A new musical written by a student is performing this week.
The musical, written by music theater/music composition sophomore Simón Gómez, titled Keep Me in Mind, will go up at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, April 26 in the Medium Rehearsal Hall in Wanda L. Bass Music Center. The show, a free-to-attend staged reading, is directed by Rachel Necessary, acting senior.
“It’s a story about a mother and a daughter, and how their relationship changes across the years,” Gómez said. “I wanted to tell the story I saw my mom go through. My mom taking care of my own grandmother.”
Gómez said Keep Me in Mind follows a young woman named “Alice” and her mother “Elena” interacting in two different points in time, when Alice is 18 years old and when she is 28 years old. The basis of the show is the mother developing Alzheimer’s and the characters’ lives and relationships changing because of it.
“The story that I tell is in Elena’s last months. It’s about when she’s not verbal at all; she has about three months left to live,” Gómez said. “What I saw with my mother and my grandmother was years of degeneration. I saw my grandmother go from a fully functional human being to almost a vegetable.”
Gómez said one of the things he wanted to explore is the difficulty of being a mother.
“From day one, I was so impressed with how he wrote the mother/daughter relationship without being a daughter,” said Ginger Harris, acting sophomore and assistant director. “There’s just some things that are special about a mother/daughter relationship versus a mother/son relationship.”
Harris, along with being assistant director on the production, is also stage manager and the swing for the entire cast.
“If something happens to Uncle Gabe, he’s turning into Aunt Gabbie real quick,” Harris said. “Yeah, but I don’t anticipate that having to happen.”
Gómez came up with the concept about a year ago, after having already written two of the songs in the show a year before. He then wrote the production and had a reading done last semester. He subsequently edited the show, and rehearsals for this production began April 15.
“I think the version from last semester was just the structure, the basic skeleton, and I changed a lot of it,” Gómez said. “I added more songs, added more scenes, I fleshed out character relationships. I put muscle on the bones.”
After this staged reading, Gómez hopes to orchestrate the music, create a cast recording and demos and send the material to festivals and producers.
“It’s such a good show,” Harris said. “It’s just such a ridiculously good show, and Simón is so talented. It makes me feel radiant to watch something he poured his heart and his love into. And the music is just so good, and the script is so good. And I just can’t believe he did that with his brain. Simón is just so cool. I get to be part of something that is so cool.”
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