Steppenwolf Theatre opens its 40th season with “East of Eden,” a production featuring an underscore of original music, performed live each show by a cellist and harpist. The score was composed by the longtime Chicago sound design team of Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, both born and raised on the North Shore, where they met at New Trier High School in Winnetka.
Friendships like these may be rare, and rarer still is their professional partnership, lasting over 30 years. Milbomusic is the headquarters for Milburn and Bodeen’s collaborations creating music and sound scores for Chicago and Broadway theatre productions, and developing exhibition and public installations for museums and other international venues.
These sound artists are concerned with the aural world of a play, and have found their creative niche composing and designing music for theater. They credit their network of early contacts, including New Trier alum Malcolm Ewen (production stage manager at Steppenwolf), and early inspirations in the Musical Theater Department at New Trier, under the direction of then Chairman, William J. “Doc” Peterman.
Milburn and Bodeen’s first collaboration, in 1971, as students at New Trier, was rooted in a shared love for blues, and desire to build a band, their first, Buckin’ Bob and the Bronco’s, featured ’50s revival style music, and earned them their first gigs playing at student dances at New Trier and for the Evanston YMCA.
After a performance tenure of 11 years, creating bands and exploring a range of music from folk-rock to country, they began writing songs, learning the craft of songwriting collaboratively — Bodeen on guitar and Milburn on keyboards.
It was in 1981, at the Remains Theater in Chicago, where they wrote and performed the score for a production of Sam Shepard’s, “The Tooth of Crime,” that their work in the theater actually began.
“With each new project we have been fortunate to be able to reinvent ourselves through our music, and that was our jumping off place where we learned how to tell a story with the music within a play,” Bodeen said. Since then, their work in the theater has given their writing of music a rich and focused directive.
Milburn also designed the sound for Steppenwolf’s acclaimed 1988 production of “The Grapes of Wrath,” which won two Tony Awards and was directed by Frank Galati (adapter for “East of Eden”), a native of Highland Park who taught at Northwestern for many years before retiring.
With this production of “East of Eden,” Milburn and Bodeen have used their creative mastery to intertwine the story’s thematic elements into the original score for cello and harp, pursuing the original creative vision of Director Terry Kinney, who was interested in the conversation between these two instruments. The finished score references this duality, along with the dual nature of the main characters, the heaven of the harp, performed by Ben Melsky, and the hell of the cello performed by Kyra Saltman. When writing for the theater, Milburn and Bodeen often derive their inspiration from the text. In this case reading the novel “East of Eden,” and “John Steinbeck: Journal of a Novel.” Conversations with Kinney, the director and with each other, reading the script out loud, thinking about where the scene is going and taking the music in that direction.
“In the music we attempt to tell the audio story from scene to scene incorporating layers of meaning in those sections of the original novel that cannot be included on stage,” said Milburn. “The music heightens this conflict of good and evil as it follows the emotional journeys of the characters.”
When asked what advice these music aficionados might have for the younger version of themselves while attending New Trier, Milburn said, “if I was talking to my 14-year-old self I would say, ‘No, don’t go out and play basketball, practice the piano.’ My 16-year-old self wouldn’t listen to anybody.”
More Top Picks Irlen Syndrome And Adhd How The Symptoms Overlap
Bodeen said, “I’d tell myself not to worry about fame, but just to think about the joy of the work you are doing in the moment.”
‘East of Eden’
Through Nov. 15
Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, Chicago