Three shows in, Tucson youth theater group ups its game 🎭

The fledgling Rigby Theater Company is taking its third production to its biggest stage when it mounts the original Western musical "Death Do Us Part" on Thursday and Friday, Aug. 7-8.

The youth company comprised of Tucson-area theater kids from middle through high school will perform in the 425-seat Proscenium Theatre at Pima Community College Center for the Arts.

The theater at Pima West, 2202 W. Anklam Road, is four times as big as the 100-seat Catalyst Creative Collective, Southern Arizona Arts and Cultural Alliance's space in Tucson Mall, where Rigby Theatre mounted its inaugural production “Young Playwrights Showcase” last October and the song cycle series "Bruisers" in early March.

The production also will involve a cast of 18 in addition to a live band that includes trumpet, upright bass, keyboards, guitar and drums. A student choreographer has created dances to complement the original songs penned by pianist/composer Ben Teller.

This is next level.

"I think we've leveled up our game significantly, and we have now written a full-length Western musical with 18 major numbers and a whole principal and ensemble cast," said Rigby founder/playwright Jacob Toole.

Toole said the songs range in length from two to six minutes, "which is our big opener."

"They're all these fun, kind of folksy, upbeat, little bit of country vibes in there. A lot of big fun horn sounds," Toole said. "I'll tell you right now, as somebody who has been working with these tracks for some time now, I love them. I tap my foot to them. They really invite so many possibilities in terms of where you're directing, where you're choreographing."

Teller said he was looking for a sound that straddled country and Western, with "a healthy dose of grandeur thrown in." The score also has nods to jazz and other "fun genres," he said. 

"We were looking for music that elicited the same emotions as those legendary outlaws — some combination of exciting, daring and haunting," he explained. "One of my favorite parts of writing music is discovering how to communicate the story and emotions that I can hear and feel in my head, and this involves experimenting with notes and instrumentation to be able to discover the emotions that best match the needs of the story and characters." 

"Composing for theater seems like solving puzzles to me — I can hear what a section of a song needs to accomplish and I just need to find the combination of 88 notes, spread over six instruments, that sounds like my imagination and solves my puzzle," Teller added. "Ultimately, writing a musical as a whole is just like writing one huge song — all of the music works together to solve the problem of 'How do we tell this story?'" 

This is the second collaboration between best friends Teller and Toole, who recently graduated from Salpointe Catholic High School. 

Teller has been Toole's right hand since Toole launched Rigby Theater Company as a way to give youths an independent theater outlet. The idea was to give young people control of the entire creative process, from performing on stage to working behind the scenes in production, from lighting and sound design, to writing original works, directing and choreography. 

The first two productions involved a handful of kids from middle through high school, representing schools from the greater Tucson area.

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"Death Do Us Part" has a cast five times that, "of which I am so proud," said Toole, who wrote the book and is directing and producing the production.

Toole said his story is "a little far out there": A young grave robber is guided by the spirit of a legendary outlaw to save the American Southwest from its greatest villains.

"And when I say the Southwest's greatest villains I'm talking about many of the famous historical outlaws like Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, Butch Cassidy and others," he explained. "A lot of these people are remembered because they created these inflated versions of themselves and how they would boast and how they would talk."

The story, which Toole described on Rigby Theater's website as "featuring high fantasy and darkly comic elements," follows grave robber Mikey Tucker, who is guided by the spirit of legendary bandit Jesse Sheppard on a journey to "save the American Southwest from the resurrection of its wickedest outlaws."

The uniquely Arizona story is set against a historical backdrop as it explores the perils of being fascinated with villains and the costs of emulating that glory in our own lives.

"That's always been a fascinating thing to me," Toole said. "I still think we are exploring that a bit, why we fascinate ourselves and the consequences of fascinating ourselves with these villains. ... It's a really fascinating piece in terms of its relation to history and its relation to all of these great figures, these great villains." 

Toole said the play's cast has a significant Salpointe presence as well as several kids from Ironwood Ridge High School. The leading man, Sylas Smith, is from Sahuarita.

This will be Toole's last production before going off to college at Northwestern University in Chicago and Teller's finale before leaving for Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, to study piano performance and math. 

Toole said he was drawn to Northwestern by its expansive student theater program and the resources it devotes to original student productions.

"I think that'll help me level up my game massively," he said. "And it'll also let me bring the mission of something like the Rigby Theater Company to a bigger audience and to more people with more resources. That's my end goal with that."

Teller said math and music go hand-in-hand.

"I see it as the perfect combination of the raw emotions embodied by music and the analytical and mathematical skills required to translate emotions into notes," he said. "I really see musical theater as one of the greatest artistic mediums as it combines so many of these facets of human nature to tell our stories."

Although Teller and Toole are leaving Tucson, Toole said he has no intention of ending or moving Rigby Theater once he leaves. He said he plans to have one of the youths who has been involved since the beginning carry on the productions. During school breaks, he plans to come back as a resident producer.

"This is a fundamentally Tucson organization, and I think so much of why it has worked has been the generosity so many other people in Tucson, all the connections that we made, and sort of the reputation in the community that we built in this city," he said. "And I think it would be a significant waste in a lot of ways to depart from that."