Samantha Brown Photos

'Samantha Brown' gets try-out run at Norma Terris

Teen styles and fads come and go, but high school is eternal.

A new musical starting a tryout run at the Norma Terris Theatre -- "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown " -- might sound like something that wants to catch the tailwinds from "Glee" and "High School Musical," but it has been in development since the early '00s.

The show is about all of those decisions kids have to make during their last year of high school -- an especially anxious period of life experienced by everyone who makes it to senior year.

The title character seemingly has everything a girl her age would want -- a sharp mind, a boyfriend, loving parents and an acceptance letter to the college of her choice.

But Samantha believes she is at a difficult crossroads in her young life and, in the show, she flashes back to key moments of her senior year, trying to come to terms with her parents' hopes, first love and an estranged friend.

"It's a lot of questions we ask anyone 17 years old to figure out," composer Brian Lowdermilk said of the major life decisions that are made in the final months of high school.

"I feel lucky in the way I was raised, but a lot of times parents think they know what will make their children happy (after high school)," lyricist and book writer Kait Kerrigan added during a joint interview last week.

The universal and timeless qualities in their show have been demonstrated by the durability of "Samantha Brown" over a series of readings and workshop productions for more than six years.

"Six years is about average for a musical these days," Lowdermilk said of the gestation process for a new musical.

The production at the Norma Terris Theatre will take the show a big step closer to a major professional staging in New York City, since that seems to happen to many of the shows that Goodspeed Musicals chooses to produce in its tidy Chester venue (a few miles away from the same organization's Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam).

"We're just putting one foot in front of the other," Lowdermilk said of the slow and steady process of putting a new musical together. (The team has created several other shows that are in various stages of development.)

"It's not an obviously commercial show -- a five-person musical -- so the rules are a little different. What we're doing here is very much about how well we can tell this story," the composer said. "A lot of the work is trial and error.

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