great."
Working with the Tony-, Jeff- and MacArthur "genius" award-winning director Mary Zimmerman to craft a fresh and contemporary revival of the notoriously challenging Candide was a very satisfying and successful partnership.
"I tend to work in classical theater where you're taking an old piece, even of a dead playwright, and putting their words on the stage," Peck said. "Mary was creating a new book for us which she did so effortlessly that we didn't even realize it was a big deal sometimes. She brought in her new pages every day and there was a moment in the first, maybe second, week when she said to me, 'You know with my plays there's a composer who comes in and writes all my incidental music. You're that person on this project.'" Peck's challenge was to study the extensive Bernstein scores and select music and themes with which to create an underscore for some of the narrative scenes.
"We wanted to create characters that could have all of that going on but also be wickedly funny and Mary cast some fantastic comic actors. Hollis Resnik [ as The Old Lady ] makes a meal out of trying to sit down.
"I believe the very best musical performers are actors as well as singers. The wonderful thing that happened Candide is that Mary and I cast singing actors and then the singing wound up being really spectacular. The comment I keep hearing is that you can understand all the words. With opera singers you can't always understand all the words; with actors you can understand all the words."
A co-production of The Goodman and Washington, D.C.,'s Shakespeare Theatre Company ( STC ) , Candide will close in Chicago Sunday, Oct. 31, and travel to the capital for six weeks at STC. Peck, Zimmerman and the entire 19-member cast will relocate to D.C. for the entire run. "It's very important to me," said Peck. "The way that Mary works, the actors are part of the process, she writes the lines with the specific actor in mind."
One of those actors is Rob Linley, Peck's life partner and soon-to-be spouse. The couple live in Lincoln Square with their "very spoiled, very loved little black cat named after the jazz singer Shirley Horn." Peck and Linley, who plays The Anabaptist in Candide, work and play together in great harmony.
"We love going to the beach and traveling. My folks live in Santa Barbara California now and we go out to see them a couple times a year. Rob is from Iowa. Once Candide settles down we're going to take a big Iowa trip and see all the places Rob grew up. We enjoy going out to eat and we cook a lot, and work out. Something that I've gotten into because of Rob is antiquing. We go to the theater to support our friends. I'm also a big opera and classical music fan, so I spend a lot of money on that.
"We do love working together and seeking out projects. We're in the business of creating galas," Peck said, noting their work creating benefit concerts for clients such as Porchlight Theatre, Writers' Theatre, Court Theatre and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
"We're getting married in June; that's a huge thing now, planning the wedding. We're actually getting married in Chicago, even though it's not legal here. We will go to Iowa for the legal aspect, but we want to have the big event here and get married in front of all our friends. It's countercultural and against the grain and we want to do it anyway.
"I consider myself a political artist. The biggest issues I care about are health care and gay rights. My parents were hippies and were very, very politically active. I inherited that from them. My mom is a diversity consultant so those issues are huge for me, making sure everyone in this country has equality. Basic human rights are very important to me.
"The arts are tremendously political, especially concerning gay rights. In Bernstein's time, artists could not be out. We do acknowledge the fact that Bernstein chose to be married and have a family, even though he was homosexual, but the minute it became possible—he was tremendously activist. If Bernstein would have lived longer he would have been active [ in gay rights ] .
"Rob and I are eight years apart and he's at the end of one generation and I'm at the beginning of another. We're also from different parts of the country. His family was more conservative, mine liberal. Things are changing very quickly, we're at a tipping point. I feel that in 10 or 20 years we'll look back and not understand why there was a problem."
Peck's next project is with director Charles Newell. They are doing a revival of Porgy and Bess for Court Theatre, to open in May. This is Peck's tenth collaboration with Newell, who picked the George Gershwin classic two years ago and the team has workshopped with a group of African American actors to look at questions of stereotype and dialect in the play. "The actors were very open and said that they were not offended, that people still use this dialect. They encouraged us to pursue this project and tell it like we tell any other story that belongs on the stage with great music."
With a small cast and six-piece orchestra, suited to the intimate space of Court Theatre, this "Porgy" will be a very different experience for audiences than the full opera production done by the Chicago Lyric a few years ago. "We can serve the theater aspect," said Peck. "To do it in the size Gershwin intended is almost un-produceable by a theater company. I really want to address the folk quality of the music more, playing with key and arrangement. I'm tremendously excited for that journey."
Porgy is the last committed project on Peck's calendar. "Although the offers for the fall of the 2011-12 season have started to come in, we're also hoping for future life for Candide," Peck said. "Mary's shows have a conspicuously long afterlife. Maybe more regional theater. We're joking about going to Tokyo or London."
