Saguaro City Music Theatre is recognized for providing opportunities for youth and adults of varying abilities to perform on stage. For nearly three years, the theater company has served as an incubator for Cameron Hood’s new musical “Voyagers: A Space Opera.”
They will present the latest workshop of “Voyagers” on Saturday, May 31, and Sunday, June 1, at the Marroney Theatre on the UA campus.
The show is being directed by Drew Humphrey, Saguaro City’s artistic director.
“It was always something, when we formed the organization, that we wanted to devote time, energy and resources to. Right around the time that we were talking about it, that’s when we connected with Cameron, and it seemed like a perfect project to start with,” Humphrey said.
The show was co-written by John D. Larson.
Hood is known for his work with his indie-folk duo Ryanhood. He has been writing, recording and performing for the last 20 years.
In 2017, he co-created a ballet about the life of gangster John Dillinger for the Artifact Dance Project. “Voyagers” is his first musical.
The production is a musical, even though its name contains the word “opera.” Hood said he grew up with “rock operas” such as Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and The Who’s “Tommy.”
The show follows ONE, a songwriter racing to record a gold record and embark on a major tour after the death of his father. He forms a group with TWO, a nurturing and thoughtful singer who is excessively accommodating to him.
The pair launches its career and relationship but struggles as TWO wants to enjoy the journey to success. Grief and ambition drive ONE.
The show also explores the complex relationships between the two characters and their parents.
It is a sung-through musical with no dialogue. Humphrey said the stories come alive through the poetic lyrics, which really speak to human nature.
Hood said that the characters ONE and TWO are based loosely on him and his wife, respectively.
“That’s how I got there was thinking about her, thinking about me, what our various experiences are, what our family history is,” Hood said.
“The truth is, it’s about a character who has a difficult relationship with their father and is constantly trying to reckon with losing their father. It’s about another character who has a difficult relationship with both of their parents. The personas they each take on are in response to the families they come from.”
Hood stated that the project began with an initial idea and developed from there.
“The very first thing was the question, ‘How do we matter in all of this matter?’” Hood said.
“That feeling that you sometimes have, just being impossibly small in the scope of the cosmos. I started writing songs around that theme long before I knew it was a musical. When I was little, my dad would take my brother and me up on the roof of our house with sleeping bags, and we’d lie on our backs and look up at the stars. Halley’s Comet came by when we were really little, and I remember him saying, ‘The light that we’re seeing now from that star is probably about a million years old.’ My little brain could not deal with that at all. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, a million? That sounds like before I was born. There was a time before I was born?’
“He said, ‘Yeah.’ And I was like, ‘Dad, that sounds like that was before you were born.’ He was like, ‘Yeah…’ There was something about that that’s always been both really scary and really comforting. With the stars, you are so out of your depth, but you are somehow at home.”
This human relationship is contrasted with the story of NASA’s Voyager space missions, which launched in 1977. Two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, visited the four outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune during “The Grand Tour.”
“Saturn has these beautiful gold rings around it,” Hood said.
“That lines up with the point in the story where these two people are struggling with whether to slow down and settle down into marriage. Everything just functions as a metaphor. Another example would be right as the two Voyager spacecraft are launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at that point in the show, we get the record launch party, where the two people are setting out on their tour with their last big hometown show.”
Hood’s astronomer friend introduced him to the Voyager missions.
“I started to adapt the songs that I had written to the Voyager stories. I think last of all, the human story emerged. Space is too big,” Hood said.
“Even the Voyagers’ story is too big, but we can follow a couple of people. We can care about a couple of people. That was the last piece, but it’s the most important piece of the whole thing. You care about whether these two people can avoid making the same mistakes that their parents made and do something new in their lives. All that happens in the background of space, space science and astrophysics, But, really in the end, it’s about two people trying to overcome that.”
The multimedia production uses archival audio and video from the Voyager missions.
The show lets audiences know that these are two musicians on Earth, and the Voyager projections represent but do not directly tie into their story.
This is the fifth workshop of the piece and the fourth time they are inviting the public. The first public workshop had an audience of 25 people, and last two drew around 100 people.
They also did a sneak peek performance at a Tucson Pops Orchestra concert in May 2024.
For most of the workshops, James Kelley Carroll and Samantha Beemer have portrays the two main characters. They are joined onstage by an ensemble.
Hood mentioned that the two lead actors have contributed to the development of the characters.
“They turn to us at times, and they go, ‘This doesn’t feel right, or what would be more honest in this moment is this,’” Hood recalled.
“I actually really welcome that feedback. I’m not somebody who’s like, ‘You must sing what’s on the page.’ I want to get it more and more honest and visceral. Having those two actors has helped to shape those two characters because of their intuitions in the moment… They’re helping give humanity to it, and they’re tweaking the script and making it more real.”
Humphrey said the show has evolved with each workshop.
“The first major workshop that we did was just focused on the first third of the musical,” Humphrey said.
“The next one, we added the second third. Then, we added some ensemble to it. Then, the third one, we did the whole piece, and we added a music supervisor. We added a little bit of lighting support and a small directing studio here on campus.
“This is an important one. We felt it was time to start adding in the projections, which is a major component of the science balanced against the metaphor of the two musicians the show centers around. When you do that and work in a larger space like the Marroney Theatre, there’s a lot more support that is needed to sustain it, like a set designer and a lighting designer.”
Humphrey said it has been interesting to watch the show grow through its various stages.
“Doing anything brand new presents its own unique challenges because there is no map written,” Humphrey said.
“Cameron presented some beautiful music and incredible ideas. Each step of the way was something brand new, like creating a libretto, finding a story on Earth that could be staged, what that story required, as far as talent goes, as far as scenic environment goes.”
“Voyagers: A Space Rock Opera”
WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday, May 31, and 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1
WHERE: Marroney Theatre, University of Arizona, 1025 N. Olive Road, Tucson
COST: Free admission
INFO: saguarocity.org
