The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre

Face the Truth, You Crazy Bastard

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:42:00 +0000

One of the things I've enjoyed most about working on Bukowsical is how honest it is about Bukowski, about creative people in general, and about creation. Sure, Bukowsical is more funhouse mirror than actual biography, more hipster prank than literary exegesis, but even though it plays fast and loose with reality sometimes, it still gets at the truth about Bukowski, his life, his work, and the explosive intersection of those three. And in the process, Bukowsical also gets at the truth about us.

As the show reminds us more than once, we can be Bukowsical too. Perhaps more often than we'd like to admit.

In my experience, there are essentially two kinds of stories -- love stories and Hero Myths stories. I can't think of a single show we've produced in twenty-two years that isn't one or the other. It seems fairly obvious why this is -- the two fundamental human drives are survival and connection. Hero Myths are about survival, including psychological and emotional survival, and love stories are about connection, love, sex, and all that jazz. As I've written here in the past, we're in the middle of a new Golden Age of Musical Theatre, with more new shows than ever before built on the Hero Myth rather than on love stories. I think that's partly because many musicals are now more individual, personal expressions than they once were (think Rent, A New Brain, American Idiot, Once), and also because the times have changed.

Human connection is not nearly the struggle today that it was when the majority of our country was rural, before television, before the internet, so it's not as primary a topic in our storytelling. Parallel to that, as our culture matures and grows more sophisticated, we have more free time, more time for reflection, more time to explore inward. When Rodgers & Hammerstein started writing together, most young people's life paths were set for them by family and society; today, that's rarely the case. Today, it's a very different world and most of us must find our own road.

Just like Bukowski did.

While Bukowski's life was way more horrific than most of our lives, and while Bukowsical takes that already extreme life and exaggerates it further for comic effect, still we can all see ourselves in Buk's Hero journey. We've all felt like outsiders in one situation or another. We've all felt rejected. We've all felt unloved. We've all felt lost. We've all known success and failure. And most of us have drowned our sorrows in alcohol at least once or twice. Despite Buk's more antisocial character traits, he is in many ways very Zen-like. He just stays on his road and keeps stumbling forward, pretty much just accepting whatever comes his way.

And his life story, even in the cartoon world of Bukowsical, has lessons for us. No matter how many obstacles and tragedies assault him, Bukowski never gives up on his writing. He knows what his path is, he stays on it no matter what, and he refuses to allow anyone to steer him off of it. That's certainly a lesson more of us could learn. I guess I identify with Bukowski because I did the same thing with my musical theatre -- since back before I can even remember, all I wanted to do in life was make musicals, and I never wavered from that path for a second. And though I always wish it was easier to pay my bills, I've always known what Bukowski always knew -- as the great Joseph Campbell put it, you must follow your bliss.

I found a wonderful article a while back about the personalities and habits of creative people. As I read it, I realized it described Bukowski perfectly, it described me perfectly, and it described most of the people I work with too. One quote is something I've learned to accept and embrace over time:

"Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm... This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always 'on.' In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work." -- quoted from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's article, "The Creative Personality" in Psychology Today, 1996

Reading this article reminded me again how lucky I am to work and play with the people I work and play with. I just read a very cool book called The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, and it makes the point that everyone is creative. The very act of speaking is creation, assembling words into sentences to express thoughts. People create all the time. People like Bukowski create great art (what the book calls "extraordinary creativity"), but we all create. Which is why Bukowski's story really does connect to almost everyone.

We are all Bukowsical.

Maybe the artistic lesson of Bukowsical for me is that when I find something that speaks to me, it's probably going to speak to our audiences too. I may not understand right away what it is about a show that's so important or compelling, but I'll figure it out over time. Hero Myth stories are important because every Hero Myth is a human life in miniature, and the point of art (as Sondheim likes to say) is to make order out of the chaos of our lives. A piece of art selects from life the details that reveal the essence of the human experience and arranges them to tell a story that reveals important truths.

As I watch this amazing, fearless cast bring Bukowsical to life every night, I keep thinking of one of my favorite lyrics, from "Pity the Child" in Chess -- "Pity the child, but not forever, not if he stays that way." In other words, we all have baggage, we all have obstacles, and the point of life is to keep moving on. That's something we all need to be reminded of, and Charles Bukowski is an incredibly vivid example of that.

The response to this show, from both critics and audiences, has been so much more positive than I expected, including several rave reviews, and I think it's for the reasons I've laid out here. In its own weird, aggressive way, Bukowsical is every bit as universal as Fiddler on the Roof.

Still, as several of our reviews felt compelled to point it, it's not a show for everyone. I can tell that some people enjoy the show, but have a hard time with the language and some of the content, while other people go on and on about how much they absolutely love it. It may be partly about their expectations -- we warned people about the adult language and content, but I know some of them came in having no idea what they were getting into. I think they probably had the hardest time with the show. And my bet is that the people who loved the show most are the people who don't distinguish between "good" words and "bad" words.

Every year when we program our next season, we know that we can pick one show that probably won't sell all that well -- or more to the point, we know we should pick one show like that. I have a theory that the only theatre companies that survive long-term are those who provide programming that no one else does -- New Jewish Theatre, St. Louis Shakespeare, Act Inc.,The Muny, and of course, New Line. The whole reason New Line exists is to offer an ongoing experience in the musical theatre that you can't get anywhere else. We produce so many shows that no one else in our area would ever dare put on stage -- The Ballad of Little Mikey, Love Kills, The Wild Party, Johnny Appleweed, She's Hideous, bare, The Nervous Set, and of course, Bukowsical. And our willingness to do that is starting to change the conversation not just locally but nationally, as other companies around the country see that our kind of programming is viable -- a company doing work like this can stay afloat for twenty-two years.

I hate using the word edgy because it's become so diluted, but sometimes we do shows that are literally at the edge of what audiences can handle. Occasionally we even cross that line ever so slightly (Love Kills and The Wild Party come to mind). I knew that this was one of those shows that was right up to the edge -- it was going to be too much for some in our audiences. I don't think a company like New Line should do that kind of show all the time, but I think we have to do them once in a while. Those shows make us uncomfortable because they take us into the dark corners where we don't like to look. But sometimes it's important that we look anyway.

People need what we do. They need storytelling. They need art. Yes, including art as vulgar and rambunctious as Bukowsical. It's been a joy and a privilege working on this show and getting to know the one and only Charles Bukowski. What a wild, hilarious ride! We close this weekend -- if you haven't seen the show yet, come join us this weekend. We promise you a hell of an adventure and at least a dozen belly laughs.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Prefer Perversity

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:29:00 +0000

The response we've gotten to Bukowsical has been amazing. We routinely get rave reviews for our work, but this show is so out of the mainstream, so subversive, so aggressive, that I thought we might freak out some of the reviewers. Instead they rose to the challenge, just as we had, and they wrote some really insightful reviews...

I think my favorite quote came from Steve Allen at Stage Door St. Louis, who wrote in his review, “Scott Miller and his New Line Theatre never back down. Has a musical been a quick flop on or off Broadway? He’ll make it a hit and suddenly regional theatres are salivating to produce it. Is a musical considered too 'out of the mainstream?' No problem, let’s give our audiences a choice and see what happens. Is this one too rude, crude and obnoxious? Let’s do it! And now, combining all three of the above theatrical no-no’s, New Line presents Bukowsical, the musical.”

In that quote, Allen gets at what's most important to me about New Line -- to find and better understand shows that others have failed to fully understand. Quite a few of the shows we produce have opened on or off Broadway but failed quickly and sometimes spectacularly. But it's never the show's fault. High Fidelity, bare, Cry-Baby, and other shows we've produced were badly served by their New York production staffs, and needed only respect and serious consideration to be truly wonderful. And as Allen mentions, once we produce these shows and prove their worth, other companies around the country begin contacting us to find out how to get production rights. Which I love.

Bukowsical is in a different category, because our version of the script is relatively different from the original, since the writers allowed me to remove the show's original framing device, and that changed the show in a fundamental way. But again, I think we came at this outrageous comedy more seriously than it had been approached in its earlier incarnations -- we take our comedy very seriously -- and the result is that we revealed the artistry and craft and insight that hadn't been fully revealed before. And it's still really funny, maybe even funnier. Even the show's authors told us that they had learned a lot about their show from seeing our production.

What better compliment could anyone pay us...?

Lynn Venhaus of the, Belleville News-Democrat, wrote in her review, "Let's hear it for the risk takers, for those who embrace originality, for entertainers who want to give audiences something different. Want to raise your eyebrows, laugh out loud and marvel at the chutzpah of creative minds? Fit the bold, brazen -- and bewitching -- Bukowsical into your schedule at New Line Theater during the next two weekends. . . it's unlike anything you have ever seen."

Judy Newmark also wrote something really insightful at the top of her review -- "Did Charles Bukowski — the alcoholic, self-destructive, charismatic artist of American lowlife, a subject he swam through in his brackish flood of novels, stories, columns and poems — ever see a musical? It’s hard to imagine what would have inspired him to take in a Broadway show. Songs such as 'Some Enchanted Evening' and 'I Could Have Danced All Night,' after all, express a somewhat different worldview from 'Love Is a Dog from Hell' (the title of one of his many volumes of poetry). But musical theater has changed a lot since Bukowski (1920-1994) came on the scene. Now 'Love Is a Dog from Hell' is actually the title of a song — and its author is the subject of the smoky, clever, amazingly foul-mouthed show at New Line Theatre."

Again, Judy gets at something important and fundamental. Our art form is changing. Notwithstanding the many inexplicable remountings of musicals from 60-70 years ago, the American musical theatre has changed dramatically in the last two decades, in response to our changing world and culture. And it's still evolving, faster than at any other time in its history.

To that same point, Steve Callahan wrote in his Bukowsical review for KDHX, "For twenty-two years Scott Miller and his New Line company have been zapping the St. Louis musical theatre scene with bolts of energy. Off-beat, eccentric, sometimes dark, often hilarious, occasionally outrageous and always fresh, New Line productions are for folks who have accepted the fact that Rogers and Hammerstein are actually dead."

Since our founding in 1991, our company has been at the vanguard of nonprofit musical theatre across the country, a movement begun during the early 1990s, just as the idea of more purely artistic musical theatre was starting to take hold. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen writes in her book Directors and the New Musical Drama, “After the pioneering efforts of theatres such as the Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York, the idea of the serious nonprofit musical spread to theatres across America during the 1990s. While these shows met with varying levels of economic and critical success, the very existence of this alternative home for the art form began to redefine the musical, offering an alternative to both the traditional Broadway musical and the new West End shows. As the economics of the commercial theatre became increasingly forbidding, the nonprofit theatre became vital incubators for musical drama and nurtured a new generation of musical theatre writers.”

In New York, a show is a "success" only if lots of tourists pay a shit-ton of money to see it, over a really long period of time. At New Line, a show is a success if it's good and it connects to our audiences in a meaningful way.

Richard Green from TalkinBroadway, wrote a very smart and funny review, built on the fact that there were tornado warnings going off during our opening night performance of Bukowsical -- something Richard found to be a perfect metaphor...

Maybe we would have gone to the basement, as the sirens wailed, if the show had been The Sound of Music: which teaches us that good can overcome evil (even if it means crossing the Alps on foot with a bunch of spoiled little brats). Or maybe we would have gone to the basement if it were My Fair Lady: which teaches us that it's better to enter into a sham marriage with an abusive, closeted gay guy than go back to a life in the gutter. Because we want to believe these things—or, at least, we want to believe these things will lead to something that will be somehow just slightly more tolerable. Those are shows you bring an umbrella to—in hopes of a brighter tomorrow. And yet I didn't see a single bumbershoot on this very stormy Friday night. So, there we sat, as the steady mechanical howl outside turned to a strangely panicked hoot-hoot-hoot, which I don't remember ever hearing before in 45 years of living in Tornado Alley. And I think we sat there because we want to believe it will all lead to something worse. Something that validates what we have actually witnessed in our own lives: that the system is rigged in favor of corruption. That God has sub-contracted out the management of this world to the worst possible slave-state plantation foreman in the Universe. And that it all really needs to be set to music.

Not only was his review really funny, but he brilliantly captured what Bukowsical is all about. He ended his review with, "Everyone on stage, and in the band, is a heavy-hitter. And that feeling in the air, of a World Series just-won, is a tribute to all their precision and effort and talent, and even hopeful endurance, in spite of the storms, throughout." That's called a rave.

Chris Gibson wrote in his review for BroadwayWorld...

