Red Rock Film Festival 2008

FOREVER PLAID is a musical comedy revue interspersed with witty and insightful banter about the love of music, and growing up, and “making one’s mark.” It is also about the everyday courage we need to face life, warts and all, kind of a swinging American version of “Happy Days” meets “The Full Monty” meets Tony Bennett (but more of that, later) chock full of all those “retro” songs that are cool again (e.g. Gwen Stefani’s, “If I were a Rich Man” and similar songs by Pink, Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake). As Peter Allen once sang, everything old is new again. The current worldwide total box office gross: $265,000,000 and rising. The show has played non-stop, worldwide for nearly twenty years. THE PLAY: The story is a simple one of four young men struggling to “make it” as a swing & standards “close harmony” group in those pre-Beatles, pre-“grassy knoll” days of our Perry Como innocence. So what’s the problem? They’re dead! Wiped out by a bus full of Catholic school girls while the lads were driving in their now iconic red ’54 Mercury convertible to their first real gig (at the “Fuselounge” in a local Pennsylvania airport). The schoolgirls, by the by, were okay. But a second opportunity is now heaven sent to the FOUR PLAIDS. They’ve been returned to Earth nearly 50 years later to put on the show they never performed in life. There are problems of course, not least of which is that they are dead, the ultimate fish-out-of-water. And then there are the more prosaic challenges, like remembering lyrics and moves that they haven’t sung or danced in over 40 years, and a nosebleed, and worse. As the PLAIDS mount the stage, a disembodied voice, heavenly in cadence, tells us about astral planes and harmonics and, in general, lays down the stakes. There is a perfect harmonic chord, buried in the song “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” a chord the PLAIDS never fully hit in life, and they are needed here on Earth to hit it now, in death. Nerves are raw, mistakes are made, but bit-by-bit, with confidence growing, they attack with increasing gusto the celestial musical opportunity they’ve been given, for each one of the four to achieve the happy resolution of his redemptive arc, and for the quartet to reach the perfect chord and achieve perfect harmony. This harmonic chord is finally found and sung. It resonates with the harmony we all want, in our lives and in our worldview, all across America and around the world. It is the epicenter of the “feel good” explosion that is FOREVER PLAID. It is meant to be a lesson to us all. Our movie version is set in a fiercely trendy, post-now club, designed by multiple Tony and Obie winner, Neil Jampolis, and peopled by glamorous extras with a ferocious fashion sense (and not a few celebs who love the show, or have been in it, and want to be among the extras seated at the tables). Our celestial MC is David Hyde-Pierce. And so, the PLAIDS intimidated by the club, and weirded-out that they “have bodies again,” begin to put on their show, haltingly and error prone at first, as in the play, but then increasingly better, tighter, and more wonderfully and harmonically complex as their confidence grows. And with their confidence comes cool, real cool, the kind of cool that all men want to be and all women want to be with, hot-sexy-cool. Also, the “audience volunteer,” always a highlight of the musical play, will be a surprise actress to be revealed at our red carpet media and celebrity event live before our studio audience. Add some CGI, too. There’ll be the typical starbursts and glissandos and whatnot, but we’ll also be “breaking out” of the play from time so time, so that when the Plaids talk about rehearsing in their basement, we are suddenly in the basement rehearsing with them! And when they talk about the gas station where Perry Como’s limo broke down, we’re suddenly at a dreamy nighttime fantasy of a small town gas station as they sing their Como medley. At the climax the PLAIDS have become the cool characters they first set out to be nearly 50 years ago. They’ve also come to realize what this night is all about. They’ve learned of the perfect harmonic chord. They know it’s in “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” the very next number. Now they confront the Heavenly Figure, but they know in their hearts why it’s needed. And they feel sure they can hit it. But do they want to? If they hit this chord they will have finished their mission on Earth and they will have to return to heaven. The Heavenly Figure impatiently awaits the drama of their decision… They sing, of course, and the moment will thrill us to our bones, the way it’s been thrilling theatre audiences for two decades.