Orange County Register

I received an e-mail from a David Janove, a Chapman University screenwriting student, the other day that got me intrigued.

He and his roommate, composition student Collin Martin, have come up with a hybrid form of entertainment — think of a musical with film elements — that sounds fascinating in concept and execution. It’s called “Jeb and Jeremiah: Alive in 2009!!! and it’s getting its world premiere this weekend.

Showtimes are 8 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday in the Irvine Lecture Hall at Chapman University. Tickets are $5.

Here’s Janove’s description:

“It’s about a famous silent comedy duo from the 1920s that time travels to the year 2009 and must find a way back home. It’s a show that involves a lot of multi-media; the set has several layers where various projections will be shown, and there is even a pre-filmed ten minute musical movie that is played in the middle of the production.”

Interested? Read my Q&A with Janove about the project.

Q. Where’d this idea come from?

A. The idea for the show stemmed from my love of both old comedy and
new comedy. The old-timey humor of vaudevillian comedians and silent-
film stars is still fairly unparalleled today, yet rehashing the old
jokes for the sake of it seemed bland… that’s why I wanted to put a
modern twist on it. Time travel seemed the obvious choice from there,
taking the humor of 1920s comedians, and putting them in a world of
drugs, sex and… hip hop. The club producing the show, The Players’
Society, is known for choosing very “out there” pieces; last
semester, they produced “Clue: The Musical” and in a few weeks, they
are doing a shadow production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. An
original musical comedy about time travel was right up their alley.

Q. How much research did you do into the silent-film era?

A. I did very little research into the actual 1920s era; any
historical information came straight from Wikipedia. The backbone of
my research came from my love of silent comedians like Buster Keaton
and Charlie Chaplin, but more importantly, the comedy duos Abbott and
Costello and Hope and Crosby. I watched hours of youtube videos of
clips from Hope and Crosby films and old Abbott and Costello
routines… there are even some homages to them in the show.

Q. How ius your roommate involved?

A. In the middle of the show, a pretaped 10-minute musical is shown of
an old movie that the title character ‘Jeb and Jeremiah’ made. Collin
Martin (the songwriter) wrote these five interlaced songs which we
recorded with our actors on our first rehearsal, and then went out
onto Chapman’s campus with an iPod player and lip synced the words
while we danced and played. The film includes a chase sequence, its
own time travel sequence complete with hokey special effects, and even
a Ingmar Bergman esque scene (think The Seventh Seal meets Charlie
Chaplin). It’s out there to say the least. My thought was that
whenever I see a theatre production, I always feel a little fidgety in
my seat when I watch actors for too long… so why not give the
audience a break and have them watch a movie in the middle of the show.

Q. How did you pay for all this?

A. The Players’ Society gets a small budget each semester to put on
various events, and a good amount of it is going to this production.
‘Jeb and Jeremiah’ is very home made though; the sets are constructed
from PVC pipes and bed sheets, the props are made from poster board,
etc. As far as musicals goes, this budget is fairly small- under a
thousand dollars. Most of that money should be made back in ticket
sales though.

Q. Where did your visual ideas come from?

A. This production is a very strange, hybrid form of entertainment,
and I came up with it when my house mates and I did our haunted house
last Halloween. All of of weren’t big fans of the kind of “pop-out”
scare tactics used in most Haunted Houses. So we constructed a show,
complete with a backstory played out on a website. It included pre-
taped video, fog machines, original music, and live murders. We put on
the entire production in our garage and staged it as a “crime scene”.
We’re employing a lot of the same tactics in “Jeb and Jeremiah” but
we’re going a few steps further. Besides live musical comedy and a
movie, we also have puppets, a (live) animated character, a light
show… and we’re re-creating heaven.

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