By Harold Reutter
harold.reutter@theindependent.com

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Independent/Scott Kingsley Grant Pyper (right) portrays a soothsayer while Greg Sallans plays Caesar during rehearsal of GILT's production of "The Big Bang. The two-actor musical opens this week and continues through next weekend. Independent/Scott Kingsley Greg Sallans plays Eve while Grant Pyper uses a sock puppet to play the snake in the Garden of Eden during a rehearsal for GILT's production of "The Big Bang." The show opens Thursday. Click Thumbnails to View

Telling the story are just two people, Grant Pyper and Greg Sallans, with the help of a musical accompanist, Elisha Harvey.

Drama director Steve Spencer said the Pyper and Sallans are not trying to be historians. Instead, he said, "they're trying to sell their big, musical production Off-Broadway to investors."

In this case, the investors are members of the audience who are seeing Pyper and Sallans trying to make the sale from a borrowed apartment.

Spencer said the play starts with the Big Bang, continues through the story of Adam and Eve, Julius Caesar, Jesus and numerous other historical characters.

In essence, Spencer said, Pyper and Sallans are putting on the play, only in a very "slimmed down version.Their play is supposed to have hundreds of actors, dancers and costumes."

In fact, the show is supposed to have a budget of $83.5 million, a cast of 318 performers and 6,248 costumes.

As they improvise the way through the play, they use materials from the borrowed apartment to create costumes.

"By the end, the apartment is not in the the same shape as it started," Spencer said.

Spencer said GILT has not previously performed The Big Bang, which he described as a relatively new play.

Spencer said The Big Bang is a little different for GILT in that is probably not for children, describing it tending toward PG-13 fare.

Music director Greg Sanchez said it is not so much the language, as perhaps the content and some of the innuendo.

Both Spencer and Sanchez said the play is politically incorrect, although neither thinks anybody will really be offended.

Spencer said the play is "extremely funny," while Sanchez said it is "very fast paced."

Sanchez said one of the things that makes the play unique and gives it some of its humor is that the two-man cast must portray some of history's most famouse couples: Adam and Eve, Napoleon and Josephine, as well as "rockers from the '60's."

The co-directors said that in addition to Pyper and Sallans, Elisha Harvey is very much a part of the cast and performance, even though she only has two lines of dialogue, just before the intermission and at the end of the play. Sanchez noted that Harvey is not hidden in the orchestra pit, but playing piano on stage. Sanchez said the production is very much a musical.

"There is more singing than dialogue," he said.

That means much of the comedic and dramatic acting comes while Pyper and Sallans are singing.