When it comes to dating, it can take years to find “the one.”
It also took quite awhile for Itamar Moses and Gaby Alter to get their musical comedy about love, dating and reality TV just right.
Moses, a Tony-award-winning playwright, and Alter, a composer with a forte for rock musicals, have been rewriting and reimagining the script off and on since 2007. Now they finally feel it’s ready for Broadway. But first, “Nobody Loves You” is coming to the American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater in San Francisco from Feb. 28 to March 30.
The two Berkeley-born men who now live in Brooklyn began their labor of love nearly two decades ago. Their friendship goes back even further.
Moses, 47, and Alter, 51, are both the sons of UC Berkeley professors who themselves are longtime friends — Israeli-born film scholar Gavriel Moses and Biblical scholar and award-winning author Robert Alter.
The Moses and Alter families, both members of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, spent many Thanksgiving dinners and Passover seders together.
“The Thanksgiving tradition was charades,” Itamar Moses recalled to J. “The Passover tradition was every person at the seder was assigned some topic within the Haggadah to elaborate upon for the group at some point during the evening.”
Moses and Alter both attended Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito and Black Pine Circle for part of their middle school years. They are also both graduates of Berkeley High School, though their four-year age difference meant they weren’t there at the same time. They also both earned MFAs from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Moses in dramatic writing and Alter in musical theater.
“There was this moment where we were hanging out in Brooklyn because we were friends, and it was like, ‘Well, I write plays. You write musicals. I guess we should write a musical together,’” Moses told J. “It was almost like it would be silly not to. And it started in Gaby’s room, with him at the keyboard and me with a yellow legal pad.”
Between 2007 and 2010, the two co-wrote the first of several iterations of “Nobody Loves You,” comically satirizing the reality show genre of dating competitions and probing the concept of authenticity and romantic connection in the hyper-performative, scripted version of reality that such shows are famous for.
Their musical is about a wildly popular and fictional TV show called “Nobody Loves You.” The main male protagonist, Jeff, is a philosophy grad student who snags a spot on the show in an effort to win back his ex-girlfriend. But he ends up falling for Jenny, a show producer, who dreams of making serious films.
“Nobody Loves You” made its onstage debut at the Globe Theater in San Diego in 2012 and had an off-Broadway run at Second Stage in New York City in 2013. When that production came to a close, both Moses and Alter felt the material needed improvements and a rewrite. In 2017, a small theater in Atlanta called the Horizon allowed them to do just that, asking Moses and Alter to resurrect the musical.
“That was a crucial turning point,” said Moses, who won a 2018 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for the adaptation of the Israeli film “The Band’s Visit.” “We got our hands dirty again, working on the show and starting to make some changes and feeling like there really was the possibility of making it feel finished to us.”
Once they had significantly altered the beginning and end of the show and felt it was ready for new audiences, the Covid-19 pandemic closed theaters.
Now, the musical — featuring more new material, some of it written in the last six months — is finally coming back to the stage. This time it’s for a pre-Broadway tryout.
“It definitely feels like a new production,” Moses said. While the show is full of laughs, Moses and Alter told J. that there are several jokes specifically Jewish in nature (but no spoilers).
In the years since they began work on “Nobody Loves You,” dating competition shows have exploded in popularity. And newer ones, like “Love is Blind” on Netflix, get binged by millions across the world.
“In retrospect, I think that the changes that the show needed only became clear to us after time went by, both because of how we changed as writers and because of how the world now interacts differently with what we want to say,” Moses said.
One of Alter’s favorite musical numbers from the show is “You’re So Real,” a song that a producer sings to the main male protagonist, Jeff, to convince him to stay on the reality dating show.
“She’s like, people are going to love how authentic you are!” Alter said. “And it’s a disco number.”
Reviving the musical in San Francisco is particularly meaningful to both men, who are excited to bring family members and friends from New York and Berkeley to its premiere.
“A.C.T. was the place where I saw some of the formative productions that made me want to be a playwright,” Moses said of the San Francisco debut. “So to get to work there and at the Toni Rembe, what was back then in my day called the Geary, is really exciting. It plucks some deep string in me.”
Added Alter: “l was doing rock musicals for 10 years in places that my friends and I rented. So doing something at A.C.T. is mind-blowing. And then on top of that, we get to invite all our friends and family. This is really exciting and fun.”