‘Feel the Earth Move’ with Compelling Stories at Asolo Rep

By Scott Ferguson | Header Photo by Sorcha Augustine | November 2024

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The first four offerings in Asolo Rep’s 2024-25 season span both world wars, the cigar factories of 1920s Tampa, and pop music’s “hit factories” of the 1950s and beyond. The productions tell the personal stories behind the world-changing events and cultural touchstones of the 20^th century that continue to shape our lives today. 

The season opens with Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (Nov. 13,2024-Jan. 5, 2025),followed by All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 (Dec. 4-22, 2024), Ken Ludwig’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (Jan. 17-Feb. 8, 2025),and Anna in the Tropics (Feb. 19-March 13, 2025).

The tagline for the season, “Feel the Earth Move” is from the lyrics to Carole King’s song from her iconic 1971 Tapestry album, “I Feel the Earth Move.”

“The theme covers a lot of ground,” says Peter Rothstein, Asolo Rep’s producing artistic director, “because our season encompasses a wide range of stories and styles. In the context of Beautiful, it’s epic — you do feel the earth move when you hear that song — but it’s also epic because the feeling conveyed in the song comes from something deeply personal. That’s what’s so brilliant about the show. I think it’s one of the best ‘jukebox musicals,’ because the story (with book by Douglas McGrath) and the songs reveal that often the moments in our lives that are the most private, the most intimate, can be the most epic.”

Julia Knitel, who will portray Carole King in Beautiful at Asolo Rep, has performed in various productions of the show for almost a decade.

“I joined the Broadway company in 2015 and became the youngest person ever to play the role,” Knitel says. “After being on Broadway for a year and a half, I went on tour playing Carole, and that was quite the adventure. I was 23 years old, traveling the country playing this magnificent role. Carole even came to see the show. I was an absolute wreck the entire day before doing the show that night. But as soon as I met her, she put me at such ease. She just made me feel so excited to show her what I had been bringing across the country with the story of her life.”

While many people think of King as a 1970s-era singer-songwriter based on her seminal album, Tapestry, she started writing songs at age 18 with Gerry Goffin (who later became her husband from 1959-1968) that were hits for the likes of Aretha Franklin, the Drifters, Bobby Rydell, the Shirelles, Dusty Springfield, the Chiffons, the Righteous Brothers, and many other solo artists and groups.

The musical traces the history of the Goffin-King songwriting partnership, their marriage and divorce, their friendship with songwriting duo Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and her solo career as a singer.

“I really get to go on a journey each time I do the show,” says Knitel. “I try to do her justice and tell her story. I find different things every night and discover new connections between the lyrics and the points in the plot where she and Gerry are writing them. It’s very cool to surrender to the piece each night, no matter where I’m doing the show: on Broadway, on tour in a regional house. It’s an amazing thing to get to do.”

Knitel’s favorite Carole King song? She says there are many, but one that really touches her every time is 1960’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”, a Goffin-King composition.

“I think it’s one of the greatest songs ever written,” she says. “When you look at the lyrics as a piece of poetry, and when you look at the structure of the song and the melody and the chords underneath it, it is a flawless piece of music. And it’s one of my favorite things to get to do every night. And what I find so striking about that song and others throughout the show, is that often the audience knows this music as well as the people on the stage know it.

“So when the first chord hits, you feel excitement and anticipation for the lyrics to start. I don’t want to ruin the story, but the song is a bit of foreshadowing. In the show it’s one of those moments where while Carole is coming into her own; it’s the first song she sings from beginning to end.”

Other notable songs in the show include “You’ve Got a Friend,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and of course, “I Feel the Earth Move.”

Rothstein says the theme of “feeling the earth move” through global and personal shock waves plays itself out throughout the season in different ways. All is Calm, which he wrote and has directed in a number of mediums and venues (including Off-Broadway, regional theaters, Minnesota Public Radio and PBS), is about true events during World War I, when German and allied soldiers raised their voices in song, inspiring impromptu and unofficial truces along the Western Front during the 1914 Christmas season.

This version will feature nine men playing several soldiers on both sides of the conflict, singing Christmas songs and popular tunes of the time in various languages. In a special holiday event in partnership with The Ringling museum complex, the intimate production will be staged at the Historic Asolo Theater, located in the Visitors Center on the Ringling grounds.

