Join the Club! is a new musical comedy written and produced by Chicago North Shore residents Leigh Anna Reichenbach and Lauren Taslitz. Featuring an all-female ensemble cast, the show celebrates the experiences of five women whose paths cross while working on a volunteer community service project. As the characters explore their own roles, assumptions and prejudices about themselves and each other, they learn to appreciate and support the other women for their own unique gifts. The show features original songs and a deeply hilarious exploration of female friendship. This summer, Join the Club! makes its public premier at the newly remodeled Skokie Theater in Skokie, Illinois. I had the pleasure of meeting with Lauren and Leigh Anna to learn more about their creative process and the winding path that brought them to where they are today.
Neither of you started out in musical theater early in your professional lives. What path brought you here?
Leigh Anna: I have always loved musical theater. As a kid growing up in Florida, I performed in community theater productions, and in college at Yale got involved in the a cappella singing group scene. After graduation I did what lots of graduates unsure about their career desires did — went to law school, which brought my husband and me to Chicago. We lived in Europe for several years and returned to Chicago’s north shore suburbs pregnant with our second child in 1999. I was looking to meet some new friends and stumbled through the doors of the Woman’s Club of Evanston (WCE). Quickly, I became involved in the organization’s annual benefit show, writing, performing and directing musical parodies.
Lauren: My parents introduced me to musicals. We didn’t go to see them, they probably couldn’t afford to take us, but they owned all the recordings. When I was banished to the basement to help with the family ironing – there was always hours worth since my mother believed in ironing everything except towels – I turned on the music and sang along to make the time pass.
I was in chorus in high school and had small parts in the musicals, but that was the extent of my involvement until years later. After high school I got a Biology degree from Princeton and JD from Harvard Law School and went on to practice law in New York. My husband and I moved to the North Shore with my husband’s job and when my oldest began middle school I started to write, perform, direct and produce shows for the school. But middle school came to an end, and desperate to write something that wasn’t G-rated, I started to write for the WCE show.
How did you meet and what made you decide to develop a feature-length musical comedy together?
Leigh Anna: We met through the WCE benefit show. I was immediately drawn to Lauren’s wicked and dry sense of humor and her straight-forward manner.
Lauren: One night after a WCE show, I sat down near Leigh Anna, whom I had admired from a distance but didn’t know at all, and asked her if she’d ever thought about writing something that was more than 3 ½ minutes long. She was open to the idea, and we started talking about developing a show.
Leigh Anna: We began working with some of the more successful parodies we already had written for the WCE show, constructing a story around them that would reflect some of our own experiences in the club. Neither of us ever viewed ourselves as the type of woman who would be drawn to join a club like the WCE, so that is part of what we wanted to explore through our musical, Join the Club!
Lauren: It was important to us that we didn’t construct a story that included a woman being “saved” by a man. The show is neither pro- nor anti-men. It isn’t about men. It’s about women, their relationships with each other and the issues they face as they navigate the ever-shifting demands of family, friends and work.
Is it fair to say that this show is somewhat autobiographical?
Leigh Anna: There are, of course, elements of ourselves and of women we know that we have morphed and combined into the characters of the five women in our show. From the hot shot young attorney, to the overworked volunteer mom, to the divorced mother of teenagers who try to ignore her, to the empty nester trying to reconnect with her somewhat distant husband, to the androgynous, overall-clad building super, these are women that Lauren and I know and love. We hope our audience will know and love them too.
Lauren: The characters are certainly informed by our personal experiences. We both volunteer and, like our character, Cynthia, we know what it is to be home with our children and running in circles to give them opportunities. And, like Cynthia, I experienced the fear that, when it was all over, I might have nothing to show for my life.
Like our main character, I can remember back in the day feeling superior to stay-at-home (and working) suburban moms; to anyone that didn’t have a high-power career. I didn’t necessarily think I was better, but I thought I was engaged in something that was more adult, more interesting, and more important and it wasn’t until I was on the other side that I realized how narrow my perspective was.
Finally and most importantly, by being part of a woman’s club, I’ve learned what the character, Sara, learns: that you find commonality where you least expect it, and that there is nothing more rewarding or essential than being part of a community of women that bring you joy and have your back. Join the Club! explores relationships between women of different ages and experiences in a positive but honest way.
Is there a message that you hope your audience will take away from this show?
Lauren: I would say this: Look beyond your surface differences. Here are five women of different ages and backgrounds – one whose kids are long out of the house, one with two teenagers, one with four kids in grade school, one a single high-power lawyer (whose boss is hitting on her) and one a single, working-class woman of indeterminate sexuality – who appreciate and support each other.
Leigh Anna: It’s an unfortunate tendency that some women divide themselves into categories – career, mommy-track, or stay-at-home – and that they judge the ones who make a choice different from theirs harshly. If, like Sara, we can overcome the reflexive reaction to criticize other women’s choices so that we can justify our own choices, we will build communities that not only are stronger and happier for women, but that will benefit our society as a whole.
What’s next for “Join the Club” and for the two of you?
Leigh Anna: We are hoping that a successful run of Join the Club! this summer will provide us with a good starting point for marketing the script to theaters on a wider basis. We believe that the show has the accessibility and appeal to connect with audiences around the county and would love to see Join the Club! on the marquees of theaters from Tampa Bay to Topeka. I can think of no greater joy than seeing satisfied audience members smiling and humming after they have seen a performance of the show that Lauren and I have had so much fun creating.
Lauren: We hope that one day Join the Club! will be widely seen, like Defending the Caveman or Menopause the Musical. It’s funny and honest, and, while it features a female ensemble, at root, it’s about friendship and being there for each other, a truly universal theme.
What’s next for me is The Graduate Program in Musical Theatre Writing at the Tisch School for the Arts at NYU beginning this fall. I love writing music and lyrics and I’ve been fortunate to have gotten my feet wet and been nurtured in Chicago, but I’m ready to do something scary again. I’m at the point in my life where I feel like it’s now or never when it comes to one final, huge adventure. While it’s going to be very difficult to leave my friends and family, I need to give it a try. I’m hoping for an engaging, challenging, immersive experience that will also make me a better writer.
And I’m hoping to bring the voice of middle-aged women, most of whom are mothers, to the musical theater stage. I believe we deserve to see shows about us; shows in which our experiences are represented and validated and shows in which mothers are sympathetically portrayed (and not characters for the sole purpose of explaining why the protagonist is the messed up mess he is.)
Join the Club runs July 9th through July 25th at the newly remodeled Skokie Theater in Skokie Illinois. Tickets ($35) are on sale now and available online at SkokieTheater.com.
