Young Scribes Get a Signature Boost

The new show at Signature Theatre is just four guys hanging out at a football field. Just some dudes, best friends from high school, giving one another a hard time and catching up after their first year of college. Realizing, as teasing gives way to truths, that none of them is quite who they thought they were 12 months ago.

And sometimes they tell it in song.

All of which might sound a little hokey and fake if it weren't for the fact that the playwrights weren't imagining -- or worse, remembering -- what that moment felt like.

They were living it.

"I think that's the reason it's working now: It came out of trying to be true to ourselves," says Nick Blaemire, who composed the songs for "Glory Days," while his buddy, James Gardiner, wrote the dialogue. "What it feels like is we've sort of bared ourselves here, about who we were and who we were hoping to become."

And they probably wouldn't have even dared to hope for this: to be, at 23, just days away from a full-scale premiere of their show at one of Washington's most prestigious theaters. It's a moment far more thrilling than the one they captured and every bit as precarious.

"I am a little nervous for them," admits Signature Theatre Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer, who has shepherded "Glory Days" from infancy to its main-stage debut. "The show is so raw. That's what so fascinating about it, because it's so real."

Blaemire, from Bethesda, and Gardiner, of College Park, met as teenagers while studying acting at the Musical Theater Center in Rockville. When Blaemire came home from freshman year at the University of Michigan, he had a falling out with an old friend.

He wrote a song about it. And shared it with Gardiner. The two gave themselves exactly one month to come up with a complete draft of the musical. And when they did a read-through for friends and theater associates, people "almost" liked it, Blaemire recalls.

They revised and revised and revised, and the summer before their senior year in college they enrolled in a musical theater program Schaeffer leads at the Kennedy Center. On a particularly gutsy day, Blaemire played a song from the show for Schaeffer. The director liked it, so they sent him the script.

"And it was kind of a mess," Schaeffer recalls. So, via e-mail and instant messaging, they revised and revised some more. Schaeffer continued to lend his ear, thinking that "it would end up being a favor: 'Let's just get these kids started and get them on their way.' "

But somewhere along that way, the director says, the show "found its voice." A voice uncommon to musical theater: today's teenage buddies, throwing jabs and insults and shifting into pop-rock ballads about coming out of the closet, feeling alienated and the pervasive self-absorption of Millennials.