Scatological, unpredictable, and oddly whimsical at times, Bukowsical is not easily defined or categorized, and that's actually part of its appeal to me. Spencer Green (book, lyrics) and Gary Stockdale (book,lyrics and music) have concocted an interesting musical stew, some of which details the life and times of writer Charles Bukowski, and some of which seems to be skewering the entire idea altogether. For instance, the man himself doesn't bring to mind anything remotely resembling a warm and fuzzy character, and yet the music for this piece is incredibly sunny and upbeat. This makes for a fascinating juxtaposition between the lyrical content and the music that accompanies it. In fact, the words are often graphic and vulgar, but, at times, they're also surprisingly erudite and witty. These contradictions alone act to sum up Bukowski's complicated existence and ultimate status as a wordsmith. New Line Theatre's production captures this drunken genius in all his splendor. You may be shocked by what you see or hear, but I guarantee you won't forget it. This is cutting edge theatre at its finest.

Gibson got at the heart of why we wanted to do this show -- it's smart and funny, but beyond that, it questions (quite wittily) all the conventions and devices of American musical comedy. And that's a conversation we're all having about our art form. As we write and produce these neo musical comedies, we have to think about what we take from the old forms and what we discard, what about American musical comedy is still relevant and still uniquely American, and what about the form no longer speaks to audiences in 2013. The most fun part about the conversation is watching as so many different artists come to different conclusions about all that, as the form grows and evolves into something much more sophisticated without losing the joy and muscle and anarchy of old-school musical comedy.

Kevin Brackett at ReviewSTL has just started reviewing New Line shows recently (his site focuses more on film), and he's not a theatre guy at all, but that's part of what makes his reviews of our shows so great -- he's not constrained by preconceptions about musical theatre. He comes to our work fresh and open to whatever we put in front of him. He wrote in his review, "Aside from its brutally honest and uncensored mentality, what makes the show so great is how seriously it is taken while being outrageous and laugh out loud funny. What I mean is that all the elements of a great American musical are there. The book and lyrics, written by Spencer Green and Gary Stockdale, are clever and quirky – always keeping the audience anticipating the next quotable line while perfectly carrying the story along. The music by Stockdale, wonderfully performed by the New Line band, is as catchy and memorable as any Broadway show."

He gets it. This is serious comedy -- which I think is a lot funnier than silly comedy. He gets that this show uses the vocabulary of the "great American musical" but for different ends than Cole Porter and Jerry Herman. Maybe it's partly because he doesn't have much of a theatre background that he can see so clearly what we're up to, and appreciate it all for what it is. He ends his review with, "It should go without saying that with a tagline like 'Sex. Drugs. Booze. Art.,' Bukowsical is not for everyone. But if you are a fan of shows like The Book of Mormon, or Avenue Q, there shouldn’t be anything you can’t handle. New Line Theatre does what it does best, putting on a raw and uncensored show that never pulls any of its punches. With a fantastic cast, non-stop laughs, and many memorable songs, 'you can be Bukowsical too.' And you should."

In fact, three of our reviews compared Bukowsical favorably to The Book of Mormon (though I think Bukowsical is smarter and funnier and more subversive), and that's gotta sell some tickets!

Byron Kerman wrote in his review for St. Louis Magazine, “It's the perfect piece of theater for a sophisticated urban crowd looking for pure ribaldry on a Saturday night. . . This is the sort of goofy, lead-with-your-pelvis, sharp late-night comedy that’s perfect for a city with a thriving, risk-taking alt-theatre scene, like Chicago or New York. We’d like more of this brand, please.”

Andrea Torrence wrote for St. Louis Theatre Snob, “This musical not only sheds considerable light on what went into making Charles Bukowski the artist he was, it also satirizes the conventions of musical theatre. It defies tradition by packaging foul lyrics about slimy behavior in these irresistibly tuneful, upbeat little songs. Under Miller's clear-sighted direction, the entire cast passionately embrace all kick-lines, key changes, and every instance of 'jazz hands.' Seeing these supposedly contradictory elements combined with such enthusiasm is what makes it so funny. The profanity may offend your sensibilities, but with everything else this show has to offer, I bet you'll get over it after about 4 minutes.”

Again, she understands that this show has an agenda beyond laughs. It's exploring what a musical comedy can -- should? -- be in this new millennium, to serve today's audiences living in these complicated, crazy times.

Truthfully, as a director, I don't really care what the reviewers think. The audience is the only true measure of a show's success. But as a producer, I know that the kind of reviews we get really do help sell tickets, particularly when we're producing shows like Bukowsical.

When New Line started out, there weren't many among the local reviewers who understood and wrote intelligently about our work. One notable exception was Mike Isaacson, who immediately got what we were up to, and who wrote amazingly intelligent, insightful reviews of our shows. (Today, Mike is a veteran Broadway producer and he recently took the helm at The Muny. But we miss him as a theatre reviewer.) But the theatre landscape in St. Louis has changed drastically over New Line's twenty-two seasons, and now it's pretty rare that we get a clueless review. Today, St. Louis reviewers don't turn off their brains when they go to a musical (as many of them once did) because we've shown them how smart and deep and relevant musical theatre is today.

And that may be what I'm most proud of.

Sure, I'm proud that New Line is still thriving after twenty-two seasons, but I get only some of the credit for that. Much of the credit goes to our incredible, adventurous audiences who embrace our work, and the rest of the credit goes to the amazing artists who do such extraordinary work with us, show after show. I am responsible for setting us on the right path, but they do all the work to get us there. I owe all of them so much.

I've been thrilled by the reception to this show. I can't imagine a better place to make the kind of theatre I want to make.

Thank you St. Louis.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. I have to share these two tweets about our show... One person, who was at our show with a couple celebrating their anniversary, tweeted, "What a show. Rude, Crude and Educational. Bukowsical is amazing. Thanks New Line Theatre and Happy Anniversary @LJcreach" And then the couple tweeted, "Bukowsical from New Line Theatre was quite possibly the best musical that I have ever seen. Love is a Dog from Hell. Happy Anniversary to us!" How awesome is that.

Watch the Underdog Prevail

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 18:10:00 +0000

Wednesday night

It's the night before our preview as I type this. We had an outstanding final dress rehearsal. The actors are killing it! Still, I really have no idea what people are going to think of Bukowsical. I know I like it. But I'm pretty weird. People may absolutely love the audacity and transgressiveness of it. Or they may find it utterly appalling. Or both. We've been here before -- with The Wild Party, Love Kills, and so many other shows -- and I'm kind of used to it now.

So I thought it would be fun to do a blog post that extends from tonight up through opening night, chronicling the response to our show. So here it is.

Thursday night

We had our preview and it went great -- a couple tiny mistakes, nothing to worry about. We had a small-ish house, but I prefer that for a preview. The show went well, but it didn't have the spark I know it will have tomorrow night. I think the cast feels good, and though the audience was a bit timid, they were laughing quite a bit, and the actors tell me they could tell from the audience's faces that they were fully engaged.

I was worried for the first fifteen minutes or so. I think we really shocked the hell out of the audience with the opening number ("too drunk to fuck," "fucking a whore," "shit on her face," etc.). It was an older audience and I'm not sure they all knew what they were getting into. I think they were sort of horrified. And then the second song, "Art is Pain," is so intensely mean that they were differently horrified by that. When Marcy came out in her liquor bottle costume, they loosened up a bit, but it wasn't really till the gross-out humor of the drunken love duet "Chaser of My Heart" that they really started laughing -- I think they finally understood the rules for the evening and were ready to get on the ride with us. They enjoyed the rest of the show.

A brief side note -- usually after our preview, we go across the street to Applebee's for dinner. Long story short, it took us an hour to be seated and another hour to get our food, with a third of the restaurant empty. A really bad experience. No more Applebee's for us.

I feel really great about the show. People are getting it.

Friday night

Wow! What a fucking night! First off, I knew the Bukowsical writers, Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green, were coming tonight, with their friend Michael, the show's original producer. But I didn't tell the actors -- that really freaks them out, knowing the writers are in the house. I kept thinking that I ought to be nervous about them seeing our production, but I really wasn't. Whatever my worries about its reception, I know I took us down the right path and I know we did justice to this clever, wonderful show.

But the most dramatic part of the evening was the repeated tornado warnings. By curtain time, the rain had not yet gotten to us and the radar (thank god for iPhones) was showing that the storm was consistently to the north of us. So I actually asked the audience if they wanted to go to the basement or go on with the show. They wanted very adamantly to go on. So we did. Though I spent the whole show checking the radar. And meanwhile, several New Liners were on the first floor, preparing our after-party, so I had them checking on things as well. We got two more warnings after the show began, but they stopped about fifteen minutes in.

Despite the weather, we had a big house tonight and the show was on fire -- the cast was electrifying and the audience was laughing like crazy. Everything really came together exactly as I expected, and I could not have been happier. I knew we were in good shape as soon as I checked in our Opening Night Tweeters -- they were loving the show. (To read their Opening Night Tweets -- which are hilarious! -- go to Twitter and search #NewLineBuk -- and be sure to click "All" at the top.)

There was one glitch -- two of our eight mics decided not to work, but luckily, both actors have big voices, they projected their guts out, and the band adjusted enough, that we didn't miss a single lyric.

After the show, I was thrilled to discover that the writers were really happy with our production. One of them paid me the most amazing compliment -- he said he had learned a lot about their show from watching our production. How cool is that? They had so many compliments for us. They loved my staging, particularly the number that I felt least sure about "The Derelict Trail." They loved Robin's choreography, the band, the vocals, the set, and they loved Zak as Bukowski and Kimi as One True Love.

The writers came to the after-party with us and they were so cool. I think all the actors got to talk to them, and they paid all of us even more compliments. I talked to a lot of other people at the party and they all totally loved the show. They really embraced it, they loved its intelligence and its subversiveness.

It was a perfect Opening Night. Well, except for the tornado.

Saturday night

A smaller house tonight, and so they were a bit timid, but people were laughing and enjoying it. Shows like Bukowsical are tricky to sell. We make a big deal out of Opening Night, because that helps jump-start word-of-mouth, but we don't get real big houses the first weekend. After the reviews come out and word-of-mouth has a chance to work, the crowds will pick up. Judging by the response so far, I think this show may actually do better than we expected.

Oh, and we had a heckler tonight. A real jackass, sitting off by himself, surrounded by empty seats, who did his best to let the cast know, all night, repeatedly and loudly, that our show wasn't pure enough Bukowski for him. It's not supposed to be pure Bukowski, dumbass. That's the point. He actually sat in the audience and flipped off the actors over and over. But the most telling moment came late in the show, when Chris and Ryan come out as Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, and this ass clown says fairly loudly, "They don't even look like the real guys!" No, they don't, dumbass. I think he came into the show intending to hate it, so wrapped up in his desperate need to prove that he's smarter than us, that he completely missed the monster dose of self-aware irony at the heart of the show's premise. He needs to get a clue and grow a set.

I was in the back of the house and didn't really know what was happening til afterward. The actors were a bit thrown off by the heckler, but the show was still great and people seemed to really enjoy it. At the end of the finale, several of the actors flipped off the heckler -- exactly as Bukowski probably would have done.

As we do after every "first Saturday," we went to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner after the show. And we were delighted that the writers (who have been exploring St. Louis all day) came to join us, so we got some more hang time. They're both really great guys, really funny, really smart, and I'm so glad that we gave their show a production they're proud of.

All in all, a pretty great weekend and a great launch of Bukowsical.

With a lot of the less commercial shows we produce, other companies around the country often find our website and ask how to get production rights to shows we've done, so we steer them to the writers or their agents. Because we resurrected High Fidelity and Cry-Baby, other companies are now producing those shows too. It's incredibly cool that we get to produce these wonderful shows, but it's ever cooler that we can give these misunderstood gems a longer life, getting produced around the country, and occasionally, even in other countries. I feel like it's a service I can give to this art form that I love so deeply.

I'm not sure if that will happen with Bukowsical. A company would have to be very brave and have a genuinely adventurous audience to produce this. It's an exceptionally entertaining show, but it's as R-rated as any musical I've ever seen. Still, hope springs eternal. I would love to see this great musical have a further life.

Sunday afternoon

So Hell Week is over and we've opened the show. I sort of have four days off now. There are a few things I need to deal with, but nothing big. Reviews will start coming out, maybe today. After listening to that audience Friday night, I bet we get pretty great reviews. And really, Zak is fucking genius in the central role, and he's got a hell of a strong cast around him -- brilliant, fearless comedians with amazing voices.

