Co-creators try to steal ears, hearts with new musical “Pretty Pants Bandit”

Now comes the musical tale of Marie Baker, a real-life woman gangster who made men she robbed strip to their skivvies at gunpoint in 1930s Miami.

This weekend, Georgia Ensemble Theatre (GET) opens The Pretty Pants Bandit, a new, original musical written by Chase Peacock and Jessica De Maria, two of Atlanta musical theater’s most familiar faces. It has a cast of 19 people and 23 original pop songs. Running through April 17, it’s the third musical the co-creators have written together and their largest and most daring.

“Our previous two shows were small and easily producible,” De Maria said in a Zoom call with Peacock. “With this, Chase and I decided to write our fantasy show. We’re not going to think about budget, cast size or where it can be produced here. We were just going to create it and see what happens! The fact that this is the one that GET wanted to put in their regular season and that they’re still doing it, coming out of lockdown to produce a large-scale brand-new musical, it’s very bold. It’s very brave.”

Peacock said he and De Maria wrote The Pretty Pants Bandit as a challenge to do something big very quickly. They had written shows and music together since connecting as castmates in an Atlanta Lyric Theatre’s 2015 production of Damn Yankees. He is a Suzi Bass Award winner, known for shows including Once and Titanic. She is a Suzi Bass nominee, known for her work in Falsettos, Once and many local productions. 

“I’ve always heard that to make a musical and get it to Broadway, it will take you seven to 10 years,” Peacock said. “I remember us thinking, ‘Screw that! We’re going to write this. It’s going to be the greatest thing ever, and we’re going to get it on stage in two or three years!’ Now we’re five years into this thing, and it’s finally getting on stage. Everything happens for a reason.”

Georgia Ensemble artistic director James Donadio, who is also directing The Pretty Pants Bandit, met Peacock and De Maria through his daughter Kate Donadio MacQueen, an actress and producer once part of The Weird Sisters Theatre Project. MacQueen brought her father to a showcase that the writers were performing of their first show, What’s Past, in a Manuel’s Tavern backroom.

“I enjoyed the concert, but what I really enjoyed was what I perceived of the way they write music,” he said during rehearsals one recent afternoon in a Brookhaven rehearsal room. “At the end of the concert, I had Kate introduce us, and I told them that I’m always looking for new stuff at GET. What do you have on the back burner?”

The duo told him the premise of Marie Baker, also known as Rose Durante, a real-life gangster from Miami who committed a string of heists from 1932 to 1933. De Maria discovered the story while researching a part for another show.

“They said they had three or four songs written already, so I had them send those demos to me,” Donadio said. “I plugged in the first one. I didn’t know what to expect. And I thought it was really, really good. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s one piece. Let’s see what the second one is like.’ It was equally good, if not better. And then third, fourth. By the time I got to the end of the songs, I was very interested in this show.”

He helped them workshop it for Georgia Ensemble, intending to stage it in 2020, but the pandemic caused delays.

Though the musical is set in 1932 and is full of period touches in its costumes and design, the music of The Pretty Pants Bandit is very contemporary. 

“Chase and Jessica’s music is their music,” Donadio said. “They did not want to write period music. We did talk about adding a little Cuban and Latin flavor to it. But their voice is very much their own, in terms of music, and I’m all for it. I don’t think that it conflicts with the story being a period piece. Their music and lyrics really draw people in. They’re very story-oriented. Not only are you listening to this extraordinary music, you’re listening to the story within the music. That dovetails with the book itself.”

Peacock and De Maria collaborate on the words and the music by bouncing ideas off one another.

“I don’t feel like I can see any moment of this show that belongs to just one of us,” she said. “First working with Chase, we incorporated each other into all aspects of creation. Everything felt like it was shared. I think we both bear the backbone of different aspects, but everything is created by the two of us in a mind-meld.”

The Georgia Ensemble partnership brought in more collaborators as the full production has come together.

“At this point, it’s a number of people, a bunch of allies,” Peacock said. “It’s so fun to walk into that rehearsal room and see all the stage managers, actors, costume and set designers. It’s so beyond the two of us having audacity anymore. It’s in good hands.”

De Maria added, “You can get so much accomplished when the process is enjoyable, And then, as Chase said, all of these other people coming on board. Jimmy (Donadio) was essential in preserving and creating the structural integrity of this script. And having the influences of this cast, we’re continually learning as we go. It was surreal watching audition tapes of these actors who spent hours prepping work that we’d created. We just keep pinching ourselves, like, ‘That’s ours! And they had to spend time on it! Ha ha ha!’”

Anna Dvorak Gonzalez, who recently appeared in Synchronicity’s Wonderland: Alice’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Adventure and in Xanadu at Out Front Theatre, is playing Marie.

Gonzalez said she connects to her character in many ways. “As a woman, this story is about finding power and finding yourself. I’ve been through that. I’ve experienced being silenced, by men in particular, and getting an opportunity to find myself along the way.”

She particularly enjoys when Marie finds her voice.

“Every time I get to speak these words, run the show or sing this music, there’s great catharsis,” Gonzalez said. “There’s release. There’s power. There’s fear, but the best kind of fear, the fear that you’re really proud to overcome.”

Information about the real Marie Baker is scarce, so De Maria and Peacock invented much of the character’s story. And in their version, Baker didn’t get men she was robbing to drop their pants just to make it easy for her and her conspirators to escape.

“We chose to view the ‘pants-ing’ of men as not just a gimmick nor an escape tool,” De Maria said. “It’s something more, a desire to humiliate them. And what kind of woman feels the drive to do that? She was already bold, leading a gang of dudes. She was in charge. And it wasn’t a ‘Bonnie and Clyde situation,’ it was a ‘Marie and the rest of them’ situation. So why did she do that?

“We delved deep into personal experiences and imagined a woman trying to break free of a bad situation with a man,” she said. “This is her taking her journey of vengeance and self-discovery to the streets. She leaves a terrible marriage, and she takes those feelings of her own humiliation, shame, her loss of self, her loss of control. She takes that out on the rest of the men she encounters, but without violence, really.”

Though Peacock and De Maria both moved to New York during the pandemic, they consider The Pretty Pants Bandit a show that Atlanta nurtured.

“Hopefully, the community can claim it as their own,” Peacock said. “We have big dreams for this show, but we would happily and gladly claim ATL as its home. Because it is.”

De Maria added, “I really hope that, outside of people enjoying it, the Atlanta theater community embraces it and sees that they can take bigger risks because they did this.”

::

Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His book Impacted was published by The Story Plant in 2021 and is a Georgia Author of the Year Award nominee in the first novel category.