Michael Ogborn creates groundbreaking froth with silly sports musical at 11th Hour Theatre Company

Field Hockey Hot, the new musical that 11th Hour Theatre Company will debut Monday at the Adrienne, raises the question: How can such a gleefully silly show be unprecedented on so many fronts?

"I wanted to put something onstage that hasn't been onstage yet," said composer, lyricist, and librettist Michael Ogborn, a frequent creative presence here with such shows as Baby Case, Cafe Puttanesca, Tulipomania, and numerous People's Light & Theatre Company holiday pantos.

"As a kid, I always thought the friends on the field hockey team were the most confident and self-assured. They were tough and feminine at the same time." In other words, they were field hockey hot - "and they weren't silly."

That last part may be one of many places where Ogborn departs from reality. In his show, the Lady Appaloosas of upper-crust Applebee Academy have a North American championship to shoot for - and against a boys' team. (Not all characters will be played by the expected gender.)

Coach Shipley Barnes is so obsessed with winning that she hallucinates Elton John healing her of her sports wounds. Yet Jennie Eisenhower, who plays the coach, promises to establish her own steely sense of reality.

"In comedy, everything has to be more truthful than in drama. This is the truthiest I've ever been," she said between rehearsals at 11th Hour headquarters in South Philadelphia. "I feel everything at the core of my being."

The show is an intentional musical throwback to the MTV mid-1980s - from Elton John to Robert Palmer to Meat Loaf. Conceptually, however, Ogborn is reaching back much further, to the lightweight shows Jerome Kern wrote before Show Boat, such as 1917's Leave It to Jane - college and high school musicals in which winning the Big Game (well, any game) is high-stakes theater and something to sing about.

While Ogborn is a serious descendant of Stephen Sondheim and is dedicated to putting fresh stories onstage, he's after an element of performance in this show that he feels has been missing in the high-tech, scenery-heavy productions of Broadway.

"American musical theater has veered so far," he said. "The performance element has been lost, and I want to bring it back."

In New York, that problem is addressed by City Center's Encores! series, which revives old musicals for short runs with minimal scenery, automatically skewing the theatrical responsibilities toward the performers. In Philadelphia, 11th Hour has filled that niche with semi-staged productions of seldom-seen shows. But combining that with a full production of a sports musical makes potential challenges escalate.

For decades, the only truly successful sports musical was 1955's Damn Yankees. Last season Rocky the Musical arrived (and failed to thrive) on Broadway. But now, independent of Field Hockey Hot, Bucks County Playhouse is developing a baseball musical titled National Pastime, set in 1933 Iowa, with songs by Al Tapper and book by Tony Sportiello. Field Hockey Hot closes March 22; National Pastime arrives April 2.

A true sports musical perhaps presents the ultimate staging problem: how to safely contain the specific sport to the stage.  And the demise of the Prince Music Theater (formerly the American Music Theatre Festival) has left little mechanism in Philadelphia for producing new musical theater, aside from one-offs (often by Ogborn) at the Arden Theatre and People's Light in Malvern. For the 10-year-old 11th Hour, this leap into a fully produced new musical requires a budget of $70,000 to $80,000 rather than the usual $50,000.

But the oddness of a field hockey musical has also been a strength: Teams are buying tickets in blocks. And, says Michael O'Brien, 11th Hour's co-founder, sporting goods companies such as Longstreth and Rage Field Hockey offered sponsorship. "It's been unbelievable. Longstreth gave us all of this field hockey equipment and uniforms in the style of the 1980s."

A native Philadelphian who graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School, Ogborn took his firsthand knowledge of field hockey players from Agnes Irwin School in Bryn Mawr and started hatching his musical in 1998. After seeing Eisenhower in 11th Hour's 2008 production of Reefer Madness, he decided "to write something that she could really get her chops around."

The all-consumed Coach Barnes appears to fit Eisenhower's outsize talent with eerie perfection. "Michael is so incredible about getting inside somebody's mind, and making the kind of choices that they would want to make," she says. "In a [2014] workshop of the show at UArts, the girl doing my role said it was like doing an impersonation of me."

The 1980s throwback element of the show has an odd twist: Much of the cast and creative team are just now seriously discovering that era. Eisenhower is 36, O'Brien is 35, and his sister, director Megan Nicole O'Brien, even younger. Still, the MTV videos of the era don't leave much to the imagination, nor do reruns of 1980s TV shows such as Dynasty.

Ogborn, who is in his early 50s, was there, but for him the decade was dominated not by shoulder pads, punk rock, and a moonwalking Michael Jackson, but by the horrors of the AIDS epidemic.

"When I watched a VH1 special on the '80s last year, I thought, 'When did all of this happen? Where was I?' " he said. "As a member of the gay community, we were fighting, living and dying in a parallel universe. By the end of the decade, I was able to compose C'est la Guerre! as a call to arms to forward AIDS education and political action." But by then the '80s party was over.

Now, he says, "almost 30 years later, I am able to go back and capture some of the joy I missed."

Presented by 11th Hour Theatre Company through March 22 at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.

Tickets: $32-$37. Information: 267-987-9865 or www.11thhourtheatrecompany.org. EndText