Wichitan Arri Lawton Simon makes most of home stay with benefit concert
Arri Lawton Simon describes his career as a “shifting triangle” of creation, education and performance.
“Whatever fits in the schedule and keeps me afloat and brings me joy is what I do,” the Wichita native said.
Living in New York, as he has been for the past decade, has strengthened his education side, including teaching at a high school for the performing arts and serving as an adjunct faculty at colleges. It’s also where he creates musical theater productions with his professional writing partner, Janine McGuire.
But a six-month return to his hometown has put Simon’s performing side in the forefront. He’s been featured in two Music Theatre Wichita concerts this summer and will be the featured performer in a benefit concert for Wichita Children’s Theatre & Dance Center on July 31, a fundraiser for the Heather Muller Black Box Theatre.
Titled “I Sing What I Want,” the concert includes a couple of his own compositions (including “Side by Side” from his musical “Express” that was performed at Jeremy Stolle’s MTW concert), as well as a few musical standards and theatrical songs he might not get to sing because of his gender.
“We’re so often confined in the theatrical world by the roles we’re allowed to play,” Simon said.
Simon began taking theater and dance classes at WCTDC when he was 4 and returned to music direct for the three years between graduating from Indiana University and moving to New York.
At about the same time he began taking theater classes, he determined that being a pilot would be his career choice. He kept that career goal fully until his junior year at Wichita East (a 2004 grad), when a woman from his church affirmed his talent in music.
“She said something akin to, ‘Lots of people can be a pilot. Not everyone can do what you do,’” he recalled.
Simon received a bachelor’s degree in music composition and vocal performance and a minor in theater from Indiana.
He met McGuire at a musical theater workshop in New York in 2012 when they were paired up for an assignment. They clicked, and since have completed three musicals together: “Borders,” about two men who fall in love amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; “Express,” where transformative moments take place in the New York subway; and “Kibby the Space Dog,” commissioned for WCTDC in 2018.
The 35-year-old says that his strength is in composing and McGuire’s is in lyrics, but they share the load equally, as well as writing the book, or script, for the musical.
“We both understood both of those languages, and there isn’t any ego about who did what,” he said. “It’s what works.”
“Borders” is scheduled to have its pre-off-Broadway tryouts in the fall of 2022, he said. Success in musical theater is never instantaneous, he said, pointing to the seven years that Lin-Manuel Miranda took to complete the pop culture juggernaut “Hamilton.”
“Broadway is the dream and the goal, and we’re close,” he said. “There are no guarantees, but there’s a lot of love and support for us and the project.”
Simon has been in discussions with several Wichita theater companies about staging his work in his hometown.
The musicals he creates with McGuire, Simon said, are reflective of the human condition.
“Our work really focuses on looking at relationship and community, why and how we draw the line between us and them and what they really mean,” he said. “We’re very humanitarian without being message-y or moralizing.”
Arri Lawton Simon: “I Sing What I Want”
When: 4:30 p.m. Saturday, July 31
Where: Wichita Children’s Theatre, 201 S. Lulu
Tickets: $20, by calling 262-2282; the concert is part of daylong fundraiser that includes an auction and a performance of the Beatles revue “Across the Universe” at 8:30 p.m. – “Universe” is also staged at 7 p.m. July 29-30