Photo Credit: Hannah Rosenfeld

In 1982 Darin Adams started school at Menlo-Atherton High back in the day of the J-building. It was a time when the divide between rich and poor was even more acute than it is today, but more or less the M-A we know. This weekend, 27 years later, he’s back in the area to tell us what he learned, and he brought a cast all the way from Broadway to help.

Mr. Adams talks fondly about the “nice ethnically diverse body of students” he went to school with, but he was not impervious to what he calls a “disconnect between the areas served by the school.” Remember that he lived in West Menlo Park long before East Palo Alto was cleaned up. “No Ikeas, no HomeDepots,” but instead an area of urban squalor that had long since fallen to drugs and crime. Where now we have a Four Seasons, not long ago there were a few blocks called Whiskey Gulch- the epicenter of violence in the area with an alarmingly high murder rate- not unlike the neighborhood called “the lost and found” that Adams’ show focuses on.

Unlike the civil rights era of the sixties, Adams is quick to point out, students did not hate each other. They only lacked “a sense of really broad connection between east and west” when they were out of the classrooms and off the sports fields. Lost and Found is about the connections the school needed to prevent outbreaks like the race riot that went on his freshman year; connections that people in general need, like the one he formed with his multiracial rock band at M-A. “We sort of needed the relationships with one another,” he recalls. “Economically where we are isn’t really the thing. We need deep relationships, and we need meaningful relationships. We need hope. We need faith.”

It is this sentiment, rather than the basic plot of a kid growing up to outshine his small beginnings, that makes the show. Lost and Found focuses on a young black singer, Timothy (John Edwards), in an after-school music program run by Sara Foster (played by Adams’ wife Sheri Adams) when his life converges with that of popular opera singer Paul, played by Adams himself. Paul is an addict who starts working with Timothy while serving community service after being caught in a drug deal with Timothy’s brother, Titus (James Brown III), who evaded the police in the same bust. A lot of the show takes place in the classroom with an eclectic group of at-risk youth who seem to find their sound and style right before your eyes in each performance. Despite the predominantly minority driven cast, the play does not dwell on racial injustice or the poverty characteristic of an East Palo Alto like area. Adams wanted to “show the economic elements and sort of take them away” in favor of just talking about people who face challenging situations.

Though the feeling and some of the ideas are loosely based on Adams’ experiences, he says the actual events are not taken from his life. “Lost and Found,” he says, “was an attempt to tell a story.” Like his character Paul, Adams has been a professional opera singer, and knows people who struggle with addiction. His inspiration for the classroom came partly from the time he spends as a voice teacher when he is not performing, and partly from the three years he and his wife spent performing on a cruise ship with a wide diversity of co-workers who mirror the students in the after school center classroom. On a more serious note, Adams understands the demands of being a performer- an obstacle Paul struggles to cope with. “The cost is too high to put work in front of personal relationship,” Adams explains.

Because Lost and Found is an original script, it was particularly malleable throughout the rehearsal process. The cast had only three and a half weeks to rehearse, during which time Adams “was slipping in new pages to the script as late as a day before our preview.” We are privileged to have a cast so talented and experienced that they could not only roll with the punches, but actually bring new elements to the characters he originally envisioned. A few of the Broadway credits of the cast include Wicked, The Lion King, and The Color Purple, along with countless national tours, off-Broadway shows, and even movies like Hairspray. Most notable for his contribution to characterization is James Brown III, who plays Titus. He took a street tough guy and he brought “this whole element as someone who had a big heart for his brother and his grandmother,” someone who deals drugs “almost not because he wanted to but because he didn’t see a lot of choices.”

The characters fit the actors like gloves. They are almost inseparable, because their role reflects the actor’s choices- unlike what you would expect from a revival like Grease or Phantom of the Opera, where the actors must force themselves into rigid boundaries of the characters.

“The benefit [of putting on an original show] is that you have an unlimited amount of freedom. The challenge is that you are putting on a new show in 5 weeks,” says Rachel Bress, the choreographer whose Broadway credits (9 to 5 the Musical, The Pirate Queen, Dirty Blond) make up only a small portion of her impressive resume. “I met with [Adams] and the show kind of awed me.” While the music is diverse, the dance focuses mainly on Bress’ personal favorite, hip hop. Though she strove to create her own style, Bress loves hip hop staples like Justin Timberlake, and in its final number, Lost and Found takes on a distinctly MTV-esque performance style.

“I tried to make it come from the story, I didn’t want it to feel like they were breaking into dances. I tried to think about why each person was dancing in the first place,” Bress explains. In order to incorporate the dance, she transcended limitation by large musical numbers, saying, “I like to find new moments where you can use movement.” The result went from “a dramatic show that sang to a dramatic show that told the story through movement and song”- a captivating visual piece that, in every way, lives up to the original score.

“Darin went crazy with the music. As a choreographer that’s kind of a dream to have so much variety,” says Bress. Not only is there an impressive array of hip-hop, but the show featured a large gospel component (backed up by a local choir, including Menlo-Atherton student Isaiah Moody) and a sizable opera presence. Adams also composed an original Spanish opera piece for the show as well as mixing in classical influences. Unlike most musicals, which feature different writers for the story, script, and music, Adams was in charge of all three- a combination that led to a fluid, well-done show.

The script has been a work in process for almost ten years now, but this week’s performance has only been two years in the making. About that long ago Paul Gerber, local pediatric dentist and long-time friend of Adams’, saw a workshop performance of Lost and Found and “just fell in love with it.” A few weeks before rehearsals started, Gerber teamed up with Serve the Peninsula Foundation, a charity dedicated to supplementing the budget of local underprivileged schools, to bring Lost and Found back to its roots. “He called me and said, let’s get this here for this good reason.”

For Adams, being back at home has benefits aside from the premier of the culmination of his labor. He and his wife, Sheri, live in New York now, but he still has family and friends in the area. “I keep walking into the audience after the show and running into people I haven’t seen for 15 years,” he says of performing so close to his home town. Adams is excited to bring something experimental to the Bay Area, where we, unlike in NYC, are only used to seeing the standards.

Unfortunately, there was no guarantee that our new PAC would be finished in time to host Lost and Found; indeed, the PAC and Lost and Found both debuted on the same night. Instead, Adams chose Carrington Hall at Sequoia High school, a beautiful, old-style theater complete with a balcony. Adams did mention, however, that the PAC is the ideal size for a professional production, so there is hope for us yet if the show comes around again. For now, Adams’ dream for MA is to have excellent, high-level theater taking residence at our school, in the same way that Broadway by the Bay used the San Mateo High School theater. Meanwhile, Lost and Found will make its way back to New York where, after some time and a few rewrites, it will be put up as a showcase for producers to take a look at.

I am confident that, before long, Adams will be bringing Lost and Found back to the Bay in a Broadway touring cast. Any person who has ever had a relationship with another person will recognize someone in this show and will come out touched, uplifted, and eager to buy the CD.