I can't wait to get back...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Be a Rebel and a Scofflaw

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:16:00 +0000

I write about a lot of different things on this blog -- our creative process, analysis of the shows we work on, thoughts on the art form, lists of cool books, shows, movies. It's been really fun over the last six years to explore the blog form and to develop a "house style" for my blog. It really is a different form of communication.

Back in spring 2007 when I started this blog, the main purpose was to chronicle our creative process. Partly just because that seems like something I would've loved to read when I was in high school and college -- one of my favorite book genres is collections of interviews with directors. But also because our process at New Line is relatively unique. We've developed a process over the last twenty-two years that takes from both mainstream regional theatre and also the experimental theatre movement in New York in the 1960s. In 2007 New Line was already in its sixteenth season, and I was realizing that our continued success was making a strong case for a non-commercial, "art" musical theatre. We were proving that it works, that there's an audience, and that there's plenty of brilliant, original work to produce.

And now there are other companies following in our footsteps -- The Music Theatre Company in Highland Park, IL; Minneapolis Musical Theatre in Minnesota; Kensington Arts Theatre in Kensington, Maryland; Factory Edge Theatre Works in Baltimore; Dreamlight Theatre Company in New York; Musically Human Productions in New York; Slow Burn Theatre Company in Fort Lauderdale; Little Radical Theatrics in Westchester, New York; Not Your Mom's Musical Theater in Derry, New Hampshire; and others. Only a couple of these companies even existed ten years ago; some are just a few years old. The American musical theatre is changing, and it's mostly happening outside of New York City.

Bukowsical has been such a wonderful experience partly because I know very few other companies are ballsy enough to produce it, and partly because I dearly love musical comedy. I had my infatuation with Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a long love affair with the Sondheim musicals, but my real love is musical comedy. The first musical I was ever in was Anything Goes, still one of my all-time favorite shows. A couple years ago, I started writing about the neo musical comedy, the new 21st reboot of the classic form. I've had such fun the last few years really diving back into musical comedy, with I Love My Wife, Cry-Baby, and now Bukowsical. Even in the form's latest evolution it still has everything that made me fall in love with musicals in the first place, their fundamentally American personality, comic, high-energy, aggressive, vulgar, muscular, rowdy, ironic, and almost always big-hearted. Even with our serious shows, I use so much that I learned from musical comedy.

And I've learned that comedy is a great way to make a serious point.

Bukowsical is one of those shows that makes me laugh just thinking about some random moment. I burst out laughing in the car last night on the way home from rehearsal, at least five or six separate times, just remembering how funny something in the show was, or how funny it will be to watch an audience react to this wild ride...

We're almost ready to open. Saturday afternoon we had our lighting cue-to-cue, where we move slowly through the show, moment by moment, so the lighting designer can see his lights and make adjustments or changes. Sunday afternoon, we had our sitzprobe, where the cast sings with the band for the first time and also with mics for the first time. It's just a few hours when the sound designer, the musicians, and the actors get a sense of each other's work before we run the whole show.

Each night this week, we run the show, full tech, band, lights, sound, costumes, props, the whole shebang. If the actors really have the show in hand before this, then these few nights -- we call it Hell Week -- aren't too bad. If the show is precarious at all, Hell Week can be hellish. But honestly, our Hell Weeks are almost never hellish anymore, partly because we get eight on nine full run-throughs of the show before Hell Week -- and most of them on the set -- a luxury we are very grateful for. The best part of this week is that the actors get to run the show, no stopping, with all the elements in place, for three nights in a row -- you'd be amazed how many problem get fixed and how much important fine tuning can happen in those last few rehearsals.

Bukowsical is in great shape, so the fine tuning is very subtle this week, mostly asking actors to move a foot this way or that, to be more fully in light, or to make sure a prop gets moved at the right time, or to correct a word in a lyric, small stuff like that.

Thursday we'll have a preview -- no critics and a small-ish house. The show really isn't finished until you add the audience, and it sucks to add that final element to the show in front of critics who are judging your work. The Rep and Stages get several previews, but one is enough for us. Every time you add an element to the show, it changes everything -- and the same is true with the audience. They change the show. So we love having a performance to orient to that before anybody's writing about us.

Friday night we'll open the show. In the last few years, we've started making a bigger deal out of opening night, encouraging all the New Liners to come that night if they can, and we have an after-party to which we invite the whole audience. It's a fun way to celebrate the opening of another wonderful adventure. And it gives us a great house on opening night, which gives us an awesome launch and gives the critics our best possible show. Also, because we have essentially no money for advertising, we rely a lot on word-of-mouth, so the more friends we get there that first night, the better the rest of the run will probably sell.

I love this show and I love this cast and, as I often do, I feel incredibly lucky that we get to do this kind of wild, adventurous, audacious work. New Line is very special and as we close our 22nd season with Bukowsical, I'm more grateful than ever to our audiences, the press, and the writers who keep writing this wonderful stuff and trusting us with it.

The adventure continues!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Expose Yourself for All the World to See

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:33:00 +0000

I used to worry, at this point in our process, whether I have made all the right choices. It's a little hard to tell right now, because the cake just isn't baked yet. But I learned a number of years ago I was worrying over nothing. There really are no right choices. There are only choices. There are only this road we're on and other roads we've left to others. We just go where the show takes us. If I've picked a great show for us to produce -- and I have -- it'll take us somewhere great.

You gotta just trust it.

And I have some remarkably kick-ass traveling companions on this journey with me. Luckily for me, my traveling companions have courage, heart, and brains. And an unerring sense of comedy, and a buttload of fearlessness.

I love actors. I love watching them create. I love helping them find that key that unlocks everything for them. I was a performer in high school and college, and I'm glad I've had that experience so I understand the process, the fear, the vulnerability of an actor onstage. But now, I couldn't do what the New Line actors do. I couldn't be that fearless, that open, that willing to jump off the cliff and hope you'll fly.

I'm really lucky. I get to work on many of the greatest works of the musical theatre ever written, and I get to do it with the most extraordinary theatre artists. Let me brag on this cast a little...

Zak Farmer is one of the two funniest people I've ever worked with -- and believe me, I've worked some incredibly funny people. The word that first comes to mind when I think of Zak is subversive. He lives to violate the social contract, to offend, to disorient, to leave you speechless. He's the Lenny Bruce and George Carlin of New Line. But he's not just funny. He can play anything from fiercely interior drama to the driest irony to the wackiest farce, and he can sing pretty much any style of music. You never know where he's gonna land with a character, but it will always be interesting, it will always make sense, and it will always be full of complexity and layers. I love working with this guy. He's been in seventeen New Line shows since summer of 2007 when he first joined us for Urinetown.

Nick Kelly is the other of the two funniest people I've ever worked with. Nick is like Robin Williams, literally overflowing all the time with ideas, really good ideas. Because of the sheer volume, I have to reject some of them, but that doesn't stop Nick. He always has thirty more waiting. I know I can give him pretty minimalist staging and then just let him play. I think working with Nick must be what working with people like Bert Lahr and Jonathan Winters was like. Overwhelming but really entertaining.

Joel Hackbarth is this incredibly sweet, decent, low-profile guy who we've got cussing like a drunken sailor with Tourette's in this show. I mentioned in my last post how hilarious it is to see this nice, unassuming guy singing lyrics like, "When you're fucking a whore, after downing a case, and you shit on her face..." It's funny no matter what, but it's even funnier if you know Joel. And I think he enjoys the obscenities more than he'd let on...

Kimi Short is the current New Line champion, having appeared in nineteen New Line shows, going back to Songs for a New World in 1998. Kimi's a trip -- one of the odder members of our odd family -- but she has a voice from God (she just played Diana in Next to Normal for us), and she's also great at both serious drama and quirky comedy. Watching Kimi and Zak sing the drunken love ballad "Chaser of My Heart" in this show makes me laugh like an idiot every time. It's tough to hold your own opposite a master comedian like Zak, but Kimi's got the comedy chops to do it.

Marcy Wiegert has done only three shows with us, but she's so a part of New Line that it feels like it's more than that. She's a consummate professional, a strong actor, and a powerhouse singer with a belt most women would die for. She sang the sweet lament "Frank Mills" in New Line's Hair and also belted out "Watch Your Ass" and "A Whole Lot Worse" in Cry-Baby. Merman may be dead, but she left her voice to Marcy. Wait till you see her as a singing and dancing bottle of beer in Bukowsical.

Chrissy Young is a relative newcomer to New Line, but she's become part of the family. In real life, she's this quiet, unassuming woman, but onstage she can be as rowdy and raunchy as the rest of the New Liners. Her portrayals of the depressive, suicidal writer Sylvia Plath and the horrifically abusive grade school teacher in Bukowsical are really dark but really funny.

Ryan Foizey joined us last season when we gave him the lead in Cry-Baby, which he was perfect for, finding that delicate balance between sincerity and irony that marks every John Waters story. Ryan has also been a record store customer in High Fidelity and the mysterious son Gabe in Next to Normal for New Line. He also plays guitar and trumpet, and directs, and he's just started his own theatre company, Theatre Lab. He's a busy boy.

Chris Strawhun is the baby of the cast, currently getting a graduate degree in theater at Lindenwood. Chris started off with us in the ensemble of Evita and then graduated to a Whiffle in Cry-Baby, and we were all impressed at how far he came in that short period of time. He just played Nathan Detroit at Lindenwood, and though this is his first larger role with New Line, we think he's ready. And he's really doing a great job.

With most of our shows, we aim for a cast that's half newcomers and half New Line veterans. This time, everyone in the cast has worked with us before. That's true partly because no one had ever heard of Bukowsical so we didn't have a large turnout at auditions, but also because this is such a tricky piece of theatre, and I know I can trust all these people -- to follow the road I've laid out for us, to "play" together to find all those wonderful moments that make a show like this come alive, and also to be utterly and completely fearless. If there's one thing New Line shows require, it's fearlessness.

We open Bukowsical next week, and I'm sleeping great. No worries here. The show is hilarious, it moves like a freight train, and it gets quirkier and more interesting every night. I really trust the people into whose hands I've put this very special, very unconventional musical.

I can't wait to share it with you.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Will Strap on Mine

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:04:00 +0000

I love this show.

We had our second run-through of Bukowsical Thursday night and it was such fun! We've got exactly the right cast for this vulgar, hilarious, sweetly old-fashioned, neo musical comedy -- a bunch of fearless New Line All-Stars who earned their stripes on bizarre shows like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Return to the Forbidden Planet, The Wild Party, Cry-Baby and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. They're all fully at home in this weird, dissonant, hybrid style. The content is dark, dark, dark, but the style is light and playful.

Even in this slightly rough state, I laugh at so many things in the show every time I hear them. And now that the cast has been through the whole show a couple times, they're settling in and starting to play -- the most important step for a comedy like this. I'm a funny guy, but I've got eight people onstage, every one of them as funny as me. I could make the show funny, but together we'll make it nine times funnier.

And really, we have a powerful head start because the material itself is so very funny -- "wrong" funny, which is my favorite kind.

So here are my Top Seven Favorite Moments in Bukowsical right now (a Top Ten or Top Five list would be too conventional for this show). I bet these will change as we polish the show and put it in front of our audiences, but today, these are the Seven...

Maybe the funniest thing about the show is hearing Joel Hackbarth, the sweetest, most decent guy I know, spew out obscenity after obscenity all night long. The one moment that makes me fall apart every time is in the middle of the opening number, when Joel sings, "When you're fucking a whore..." and he sings it -- almost shouts it -- with such crazy joy and such high musical comedy energy that you'd swear he's singing "We're the U.S. of A.!" The whole line is "When you're fucking a whore, after downing a case, and you shit on her face..." and the choreography Robin has given them for "shit on her face" always makes me laugh again. You'll have to see the show to find out why...

Second, in the song "Art is Pain," in which we witness Bukowski's horrific childhood, there's a section in which all the schoolchildren yell terrible things at him, and Ryan yells, "Hey! Let's pee on him!" And all the kids joyfully agree. It's so wrong and it's so very, very funny -- and significantly, it's also a moment that really forces the audience to confront the horror of Bukowski's early life, even as they're laughing.

Third -- Zak and Kimi singing "Chaser of My Heart," the show's big love song, when Bukowski has just met One True Love. It's a beautiful song with the grossest lyrics you've ever heard -- and not just really funny, but again, revealing the horrors of his life in a very pointed way. When Zak and Kimi learned the song in music rehearsals, we all thought it was hilarious. Then we staged it. And they decided to play the whole song sloppy drunk. That choice hadn't occurred to me, but it couldn't be more perfect. It makes it even funnier but also kind of poignant in a weird way. And there's nothing better than the climax of the song, when Kimi lets loose an American Idol power-pop moment. Zak sings, "But if my cock should lie supine..." and Kimi finishes the sentence for him, with a fully belted "Then I will strap on mine! Strap on mine!" The lyric is hilarious, and the American Idol moment is even hilariouser...

