Musical Dinner Theater 

It all comes to this 

He has a concept for a 12-course offering in a story about a sailor, a stolen da Vinci drawing, a kidnapping and a magical, musical printing press. As songs and twelve ethnic dishes are served to an audience, we re-discover the lost ship, the Emeralda II. 

Fact or fiction? 

In art, we sometimes experience make-believe worlds populated by make-believe people. In the minds of the artistic creators, crafters, designers and directors of teams of people, the make-believe world and its people come to life briefly—they live and die away as though their stories could actually have happened. As such, they become heroes and villains, unfortunate losers and masters of their chosen destinies. They interact with each other, with Nature, and wrestle with mechanization which, if it wins, will take command.

This proposal for a Musical Dinner Theater production comes from one author who had many opportunities to find and develop the elements of the story titled, Emeralda. It is a story in many parts, and on the occasion of a chance meeting with the Artistic Director of Gallery Concerts—a performing group specializing in period music and instrumentation—it is fit into the musical dinner theater art form.

Emeralda

“The Jewel of the Ocean” was the name given to a ship in the 1500s by its architect, a Basque shipbuilder. The Emeralda was the fastest frigate of its day. Its secret design made it outrun pirates and win shipping contracts even into its second generation, the Emeralda II, the daughter frigate restored in the 1700s.

In the 16^th Century, a Jesuit order had come into possession of a diary by a sailor who had been to the far east; and also a stolen drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Led by an enterprising member of the order, they made plans to trade with the people of the Celestial Empire.

In his diary, the sailor cautioned that any European who wished to do business in China would have to bring things both beautiful and functional. In Spain, a monk found two brothers one a renowned steel wright and the other a fine luthier. With gold, the order contracted with the two to make a European-style printing press which the Chinese were bound to treasure.

To the brothers the monk suggested that the wood from the French fer grape could be used, or perhaps lignum vitae. The steel wright and the luthier knew better, and they contrived to combined wood and steel by fixing the materials together with pins. The finished printing press was called the media ferlignum imprimo machinamentum, the Halfwood Press.

By 1746, several models of the Halfwood Press were completed and, along with other trade goods, they were part of the manifest on the Emeralda II, contracted for the voyage to China. The ship was manned by officers and crew of an extraordinary kind—not the usual able-but-rough-and-tumble lot. The navigator, for example, had turned down a position with the famed explorer, Vitus Bering, an old friend. The Emeralda's navigator spoke several languages, including Russian.

Kidnapped

Meanwhile, far north, in Russia, as the Halfwood Press was coming into being and plans being made for the expedition, a boy was kidnapped and was taken on a trek across Russia to the eastern coast. He was eleven at the time he was stolen and when he reached Kamchatka, he was fourteen. He was taken as a cabin boy on a mission to trade with the natives of the Americas for fur. His story is an adventure in itself, and includes the miraculous intersection with the voyagers of the Emeralda.

Many subplots

The treatment of this story, to be adapted to Musical Dinner Theater, remains to be adapted to musical theater. It will include the rescue of twin girls from slavery on Madeira, a stopover in Desterro (Florianopolis, the “Floripa” of today), a Colombian emerald and the tragic ending of the voyage in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.

My ongoing story

Despite the failure of the fictional mission to China, as I made in my works of art, writing and teaching, the story of the Emeralda and the Halfwood Press inspired my ten years of production of Halfwood Presses—the jewel to crown my fifty years of making prints and teaching the enjoyment the printmaking experience in its many transformations.

Then, on March 27th, three days before I wrote this essay--in San Francisco--I met with visitors from Taiwan and sold them a model of the Halfwood Press. The Emeralda mission, with the Halfwood Press, has succeeded.

To make it known for the enjoyment of others

I am proposing the production of an experience for audiences to enjoy the fantasy that I built into, and made manifest in, Halfwood Presses which stems from my belief that mechanical and digital reproduction evolved over hundreds of centuries from hand prints on the walls of prehistoric peoples’ performance chambers—the caves—to include today’s artistic communication technologies. Musical dinner theater is one way to show that live performance cannot be replaced by new technologies, no matter how divinely it is crafted and widely disseminated, but they complement one another.

I think musical dinner theater is an ideal format with which to give young people a way to see the complementary relationship of living and media arts.