Interview with Lori Mannette, writer of BRIDAL PARTY OF FIVE

Lori Mannette is an NYC-based playwright and librettist, with a sensible day job that has nothing to do with theater. With Joel Waggoner, she has written Carolina Breeze and Dead Woman Crossing; with Giuseppe Ritorto, she has written 3XL; with Helen Goldwyn, she has written Women of a Certain Age; and with Tony Greenlaw, she is writing a musical about icon Brownie Wise based on the biography Life of the Party by Bob Kealing. As a playwright, she has written Over the Hill, We Will Rise, and a collection of short plays entitled Roommates and Other Lovers. If the titles don’t make it clear, she loves writing for strong female characters and prides herself on having no wide-eyed ingenues in any of her stuff. Her works have been performed at venues including Goodspeed Opera House, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Repertory Company, Lincoln Center (Songbook Series), MITF, the Tank, etc. Proud member Mercury Musical Developments, Dramatists Guild. Former Dramatists Guild Musical Theater Fellow. MFA in Musical Theater Writing, NYU. BA in Dramatic Art, UNC-Chapel Hill.

What is your favorite musical and why?
Acknowledging there is a different between “favorite,” “best,” and “obsession-of-the-moment,” my favorite musical (and novel) is Les Miserables. It’s truly amazing to me how Boublil and Schoenberg are able to take such a dense and sprawling novel and not only stay true to the general plot, but also enhance the drama through musicality. Every time I listen, I find something new in it. I believe the best musical ever written is Cabaret, which I was fortunate enough to have directed during my time at Chapel Hill. And my obsession-of-the-moment is Great Comet, which very literally took my breath away. I have not stopped listening to it for a year.

What inspired you to write Bridal Party of Five and what do you hope the UNC community gets out of our production?
The song “Changing” was the first song Joel Waggoner and I ever wrote together. We created it our first year in graduate school, for an assignment on extended sequences. I knew as soon as we presented it for our class that it was something special; Joel and I have a writing chemistry that is very rare. We were then partnered to write a full-length musical for our second year of graduate school and submitted the plot to Bridal Party as well as Carolina Breeze. Our advisors told us to continue Carolina Breeze as our Master’s thesis and we put this on the back burner. Then picked it up again, and put it back down. And so it went through the years. It wasn’t finished until maybe last week? And I still don’t believe it’s actually done.

How do you think your work in student theater has helped you in your career/adult life?
I keep saying I’m going to write a book called “So Your Child Wants to be a Theater Major? (Don’t worry, it will all be ok)” which will extrapolate on this topic. Theater teaches collaboration, ingenuity, and dedication, among other skill sets. Also, people who spend hours and hours of time working on something they do not get paid for generally make fantastic employees. Plus, if you take an interest in the leadership roles, you’ll learn more about business than a lot of people with MBAs. Basically, you can learn anything you need to learn about any industry by doing theater.

What advice do you have for students looking to pursue work in the theater after graduation?
The thing that I’ve seen surprise so many people who pursue the arts is how mundane it is to do 8 shows a week as an actor or work on a script for 5 years and never see it lead anywhere. All through high school and college, people kept warning us how tough it is to constantly audition and deal with all the rejection and poverty. Most people then feel prepared for that. The thing no one tells you is that professional theater doesn’t FEEL anything like amateur theater. You aren’t performing works you love for people you love. I often wish I had opened a community theater instead of spending a fortune on graduate school. I’d probably be better off financially and much more fulfilled artistically.

What is your favorite Pauper memory?
This is harder to choose than my favorite musical, to be honest. If I have to pick, it would be opening night of Footloose in Spring 2005. I was shocked that Pauper had selected my proposal and allowed me to direct since I was only a freshman. An awful lot went wrong during the rehearsal process, but opening night was pure magic. The show was everything I wanted it to be and I felt absolutely certain that night that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. And us Footloosers still do the choreography to the closing number every chance we get! (shout out to Ashley Barbour, who choreographed that epic number).