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[title]Some musical-theater auteurs produce new pieces once a decade or so; Peter Mills grinds out one a year. Since 2000, he has written nine shows—all for the burgeoning Prospect Theater Company. “What’s unusual about my career is that I’ve been attached to this Off-Off Broadway company,” he notes. “And because we’re trying to produce a season each year, there’s an imperative to generate new work.” Despite the pressures of such quick turnarounds, Mills, 34, has steadily built a reputation for quality songwriting; the versatility and old-fashioned craftsmanship of his best scores (such as those for 2002’s Illyria and 2005’s The Pursuit of Persephone) have earned him a fervent following among show-music aficionados.
Mills’s monogamous devotion to Prospect is not just professional: The troupe’s artistic director is his wife, Cara Reichel, whom he’s been with since the early 1990s, when they were undergraduates at Princeton. “We created a lot of these shows together,” he says. “Often, Cara comes up with an idea for a show—the big picture—and I put things on the page and actually realize that idea. But sometimes she’s also involved in generating melody ideas or cowriting scenes.” Their latest project, which begins previews next week, is Honor, a musical version of As You Like It. “We had good results adapting Twelfth Night for Illyria, so we thought of doing another Shakespeare adaptation,” Mills says. “This one is set in medieval Japan, and it’s more of a historical romance—more of a Kurosawa film than Shakespeare’s sort of pastoral comedy.”
Though productive, Mills’s partnership with Prospect has at least one disadvantage. “We usually bill these shows as kind of workshop productions, because it is their first incarnation and they tend to have rough edges,” Mills says. “But it’s always a question of going on to the next show, rather than going back and doing further development on a promising piece.” That paradigm will shift somewhat next year, when the company marks its tenth anniversary by revisiting Illyria. In the meantime, Mills says he’s happy to have so stable a home for his shows. “I sometimes feel like Prospect monopolizes me—it’s hard to do a lot outside of that,” he concedes. “But it’s also been a great thing to have the most motivated possible producer hustling to do something with my work.”
Listen to a sample track by Mills. (It make take a few seconds for the audio player to load.)
Honor begins previews at the Hudson Guild Theater on Apr 19, 2008.