'90s rock star Matthew Sweet's love songs inspires a musical about two gay teens

Declaring romantic intentions is a scary prospect for most teenagers. It's even scarier if the teenager is gay and uncertain of the other person's orientation. It's scarier still if that gay teenager lives in Alliance, Nebraska, in 1993.

In such a case, the safest course is to give the object of desire a mix tape of love songs, even if they are heterosexual love songs by the power-pop rocker Matthew Sweet. It provides the sender plausible deniability. One can always claim, "Oh, I just like the music."

Mike, Alliance's popular high school football player, gives fellow student Will just such a cassette tape of Sweet songs in the stage musical "Girlfriend," which is having its regional premiere at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia. It's no coincidence that Todd Almond, who wrote the musical's book, also attended high school in Alliance during the early '90s.

"I made a mix tape for a boy I had a crush on and gave it to him," Almond says by phone from Manhattan. "That's what I like about the way music is used in this piece, because the songs talk for us. ... Which is what happened in my case."

The music on that tape included songs from Sweet's 1991 breakthrough album, "Girlfriend," and all of the songs in the show are Sweet's as well, mostly from that same record. It was the kind of alternative rock record that outsider hipster kids at a rural high school would latch onto to separate themselves from the country and hard rock fans. It was an album that Almond and his best friend, Shannan, a girl and the only person he'd confessed his orientation to, listened to obsessively.

"There was nothing to do in the Midwest but drive around in our cars through miles and miles of flat land," he recalls, "listening to that record, thinking about the people we loved who didn't love us back. After a while it embedded itself in my head."

"When I read Todd's script about two young guys falling in love," Sweet says by phone from his home in Lincoln, "that seemed fresh. My best friend growing up was gay, and I liked that the album could be taken as speaking to any kind of relationship. To take this album, which was about real personal things for me, and make it work for these two other kids was so cool."

Almond originally set out to make a conventional stage musical, where his young, would-be lovers burst out singing Sweet's songs whenever spoken dialogue is no longer sufficient. But the play never seemed to work until Almond used the songs as he had used them as a teenager: as something that characters listen to on the radio or on a cassette player, singing along when the spirit moves them. Onstage, the songs are performed by an all-female rock 'n' roll quartet and then picked up by the only two actors: Lukas James Miller as Mike and Jimmy Mavrikes as Will.

The playwright's other crucial choice was to not include the seemingly obligatory scene of gay characters getting beat up by homophobic bullies. The closest the show gets to that is a shout of a slur from a faceless bystander. Instead the show focuses on the awkward but endearing romance between the two leads.

"It was a conscious decision not to give agency to that negative energy," Almond says. "I wanted to play with it, to lead the audience down a path where they think they know what's going to happen and then it doesn't."

Almond was an obscure, struggling playwright when he first contacted Sweet's manager around 2000. To Almond's surprise, both Sweet and his manager were supportive. It took 10 years of workshops and rewrites before "Girlfriend" finally opened at the Berkeley Rep Theatre in 2010, but when it did, Sweet sent flowers to the cast and crew.

The songs from the "Girlfriend" album are still favorites of Sweet's audience. His 16th studio project, "Tomorrow's Daughter," taken from the same power-pop sessions that yielded last year's "Tomorrow Forever," comes out mid-May, and he will kick off a summer tour June 13.

"People think the 'Girlfriend' album was more autobiographical than it was," Sweet says, "but I did write it during a time when I went through a big breakup and then fell in love again, so it touches on both of those themes. Maybe that's why my fans relate to it on a real personal level. It slotted in with what was happening in their lives, either when it came out or when they discovered it years later. When people come to see me, they're really invested in it."