Three months ago I wrote a story for one of the daily newspapers about Bark!, a musical that opened October 21 and is still playing at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. Composed by David Troy Francis with a book by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard (who also wrote the Great Dane’s share of the lyrics), Bark! focuses on the small pleasures and major anxieties of six dogs stuck in an animal shelter. There’s a prima donna purebred, a scruffy street mutt, a couple of old veteran working dogs, a kindly maternal bitch, and Rocks, the abandoned puppy everybody would call “Kid” if this were a war movie. They laugh, they cry, they howl, and they long to be adopted. The poodle sings an aria and Rocks whizzes on stuff. It’s an eccentric but sweet–even occasionally soulful–show.
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The e-mail goes on to claim that resemblances between the two shows aren’t coincidental, and singles out Bark! director and choreographer Kay Cole as the alleged conduit through which features of DogMusic–first produced as a one-act in 1998–found their way into the Francis/Dillard musical, which premiered in Los Angeles in 2004. Phrases like “artistic rape” and “theft of an idea” are used alongside words like “maddening” and “heartbreaking.”
“Absolutely outrageous,” replies Francis. “[Bark!] is my show.”
Francis says he was unaware of Cole’s connection with DogMusic until he saw the notice about the workshop in New York. Struck by the similarity of that project to his own, he mentioned the notice to Cole, who then “told me she had been involved on a very minor basis for a very short time.” By way of debunking the notion that Cole brought elements of DogMusic with her to Bark!, Francis says she argued for retaining the doggie-day-care concept while he held out for the change to the animal shelter.
Deanna Isaacs is on vacation.
