Wyatt Earp's wife inspires new musical

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but, for actress/writer Sheilah Rae, insatiable curiosity was the first step in the creation of "I Married Wyatt Earp," the musical that made its world premiere to open the 19th season at Bristol Riverside Theatre last week.

Rae spotted an exotic photograph of Josephine "Josie" Sarah Marcus in a book about the American West titled "Pioneer Jews." Further research led her to a Marcus biography by Glenn Boyer.

Beautiful, headstrong Josie ran away from her family in San Francisco to join a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan company's production of "HMS Pinafore." She landed in Tombstone, Ariz., a booming mining town through which $80 million in silver passed in its heyday.

With a male population of 12,000 and a female population of fewer than a thousand, Tombstone also was known for its lawlessness and, subsequently, lawmen - including the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. Their famous shootout at the OK Corral has long been the stuff of movies and TV shows.

Their women - including Josie who married Wyatt Earp - had been mostly ignored until Rae teamed up with Thomas Edward West to create the book of this musical with an all-female cast.

Since they now needed a composer, Rae and West went to Michael Kerker who's sometimes referred to as "the godfather of the American musical." He suggested Michele Brourman - and a decade of often bicoastal work, interrupted by other projects and the demands of three separate lives, began.

"We haven't given our director, Keith Baker, an easy job because the action shifts often in time and place, but he and his inventive production team, especially lighting designer Scott Pinkney, have done a fine job moving easily between centuries and locations and keeping the story line clear and uncluttered," says Rae. "It isn't just Josie's story either. There were many other strong and loving women who stood with those male figures we're more familiar with." Josie is played by two actresses: Leila Martin plays Josie at age 81 in 1943, and Josie's younger self, the center of a May/December scandalous romance of the Old West circa 1880, is played by Jennifer Zimmerman.

Brourman aimed for a composing style as eclectic as the music of the Old West really was.

"We might imagine that the tough, tobacco-spitting guys of the great macho West . . . sat around strumming guitars and crooning Stephen Foster ballads, but it was a real stylistic mix, as varied as the pioneers who went West and those miners who hoped to be rich," says Brourman. Brourman added that many immigrants, steeped in varied musical traditions, took their music westward. Surprisingly, perhaps, Gilbert & Sullivan's stage shows were enormously popular.

"There's a song in the score that pays homage to the G&S style," says Brourman, "and I took it as a great compliment when somebody asked me which operetta it was from."