Building Legend City

Baton Rougean Justin Rayna is like one of those unbelievably talented students in FAME—his collection of talents and interests, in other words, is diverse enough to make a casting director cry—with joy. Let's start with music: he plays drums (he was in Drum Corps International), he plays piano, and he is just shy of a degree in music composition. He's also a poet—an extension, he explained, of his fascination with rhythm. And he's a gymnast, dancer, and sometimes stuntman. I think that's it. That's certainly enough.

The next few notches he'd like to add to his belt are writer, director, and producer, in this case of a musical written, directed, and produced by Rayna called Legend City. He originally conceived the production as his version of the required graduation concert every composition student must produce, but the project has since mushroomed into a show that will reflect his unique collection of talents, with numbers that include tumbling, hip-hop and contemporary dance (including a duet choreographed by local company director Kris Cangelosi), and drumming, all accompanied by an original score.

Legend City follows a young man named Chance who's lost the love of his life. Heartbroken and unmoored, Chance is grappling for a way forward. Rayna described the show as a semi-autobiographical piece of "meta-theatre"—essentially a show about producing a show— as the audience watches Chance evolve over the course of producing a Christmas concert.

If this loose confederation of performance arts strikes you as an incongruous blend for a musical show, Rayna points to Cirque du Soleil. Cirque is famous for weaving diverse performing arts into one theatrical extravaganza that offers the spotlight to all performers in equal measure. “I’m a big believer in Cirque du Soleil,” said Rayna. "I want each individual to shine; there's a highlight spot for the dancers, a highlight spot for the singers, a highlight spot for the tumblers and musicians. No one has a back seat."

Since the first draft, Legend City has undergone numerous revisions; Rayna has even organized focus groups to attend readings of the script so that he and his team can receive feedback and make adjustments. The next step is funding, for which Rayna, in addition to smaller fundraisers like rummage sales, has turned to crowd funding tool, Kickstarter. The Kickstarter campaign, live now, has until May 30 to raise $25,000, all of which will go towards paying for technical and artistic talent, rehearsal space, and performance venue. Rayna explained that if the campaign does not reach its goal, he will campaign again with a longer time horizon for raising the seed funds.

If you'd like to learn more about Legend City, visit the website (legendcitythemusical.com) or the Kickstarter page. And of course, you may decide that the ambitions of a young, local artist are worth a few (or more) bucks.