Musical Couple Turn to Aviator and His Wife

TONIO and Consuelo, the wanderlusty aviator and the exotic widow at the center of the new musical “Saint-Ex,” give voice to their tempestuous relationship by singing, “Love is not a gaze that’s shared/But years spent gazing outward together.”

The sentiment is only partly undercut by the fact that Tonio — better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44), the French author of the well-known fable “The Little Prince” and of stirring accounts of his life as a pilot — can barely seem to spend five minutes with his wife before heading outward himself, to Patagonia or the Sahara desert or Manhattan.

By contrast, for more than three years the composer Jenny Giering and her lyricist-librettist, Sean Barry, have been turning their relatively undivided attention to “Saint-Ex,” which opens Thursday at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont, where it runs through Sept. 10. Their focus has been made easier by the fact that Ms. Giering and Mr. Barry are married; when their attention is divided, the primary culprits are their 4-year-old son and the Berkshires home to which these former Brooklynites moved a year ago.

A few days before rehearsals began in Vermont the two stopped at a restaurant in Chelsea, and over drinks but not food (it was their seventh anniversary, and they had reservations for a highly anticipated 10-course dinner immediately after) they talked about collaborating onstage and in life.

“I don’t think either of us had a timeline in terms of when we would work together,” said Mr. Barry, 42, a poet and author of short stories and the family breadwinner as a freelance writer for the medical Web site Medscape. But when the couple wrote a song together for their own wedding, it was inevitable.

Ms. Giering, 40, with a bachelor’s degree in music from Harvard and Radcliffe and a master’s from the graduate musical-theater writing program at the Tisch School of the Arts, is the more seasoned theater writer. Ever since her song “I Follow” was included on Audra McDonald’s first solo CD, “Way Back to Paradise” in 1998, she has been a fixture within the realm that straddles traditional theater music, art songs and singer-songwriter folk-pop. In 2007 the theater company Transport Group presented “Crossing Brooklyn,” Ms. Giering and Laura Harrington’s musical about the aftershocks of 9/11, and like-minded genre hoppers often feature Ms. Giering’s stand-alone songs as well as material from pieces like the musicals “The Mistress Cycle” and “Princess Caraboo” in recitals. “She’s got a little bit of a pop influence,” Ms. McDonald said, “and then there’s the musical-theater influence, but she’s really got a talent to filter it into her own unique voice.”

The idea for “Saint-Ex” stemmed from Mr. Barry’s longstanding interest in the life and works of Saint-Exupéry, who was lost over the Mediterranean on a reconnaissance flight for the Free French in 1944. “Sean spent a lot of time in France and grew up reading Saint-Exupéry,” Ms. Giering said, “and he was always talking about how terrible the English translations are.”

Mr. Barry’s first plan was to translate Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 memoir, “Wind, Sand and Stars,” himself. But then he began thinking of a musical about the man instead. The couple dived into the project in early 2008 and abandoned it almost instantly. “We wrote one song,” Ms. Giering recalled, “and it was terrible.”

But the idea of setting Saint-Exupéry’s life to music was still on their minds when Kent Nicholson, then the director of new works at TheaterWorks in Palo Alto, Calif., invited Ms. Giering to a writers’ retreat. She mentioned the germ of the idea that she and her husband had, and knowing nothing beyond that, Mr. Nicholson invited the couple to California. He has directed each iteration of the piece since and is also directing it at the Weston Playhouse, which gave the show a new-musical award in 2010 and offered to produce it.

“Saint-Ex,” which stars Alexander Gemignani in the title role, initially paid more attention to the pilots who started the Aéropostale commercial aviation line, a group whose camaraderie and dangerous flights provided Saint-Exupéry with much of the material for his books. And while many of these scenes are still in the script, each draft seemed to result in an increased role for Saint-Exupéry’s wife, Consuelo, a tiny Salvadoran beauty who had been widowed twice while in her 20s. “It was always part of the plot,” Mr. Nicholson said of the central romance, “and now it kind of is the plot.”

Krysta Rodriguez (“The Addams Family”), who is playing Consuelo, joined the cast after hearing the score. “It’s not that unusual to look at lyrics and pick them apart to see why each character sings each note,” she said. “But you can do the same thing with Jenny’s music, which is unusual. It’s totally clear from the characters’ perspective why you’re singing in this key or why this new chord should be there.” Ms. Giering, a former pianist and not infrequent performer of her own material, explained that it took time before she understood how to tailor her music to whoever was singing it. “When I was in my 20s, I wrote a piece in ‘The Mistress Cycle’ for a 65-year-old woman, and I had all this stuff in this rangy soprano style. I look back at it and say, ‘Well, that was dumb.’ Now I pride myself on writing things that are very singable. Alex has been part of ‘Saint-Ex’ for years now, and Sean and I basically lob everything right into his sweet spot.”

“Saint Ex” marks a change of pace for Ms. Giering, who has often gravitated toward female protagonists and collaborators. She and the Chicago playwright Laura Eason are working on a musical about Maggie and Kate Fox, figures in the late-19th-century spiritualist movement. And Playwrights Horizons, where Mr. Nicholson now works, has commissioned Ms. Giering and Ms. Harrington to adapt “Alice Bliss,” Ms. Harrington’s novel about the teenage daughter of a soldier in the Iraq war. (The novel is based on “Alice Unwrapped,” a one-act musical the two women had written earlier; that piece, in turn, stemmed from a character who was cut from their “Crossing Brooklyn.”) Still, this “really isn’t by design,” Ms. Giering insisted. “I don’t feel the need to make parts for women.”

All the same, she and Mr. Barry have expanded the old flyboys’ club to include Consuelo and, to a lesser extent, Saint-Exupéry’s mother (played by Cass Morgan). As Saint-Exupéry put it in his 1933 novel “Night Flight”: “When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?” With “Saint-Ex,” he’s not the only one singing.