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Homegrown musical ‘Idaho!’ opens in Las Vegas with one eye on Broadway

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A rehearsal for Idaho! The Comedy Musical at the Smith Center on June 16, 2016.
Photo: Mikayla Whitmore

Our aerial invasion of the Gem State commenced on a September afternoon at Boise Airport, our troupe numbering eight in all, artists from assorted outposts. Co-writers, Buddy Sheffield hails from Biloxi, Mississippi and Keith Thompson is originally from Dothan, Alabama; Smith Center executives Myron Martin from Houston and Paul Beard from Madison, Wisconsin; director Matt Lenz from Rockford, Illinois; choreographer Michele Lynch from New York City and set designer Andy Walmsley from Blackpool, sometimes called the Las Vegas of England. A worldly bunch, with one shared characteristic: They’re puttin’ on a show set in the state we visited. Idaho! The Comedy Musical is an odd sort of project with an odd sort of history—it was actually conceived in Las Vegas and will premiere at the Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall. Previews run July 6-8, opening night is July 9 and the show concludes July 17.

At the time of this pilgrimage, the original draft of the Idaho! script had been completed, the songs finished. The characters had yet to be cast, but their personality traits and names—Ida Dunham, Whip Masters, Mavis White Eagle—had been established.

Somewhere in the general conversation about its path to fruition, I asked a question: “Have any of you ever been to Idaho?” I’m originally from Pocatello, the railroad town in the southeastern region of the state, home to Idaho State University. Comically, it turned out that nobody developing Idaho! had been to Idaho. Ever. So when we touched down in Boise for a three-day sprint through the state, there was palpable excitement about this fact-finding tour. As we walked through the airport, Sheffield, who penned most of the zingers in the show and is responsible for the “Men on Film” skits from In Living Color, stopped at a gift shop. He had spotted a large basket full of little Idaho Potato stuffed dolls.

He plucked one of the figures and gave it a squeeze. And in his Neil Armstrong-landing moment announced, “The only reason we are here is because I couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with Wyoming.”

‘Idaho! The Comedy Musical’ Dress Rehearsal

Sheffield’s mirth notwithstanding, this musical’s blueprint has been carefully and thoughtfully conceived, its origins dating back more than a decade, and its vision ambitious. The show is produced and financed by the Smith Center, and if these Idaho dreams are realized, the version staged at Reynolds Hall might well end up playing Broadway.

“Not only am I super-excited about Idaho!, I am super-excited about the Smith Center and Las Vegas becoming a place where shows get to be fully showcased in a way that might well lead to a Broadway run,” Martin says. Still, the big words for the show’s potential viability as a Broadway production are “might” and “dreams.”

First, the Smith Center show won’t be the fully realized version of the production. It runs the length of a proper musical with 29 songs (including reprises), but the scaled-back scenery designed isn’t what you’d see in New York. The charm of the show has been its simple, straightforward comedic appeal.

“I don’t want to get too far ahead, because there is no guarantee of [a Broadway run] happening,” Martin says, “but I am excited about how great it will be for our audiences to see this production while it’s still being formed, while it’s still in clay.”

For many years, Idaho! was not even clay—it was a powder-and-water project being formed in public through stripped-down performances dating to the mid-2000s. The co-masterminds were Sheffield and Thompson, who met while Sheffield was running a theater company in Biloxi. They’d swapped ideas about a musical based on Rodgers & Hammerstein productions like Oklahoma!, as if in the hands of Mel Brooks, with Sheffield saying, “We researched the location not at all. Part of the joke was that for two musical-theater people, Idaho and Oklahoma are completely interchangeable, because they’re west of New Jersey and we didn’t know anything about either one.”

A rehearsal for Idaho! The Comedy Musical at the Smith Center on June 16, 2016.

The first numbers from the musical were tested during a reading at UNLV’s Paul Harris Theater in 2005. The following April, such songs as “The Boys Are Never Put Out,” were sampled during the Composers Showcase at Suede restaurant. An early variation of the show was performed at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, where Idaho! won the Best of Fest Audience Prize.

With Thompson working in Las Vegas and Sheffield in LA, the creative partners continued to build a plot and a set of songs. In the early stages, the sense among the two writers was to keep the content lighthearted and appeal to a family audience. “Then Book of Mormon hit, and we were thinking, maybe we can make it a little more risqué,” Thompson says.

Thus, the show is often described as mature, bawdy but not vulgar. The central plot is a romantic yarn between Cassie Purdy, “a mail-order bride from Ohio,” (one of the states most often mistaken for Idaho, with Iowa being the other) and the very rich and equally smarmy Jed Strunk, “a real toad gagger who’s got the personality of a festered wart and enough money to buy every last spud in town,” according to the official plot synopsis.

When Cassie (Jessica Fontana) arrives in Idaho, she falls for the handsome Whip Masters (Nathaniel Hackmann), setting off a series of events that leads to three couples finding love in the most unlikely places.

The show’s script, and song lyrics, feel as if they’d be best accompanied by the comedic droning of a sad trombone or a crisp rim shot. From “Screw Up Your Courage”: “Life can be such a ball if you just grow a pair.” And from “Heck, It’s a Helluva Day”: “All the sheep are takin’ cover just in case all the gals are too quick!”

'Idaho!' Co-writers Visit Idaho

Sheffield says the setting, around 1900, was chosen to match that in Oklahoma!. “This is a time when it’s a little bit lawless,” Sheffield says. “This is not about Idaho as much as it is about the culture of musical theater. Idaho!, to me, is an American story, set in that time.

“Rodgers & Hammerstein had never been to Oklahoma. They probably got a key to the state after it became a hit, but I don’t think they knew anything about it in advance.”

The team’s trip through the state included tours of Idaho City, the State Capitol in Boise and the Idaho Potato Museum in Blackfoot. The education led to the whittling of a scene involving a twister (not common in Idaho) and the addition of “Pocatello Fellow,” which is sure to hit home.

During a tour of the Tiede family farm, which was founded in 1908, Lenz had pulled a tiny, baby potato from the thousands of spuds rolling off the ranch’s conveyor belts. He handed it to Sheffield and said, “Take this to Nina,” referring to Sheffield’s wife, the person who encouraged him to continue work on Idaho!. A couple of weeks ago, Sheffield sent a photo of the plant, which is thriving and has grown little sprouts.

As Lenz said in a group email with those who visited the state, “Heartwarming! That growth is a good omen, methinks!” It’s also a reminder that you should never, ever sell Idaho short. The musical is just opening, but the state is a winner.

Idaho! The Comedy Musical July 6-17, times vary, $19-$89. Smith Center, 702-749-2000.

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