“It’s an acapella musical,” says Rothstein, “with some spoken-word excerpts from letters and speeches that help set the scene. “It runs about 75 minutes, with about three dozen songs. The soldiers would do round-robin concerts back and forth across no-man’s-land, singing to each other as Christmas approached.

“When I set out to write it, I realized that if I told this story in the words of the soldiers themselves and people like Winston Churchill, Pope Benedict, World War I poets and others, it would have much more power than any piece of fiction I could create to tell the story. So I collected a lot of rich material that forms the basis of the play.”

The Christmas truce and word that it happened were squashed by military leaders on both sides, fearing that it would weaken the men’s fighting spirit. It never occurred again after 1914, even as the war dragged on until late 1918.

Asolo Rep’s season moves to World War II for its next production, the world premiere of Ken Ludwig’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. The popular playwright’s work was last seen on the Asolo stage last season in the Gershwin-inspired musical, Crazy for You.

Ludwig was inspired when he came across a book with that title by Baroness Orczy, a collection of short stories.

“The book is indeed about a woman named Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, and it’s set in 1910 when Orczy wrote it,” he explains. “She has a sidekick, so it’s sort of a Sherlock Holmes-Dr. Watson setup. But I didn’t use any of her stories, because I wanted to write something set in World War II. So I used her title and the name of her main character, and I wrote the play and all the other characters from scratch.”

In the play, Lady Molly and her sidekick, Peg, are Scotland Yard detectives trying to solve a mystery. A murder investigation leads them to the top-secret code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park, about 50 miles northwest of London. Molly and Peg go undercover as cryptographers, which worked because many of the code breakers there were women. The women’s tasks were to decipher messages sent by the Germans in code, scrambled to disguise their military plans, using devices called Enigma machines.

“They came across women who had the ability to solve very complex puzzles. They tested men and women, using crosswords and other challenging tests. As they narrowed down the possible code breakers, the tests got more and more complex. I find it fascinating that they were open to women working to crack the codes. They made a huge difference in the war effort, especially the breaking of the naval codes. Their work probably shortened the war by about two years and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Ludwig pitched the idea of the play to Rothstein, who agreed to host and direct the world premiere at Asolo Rep. The pace is frantic, as Molly and Peg uncover a Nazi plot that could spell doom for England. They race against time to unravel and foil the plan. As the season brochure says, “Saving the world has never been so much fun.”

“It’s a great thriller,” says Rothstein. “Ken is so theatrical in the way he thinks, so the piece is highly theatrical, and in some ways it reads like a movie. The women are in a car, then they’re in Parliament, then we’re at Bletchley Park, then we’re at the Savoy listening to Louis Armstrong singing, then we’re in an airplane swirling around a cathedral. These things are not easily staged, but audiences will have fun seeing how we do it!”

Next up is the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, by Nilo Cruz. It takes place in 1929 just up the road from Sarasota, in a cigar factory in Tampa’s Ybor City.

“My father told me about this beautiful tradition of lectors, or as we say in Spanish ‘lectores,’ reading books and newspapers to the workers in the factories as they rolled the cigars. I was a teenager when I heard the story, and it stayed with me. But it wasn’t until years later when I was writing for the theater that it occurred to me to write about the lectores in the cigar factories of Tampa.”

Cruz set the play in 1929, when word about coming mechanization of the cigar factories brought uncertainty to the workers. When a new lectore arrives in Tampa from Cuba, he brings a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to read to the workers. The story that unfolds in the classic novel is paralleled in the play.

“I chose the book in part because I love Tolstoy. But also, the concept of reading a Russian novel aloud in Spanish in 1929 was intriguing to me, given the later influence of the Russians in Cuba.

“So I thought it should be a Russian novel and it should be romantic. So I chose Anna Karenina. When I selected the passages from the novel that the lectore would read, I’d imagine how they were impacting the workers. That’s how I came up with the structure of the piece.”

Rothstein says, “Anna in the Tropics puts the workers’ seemingly small lives inside the cigar factory where the reader is reading Anna Karenina, in the same space as this big romantic epic novel. They realize their small world is really not much smaller than Tolstoy’s epic novel.

“The idea of feeling the earth move can come from big and small revolutions, and it often comes from the most personal and intimate places. I’m always drawn to that kind of work in the theater, and there’s a lot of it in our new season.”

For more information and tickets to these shows and other productions in the 2024-25 season, which runs through June 15 and includes Dancing at Lughnasa; Good Night Oscar; and Jesus Christ, Superstar, visit AsoloRep.org or call the box office at 941-351-8000.