Diet! The Musical

"Put Diet! The Musical on your menu."
-- The Arizona Republic

Press

"The lyrics are absolutely hysterical," said the show's musical director, Wendy Roman, musical coordinator for the playhouse. "There's something in it that everybody can relate to..."

from The Arizona Republic
April 18

Bios

Susan Simpson LaFave

Photo by Mary Pegg

Susan Simpson LaFave's works for the stage include the comedy So Long, Prince Charming; the interactive theater piece Mirror, Mirror; and the ten-minute anti-war play, To Freedom, all produced in Phoenix, Arizona. With husband and co-author Kenneth LaFave, she was recently commissioned to write the radio script, A Reduced History of Classical Music, and The Medicine Gift, a musico-dramatic experiment. A free-lance video producer, director and scriptwriter of industrial and educational productions since 1985, Ms. LaFave is also a personal life coach, specializing in relationships and sexuality.

Kenneth LaFave
Kenneth LaFave has composed dozens of works for the stage and concert hall, including the opera American Gothic (2005) for Arizona State University; the overture Fly! (2004) for the Tucson Symphony; the 9/11 memorial work Spires (2002) for the Kansas City Chorale; the song cycle Immense Sky for London tenor Philip Eve, and a string quartet for the Chicago String Quartet. His musical, Outlaw Heart, originally workshopped in 2001, will enjoy its first production in summer, 2007. Mr. LaFave has also written extensively about music for such publications as Playbill and Opera News. For more about him, go to www.kennethlafave.com.

How Diet! The Musical Came to Be

Diet! The Musical began as a playful jest with my composer husband Kenneth, on the eve of one of my more recent diet schemes. In celebration of my imminent weight loss, we were feasting on a large double cheese pizza and reflecting on the phenomenal success of Menopause The Musical, a show that had triggered in us both a profound desire to assuage our midlife cares with an ample infusion of excess calories. (I wasn’t looking forward to having hot flashes, and he wasn’t looking forward to being married to a woman who had them.) Kenneth was astounded by the huge crowds of women who showed up to hear songs that he, as a man, found rather silly. As a woman, I could relate, because Menopause offers comic relief for one of life’s most inevitable and unfortunate realities (except for maybe death, which I’m also postponing for as long as possible).

I joked that we should write a musical comedy about dieting, to address our culture’s obsession with the perfect body, and the fact that so few of us have any hope of ever attaining the media ideal, no matter how valiantly we fight the Battle of the Bulge. How many of us have counted calories, carbs or suffered through cardio-kickboxing classes in the elusive quest for physical perfection?

Within days, Kenneth proudly announced that he had contacted Jeana Whitaker, director of Phoenix’s North Valley Playhouse, who had enthusiastically agreed to workshop our new project. I was confused. What new project? Why, Diet! The Musical, of course, he replied with a wink.

Now we had to write it.

Every writer will tell you that their characters, once birthed, take on lives of their own, and ours were no exception. What began in my mind as a simple story of two girlfriends who go on a diet together, evolved into a tale about two women, two men and a mom who all have very different ideas about food and love, which they are all “hungry” to share with you.

Guys, lest you worry that this is a chick show like Menopause, fear not! I promise that you, too, will relate. Honestly, who among us -- male or female -- can look in the mirror and truly love whom we see reflected there? To me, this is life’s greatest challenge.

(Of course I haven’t reached menopause yet.)

Susan Simpson LaFave