A little romance Pitts-Wiley’s Man, Woman, Chaos BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The bad news has been that, over the years, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley has had to take songs he was especially emotionally connected to and remove them from shows because, as the story lines developed, they no longer fit in.

The good news is that many of these songs are in Man, Woman, Chaos, a cabaret song fest by Pitts-Wiley and Robert Schleeter, at AS220 on Sunday, December 14 at 6 p.m. and on Monday, December 22 at 7:30 p.m. The theme is relationships, and the singers reviewing that madness are Sharon Mazyck, Elise Coverdale-Mancini, Bobby Justin, and David Tessier.

The show came about eight years ago, when Pitts-Wiley and his longtime collaborator added up the discards from the three musical productions they’d done together and found they had more than 40. Some were, they thought, quite good. As with a romantic relationship, when a song in a production doesn’t work out, it’s not necessarily because it’s unloved.

"Whenever you’re writing a new show there are things that help carry the story line along very effectively, and as the story develops not everything works the same," Pitts-Wiley explains. "A song might carry an idea but it doesn’t help the story along. So you get to a point where you have to eliminate those songs."

And that, like breaking up, is hard to do. Especially hard in this case, because most of the orphan songs were about love relationships, so they had their emotional hooks in him — and musical hooks, too.

"It’s very difficult," he says of the culling process, "not only because I feel very strongly about the material but often because it’s the kind of song that has a lot of commercial potential. Sometimes it has a great groove to it."

Relationships was the theme common to most of the rejects, but musically it was a mixed bag — Aretha Franklin meets Willie Nelson.

"Sometimes when you’re writing a song it comes out as a rock and roll, sometimes it’s country and western, sometimes it’s rhythm and blues, sometimes it’s just the blues because that’s the best form to tell the story of the song," Pitts-Wiley says. "And sometimes you’ll cut a song out not because it doesn’t carry the story line along but because it’s not in the genre of the show anymore."

So sometimes he’s had to take what promised to be a showstopper and kiss it goodbye. An interesting example of that is "Skywalker," which at first looked like it would be one of the best moments in his 1984 work, The Spirit Warrior’s Dream. It started out about how we deal with the music of our lives and what happens if that music is taken away. In the show, there were denizens of an underworld trying desperately to cling to their music. With that premise, Pitts-Wiley had carte blanche to pull together songs in various musical styles, so genre wasn’t an issue. However, the thematic through line was a problem.

"Ultimately, there was a theme in the show that wasn’t about the loss of music, it was about the loss of freedom, that became more dominant than the original idea," Pitts-Wiley recalls. "The Spirit Warrior’s Dream began to take on a different form as a show. And thus 90 percent of the original music no longer worked."

But "Skywalker," which is about loving someone who has a dangerous occupation, can readily fit into the current Man, Woman, Chaos, first staged in 1997. As a cabaret, it doesn’t have to tell a story.

For 18 years a member of Trinity Repertory Company, the 50-year-old Pitts-Wiley has staged six more musical shows since he did Celebrations: An African Odyssey in 1979, which will have its 24th production this month. They tend to adhere to themes more than to be full narrative stories, so they are less what you think of as musicals than they are evenings of song with bridging conversations. Sara’s Jukebox (1992)dealt with a depressed woman whose music spirits emerge to help save her. A Secret Meeting of Black Men (1996) concerned black identity on the occasion of the 1995 Million Man March.

Man, Woman, Chaos has been much delayed — productions were rained out this summer, and in recent weeks both snowed out and actored out when one performer had to be replaced at the last minute. Producing under his Mixed Magic Theatre umbrella, Pitts-Wiley has never been busier. When he was appearing recently in Driving Miss Daisy, he was director and producer on four works at the same time, including the upcoming Middle Passage Week in Newport (December 16 through 21), which will include Celebrations and his annual A Kwanzaa Song.

"It was crazy," Pitts-Wiley says about his recent hectic pace. "But over the years I’ve learned how to multitask that way. You try to find good people and ultimately you learn to let people help you."