Fourth is Chrissy as Sylvia Plath. Chrissy decided early on that Sylvia Plath has no sense of humor, so all throughout the Writers' big vaudeville number, "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty," Chrissy is totally stone-faced as she dances, and it's really funny to watch. It's a choice that totally embodies the show itself -- both outrageous and straight-faced.

Fifth is my favorite piece of choreography in the show, "Love is a Dog from Hell," for which Robin has a created a cool Jack Cole/Bob Fosse kind of number. But here the misogyny is right there on the surface rather than subliminal -- it's funny and uncomfortable at the same time, as Bukowski repeatedly shoves and abuses the women in his life, but all in the form of uber-cool dance...

Number six on my list is Nick as the French director Barbet Schroeder. Throughout the song, "Through a Glass, Barfly," Nick "studies" and "frames" Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, as possible leads to play Bukowski in Barfly, and you have to see it to understand why it's so funny. Barbet is so serious and the song is so ridiculous -- and did I mention the accent...?

Maybe my favorite moment in the entire show is the faux operatic "Elegy," in which Bukowski mourns over the body of one of his women. The writing is amazing and Zak delivers it like it's Grand Fucking Opera and he's at the Met. It always makes me think of "What's Opera, Doc?" Such serious music coupled with lyrics like "Oh, cocksucking motherfucking fuck!" Again, a moment that totally encapsulates the spirit of Bukowsical.

This is clearly not a show for everyone. This will be only the second show of mine -- ever -- that my mother won't see (she would hate this). But for people who don't mind adult language, there is so much here to enjoy. It's so smart, it's so funny, and strangely enough, sometimes it's unexpectedly sweet. And on top of everything else, it also gives you a rough idea of the arc of Bukowski's actual life.

I'm so glad I happened on this recording on Amazon and that I decided to find the show's authors. It has been such fun working on Bukowsical, and I don't have to wait long now, before we can share it with our audiences.

Which is the best part.

Come join us on opening night, Friday, May 31, and stay for the after-party to meet the actors and musicians.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Just Pull Your Nuts Out

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:16:00 +0000

The ending of Bukowsical is as unconventional as the rest of Bukowsical.

The last big number is "Twelve Steps of Love," in which Bukowski goes to an AA meeting and is convinced to turn his life around. Except that never happened. There is a grain of truth here -- after treating a bleeding ulcer, Bukowski's doctor did tell him he'd die if he didn't give up alcohol. But he didn't, and he didn't.

So why this AA number? Probably mostly because it's a giant Fuck You to narrative convention and structure, and also to the recent string of bio-musicals. Bukowski wasn't interested in narrative structure and neither is Bukowsical. You could argue that narrative is far less important in Bukowsical than the act of storytelling itself. Like Bukowski himself would, this show and this song both sneer at the kind of happy resolution classic musical comedies required. Bukowsical gives the audience a musical comedy ending, then immediately takes it back -- right after "Twelve Steps," the narrator says, "This didn’t really happen to Charles Bukowski." And then they finish the show with a reprise of the uber-vulgar, confrontational opening number.

As the American novelist Willa Cather said, "The end is nothing; the road is all."

But this song does represent a kernel of truth, that the mainstream world was applying its worldview and values to Bukowski's life and pushing him toward the safe and conventional. Like Assassins, Bukowsical doesn't get historical fact right (and isn't trying to), but it does get essence right. It's a representation of how Bukowski perceived the world around him. "Twelve Steps of Love" presupposes that alcohol is a problem for Bukowski that must be solved, to "save" him. But none of that was actually true, as far as he was concerned. And Bukowski didn't stop drinking.

Both Bukowski and Bukowsical up-end our traditional ideas of morality, health, culture. ambition. The lesson we get from Bukowski's life and his work -- and his musical -- is that you can do everything "wrong" and still succeed. He might argue you must do everything "wrong." He wrote, "The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart." In other words, fuck the rules; follow your instinct.

But like the rest of the show, this song works on two levels at once. There's the surface level, the clueless earnestness of the do-gooders who think they know Bukowski's road better than he does. And there's also the meta-layer that comments on that surface sincerity, opening up an ironic distance between us and this AA meeting. It's a great lyric, that does more than it appears.

It starts off innocuous enough, pretty much what you'd expect, though it drops a shit pretty early on...

It takes
Twelve Steps of Love,
Twelve Steps of Love.
First admit your life is shit,
And you know you just can’t quit
Without the Man above.

You need
Twelve Steps of Love -- 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9...
Twelve Steps of Love.
Give your name and tell your story;
Make that moral inventory
Of all you’re guilty of.

Suddenly it's sounding a bit oppressive. And there's something a little off, like not having time to count all the way to twelve. Now it gets a little less sweet, a little more vulgar... dare I say, a little more Bukowsical...?

This is what it will take
To make you spill the beans.
Don’t make the same mistake
As Elvis and James Dean.
Don’t just puke your silly guts out;
Come on, Buk, just pull your nuts out --
The amends justify the means!

That last line is one of my favorite jokes in the show. And really, how often do you get a good AA joke in a musical, anyway? Then it gets a little more aggressive, and we get an even funnier rhyme, which also subverts AA's central tenet, "Let go and let God."

It takes
Twelve Steps of Love.
It’s a hug, then a fucking shove.
Although booze and drugs still trouble you,
Just let go and let Bill W.
Show you
What to do!
Let those Twelve Steps of Love.
Twelve Steps of Love,
Twelve Steps of Love,
Step all over you!

And we end with this ironic punchline -- this love and support will trample you! Or maybe more in tune with Buk's fears, it will trample his artistic output. His process is a completely organic one, so adding an outside, arbitrary control might strangle it, right? And if he's enjoying all this success, writing while he's drunk, why would he want to change that? We see by the end of the song how wrong this advice is for him. Buk and the audience can see this isn't his road.

It'd be like someone telling me to write my blog posts without smoking weed first...! Can you imagine...???

And maybe all this is a self-reflexive comment on how bad an idea it is to make a musical comedy out of Bukowski's story, how impossible it seems to musicalize his life, how much his story does not conform to musical comedy conventions. Then again, Bukowsical itself argues the same thing for its entire running time. That's the whole point. The fact that this show shouldn't exist to begin with is the whole reason it exists. If it had sounded like a good idea, Stockdale and Green probably wouldn't have been interested. It's the dissonance, the irony, the mismatch between story and storytelling, that's interesting and fun here.

We live in a world of The Daily Show and Robot Chicken now. Our culture has changed. And despite the wails of the traditionalists clinging to their vinyl cast albums, our art form is changing with the times. The American musical comedy is evolving, and that's really exciting.

Bukowsical is something of a Rorschach Test. Some people who see it will love it merely for the defiant way it hurls obscenities at its audience. They'll love the sheer moral and artistic anarchy of it, the same reason I first fell in love with Rocky Horror and Grease. Others will love it for its pointed irony. Lots of new musicals today are ironic, but this one is dripping with it. Probably both these groups will love the joy and rowdy chaos of it all. And some will probably love it precisely because it is on some level an old-fashioned musical comedy -- it both challenges us and comforts us. It's a neo musical comedy.

After I first listened to the LA cast album and after I first read the script, it really stayed with me, and I wasn't exactly sure why. Yes, I love four-letter words; I use them regularly and enthusiastically. But I don't like four-letter words in a musical just for the shock value (I'm looking at you, Silence!). So yes, Bukowsical is raunchy and R-rated, but that wasn't what I loved.

Having worked on it now for several weeks, having seen the whole show for the first time at our last rehearsal, I think I know why I love it. Bukowsical is a perfect example of what I call Stupid Humor for Smart People, a category which also includes The Daily Show, South Park, The Ricky Gervais Show, Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, you get the idea... It's the best of both worlds, and I think it has ancestors in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In. It's dick jokes and fart jokes, but also politics, literature, psychology, and existentialism.

Cheap laughs that raise interesting questions. Childish jokes that get at the nature of art and the relationship between an artist's life and his work.

And also the word "fuckhole."

It's a very dark piece of theatre. But these are dark times. And what better way to fight the darkness than to face it and laugh at it?

I can't wait to share this show with our audiences!

Long Live the Musical (Comedy)!
Scott

You've Got Sondheim, But We've Got Charlie Sheen

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:21:00 +0000

About halfway through Bukowsical, a lawyer stops the show dead in its tracks. He says, "I represent the estate of Charles Bukowski and have been retained to halt this unauthorized production. There can be no fictional or non-fictional representations of Charles Bukowski and/or the events of his life, nor can there be any discussions or references to his novels, poems, short stories, songs, slogans, or screenplays based on or inspired by the events of his life."

It's a really weird meta-moment in the middle of an already weird meta-musical.

The conversation goes on. The narrator says to the lawyer, "But we're not representing his life so much as capturing the essence of his being." That sounds comically pretentious, but it's also true. That is what this show is doing. The lawyer responds, "There can be no fictional or non-fictional representations of the essence of the being of Charles Bukowski and/or the events of his life, nor can there be any discussions or references to his… all right, let’s cut to the chase. This performance must stop now or you will all face legal ramifications."

It's such an interesting moment on several levels. First of all, it brings up the issue of art made from other art, and the rights of artists to control their work. Should hip-hop artists be free to sample other artists' work in their own work? Should visual artists be able to use Disney images in their work, without the Disney legal department descending upon them? Should video artists be able to use other people's film and video clips to create new work, a question brought to the fore in recent years by YouTube? Where do the First Amendment and "intellectual property" law collide? In 2013 do we have to completely rethink ideas of copyright, intellectual property, and the "ownership" of ideas and art?

Also we realize, as we listen to this conversation between the lawyer and the narrator, that this show hasn't quoted any of Bukowski's work. The closest it comes is the song "Love is a Dog from Hell," which takes the phrase from one of Bukowski's titles. And presumably, the Bukowsical writers know you can't copyright a title. What's fun about all this is it's both fictional and real at the same time. This lawyer is just one of the actors and the audience knows that. But it's also true that Stockdale and Green don't have the rights to Bukowski's work.

Bukowsical works on two (or occasionally more) levels of reality. The actors at New Line are playing a troupe of actors in Los Angeles, who are playing the people in Bukowski's life. Without the show's original framing device of the backer's audition, this idea is more subtle during the first part of the show, but it becomes more explicit when the "performance" is interrupted by the lawyer. When this New York lawyer takes a swipe at people in Los Angeles, the "actors" respond with the song "That's Los Angeles," a charmingly clueless tribute to the city of angels, chock full of very funny back-handed compliments. The audience knows this song is scripted, that it's been rehearsed and staged, but it's also "spontaneous" within the world of Bukowsical.

If the audience didn't consciously register this double layer of reality before, they do now. And it will pay off at the end of the show, after the song "Twelve Steps of Love."

We New Liners have dealt with this kind of double-reality before. It's written into some shows, like Man of La Mancha and Reefer Madness, and it was part of our approach at New Line to some other shows, like The Robber Bridegroom and Evita. It's always hard for the actors to figure out how to play this, if they haven't dealt with it before, but they always eventually get comfortable with the idea. And we've found that as long as the actors are comfortable with it, so the audience will be too -- whether they recognize the double-reality consciously or not.

The show's writers help the audience with this double-reality by mentioning two other fictitious musicals this troupe is working on, and letting us hear songs from both of them -- "an all-African-American musical version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters set during the Watts Riots of 1965" and a show called Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts. We get just a taste of the black Three Sisters with a fragment of the gospel-flavored "Sistah Sistah Sistah," and then we're told that the next song, "That's Los Angeles," was cut from Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts (about which we find out nothing more), giving this troupe of players a little more backstory, a little more reality. But just for a second, before this freight train of a show barrels on, we wonder what on earth Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts might be about, and how on earth "That's Los Angeles" would fit in a show with a title like that.

But in the midst of all this craziness, this song also gets at something fundamental about Bukowski's work -- almost all of it is set in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life. But it's not the Los Angles we see in movies. Bukowski's L.A. is dark and seedy and dangerous. So here's this anthem to Los Angeles, but everything in the lyric undercuts itself --

Maybe you've got concerts
At Alice Tully Hall,
And other high-class venues packed with
Snobs from wall to wall.
Well, we've got sitcom tapings,
And they're absolutely free!
And baby, that's Los Angeles to me.

