Kris Ikejiri
Brooke Matthews, left, and Robert Mata play notorious Texas criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Uptown Theater's production of Bonnie & Clyde, on stage Sept. 20-22.
When Fort Worth native Jacob Rivera-Sanchez decided to tackle directing Uptown Theater’s production of Bonnie & Clyde, a musical based on the lives and exploits of the notorious Texas gangsters, he knew he’d have to walk a tightrope between two feuding factions.
Nearly 100 years after the couple robbed and murdered their way into infamy, many still argue that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had no choice to do what they did, that circumstance forced their hands. Then of course, there are those who believe they were nothing more than money- and blood-thirsty criminals and that when a six-person posse shot 130 rounds into their stolen Ford Deluxe V-8 on a back road near Gibsland, La., in 1934, they got what they deserved.
Jacob Rivera-Sanchez
"What's intriguing to me is the question, why are we still so fascinated by them? Why are we still having those kinds of conversations about them after all this time?," says Rivera-Sanchez, who grew up on the city's North Side. "It's so daunting of a task to try to tackle, to try to answer those questions. That kind of frightened me a little bit but was also all the more reason I wanted to jump on it. I knew it would be a challenge."
After debuting at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 2009, the show - featuring music by Frank Wildhorn, lyrics by Don Black and a book by Ivan Menchell - moved to Broadway two years later, running from late 2011 to early 2012; it closed after only 69 performances.
But, much like the story of Bonnie and Clyde itself, the musical continues to thrive: There have been multiple stagings and touring versions of B&C around the world, from London to Japan, and a countless number of local/regional productions in the U.S., of which Uptown Theater’s is the latest.
Bolstered by strong performances from the local cast, memorable songs that incorporate blues, country, pop and rock, and believable set pieces, Uptown’s well-crafted production is practically a word-for-word remake of the original show, but Rivera-Sanchez put his own stamp on it directorially.
"I don't want to equate it exactly to this, but it's almost like what was done with the recent revival of Oklahoma," says the 32-year-old director who graduated from Texas Wesleyan with a bachelor’s in theater and now serves as the school’s marketing and recruitment manager for the theater department. "The original and revival are almost the exact same show on pen and paper - same dialogue, same songs. But there's a whole different directorial tone in the revival. The goal is to make the audience think a little bit differently about what's being presented to them."
The show takes a vastly different approach to telling the story of Bonnie and Clyde than the most well-known B&C property, the 1967 Academy Award-winning film. Here, the brutality of the couple’s crime spree is downplayed in favor of telling what perhaps led to that crime spree.
Through a series of flashbacks, Parker and Barrow’s back stories are told: Barrow spends much of his youth trying to claw his way out of poverty, his actions leading him to another kind of hell - prison - while Parker constantly daydreams about becoming a singer and poet. Bored by her small-time life in west Dallas, she turns to Barrow for excitement and newness.
To bring Parker and Barrow's childhoods to life, the show utilizes young versions of their characters, played, with finesse and aplomb, by actors Amrynn Wood, who plays Parker, and Reece Turley, who plays Clyde.
"There's a whole different way of thinking about their story that we don't really consider," Rivera-Sanchez says. "We're very focused on the weaponry, the bloodshed, the lives lost. I want to challenge the audience and challenge myself on how to flip that narrative for us to root for the versions of themselves that they lost along the way - in the form of their younger selves. They lost that innocence so early and so young, and that's just something that, instinctively, we just don't think about with them - that they had families and parents, that they were practically just babies when they died."
In their adult lives, Parker (played by Brooke Matthews) is portrayed as sometimes having mixed emotions about her involvement in their crimes, while Clyde (Robert Mata) is rendered as the restless mastermind, enlisting his brother Buck (Ben Meaders) to help pull of heists; Buck’s wife Blanche (Caitlin Martelle) comes along for the often-deadly ride. As they did in the film, Buck and Blanche often supply the show's comedic moments.
As their crimes multiply in intensity and frequency, a group of lawmen, led by Frank Hamer (Gary Payne), come together to try to stop the gang. Among those to join the chase is Ted Hinton (Preston Lee Isham), a police officer once smitten with Parker who must come to terms with having to kill her.
Like its Hollywood counterpart, the musical is far from being an historically accurate portrayal of the couple and their crime spree that lasted nearly two years and crisscrossed four state lines. Many of the key figures who played pivotal roles in their exploits are absent from the show, such as W.D. Jones and Henry Methvin, two of their gang’s most well-known members, and debate continues to this day, nearly a century later, about Parker and Barrow’s true motivations.
Other times, the show goes to great lengths to be as accurate as possible, such as dressing Blanche in jodhpur pants, which she wore in real life, daring for any woman of that era, and incorporating some of Parker’s actual poetry, word for word.
Rivera-Sanchez says after he took on the role as the show's director, he went into research mode, reading the books Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie & Clyde, by Fort Worth bestselling author Jeff Guinn, and Blanche Barrow's memoir, My Life with Bonnie & Clyde, and visiting many of the local sites associated with Barrow and Parker, including their gravesites.
"It instilled in me how real this story was, regardless of anybody's feelings or opinions on it," he says. "They are here, six feet below us. And when we are streets away from where they grew up or may have driven or a bank that they might have robbed, it's fascinating to feel their presence in that space."
As the show grew closer to opening night last week, many who have connections to Barrow and Parker reached out to Rivera-Sanchez or the Uptown Theater to share their stories.
"It is interesting thing to think about how their, quote unquote, legacy has continued almost a hundred years," he says. "We've heard from people who are in our families and friends' groups who have some sort of connection to Bonnie and Clyde. There's somebody who has a connection to the florist from Bonnie's funeral. We had somebody reach out and say, 'Hey, I think my grandfather had received some sort of gift from Clyde.' There are so many connections with people here - it shows how factual this story is."
Though the show focuses on the relationships among the characters, it doesn’t gloss over their crimes. The recreation of the shoot-out in Joplin, Mo., is particularly harrowing and, at the end of the show, the names of the 12 people who were murdered by the couple or their gang are displayed prominently on a large digital backdrop, a sobering reminder of the lives lost at the hands of the Bonnie and Clyde.
"This is just a challenging story," Rivera-Sanchez says. "Challenging to stage, challenging to digest, challenging for our performers to tackle every evening. And hopefully, challenging for the audience to consider a different perspective than their own."
Bonnie & Clyde runs Sept. 20-22 at Uptown Theater in Grand Prairie. Tickets are available at uptowntheatergp.com.
