It was born in Miami, nurtured at the University of Miami —
a show full of gentle songs spun out of a real-life love affair.
And now New York hopes to stage ‘Becoming’ for all the world to hear...

It is a fluke, the composers themselves will tell you, a series of love poems that grew and grew and finally got out of hand. A show about love — that became larger than its two parts and now promises a bittersweet payoff not detectable from the audience side of the footlights.

"I don't know how this is going to sound," says Sam Harris, the 27-year-old musical conductor and co-author of "Becoming," curling next to composer Gail Edwards in a South Dade living room. "As soon as the next couple of weeks are over and we know where we stand with the show, I'm going right back to obscurity. If we do the show in New York, I won't be going."

AND WHAT then will happen to Sam Harris and Gail Edwards, whose own personal story is very much a part of "Becoming," the original, Miami-produced musical that's become an off-Broadway candidate?

‘“Becoming’ is already a success,” the slender musician and teacher says quietly, cleaning his glasses over and over. "Nothing that happens, or does not happen in New York, can change that. You have to understand how it was, how it began. A senior class project for Gail, a little show for two nights at the Ring."

And now — a crack at New York, all in nine dizzying months.

Harris was a schoolteacher at North Miami High and a percussionist for the Miami Philharmonic who met a pretty University of Miami senior with a china doll face (which, at this moment, as the pair lounge barefoot on the floor, wears a pained, unsure expression).

"I THOUGHT he was one of the weirdest looking guys I had ever seen," Gail laughs suddenly, recalling the bizarre drummer with the wing-tip shoes, old fashion suits, and shoulder-length hair. But Sam and Gail began to date anyway. "We set out," Harris says, "on a discovery trip."

As the romance grew, the two began singing songs about love, freedom, and new personal values to one another. Gail would do a Carole King ballad in her high, pristine soprano. Sam would pound out an Elton John rocker.

"At first we always were wishing aloud that we had said those things ourselves," Harris says. "Then we decided the songs did not say enough, that they did not express what we felt at the moment."

When Sam and Gail began to write each other original songs, "Becoming" was born. "He'd write me a song. I'd write him a song and soon we were communicating like this."

A great deal, Gail Edwards says pensively, has gone down since.

FROM THE private, intimate, and deeply personal telegraph line strung between the two young people to what Miami theater followers know as "Becoming" was but a short step. In the fall of 1972, Sam asked Gail about her upcoming senior class project, required by the drama department for graduating seniors.

"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know," Gail replied. "Direct a show, maybe."
"Can you direct your own show?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you?"

DRAMA professor Hank Diers, apparently not a bit surprised that his star pupil (the lead of "Cabaret" and key player in "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Midsummer Night's Dream") wanted to direct, choreograph, star in, and stage her OWN show, gave the project his approval.

On Dec. 12, 1972, Gail Edwards' senior class project opened before a student and faculty audience at the Ring Theater. The response caught everyone by surprise. Applause was long and heavy. Many stood and cheered long after the final curtain. There were not only calls for "more!" but demands the show be held over through the week. Mike Prager, a Channel 3 television producer, appeared backstage and said the station would like to televise the original musical.

DAZED, the composers of "Becoming" agreed to the show and began to streamline the revue for Public Broadcasting's "Fusion" series. Next stop: The Everglades School for Girls and a three-weekend run starting last March 15. This time, critics were in the audience —- and their verdicts were swift and unanimous:

"Becoming," the word was passed throughout south Florida, is a thoroughly professional, equally likable hit, a loving, moving, honest work with fresh, vital, uplifting sparkle.

Once more Sam and Gail returned to their piano, Sam helping with the arranging, Gail doing most of the composing. The show was tightened, the format made more simple.

JIM ZUBIENA replaced Frank Laloggie, the original male lead in the show. Anne Sward, a show-stopping blonde with a growling, lower-register voice, sang opposite Zubiena and Edwards. In a series of numbers, "It's Not So Bad" being a very good example, Sward turned the demure Everglades auditorium into a smoke-filled saloon at four in the morning. Her torch singing comes with a flame bigger than a house.

"Lordy," a teasing, prankish number that gives the show a sensual, sexual, adult dimension, pits the bottom tones of Sward against the stinging high notes of Edwards. And altogether different is "Valentine," a quiet, quick song that alludes to the origins of the show, back in the days when Sam and Gail sang each other poetry.

"It's just that if I said, Be Mine,
I'd know those aren't my words,
So all I'll say on the day of hearts, is:
Be you.
My love — be you."

On June 22, "Becoming" opened a third time, again at the Everglades School in Coconut Grove and again to a fresh battery of critics. More rave reviews, and business, good all along, surged; sellouts became routine.

THEN THE professionals arrive.

Tom Jefferson, a Miami producer and promoter, offers to sign the cast to management contracts and agrees to contact New York associates, who then agree to fly into Miami to see the show. Marvin A. Krauss, connected with the "Godspell" organization, says he likes the show, feels it has off-Broadway potential. Larry Whiteley, a director, sees the show twice, takes extensive notes.

"Becoming," due to reopen a fourth time next Friday at the Players Theater, is now very close to an off-Broadway engagement. A $50,000 tentative budget is being computed. Investors are expected to see the show next weekend. More streamlining is being done to accent the show's innocent, open tone.

"BOTH KRAUSS and Whiteley say they want to maintain the simplicity of the show," Harris says. "That doesn't mean they won't make changes, clean it up, tighten it. We've already decided, for instance to open with the song, 'Let's Get Started.' The changes are mostly in the area of pacing, however."

How do the composers themselves explain the popularity of "Becoming?"

"For me the show has a simple honesty, an honesty that is very difficult to manufacture and very difficult to sustain," Harris says. Gail Edwards agrees: "Sincerity is important—and the fact that the show talks to everybody, from 12 to 60."

"BECOMING" IS becoming all right, and that is understandable. For all the changes that have been made since December, the little musical remains an unashamed and uninhibited reflection of a real-life love story—and that could be the reason for its success.

The high school teacher who once taught a class on love ("love is not something you're born with, it's something you learn") and the pretty, romantic coed give "Becoming" not a little dose of truth.

Ironically, the very success of their offspring seems likely to shatter that storybook romance.

"I don't really care for what we're going through now," Sam Harris says. "I'm a schoolteacher, that's all. Not a producer or a playwright or a composer.

"Gail's going to go somewhere to stand in audition lines, to New York with this show, to New York with another, even if she has to be a waitress somewhere…. And I'm staying here.

"And if she became a big star and wanted me as her manager, I would still stay here. This is not a comment on Gail but a comment on how much I love teaching."

GAIL EDWARDS, who looks like a young Debbie Reynolds and sings like a more cheerful Carole King, is less sure today than she once was — but finally concedes she will someday move on.

"The ultimate goal, years ago, was to become a household word," she says. "All the little songs for the neighbors and skits for relatives and musicals at school, it all seemed to be for this. So I guess there's only one thing to do. Follow it through, all the way.

"I feel as though I have to go, but it's still very strange." She turns to Sam.

"You've changed my life in a lot of ways. Like a teacher. You're really good at pushing away all the B.S. So many of my old foundations have fallen away. I'm really free…"