Not only are they comparing Lincoln Center's classical music venue to sitcom tapings, but the big selling point here is not that they're good, but that they're free. It's a reminder that this is a city not of culture but of commerce, at least according to this song. It's a comically cynical (and arguably accurate) picture of Los Angeles that Bukowski would have appreciated, but it's delivered with such aggressive sincerity that it becomes even funnier.

Before the cast sings "That's Los Angeles," the lawyer says, "I’m a lawyer, I’m from New York, I’m a Jew. I know musical theatre. And there’s no way that this is ever going to make it on Broadway." The lawyer lives inside a false reality but he's getting at a real truth -- Bukowsical, even as clever and funny as it is, could never be produced on Broadway, where audiences aren't always eager to be challenged and almost never ready to be offended, both reasons why Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson couldn't survive in New York. The Bukowsical writers are acknowledging what everyone in the audience is thinking.

But it also brings up -- if only subliminally -- a more interesting point, particularly here in its production by New Line. No, Bukowsical could not survive the commercial theatre, but commercial theatre isn't the only game anymore. Since the early 1990s, when New Line was founded, there has been a growing nonprofit musical theatre movement across America, an alternative to the commercial musical theatre of New York and Broadway tours. Musicals no longer have to be designed for the (often non-English-speaking) tourists and families who go to Broadway shows.

Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen writes in her book Directors and the New Musical Drama, “After the pioneering efforts of theatres such as the Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York, the idea of the serious nonprofit musical spread to theatres across America during the 1990s. While these shows met with varying levels of economic and critical success, the very existence of this alternative home for the art form began to redefine the musical, offering an alternative to both the traditional Broadway musical and the new West End shows. As the economics of the commercial theatre became increasingly forbidding, the nonprofit theatre became vital incubators for musical drama and nurtured a new generation of musical theatre writers.”

And Broadway is usually playing catch-up these days. The times, they are a-changing'.

Both Cry-Baby and High Fidelity died quick, humiliating deaths on Broadway at the hands of the chronically clueless, but New Line resuscitated them, produced them, demonstrated how outstanding both shows are (without rewriting them), got rave reviews and sold-out houses, and now other companies around the country are producing both shows. We hope the same thing will happen with Bukowsical. We don't need no stinkin' Broadway...

I know, easy for me to say...

When I was a kid, I guess I cared about Broadway. But now all I want is to work on amazing pieces of theatre with amazing artists and share it with amazing audiences. And that's what I do. The truth is I'm living exactly the life my four-year-old self always wanted. I'm making musicals. Although now that I think about it, my four-year-old self wouldn't be allowed to see New Line shows...

Ah, fuck him.

I realize as I work on this show that I have a lot in common with Charles Bukowski. Like Buk, I refuse to follow convention in my art and I don't care much about money. I make the kind of art I want to make, and people can like it or not. Like Buk, my art is often vulgar, often uncomfortable, often confrontational, but always suffused with truth. Because life itself is often vulgar, uncomfortable, and confrontational. We don't make art that allows you to escape from your road in life -- we make art that helps you understand and navigate your road.

Because that's what art is for. Bukowski understood that better than most. And in a weird way, so does Bukowsical.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Think I've Got Crabs

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:44:00 +0000

There are a lot of very funny musicals, even more now that we've moved away from the bombast of the (musical theatre) British Invasion and back toward the original form of the American musical -- the musical comedy. These neo musical comedies (Cry-Baby, Spelling Bee, Shrek, Lysistrata Jones) are more self-aware, more political, more ironic, and more vulgar, but they capture the joy, the chaos, and the muscle of classic musical comedies. It's a perfect blend -- a uniquely American blend -- of innocence and irony, idealism and cynicism.

Maybe the funniest aspect of Bukowsical is its perversely good-natured, sunny tone. It's not Bat Boy or Urinetown. It's Anything Goes and No, No, Nanette. But with the irony turned up to eleven.

The musical comedy has always had this kinetic tension, but it used to lean more toward the innocence and idealism, and now it leans more toward the irony and cynicism. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen wrote in her book, Directors and the New Musical Drama, "Rather than finding order through chaos, or offering the sense of resolution that even the more political Broadway musicals often give their audiences, some newer shows imply that emotional confusion is a reasonable response to the contemporary world. Just as social playwrights have been doing for years, today's musical writers choose to raise more questions than they answer, and to reflect the world around them rather than trying to interpret it through a simplistic lens."

There is a self-awareness and a defiance about the neo musical comedy. Broadway composer-lyricist William Finn says, "Musicalizing something inherently nonmusical seems a very dramatic action -- arrogant, humorous, whimsical, yet serious. It says, 'We are in the business of making the world sing.' It's almost revolutionary."

You mean, maybe something like an arteriovenous malformation, Bill...?

One of the differences between the classic musical comedy and the neo musical comedy is that the new form quite often uses funny music. That's not something Cole Porter or Jerry Herman even tried to do. Traditionally, the music has always done the emotional work, but today it does more. And it takes a special kind of composer -- and maybe a special kind of lyricist -- to make the music itself funny. Bat Boy does it a lot, toying with the musical devices of horror movies and thrillers, so in tune with its mock serious tone. Shows like Urinetown and Cry-Baby use music comically, mostly in the dissonance between style and content -- in other words, Cry-Baby's mash-up of John Waters craziness with old-school musical comedy music, or Urinetown's mash-up of its silly story with agitprop music in the style of Kurt Weill.

Bukowsical does get many of its laugh from that kind of stylistic dissonance -- the perky musical comedy style matched to Bukowski's dark, vulgar, freaky life story. But Bukowsical goes further and finds small moments in which the music references something outside the world of the show, to reveal an ironic dissonance, to establish the ever shifting style of the show as the story races through the 20th century, and to connect the bizarre experiment that is Bukowsical to other iconic works of musical theatre. That last use of music does two things -- it makes a meta-joke about the intentional, faux cluelessness of the show itself, and it also comments on the history of the art form that Bukowsical is deconstructing in front of our very eyes.

Here are some examples...

In the opening number and also in its reprise at the end, the narrator leads us into the final chorus with the words, "Come on now, everybody..." in the same rhythm, in the same structural place, and with almost the same accompaniment as a similar moment in the song "Side by Side by Side" in Company. It's a funny reference for those who catch it, but it also suggests a comically presumptuous parallel between Bukowsical and Sondheim's masterwork of concept musicals. But this meta-self-awareness is part of the joke too.

Later, in the middle of the song, "The Derelict Trail," composer Gary Stockdale uses some faux Aaron Copland in brief instrumental sections, for this fucked up American travelogue, but when the third instrumental comes up, it's the theme from the classic western The Magnificent Seven -- which was also the the theme for the "Marlboro Man" cigarette commercials in the 1960s, featuring the solitary "quiet man" cowboy. It's a perverse and funny choice for a dance break after the Indian's solo verse...

The wacky, vaudevillian "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty," cribs its intro from "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story, ending on a "wrong" note (the tritone) that holds, while a conventional accompaniment foxtrots beneath it. It invokes vaudeville and musical comedy, but it also tells us there's something wrong here. It's a fun choice because it's a similar kind of song -- a bunch of guys fucking around, being funny about pretty dark shit. Also, biographically, this is the 1950s, the decade in which West Side Story was taking the Broadway musical back into the darkness, leading to Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, Fiddler on the Roof, and other dark shows

There's also a tribute, if not a quote, from West Side Story's "Cool," in the vocal lines of the song "Bitches/Bestsellers."

The gleefully disgusting love duet, "Chaser of My Heart" starts with an almost direct quotation of the intro to The Carpenters' "Close to You." Once again, the mash-up is so much fun, matching the saccharine sound of 70s soft pop with lyrics like:

You're more than just a fuckhole,
You're a different breed.
You drink more than I do;
That is very rare indeed.
Though I'm covered in scabs,
And I think I've got crabs,
We're a match like rosé and chablis,
The chaser of my heart.

In the rousing number "Slippery Slope," set to a jaunty Italian tarantella, mid-century TV star and creepy moral arbiter Bishop Fulton J. Sheen scolds us about our sins and our failings -- in comic opposition to the opening number, which celebrates and accepts our sins and failings. Not only is Sheen presented as a cultural obstacle (standing in for the whole of conformist 1950s America) that Bukowski must overcome, but also as the yang to Bukowski's yin. We see in this very clever lyric that Sheen (and by extension, religion) is about control, repression, censorship; while Buk is about honesty, openness, complete freedom of expression.

This juxtaposition is announced ironically in Sheen's entrance music, the famous hymn, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." Where Bukowsical's opening number encourages us to make peace with our dark side, this hymn tells us to run from our dark side. (We don't actually hear the lyric in the show, but it's such a famous hymn that many in the audience will register its content anyway.) While Bukowski accepts what life throws at him, Sheen tells us our inherent badness brings on life's obstacles. It's Zen versus the Old Testament. Like Cry-Baby, this show's villain wears the costume of Good, while our real Hero wears the costume of Bad -- outcast, rebel, despoiler. In another context, this intro music might suggest goodness or hope, but in this context, it suggests hypocrisy and artistic peril.

About halfway through the show, a lawyer shows up to stop the show. After his scene, as he leaves, he tells the company that this show will never make it on Broadway, and that people in Los Angeles don't know anything. Of course, he's just saying what everyone in the audience has been thinking all night -- this crazy, vulgar show could never get a commercial run. But that's also a big part of its subversion. Like Bukowski, this show just doesn't give a shit.

In reply to the lawyer's put-down, the cast sings the slyly ironic "That's Los Angeles," a very funny anthem, full of mock solemnity and comically dubious claims of L.A. pride, set to martial music that just begs for the Les Miz march. (And we answer that demand.) It's a song of pride and defiance, with more than a modicum of pop opera pomposity thrown in for fun. It's "One Day More" from Les Misérables, without the class. The music takes itself so seriously -- too seriously -- while elevating the intentionally trivial, dubious content. And it's really funny.

There are even more bits of funny music, but you get the idea.

This is a show that started as nothing but a joke, but perhaps even despite themselves, Stockdale and Green have written a musical with lots of truth, occasional depth, real wit, and a score that's far more sophisticated than it seems. It's not just funny; it's really good theatre.

Yes, there is method in their madness.

We've finished staging the show and now we just run it. This is the fun part!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Even Willy Shakespeare Liked to Tongue Some Tail

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:46:00 +0000

I often end my blog posts with "The adventure continues..."

But some shows are more of an adventure than others. Sometimes it's an adventure because the show is really hard (Sweeney Todd, Floyd Collins, Next to Normal, The Wild Party). Sometimes it's because the show is just so weird that none of us really knows what the end product will be (Forbidden Planet, Robber Bridegroom, The Nervous Set). Sometimes it's because we know where we're headed, but we have no idea what kind of reception we'll get when we arrive (Love Kills, Two Gents, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), in that last case, usually because a show is exceptionally dark or vulgar, or both.

Bukowsical is in that last category. (The title of this post comes from the lyric of "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty.") I've figured out how this show operates, I know what our destination looks like, and I know how to get there. But what are people going to think of a musical with lyrics like:

What's the feeling you get
When you're coughing up blood
And your liver is crud?
Bukowsical!
When you’re fucking a whore
After downing a case
And you shit on her face?
Bukowsical!

I've already told my mother not to come to this one...

When I first started talking about this show, some folks said, "But do people know who Charles Bukowski is?" Well, the answer is that some do, but it doesn't really matter. After all, most people didn't know who Floyd Collins or Sam Byck were.

Almost every season we choose one show that we know may lose a lot of money. To be honest, every New Line show loses money, which we make up for with donations, grants, etc. But some shows lose a lot of money (Johnny Appleweed, Passing Strange, Love Kills). But that's okay -- we build that into our budget. Of course, some shows that we think may do poorly at the box office end up selling like crazy, like Return to the Forbidden Planet, Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, and The Robber Bridegroom.

Nobody knows how Bukowsical will do in sales. But it's still worth producing because it's so smart, so funny, and so interesting. And the form the writers have chosen for their story, the neo musical comedy, is at the vanguard of the art form in 2013.

Part of the fun for me working on his show is the research. I love research. The more I can learn about the world and characters of a show, the richer and fuller our storytelling will be. In this case, I'm reading all of Charles Bukowski's autobiographical novels (which are AWESOME, by the way), reading about the cultural influences that the show explores, finding video of the real people who show up in Bukowsical, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs, William Faulkner, etc. It's such a blast.

