Last fall, after speaking on a panel at Columbia College on how to manage a career in the arts, Kevin O’Donnell got on the elevator with House Theatre artistic director Nathan Allen, playwright Phillip Klapperich, and some other members of the young company. Making small talk, Klapperich asked the musician where he played around town. O’Donnell said he was the drummer for Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire.
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This was swell news for O’Donnell, who has over the last five years shifted from music scene mainstay (in addition to drumming for Bird, he led his own group, the Quality Six, whose members rarely numbered more than four) to composing for theater and dance. By then he’d already written scores for Redmoon Theater and Molly Shanahan’s Mad Shak Dance Company and scored a Jeff Citation nomination for music composed for the Hypocrites’ Machinal. This spring he netted another nomination for work on the company’s Camille/La Traviata.
“I saw Houdini and thought, ‘Man, these guys don’t need me,’” he says of the company’s highly praised Death and Harry Houdini, in which several House members played instruments and sang original music. Still, he gave them a CD, and they invited him to compose music for Klapperich’s The Rocket Man, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury short stories that went up last spring.
Cave With Man previews Thursday and Friday, August 26 and 27, and opens Saturday, August 28, at the Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western. Performances are Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM through October 16, and tickets range from $10 to $19. Call 773-251-2195.
