Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artists Ceci Fernández, as Ernestine, and Alex Weisman, as Kenneth, dance across Ernestine’s kitchen during the final dress rehearsal of Birthday Candles July 5 in Bratton Theater.
Growing up in Hong Kong, Jane Lui discovered a love for music when she was about 4 years old as she eagerly watched her older brother learning to play the piano.
Wanting to be just like him, she begged her parents to let her take lessons. From there, she fell in love with the instrument.
“I led a very sheltered childhood and the piano was really my main outlet,” she said. “Music was my main outlet.”
Now an award-winning recording musician and actor who lives in Southern California, she has produced four studio albums and is credited as Opera Evelyn in the 2022 Academy Award-winning film, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
As the composer for Chautauqua Theater Company’s production of Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, which orbits around Ernestine Ashworth through nine decades of life on her birthday, Lui wrote original piano music that serves as the play’s soundtrack. The production will finally blow out its candles during the final shows at 2:30 p.m. today, Saturday and Sunday in Bratton Theater.
Known as the “class clown” in her all-girls school, Lui said she often behaved badly and most of her teachers didn’t like her. But when she was in music class, she was considered the best student.
Her brother became a classical pianist and learned by studying sheet music. For Lui, she developed her “piano voice” by simply playing by ear.
Fernández and Weisman dance in character during Birthday Candles, to music composed by Jane Lui.
The first song she taught herself was “Silent All These Years,” by Tori Amos. With a cassette tape in hand, she played and rewound the recording for hours. Raised by more traditional Asian parents who were against the idea of Lui pursuing music, she buried her talents for years.
“Music was so sacred to me, and I knew they wouldn’t want me to do it,” she said. “So I kept closeted.”
She composes under the name Surrija, the name of a young girl in the audience at one of her open mic performances. Surrija was half-Dutch, half-Taiwanese, and she and her mother approached Lui after the show. Surrija was fascinated by Lui’s work — and the fact that they looked alike — and she began asking questions about her life and career.
“I never saw her again and that was the end, but she stayed with me,” Lui said. “I hoped to keep that child in me and keep the curiosity in me to remember what it is that made me want to do this in the first place.”
She was brought onto Birthday Candles after Ben Truppin-Brown, the play’s sound designer, connected her with the project. The two had previously worked together, and Truppin-Brown thought she would be a perfect fit.
When she first read the script, she cried and felt instantly drawn to the story. For one thing, like Ernestine’s character, she too bakes herself a cake each year on her birthday.
As a composer who has never written piano music for theater before, she was terrified at first. Fuelled by the show’s messages of love and the beauty of simplicity, Lui decided to take on the challenge and composed all the music by placing her hands on the keyboard and leaning into her feelings, essentially free-writing the score.
Describing herself as an “emotionally-motivated” songwriter who writes based on her feelings and gut instincts, Lui said her vision for the music was to emulate simplicity and recognizable melodies with folksy, harmonic undertones.
“The first things I wrote, I thought, ‘OK, there’s clusters, there’s dissonance and an ethereal feeling, but also something that feels really earthy and something people really relate to,’ ” she said. “In the end, it’s a story based off of a woman making a cake.”
That “ethereal” style can be felt throughout the play as Ernestine travels through 90 years, with her loved ones flowing in and out of her life across time.
During pivotal and everyday moments in Ernestine’s life, Lui’s piano work soars through Bratton, layering on the themes of the miraculous mundane and the wonders of the universe.
“It’s so grounded in the everyday, as the show talks about, but then we’re looking for a place in the universe,” Lui said. “We’re living by the rules of time in a universe where time doesn’t exist.”
She composed piano music specifically for the character Billy, Ernestine’s son, played by Conservatory Actor Kamal Sehrawy. Billy grows up an angry child who softens as the play develops. The character plays piano off to the side of the stage during the show as he ages from boy into an older man.
When she first met Sehrawy during rehearsals, his character arc inspired her to create his melodies.
“When he grows up, he softens,” Lui said. “It was the perfect information and it gave me tools to write in a fluttery way, where his hands just fly on the keyboard.”
As she reflects on composing the music that echoes throughout Birthday Candles, she said she will carry its spirit of simplicity and embracing the unknown wherever her next project takes her. After all, “we don’t get to know” what’s next.
“We don’t really get to know, but all we can do in these simple acts is that — in the end — as much as we want to ‘surprise God,’ as Ernestine says, we do,” Lui said. “We surprise God, so to speak, every day in the simple acts.”