Judy Newmark, theatre critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote in her review of New Line's I Love My Wife:

New Line has done well with Hair, which it has mounted several times. It’s also staged strong productions of Grease and Chicago, the Beat musical The Nervous Set, the slacker musical High Fidelity and Return to the Forbidden Planet, set either in the 1950s or the future, maybe both. Put them all together, and it's an era-by-era look at changing American mores. Miller’s anthropological twist on musical theater gives New Line a distinctive point of view, brainy and bold.

I loved that so much, partly because it's true. I am -- and by extension, New Line is -- exploring American culture and politics throughout the 20th century, through the shows we produce. That's why my last book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals is organized by when the shows are set, starting with The Wild Party in the 1920s and going up through the present, chronicling the changes in American culture and politics as I explore these musicals.

I'm one of those people who just doesn't understand the point of making theatre that doesn't explore the issues and ideas of our times. I agree with playwright Arthur Miller, who said, “I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world.” I also agree with the great Stella Adler, who said, "Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger – better – do not act."

It's only been the last ten years or so that I've fully understood the power and necessity of storytelling and the obligation of storytellers. As actor Ben Kingsley has said, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you." Yes!

Bukowsical is wild and silly and vulgar and outrageous. But it's also really smart and insightful. And I think audiences are going to love it. Well, the ones who don't walk out after the opening number...

It's so exciting working on a new piece, but particularly a fearless, original show like this one. Sometimes, people ask me if I would like to be as "successful" as Stages St. Louis is. Well, no, not if we'd have to produce State Fair and The Sound of Music. As Michelle Obama argued during the last campaign, success doesn't have to mean money. New Line is in our 22nd season of daring, alternative musical theatre, having produced dozens of regional premieres and a handful of world premieres. We're in the best financial shape in years, we're doing the best, most exciting work we've ever done, and we've got a loyal, growing audience who love being challenged and love going on an adventure.

We've already got two incredibly cool regional premieres planned for next season...

That's success.

So plan to join us for opening night of Bukowsical on Friday, May 31, and help us get word-of-mouth jump-started. I promise you've never seen anything like this, and I also promise you'll laugh your fuckin' ass off. I'll leave you with one of the funniest, most jaw-dropping moments in the show, when Bukowski stands over the body of his one true love, and sings operatically:

Fu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uck!
Why did you do this, you goddamn motherfucking…fuck!
Oh, cocksucking motherfucking fuck!
Oh, goddamn motherfucking fuck!
Oh…fu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uck…!

Yes, you can be Bukowsical too!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Jerk It When You Work It, Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:26:00 +0000

The more we work on this show, the more treasure I find there. And the more I read Bukowski, the more I can see how much the Bukowsical writers, Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green, really understand Bukowski and his work. This is the most literate R-rated show we've ever done...

One of the most interesting -- and in some ways, weirdest -- songs in Bukowsical is "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty." In this postmodern vaudeville number, four famous writers, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath give Bukowski advice and encouragement. And their central lesson to him is to Be Yourself.

Burroughs: With gluttonous voracity!
Faulkner: Sing of violence and pugnacity!
Plath: I wrote my stuff sardonic.
Burroughs: I wrote mine catatonic.
Williams: I liked my sex symbolic.
All: And we all were alcoholic.

That last line is funny but it also implies a question that pervades Bukowsical. Why are all these great writers, and Bukowski in particular, so fucked up? Is it the same thing that makes them great writers and also makes them fucked up? Would they be great writers if they weren't fucked up? I often tease my actors that "You have to suffer for your art." But maybe it's true. Maybe you have to. One lyric early in the show goes, "Life is rotten and art is pain." Wow.

"Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" ends with some playful rhymes that reveal genuine truth.

All: With candor and sagacity,
With fervor and tenacity,
We’ll drink to our capacity,
Williams: But please, sir… No mendacity!
All: Get down, get dark, and just get dirty...

Yes, they are all alcoholics, but they are serious about their work and they cannot stomach less than the truth. Williams' line is a comic reference to Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but it also speaks to these writers' artistic integrity. No mendacity. No lies. Fictions, sure, but not lies.

This is a song about artistic -- and spiritual? -- freedom, fearlessness, honesty. These four famous writers (as Stockdale and Green have incarnated them, at least) make the argument for telling the truth even when it's ugly, even when it's controversial, even when it's dangerous, even when it's about sex. As long as it's the truth. The last line of this song is, "Jerk it while you work it, baby, dirty it up!"

This show is about the relationship between an artist's life and his work -- in this case, a really fucked-up artist and his really fucked-up work -- a show about what it's like to be an artist. And right at the center of the evening is this song, which gets to the heart of the show. As rowdy and raunchy as it is -- and it really is -- this is a song about the moment when an artist learns to free himself, to reject the conventions and expectations of others, and to find his true voice, his authenticity.

This scene is more sophisticated than it might appear, with its old-fashioned vaudevillian style, and it's potty-mouth'd lyric. It does some important storytelling. In Assassins, all the American assassins from throughout history all converge on the Texas Book Depository in 1963 to convince Oswald to shoot Kennedy. It's a brilliant, chilling scene. But it doesn't suggest that Oswald was delusional; it's a dramatic representation of the influence on Oswald of those assassins who had gone before him. Suddenly, instead of a crazy loner, Oswald becomes part of a force of history, and that gives him the courage to shoot Kennedy. Likewise, in Bukowsical, in order to dramatize the influence of the other great American writers on Bukowski, Stockdale and Green present those writers in the flesh, to have a conversation (well, a vaudeville number) with Bukowski. It's a fun way to get at a somewhat abstract point, and it's utterly organic to the rest of the show.

And it's really funny. Wait till you see Robin's choreography for it...

It's a pretty potent group of ghosts who show up here. Williams S. Burroughs, one of the founders of the Beat movement, was one of the most politically and culturally influential, and most innovative artists of the 20th century, writing about drugs, homosexuality, and other controversial topics. Like other writers discussed here, Burroughs wrote a lot of autobiographical fiction. His most controversial work was his novel Naked Lunch in 1959, which included a talking anus. According to Wikipedia:

Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift," a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius."

Burroughs shot his wife Joan in 1951, playing drunken games, and he later wrote:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Kinda sounds like something Bukowski might have written.

We think of Tennessee Williams plays as "classics" today, but many of them were extremely controversial when he wrote them -- the prominent sexual content of many of his works, the only barely veiled homosexuality at the center of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer, the domestic abuse and sexual content of A Streetcar Named Desire, and of course, his works of dark autobiographical fiction, most notably, The Glass Menagerie.

His plays were R-rated enough that most of them had to be substantially rewritten for film. Like Bukowski, Williams suffered from depression throughout his life.

William Faulkner is considered one of the greatest of American writers. Like most of these other writers, Faulkner wrote in many forms, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, screenplays. To quote Wikipedia again:

Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.

Like Bukowski and Burroughs, Faulkner was fascinated by the American underclass.

Sylvia Plath is such an interesting choice to put in this group. Like Bukowski, she was very controversial, writing about the straitjacket of mid-century Western civilization for women -- from the inside -- in what was called "confessional poetry." Honor Moore of Boston Review wrote: "When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened. Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified." Like Bukowski, she also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel. And as Bukowski did, Plath and her husband traveled across the country. She later said that was when she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses."

In the book Morbid Curiosity: The Disturbing Demises of the Famous and Infamous, Alan Petrucelli titles one section Easy Off(ed) and writes, "Mother knows best. When noted bipolar poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) decided to take the final path, she made sure her two children would be safe. Before turning on the gas jets in her London kitchen, she left them bread and milk, cracked open a window in their bedroom, and placed wet towels at the foot of their door to prevent the toxic fumes from reaching them. Then Path, depressed over her husband’s infidelities, stuck her head deep into the bowels of the oven. The Plath passings didn't end there: On March 16, 2009, Path’s forty-seven-year-old son Nicholas Hughes hanged himself in his Alaska home – forty six years after his mother’s suicide and almost forty years to the day after his father’s mistress, poet Assia Wevill , killed herself and her four-year old daughter Shura in a copycat suicide. Assia gave her daughter some sleeping pills, popped some herself, sealed off the kitchen windows and door, and turned on the gas.”

Plath seems right at home among these others.

And even more writers get shout-outs over the course of the show -- Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Malcolm Lowry, Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Tom Wolfe, Rod McKuen, Erich Segal, Gore Vidal, and others. Not only are the literary references fun for those who catch them, they also subtly place Bukowski among the great writers of the 20th century.

And not just great writers, but great rebels. Shelley was an artistic, political, and social radical, so much so that publishers were afraid to publish his work for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy or sedition. Lord Byron was a bipolar hedonist, not unlike Bukowski in some ways. Keats was a sensualist, like Bukowski. Melville was a modernist. Hemingway was a hard-living, hard-drinking, ground-breaking minimalist. Steinbeck was the chronicler of the American underclass. According to Wikipedia, "Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism." Bukowski would take that experiment and make it even more personal with his autobiographical fiction. Malcolm Lowry also wrote autobiographical fiction, was an alcoholic, and may have killed himself with a barbiturate overdose. You can see how all these writers may have influenced Bukowski's work, and how much they all have in common. He'd be right at home among them.

Someone should write a play and put all these writers in the same room for two hours. With a fully stocked bar, of course.

It's likely that many of the people who see our show will not have read any of Bukowski's work, but that won't keep them from enjoying the wacky anarchy of this show. And I bet a lot of them will check out his books after seeing the show. And maybe they'll also check out some Steinbeck and Faulkner and Plath... Oh my!

I love art about art. The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Art is Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:21:00 +0000

A big part of the fun of Bukowsical is the whimsical, cartoony way Stockdale and Green approach each of the relentlessly dark episodes in Bukowski's life, always in the "inappropriate" language of high-energy musical comedy.

Even for those who know nothing about Charles Bukowski, this dissonance is really obvious and really entertaining. For Bukowski fans, there's even more fun, as they'll realize we're essentially telling the truth about his sordid life. And that's what makes this deeply ironic musical so special -- it's both "wrong" and "right" at the same time.

In the show's second song, "Art is Pain," we get a glimpse into Bukowski's torturous childhood as an outcast in the 1930s, a period he wrote about in his novel Ham on Rye. And with this song, the writers establish their pattern for the evening of using music ironically, here portraying Buk's youthful hellscape in the form of a children's song -- Content Dictates Form -- a very simple melody with a very small range, short percussive words, and lots of repetition. And it's really nothing more than mean, random, childish insults:

You're stupid, gross and ugly and we hate you.
You’re always at the bottom of the class.
We all wish we could find some kind of way to
Push you off a freeway overpass.

We don’t think you’re very nice.
And we’re sure that you have lice.
It’s time for someone to step up now
And kindly kick his fucking ass.

There are even some nyah, nyah nyah's. The extra horror here is that the teacher starts the torment, and later in the song, Buk's father invites the kids to help him physically beat Bukowski. It's both darkly funny and really brutal, and as you watch it, you wonder how he turned out as an artist instead of Norman Bates. This horror scene/song offers up the truth about Buk's early years -- and probably invokes awful memories from many in the audience -- but it also trades in wacky, comic exaggeration. We laugh even though we're horrified. Just like Bukowski's writing.

In the hilarious "Take Me," a teenaged Bukowski is introduced to alcohol by a waltzing, singing bottle of booze...

There’s a secret world
In the heart of a real poet,
But unless you get shitfaced,
You'll never know it.
So…
Take me, Take me,
Quaff and boilermake me,
Take me, I'm yours!

Take a little drink,
Take a little drink,
It will help you more than you know --
You'll be like Poe.
Sooner than you think,
You'll be on the brink,
Like Steinbeck and Papa and so,
Onward you go.
You'll be more adored than
Shelley, Keats or Byron.
Can't you hear me calling to you
Like a siren...?

What's so wonderful about this song is that it works as a traditional "Boy Gets Girl" musical comedy seduction number, like "Make Believe" in Show Boat, "I Could Write a Book" in Pal Joey, "They Say It's Wonderful" in Annie Get Your Gun, "I'll Know" in Guys and Dolls, "Metaphor" in The Fantasticks, and lots of others. This is the song in which the Hero convinces his Love that they belong together, and often they end up dancing (or at least, harmonizing) to show us how clearly they belong together. In Bukowsical, the writers subvert this standard song type in two ways, first, by having the woman sing it to the man (Gypsy also did this, with "Small World" and "You'll Never Get Away from Me"), and second, by making that woman into a waltzing, singing bottle of booze (I don't think any other show ever did that).

And even beyond the deconstruction of the song form, they've chosen standard 1930s musical comedy tools to tell this part of the story that takes place in the 1930s.

