An Encore That Took 30 Years

Musical of Medieval Japan Gets Second Chance In Revised Production at Laurel Mill Playhouse

The "do-over" is one of life's most appealing, if elusive, fantasies. Wouldn't it be great to redo something that failed and get it right this time? Rarely does anyone actually get that chance, but Greenbelt's Bill Tchakirides is enjoying a second chance at something left unfulfilled for 30 years. He has revived his own Broadway flop, and the do-over is being shared with enthusiastic audiences at Laurel Mill Playhouse.

Long since retired from pursuing show business as a full-time career, the computer software analyst and part-time theater director has helped to retool and re-imagine the show, "Ride the Winds," a musical about the education of a medieval samurai.

"I wish I had another six months to work on it," he said shortly before opening night a few weeks ago. "I've been thinking about this show for 30 years, and still keep thinking of new things to do with it, so we finally had to say, a few days ago, 'This is as far as we're going to go.' "

"Ride the Winds" is an adventure-filled story written by Tchakirides's college pal from Northwestern University, John Driver, a TV actor and writer (he had done both for "Law and Order"), and award-winning theater director, playwright and composer ("Shogun: The Musical").

The result is an exotic mixture of martial arts movement, choreographed by stage combat artist Eric Eaton, and Japanese Noh theatrical expression. Noh is a masked dance-drama discipline in which actors' movements are extremely stylized. Narrative music is used to evoke a beautiful, mysterious atmosphere. Tchakirides designed a scaled-down version of a Noh stage, which traditionally floated on water in Japan.

Wishing to expand the concept into a wider Asian theme, Tchakirides adapted Kabuki theater's footbridge, which usually passes through an audience, and black-clad, hooded stagehands called kuragos, who are always present but are considered invisible. A chorus is present at all times, borrowed from Bunraku puppet theater, where narrators usually recite all the dialogue while seated at the right side of the stage. The musicians are visible against the back wall, which features a symbolic Noh pine tree (the gods made the gift of Noh via a pine tree, according to Japanese folklore).

For Tchakirides, getting "Ride the Winds" to this point has been a long process.

After receiving his master's degree in theater from Northwestern in 1969, Tchakirides headed to Broadway, where he and Driver reconnected. Soon, Driver was getting acting jobs and writing in his spare time, and Tchakirides was doing technical work at the now-demolished New Theater on East 54th Street. He also was planning a career as a producer.

In 1972, the ABC television show "Kung Fu," which combined Asian martial arts with the American western, sparked interest in Asian martial philosophy, inspiring Driver to write the story, music and lyrics for a musical based on the life of a samurai. At the time, he was an understudy in the original Broadway production of "Grease," covering a variety of roles, and he had plenty of time to write in his "cold, damp, and shabby fourth-floor walkup dressing room with the peeling paint at the Royale Theatre," as he remembers it.

Driver, a black belt in iaido, the art of the Japanese sword, loosely based "Ride the Winds" on the early life of Musashi Miyamoto, a celebrated Japanese samurai and renowned brush painter and poet. Tchakirides readily agreed to produce it.

For two years, the pair sought funding, traveling to more than 20 cities to raise money by playing songs and acting out scenes for potential backers. To save money, Tchakirides asked his old scenic design teacher back at Northwestern, Samuel Ball, to design the set. Ball agreed, and Northwestern students built the sets and even made the costumes, while Tchakirides drove the truck with the set pieces from Chicago to New York. He and Driver eventually raised about $250,000, a modest sum for a New York show even then, but it was enough to open the production on Broadway.

The big night came May 9, 1974: "Ride the Winds" was before an audience for the first time, at Broadway's old Bijou Theatre. The show ran for eight previews, had its official opening night for the press on May 16, and then closed after only two more performances.

"It got good reviews from the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, but Mel Gussow in the New York Times tore it to pieces," Tchakirides said. "You couldn't sell a ticket in New York if the Times didn't give you a good review, and we couldn't keep it open because we had already spent all the money we had. So we closed it."

The show was largely forgotten, even by Driver. But not by Tchakirides: "My whole life changed when that show closed," he said. "After a couple of years of hard work, I had lost my investors. And it's very hard to raise money for another show in those circumstances."