Chris McCarrell and Hannah Corneau with the cast of “Prelude to a Kiss” at South Coast Repertory, (Photo by Matt Gush)
In 1988, South Coast Repertory debuted a play they’d commissioned, Craig Lucas’s Prelude to a Kiss, in which a newlywed couple’s love is tested when the young bride suddenly swaps bodies with a mysterious old man. The play went on to become an Off-Broadway and Broadway hit, a Tony nominee for Best Play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a popular regional theatre staple, and the source of a film adaptation with Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan.
Now, more than 35 years later, this 70-minute adult fairy tale is back at its original Orange County theatre—this time as a two-hour musical.
While plenty of playwrights have transformed their own plays into musicals (Kimberly Akimbo, Purlie!), and while Lucas has written his share of books for musicals (including the recent Days of Wine and Roses), he admitted in a recent interview that this Prelude musical wasn’t his idea. Given that the seemingly whimsical fairy tale plot of the play, written at the height of the AIDS crisis, was in fact inspired by Lucas’s grief as he watched a loved one become physically unrecognizable in what seemed like the span of an instant, he was hardly eager to go there again.
“I just wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit those years—they were extraordinarily horrible, most of my world was decimated, and the majority of my closest allies, friends, and loved ones were killed,” Lucas recalled. “The idea of going back and trying to retell a story that looked at mortality and catastrophic loss, even in terms of a romance, is hard. There had to be something actually worth diving back into, and the music had to bring out aspects of the material that the play didn’t dig into.”
Lucas was approached by lyricist Sean Hartley about the possibility of a musical adaptation 10 years ago, and was won over when he heard the first song, written by Hartley and composer-lyricist Daniel Messé.
For his part, Messé thinks that the story’s combination of realism and fantasy makes it “a perfect choice for a musical. The play is grounded in reality, but there’s this element of magic that anyone who’s been in love would recognize, where the entire world feels full of possibility. That’s exactly what you want in a musical—a suspension of disbelief, because people are singing, and a heightened sense of emotion that’s grounded in characters that feel very real.”
Now in its world premiere through May 4 as part of South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, this Prelude resets the story in the present, where the character Peter, who initially worked in publishing, now works in data analytics.
“I asked Craig about the new time period, and he said that true love in a technological world is worth fighting for, even more than before,” said Chris McCarrell, who plays the cautious, solitary Peter. “It’s interesting to think about how social media and cell phones affect this love story, and what it means to really know the person you believe is meant for you.”
As in the original, Rita is still a bartender and graphic designer—and a romantic fatalist. Said Hannah Corneau, who plays, her, “Rita is very fearful and riddled with anxiety about the present world, so it’s hard for her to see life as an opportunity to seize.”
When Mary-Louise Parker played Rita in the 1990 Broadway production, Lucas recalled, “People thought Rita was a charming kook because she was so afraid of the world being destroyed. Flash forward to 2024, Rita doesn’t seem crazy at all. She seems correctly alarmed by the state of the world—she is the most sane person in the play!”
The musical also expands on the events leading up to that fateful kiss, because, as Lucas admitted, in the play Peter and Rita “fall in love very quickly, and they actually get married much too quickly.” Peter and Rita’s meet-cute conversations and wedding-day encouragements are now set to a whimsical, piano-driven score, though Peter’s first meeting with Rita’s parents gets a particularly comical banjo number.
Their scenes also feature an ensemble that sweeps across the stage like a chorus of fates, pushing them together and even pulling them apart at times. “Anyone who has been in a relationship knows it isn’t just built,” said Lucas. “Even without an illness or the kind of terror Rita has, relationships are really hard and take work. The ensemble says: We’re gonna test these people, we’re gonna put them through the wringer to learn what love really costs. What are you willing to do for your love, even if you don’t know what it’ll cost you yet?”
After an anonymous old man ascends from the audience to the stage and shares a kiss with the bride, their switched souls are represented musically: Rita, who had been crooning moody contemporary ballads, suddenly breaks out into a toe-tapping tune packed with jokes and optimistic truisms. The songs of the aged stranger—whose name, we learn, is Julius, and is played by Jonathan Gillard Daly—“have a much more classic feel,” said Messé. “His musical vocabulary is much more old-fashioned.”
One number, “The Man He Used to Be,” called for particular care, as Julius’s daughter mourns the father she knew before the onset of various health problems, and the relationship they shared that no longer exists. “That wasn’t really explored in the play to the degree that you can do with a song,” said Lucas. “It’s a look at mortality in a way that young people don’t like to and don’t want to do. It’s wonderful that [Hartley and Messé] were able to dramatize that, especially since it’s something audiences might be able to relate to on a personal level.”
While much has been added to Prelude to a Kiss for this musical adaptation, some things have been trimmed—like a bit in which the male characters attempt to secure Rita in order to reverse the body swap. As Lucas put it, “In 2024, nobody wants to see two guys with rope getting ready to tie up a woman—it’s sort of obnoxious, and I think that the humor back then was slightly too easy.”
The playwright continued: “I’m generally not someone who likes to revisit what I’ve done before, and it’s very hard for me to pull apart something I made before and rethink it,” he continued. “But it’s fun to be in a room with artists of a new generation, talking about expectations and awareness. And what I’ve learned over the years is, you’d be an idiot not to listen.”
Echoing some of the themes that the show brings to light, Lucas admitted, “That’s why people get annoyed with people of a certain age. They dig their heels in, they refuse to listen, and they refuse to grow.”
Ashley Lee (she/her) is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theatre, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. @cashleelee