Sondheim deconstructed this song type with "Lovely" in Forum, and weirdly, because there have been so many rewrites of Anything Goes, there are three songs that function this way in that iconic show -- "All Through the Night" in the original 1934 production, replaced by "It's De-Lovely" in the 1962 off Broadway revival, and replaced again by "Easy to Love" (the first song originally written for the spot) in the 1987 and 2011 Broadway revivals. But they all work the same way. We see this song type less often these days, because more new musicals are telling Hero Myth stories rather than love stories. Here, with "Take Me," Bukowsical is operating both as a traditional musical comedy as an ironic, postmodern, neo musical comedy. That's some great writing.

Just a few songs later, we'll get another "Boy Gets Girl" song -- this time with an actual woman -- the Carpenters' inspired "Chaser of My Heart," almost exactly quoting the introduction to "Close to You." No musical has two of these songs, but in this case it points up the central conflict of Bukowski's personal life, the battle between booze and everything else. Plus, he'll soon learn that he writes better drunk, so that will tip the scales. In Bukowsical, Boy gets two Girls (and even more later in "Love is a Dog from Hell"), but we can all see how badly that will turn out...

Though I think you'll be surprised -- and amused -- at just how badly it will turn out...

During the 1940s Bukowski traveled, living hand-to-mouth, living the life of a "hobo." His novel about this time, Factotum, is translated for the stage into the song "Derelict Trail," a classic musical comedy "traveling" song, like "Getting Out of Town" in 42nd Street or "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" in Hello, Dolly! This big, upbeat, company number turns hobos, hookers, and Native Americans into cardboard characters out of a 1940s Broadway revue or Ziegfeld Follies, nothing more than sanitized travelogue props. America's very real economic woes (homelessness, unemployment, etc.) are presented as this charming, romanticized "subculture" that 1940s Hollywood films traded in, specifically the 1941 movie Sullivan's Travels.

In its meta-layer, the song makes us a little uncomfortable, reminding us that until a couple decades ago, no one even thought about the homeless, other than as punchlines and clowns. My older readers will remember comedian Red Skelton's hobo character Freddy the Freeloader, a name that makes most of us cringe in a time when the Republican party has divided us into "makers and takers," and "the forty-seven percent." People used to call them hobos and bums, dismissing them as somehow less than "normal" people. "Derelict Trail" takes on that shallow, midcentury social myopia, and the show's very politically incorrect presentation takes on an uncomfortable dissonance with the way we talk and think about this problem today.

Most of us would recognize the intro to "Gee, Officer Krupke," from West Side Story (1957) -- it starts with a short, quick little four-note run down to a "wrong" note (the tritone, known as "the Devil in music") that rings underneath a fun but dissonant vaudeville accompaniment (remember that in the 1950s, vaudeville wasn't all that long ago). That tritone pedal note also makes the key ambiguous. Long before the neo musical comedy emerged, this song worked the same way -- dark, ironic lyrics set to perky, subtly altered, old-fashioned music -- always with that "wrong" note starting every verse... Something's not right here...

Bukowsical's "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" borrows that wrong note and the older song's split personality, as it portrays Bukowski's evolution as a writer in the late 1950s. With everything in American culture changing rapidly and fundamentally (rock and roll, sex, drugs, movies, TV, the Beats), Bukowski finds himself visited by four great American writers -- Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath. These four fearless, groundbreaking iconoclasts offer Bukowski a lesson: if he wants to be successful, he must "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" --

Don't huddle in some hovel,
Trying to write the perfect novel.
Like some loser with a useless Ph.D.
Hit below the belt and you can never fail --
Get down, get dark, get dirty.

Don't be shy, the world is waiting --
Writing's like ejaculating.
Get down, get dark, get dirty.
Face the truth, you crazy bastard --
You write better when you're plastered!
Get down, get dark, get dirty.
Don’t sweat commas and conjunctions;
It’s your scatologic functions
That will guarantee your place in history.
Even Willy Shakespeare liked to tongue some tail...
Get down, get dark, get dirty.

It's such a fun lyric, partly because it takes these great writers down off the pedestal, and partly because they're right -- Shakespeare wrote tons of dirty jokes into his plays, because audiences love it. Most of what our culture calls "dirty" is really just human and natural, but it's treated as perverse and dangerous, thanks to our Puritan roots -- and never more so than in the pre-HBO 1950s. (I highly recommend the documentary Fuck.) But behind the comedy here is some serious truth -- great artists become great when they are freed from constraint. Which is why HBO shows are so much better than broadcast TV. This song is about freeing Bukowski to write about what he wants to write about. This is the moment when Bukowski becomes an artist.

Bukowsical's writers have dramatized the influence other writers' work had on Bukowski by physically placing four of them onstage with him, offering advice. But the larger point is not lost in all the laughs -- the times were changing and Bukowski was right in the middle of the revolution. He started writing poetry right around this time, in the mid-1950s, and his first poetry collection was published in 1960.

But Bukowsical's story stays in the 1950s and early 1960s for a while, as we move on to the cultural response to the revolution those great writers were leading...

The song "Slippery Slope" gives us a classic Disney villain's song, a companion piece to "Poor Unfortunate Souls," "Cruella DeVil," and of course "Hellfire" from The Hunchback of Notre Dame; but here the Disney villain is the real-world television personality, Bishop Fulton Sheen, the 1950s version of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Because Bukowsical is such a weird and unconventional Hero Myth story, it's hard to identify one antagonist -- this is more of a Man vs. Society story than a Man vs. Man story. In this song, Bishop Sheen represents the repressive 1950s culture that Bukowski, Williams, Faulkner, Burroughs, and Plath were raging against, the cultivation of a homogenous, even bland, national culture. And TV was a huge part of that effort.

So to musicalize that idea, the show's writers give us Sheen's telecast in the form of an Italian tarantella, the perfect ironic musical form for America's ultimate Roman Catholic. And as fundamentalist Christians often do, Bukowsical's Sheen seems to get perverse pleasure in cataloguing all our sins in lurid detail, which makes it all even funnier. And here's the weird part -- probably unintended by the writers -- the Italian tarantella was originally a frantic "medicinal" dance, once thought to be the only treatment for a tarantula bite, to literally dance the poison out of your system. How funny that this musical form becomes Bishop Sheen's apocalyptic warning of America's demise, as he tries to preach the poison out of the American culture, and as his singing turns the ever-so-earnest bishop into an Italian comic opera villain from a 50s TV variety show.

The whole score is built with this kind of wit and deft touch.

The song "Postal," about Bukowski's soul-crushing time working for the Post Office in the 1960s, is rendered as a driving, anxious, dissonant piece of music -- constantly setting two eighth notes in the vocal line against five sixteenth notes (on every beat) in the accompaniment. That gives the music a feeling of wrongness, of not fitting, of discomfort, a musical equivalent to Bukowski's struggle to fit in and conform (if only for a paycheck) versus his hunger for freedom.

The schizoid number "Through a Glass, Barfly" gives us a comic (and madly exaggerated) behind-the-scenes glimpse into the casting of Bukowski's 1987 film Barfly. To dramatize French director Barbet Schroeder choosing between his two possible leads, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, Bukowsical's writers give Schroeder a European waltz -- a French chanson, worthy of Maurice Chevalier or Charles Aznavour -- alternating with Rourke and Penn's aggressive 1980s rock and roll verses.

I think there's also another sideways reference to West Side Story late in the show, when the Bitch Goddess of Fame and the Bitch Goddess of Fortune get a twisted jazz vocal line in the song "Bitches" that's gotta be a nod to West Side Story's "Cool."

It's a whole score full of funny music, something you don't always get in a musical comedy...

And then there's the operatic "Elegy," but I don't want to ruin that surprise for you...

Maybe the biggest musical surprise (at least to me) is the song "That's Los Angeles to Me," a weird, comic interruption in the show that sounds a lot like "Look for the Union Label," both songs about pride and community and a demand for respect.

The central joke of the Bukowsical song is the dubious, questionable things they're bragging about, set to this proud, defiant music.

Maybe you've got Sardi's
And Tavern on the Green,
And maybe you've got restaurants
That don't close at 10:15.
Maybe you’ve got Sondheim,
But we’ve got Charlie Sheen.
And baby, that's Los Angeles to me.
. . .
We’ve learned to feel,
Not merely think;
And we’ve got Dianetics,
So we never need a shrink.

But even though "Los Angeles" interrupts the story, even though it seems like it doesn't "belong" in the show, the truth is that it gets at something fundamental about Bukowski's life and work -- Los Angeles is at the heart of everything for Bukowski (which is why it will be the central image in our Bukowsical set). The song is presented to us as not a part of Bukowski's story, but the authors are pulling a double-fake on us, because it really is.

This score is so smart, so clever, so subtle in such unexpected ways, and we're having such a blast digging into it.

The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Got the World Right By the Balls

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:42:00 +0000

So how do you stage a wild, even bizarre show like Bukowsical?

Good Question. I'm working on it...

Sometimes when I'm directing, I get lost in trying to find a "clever" way to stage something, or to avoid being "boring." But those are the wrong goals. The right goal is to figure out what this story and these writers are saying, then come up with the clearest possible way to tell that story. How can my physical staging make each moment as clear as it can be? If I'm working on good material, I don't have to add to it; I just have to reveal it.

I realized a while back that most New Line shows share a common trait -- they are sui generis, completely and fundamentally unlike anything else, original in the extreme. Just look at shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bat Boy, Love Kills, Assassins, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, Floyd Collins, Return to the Forbidden Planet, The Rocky Horror Show, Passing Strange, High Fidelity, A New Brain, The Robber Bridegroom, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Kiss of the Spider Woman... I could keep going...

So for every show, I have to start back at square one and figure out how this show works, what the rules are this time. The answers are never the same twice.

And of course, Bukowsical is also on that list. I've never encountered anything like it before. Its fundamental premise is so "wrong," so hilariously dissonant, that it feels like it could only have been born of copious amounts of incredi-weed. (I have no actual information on whether that's true.) Sure, there are other shows that are mash-ups of dissonant genres -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Catch Me If You Can, Urinetown, Forbidden Planet, and others -- but Bukowsical chose two forms that are even more dissonant, and surprisingly, also more revealing.

Bukowsical is a subversive, rule-busting musical about a subversive, rule-busting writer. It is "carnivalesque," which Wikipedia describes as a term used by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival, in which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the cassock." With Bukowski as the Lord of Misrule, a title he would have loved.

As always, Content Dictates Form.

Ask somebody if they like musicals, and if they don't, ask them why. Almost everything they say they hate about musicals is generally no longer true. Many contemporary musicals reject the love story for the Hero Myth. Most new musicals reject the awkward Fourth Wall "naturalism" of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Yes, characters still break into song, but there's no pretense of "reality" before they break into song, so it doesn't feel phony in the same way. After all, people break into song in music videos. It's not really the singing that bothers people; it's the "breaking" into song (think about that verb), the cracking of the "reality" we're asked to accept. I think it was largely the laughable Fourth Wall "lie" of mid-century musicals, coupled with their simplistic, faux romanticism, that has turned off so many people to the art form, at least since the 1960s.

Musicals used to be an incredibly popular, mainstream form, but for a big part of the later 20th century, the art form didn't keep up with the culture. But that's changing...

We sometimes joke that New Line produces musicals for people who hate musicals. The truth is we produce musicals for people who hate old-fashioned, phony musicals that traffic in shallow love, shallow morality, and superficial Happy Endings. I'm lookin' at you, Brigadoon. New Line shows are honest. Even at their most outrageous, they are about the real world as it really is, and they reject the lies of the midcentury musical. Almost none of our shows have a Fourth Wall, and those that do, violate it repeatedly.

Classic musical comedy and its latest descendant, the neo musical comedy, are fundamentally honest because they never pretend to actually represent reality. The actors often face front and sing directly to the audience. The actors can see the audience, even interact with them, in a way they never would have in the Rodgers and Hammerstein model. They sing in harmony and move in choreographic unison, without explanation; while in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the dance must be explained away as a party, a dream, a performance. In musical comedy, dance is part of the base language, not a device.

In neo musical comedies, there's always an ironic, self-aware, meta layer interacting with the story and the storytelling. For instance, in the finale of Cry-Baby, the meta layer of what the audience actually knows about America today comically contradicts the utopian America these characters in 1954 think they see coming, in the song "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again." The song is only funny because of the knowledge and information the audience brings to the performance. The audience completes the circuit.

