They meet in secret, hash out their differences, come to an agreement and present the results to an anxious public.
I'm talking about the creation of a musical — a process so full of pitfalls and wrong turns that it's a miracle when a new one emerges as scintillating as Theater Latté Da's "Twelve Angry Men" — but I could also mean a jury.
One is at the center of this 1950s-set show. Its dozen characters, including one we'd now call a white supremacist, must decide the fate of a Spanish-speaking teenager charged with stabbing his father to death.
"Twelve Angry Men" is faithful to the seven-decade-old Reginald Rose teleplay on which it's based, but to watch it is to experience the thrill of the new.
Under the swinging music direction of Denise Prosek, Michael Holland's jazzy, vocalese score feels like it's about to step up to a bar and order a Tom Collins. While this show is set in roughly the same time and place as "West Side Story," it's much jazzier. The only musical I can think of with a similar feel is "City of Angels."
Often driven by a walking bass line, often chorus-less, the tunes are syncopated and don't resolve in the tidy way that most musical theater songs conclude. Appropriately, they create a tension not released until the jury decides the unseen defendant's fate.
There are no cues for the songs, which emerge from dialogue and then slide back in, but they feel like they belong because every moment in the 100-minute show does. Like "Company" or "A Chorus Line," there's not much plot in "Twelve Angry Men" but David Simpatico's canny book finds its way into the hearts and minds of each character, half of them white and half people of color.
They have a fair amount in common — they're all men, all sons and, intriguingly, each feels like an outsider — but Simpatico reveals details about their families, their ethnicity, their prejudices and their class to illuminate how they approach their duties.
