Bolingbrook Composer Teams With Son, Aims To Bring Real 'Polka King' Story To Broadway

BOLINGBROOK, IL — First, a movie on Netflix; now, a musical workshop in New York City with the possibility of Broadway in the future. Bolingbrook resident Stephen Kaminski is no stranger to writing music.

From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, Kaminski served as the music director of Polish-American entertainer Jan Lewan's Polka band.

In 2018, Jack Black starred in "The Polka King," and Kaminski arranged and composed the soundtrack music for the movie. The movie told the real-life story of polka band leader Jan Lewan, who went to prison in 2004 after he was involved in orchestrating a Ponzi scheme. Lewan was released from prison in 2009.

Now, seven years later, Kaminski has written "Big Famous, The Musical," which recently had a workshop at New 42 Studios in New York City in March. The space is used by many Broadway shows to practice and rehearse.

Born and raised on the East coast, Stephen and his wife, Lynn, moved to Bolingbrook in 2014.

"Neither Jan nor myself had any influence on the story or script for [the movie], although the music supervisors contacted me to write and arrange all the band music heard in the film," Kaminski said of the "Polka King" Netflix movie. "Even though it was an amazing experience to be a part of the film making process, there were things in the story that I was not completely happy with."

Kaminski said that after the movie was made, producers said that the story would make a great musical on Broadway.

"And, while waiting to see if they would connect us with a writer, COVID hit, and everything stopped cold," he told Patch.

After thinking about how he wished he had had more control over the story of the movie, Kaminski decided to tackle the musical himself.

"My son, Nicholas, lives (literally) on Broadway in [New York] and works in theater as an actor, musician and music director," Stephen said. "I thought, if I am going to do this, I wanted to enlist his help and expertise. So beginning in 2020, we started to write this show together."

So, Kaminski and his son, Nicholas, paired up for the show. Stephen handled the music and lyrics, while Nicholas did the book, music and lyrics.

"In the last five years of writing and developing this show for the Big Stage, my son and I surprisingly never had an argument. We disagreed a lot but found ways of working together by debating our viewpoints. We always found that 'middle ground' that we felt was best for the scene or the song, with our egos unbruised. It has been a great experience working with my son on this for sure," Kaminski told Patch.

He added that his wife and two daughters acted as early critics of all the songs in the show.

"They even helped record a lot of the demos as we tweaked and further developed the music," Kaminski said.

Similar to the movie, "Big Famous" is based around Jan Lewan and his "American Dream gone wrong" story, Kaminski said.

The story is about "how his actions and decisions affected the people around him, including his wife and family, his fans, the musicians and of course, myself," Kaminski said.

"Jan was convicted of taking in around $5 million dollars of investor money, defrauding about 400 investors, mostly elderly fans, and spent 7 years in prison. It’s a compelling story, now told by someone who was there and lived through it," he said.

Kaminski said the workshop response was "extraordinary," and the studio was packed for both days of presentations. The workshop was directed by Rachel Klein, and featured Aaron Ramey as Jan Lewan, according to Playbill.com.

As for next steps, Kaminski said the team will gather some more feedback, make minor adjustments to the script and music, and then look to get funding for a limited regional development run in Akron, Ohio, among other locations.

"Once the regional debut happens, then we look to an 'out of town' run for a few months at stages such as in Chicago, before being finally [it's] ready for a New York Broadway opening," Kaminski said. "It’s a long process, but I think when theatre-goers experience this musical, it will stay with them for a long time to come."