The long road to ‘Daddy Long Legs’

To prepare for the part of college student Jerusha Abbott in Cinnabar Theater’s upcoming two-actor musical “Daddy Long Legs,” actor-singer Brittany Hasbany-Law decided that she would follow the same educational challenge that her character sets for herself.

“I decided I would read every novel and every poem that Jerusha reads, and I calculated that it would take something like 230 hours,” says Hasbany-Law, on a brief rehearsal break with her husband Zachary Hasbany. He plays the other character in the play, the mysterious Mr. John Smith, aka “Daddy Long Legs,” aka Jervis Pendleton, the tall but largely anonymous benefactor of Jerusha, who grew up in an orphanage, and whose facility for writing inspires him to grant her a full scholarship to college in exchange for one letter a month in which she’d report on her educational progress. Those letters include an ever-expanding list of books and poem Jerusha is reading at school.

Asked how far she made it in her own efforts to follow in her character’s literary footsteps, Hasbany-Law laughs, and looks to Hasbany with a smile.

“She read a few books,” he acknowledged, smiling back. “She’s made a good effort.”

“I did read at least a synopsis of all the books her list,” Hasbany-Law explains. “And I’ve read every poem that is referenced in the play. I especially enjoyed Walt Whitman’s ‘Oh Captain, My Captain.’”

As it so happens, Hasbany shares an affinity for that same poem, having directed a production of Lauren Gunderson’s “I and You,” in which two high school students collaborate on a Walt Whitman project in English class.

“I like how Whitman writes about how we sometimes feel lost in our place in the world, trying to come to peace with who we are and what we are meant to be,” he says. “And there’s a lot about that in ‘Daddy Long Legs’ as well.”

The sweet-and-funny musical, adapted by John Caird and Paul Gordon, is based on a book itself, of course: the 110-year-old book by Jean Webster, the pen name of author Alice Jane Chandler Webster. She wrote a total of eight novels in her short life, most of them from the perspective of young women with humble beginnings and ambitious hopes and dreams.

Originally released in serial form in “The Ladies’ Home Journal,” “Daddy-Long-Legs” became Webster’s seventh book, an enormous bestseller in 1912. She then adapted it into a well-received stage play in 1914. A straightforward, non-musical staging, itthat version ran for eight months on Broadway, then toured the U.S. in a popular production that included a unique fundraising effort, with the child actors appearing in the aisles to sell “Daddy-Long-Legs” dolls between acts of the play, with all profits going to support orphans in whichever city it was playing, and also in portions of Europe where WWI was brewing.

Not long after, Webster wrote “Dear Enemy,” a sequel, of sorts, to “Daddy-Long-Legs,” in which a particularly entertaining college friend friend of Jerusha’s takes up letter writing to tell her own story of eventually becoming the superintendent of the very orphanage in which Jerusha was raised. It was also a hit, raising Webster’s fame to the level that even President Theodore Roosevelt counted himself a fan, and reportedly crashed her honeymoon in 1915 just to meet her. Unfortunately, she died in childbirth at the age of 40, too early to see how influential her story would become. To date, “Daddy-Long-Legs” has been adapted eight times into films and television serials, including versions in India, Japan and Korea. In addition to Webster’s stage adaptation, there have been two other stage shows, including Caird and Gordon’s, which premiered in 2009 at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto.

It was about six years after its debut that Law encountered the show, immediately placing Jerusha Abbott high up on her list of all time dream roles. As it so happens, the the couple was enrolled in a two-year acting program at Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California, where “Daddy Long Legs,” the musical, was all the buzz due to the recent world-wide streaming of the off-Broadway production, the first-ever live streaming of a musical on Broadway or Off-Broadway.

“I saw the streamed show, and I just immediately wanted to do it,” said Law. “The music really spoke to me, and the story was beautiful and heartwarming and I knew a really tall guy who could play the other lead.”

In 2017, Main Stage West theater in Sebastopol announced a production, directed by Elly Lichenstein (the former Artistic Director of Cinnabar Theater), but by the time Law and Hasbany reached out to her, the roles of Jerusha and Jervis had already been cast. A few years later, in late 2019, the couple auditioned for Lichenstein in a different show, and during the audition the subject of “Daddy Long Legs” came up.

“And Elly said, ‘Oh, you and Zach would be perfect for that,’” Law says with a laugh. “So I said, ‘You know, that’s actually a dream show of ours.’ So we started talking about it, and dreaming big, and then COVID happened, and those plans fizzled away, and we thought, ‘Oh well. Looks like we may never get to do it.’”

“The fun thing is,” recalls Hasbany, “last year when Cinnabar had the virtual Broadway Bash gala last year, they asked us to sing a song from ”Daddy Long Legs,“ and during the show they said something like, ‘This is a potential sneak peek of something that may or may not be on our stage in the future,’ and suddenly we were thinking, ‘OK, maybe there’s still a chance we’ll get to do this show together.’”

Not only are they now preparing to open the "Daddy Long Legs“ – which runs from January 6 to 22 – the director of the production is Elly Lichenstein.

“So we get to do ‘Daddy Long Legs’ with Elly after all,” says Hasbany-Law. “It’s been such a great experience, this whole thing. Though ironically, all this time, all these years, we’ve dreamed of doing this play together, and of course, the way it’s written, as letters back and forth, we only have one scene where we actually look at each other.”

“Though we are onstage together for pretty much the whole show,” Hasbany points out, gesturing to the set, which is divided into two distinct sections – Daddy long Legs’ opulent office space and Jerusha’s exuberantly decorated college dorm room. “So I’m up there and she’s there, and we are both performing, and singing our way through the story, but we don’t actually break through and sing to each other until it’s the right time.”

The cleverness of the script, and Lichenstein’s direction of the story, allows the two to support each other’s performances in subtle ways, even when not directly delivering lyrics or lines to one another. None of that is easy, and they reveal that they’ve worked extremely hard to get the tone right. Hasbany-Law adds that being together for 10 years, their own specific relationship, as theater artists, has served to support the relationship of the fictional characters they play.

“I think there is a similarity in how our characters help bring out the authenticity in each other’s personality,” she says. “We are most comfortable around each other; and I think that comes through in Jerusha and Jervis as well. And now, we really just can’t wait to share it with people. It feel like we’ve waited a very long time to finally get to do this.”