Likewise, so much of the humor in Bukowsical comes from the raw, bleak content smashing up against a form once known for rose-colored escapism. By choosing the neo musical comedy as their form, Bukowsical writers Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green chose complexity and honesty, two things Bukowski cherished. Never does this show ask the audience to pretend this is something that it is not. It's a performance, right here, right now, in this theatre. Nor does it whitewash the horrors of growing up Bukowski, despite its absurdist tone. Bukowski himself seemed constitutionally incapable of bullshit, and though Stockdale and Green seemingly chose a form many people often associate with bullshit, the show's sly self-awareness reverses that polarity.

Which is kind of the whole point of the neo musical comedy. The audience's expectations about musicals -- and the subversion of that -- is part of the storytelling. But Bukowsical is so well-crafted, so carefully and intelligently wrought, that it works both as a straightforward musical comedy and a satirical meta-musical. The jokes are great; the music is really fun and interesting and surprising; the lyrics are clever, fearless, and technically impeccable. It's every bit as entertaining as Anything Goes, but with a rich layer of irony on top thick enough to choke Brecht.

But one thing bothered me when I first read the script. There was a framing device about this misguided, mediocre theatre company holding a backer's audition to raise money for their new show Bukowsical. Right away, the frame didn't feel right to me. It made the show seem more like sketch comedy than the smart, Brechtian theatre that I think it actually is. (The fake theatre company is called The Sacred Angel Fist Circle of Note Gang Theatre.) The framing device takes the audience off the hook by putting up a wall of "We Don't Really Mean It" between them and story -- so the audience doesn't have to grapple with any of what's onstage because it's just some silly musical.

I think my reaction was partly about the comparative dishonesty of that frame, in what is otherwise a weirdly honest show. Also, it seemed like the writers were giving themselves an "excuse" for writing this vulgar, fearless show, by putting its creation in the fictional hands of the clueless, nameless egotist, "The Founder," and his merry band of players. To me, that feels like a cop out. Why not just dive in? In 2013, in front of an audience who's seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Wild Party, there's no need for excuse or explanation. They can handle anything we throw at them. Luckily for me, the authors are very cool, and they're letting me cut the framing device.

So I've come to the conclusion that the way to approach this show is just to treat it like a rowdy, wacky, big-hearted George M. Cohan musical comedy, and let the dark, oppressive, vulgar, offensive content do its own work, supplying the "neo" that makes the show a neo musical comedy. The original production played more like sketch comedy, but New Line's production will be in what I call the Bat Boy style -- completely straight-faced, emotionally honest outrageousness. No winking at the audience.

That's what the neo musical comedy is -- serious comedy. After all, Bat Boy is about religious intolerance, Forbidden Planet is about the clash between morality and science, Cry-Baby is about class injustice, Urinetown and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson are about the shallowness and self-destructiveness of political movements, and Bukowsical is about the struggle between an artist's life and his work. All hilarious shows about very serious shit.

With Bukowsical, we give the audience storytelling that seems shallow but is actually really smart and insightful, and we give them a form that seems light and superficial, even as it tells a dark, complicated story. We depend on the audience to discover this dissonance and this irony, which is what makes it all so funny. Even more so than with most other shows we do, here the audience has to complete the equation. Great comedy requires two things -- surprise and truth -- and Bukowsical has lots of both. Despite the style, we are telling the audience the truth about the horrors of Bukowski's life. And every song is a surprise in its crazy dual personality, exploring Bukowski's alcoholism while he dances a waltz with a seductive bottle of booze, or putting four great American writers -- Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, and William S. Burroughs -- into the middle of a Vaudeville number about obscenity.

And wait till you hear "Elegy." You'll shit yourself.

In all these ways, Bukowsical is a companion piece to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which started off this season for us. BBAJ is angry and aggressive, while Bukowsical is warm and friendly, but they have a lot in common. I've been writing a lot lately about the New American Musical, but I'm not just writing about it. We're putting it onstage, show after show. We're letting our audience watch the evolution of this most American art form, right in front of their eyes, as it's happening. And to my delight, more and more companies around the country are following our lead, producing really challenging, original, new works of musical theatre. There is an audience hungry for that.

Just as we're seeing a massive realignment in American politics today, we're seeing the same thing in the American musical theatre. We're at an historical turning point, and it's pretty exciting to watch it happening all around us.

And Bukowsical is part of that.

We start blocking Sunday.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Amends Justify the Means

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 19:32:00 +0000

Why Bukowsical...?

Lots of reasons. It seemed like such a good fit for this season -- three really dark Hero Myth stories. It continues a theme I love exploring -- the relationship between an artist's life and his work -- in shows like Passing Strange, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Man of La Mancha, and Sunday in the Park with George.

One of the big reasons I wanted to do this show is the answer to a question I often ask myself when I'm thinking about producing a less mainstream show: If not us, then who...? Granted, not every show deserves producing. Still, there are a lot of shows that are really wonderful, but there's something about them that scares the people who produce musicals -- language, sexual content, moral ambiguity, stories about drugs or politics or religion. But the shows that fit that description are usually the best, most interesting, most exciting shows. Because those are the stories the best writers are drawn to.

I've already written here about why the adult language and the sexual content in Bukowsical are organic to the storytelling and not just there for shock value. This show follows the Sondheim Rule, that Content Dictates Form. But that language will keep many folks from producing the show.

So really, if not us, then who?

Maybe the biggest reason I wanted to do the show is the hipster intellectualism at the heart of the show's central joke. What better -- or funnier -- form to tell the story of Bukowski's fucked-up life onstage than an ironic, postmodern musical comedy? I think he would have found the idea both annoying and delightful. He'd rail against it, but with that big, sly smile that told you he couldn't help but appreciate the balls it takes.

The sheer intellectual audacity of it all blows me away. Each of Bukowski's autobiographical novels is represented by a song in the show, and like his novels, Bukowsical is a series of somewhat disconnected episodes that, taken together, paint a bigger picture. Bukowski's novel Ham on Rye becomes the song "Art is Pain." Factotum becomes "The Derelict Trail." The novel Women becomes the song "Love is a Dog from Hell" (which is also the title of a Bukowski poem and a collection of his poems). His first novel Post Office becomes the song "Postal." And Hollywood, about the making of the film Barfly, becomes "Through a Glass, Barfly" in the show.

(This last title is a joke on the famous Biblical phrase, "For now we see through a glass, darkly," meaning that humans can't fully understand the Big Picture while on earth. Though glass means mirror or lens in the Bible, here it means a bar glass, and the Biblical meaning of the phrase becomes a joke about Bukowski's alcoholism -- which is the subject of Barfly. See how smart this show is?)

You might even argue that Bukowski's collection of magazine columns, Notes of a Dirty Old Man is represented in the show by the song "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty."

Bukowsical celebrates everything our culture of Ironic Detachment embodies, from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to Scream and The Onion. And I think it's that meta irony that allows us to observe the horrors of Bukowski's life without getting emotionally caught up in them. But if we New Liners do our job right, the audience will find the humanity in Bukowski and they'll find themselves caring for him anyway, despite the seemingly bullet-proof layer of irony, just like they did for Edgar in Bat Boy, Barfée in Spelling Bee, and Queenie in The Wild Party.

That's because there's truth behind all that irony. As Al Capone says in The Untouchables, "We laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's true." And once we see the truth, we also feel a connection. The secret to Bukowski's success as a writer is that he is all of us. He was a genuine Everyman. And he spilled all his pain and addiction and fear and insecurity onto the page and when we read it, we know we're not alone. We are like him, more than most of us would admit.

Or in other words, we are all Bukowsical.

My favorite kind of show is the outrageous, crazy, even offensive comedies that have a really big heart -- Bat Boy, Urinetown, Cry-Baby, HIgh Fidelity...

Bukowsical is one of those. If you just listen to the cast album, you miss some of what's really wonderful about the show -- the way it's presented, the innocence of musical comedy. The form of the show and its crazy high spirits throw you off kilter, so that instead of condemning Bukowski's hedonism right away, as many people might, this approach knocks down your defenses and your judgment, and you meet Bukowski on his own terms.

Vulgar yes, often disgusting yes, but also smart, vulnerable, deep, romantic, urban, even kind of Zen-like. And a real artist, maybe even a genius, who experienced life in a way few of us have to; but our everyday failures and humiliations are washed away by Bukowski's far worse, far darker episodes. He's a Christ figure for anyone who ever got picked on, laughed at, or ignored. He takes our horrors on himself and as we read his books -- or watch this show -- we feel better. Not because he had it worse than any of us did, but because we understand that even our worst experiences are essentially universal. We are all the victims of our own fears and expectations, and we all have to learn the lesson Spelling Bee brought us -- "Life is random and unfair." Life's not out to get us. It just doesn't give a shit.

And while that might sound depressing, it's actually oddly comforting. We're all in the same boat, just trying to get through to tomorrow.

In his life and in his art, Bukowski knew the great lesson of the Hero Myth: You just have to stay on the road and keep moving forward. Bukowski had a much harder road than most of us, but he just kept plugging along and writing it all down. Like Bukowski, all we really need to know is to stay on the road. We each have our roadblocks and potholes, but we each learn to navigate around them as we continue on our journey. Just like Bukowski did.

We are all Bukowsical.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:25:00 +0000

The subtitle of my blog says I'm a bad-ass culture warrior. I'm half-kidding of course. But only half. Though it wasn't consciously intended, I think I chose to produce our next show, Bukowsical, as an answer to America's Culture War.

This morning I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, one of my favorite political talk shows. And they started talking about how there's too much violence in movies and video games, and connecting that to recent mass shootings. I hear this a lot, and it always drive me nuts. First of all, these folks need to take a stroll through the very violent, very gory, original Grimm's Fairy Tales. Or the Bible, for that matter. And then they need to read the book that sort of inspired Into the Woods, Bruno Bettelheim's brilliant The Uses of Enchantment, which I'm reading right now for the second time.

Bettelheim argues that fictional violence can be healthy because it's a safe way to work through the primal, violent impulses everyone has. Fictional violence doesn't cause real violence; it replaces real violence. Humans are innately violent -- just watch kids at play -- so as we have become more civilized, we have channeled those violent impulses into our storytelling, experiencing those impulses in a safe context. There are many recent studies about this. Whatever "common sense" may appear to tell you, it's not true. Video games and movies don't cause violence, and pornography doesn't cause sexual assaults. Yes, there are crazy people, and they will do crazy, horrible things whether or not they play a video game or see The Matrix. Crazy people have been doing crazy, horrible things since humans first showed up on planet Earth.

But the Culture War (and its imaginary red-headed stepchild, the War on Christmas) isn't about ideas or rationality. It's about emotion. It's about fear. (I will once again recommend the brilliant book, The Republican Brain.) Statistics and science and reasoned arguments won't change anyone's mind about this stuff. Why shouldn't we say the word fuck? Because it's bad. Why is it bad? Because it means sexual intercourse. Actually, most of the time it doesn't mean that. Much of the time it's just an intensifier. And when it's not, fuck can mean so many different things in its various forms today, very few of those meanings related to sex. I use it constantly. Seriously. I love it.

And really, so what if it means sexual intercourse...? Why do we persist in thinking this fundamental biological function is "dirty" -- or really, that it has any moral component at all...? I think it's because it reminds us of our animal nature, and we fear our animal nature. Bukowski accepted his animal nature without judgment, and that makes people uncomfortable. Luckily, organized religion is on the decline in America, so maybe there's still hope that we'll find our way out of this forest of moral hypocrisy and the pathological need to control others.

The truth is that fuck is a bad word because it's a bad word. No other reason.

According to the wonderful documentary Fuck, the word's origins go back further than recorded history. It's literally one of humanity's oldest words. And let's get real here, it's only a word. Just a sound to which we've assigned meaning. The intent behind this word can be playful, awestruck, angry, dismissive, resigned, violent, amused, impressed... It has almost limitless uses and literally limitless meanings. Why on earth would we want to fence this word off from all the others? Is it that dangerous? That appalling? And when my mom says, "Oh fudge!", isn't that a difference without a distinction? Doesn't she mean the same thing I mean when I say, "Oh fuck!"? In other words, shouldn't we be focused more on meaning and intent?

Or as the legendary George Carlin put it:

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you, over here. You seven -- bad words! That's what they told us they were, remember? "That's a bad word." There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

One of the things that was so subversive about Bukowski was his "obscene" language. But today, when lots of literature and other storytelling forms regularly use that kind of language -- and yes, musicals too -- it feels less subversive. How do you give an audience the same feeling encountering his work in the context of today's culture?

Put it in an old-fashioned musical comedy, that's how. I think George M. Cohan would love this show. He would love its rowdy, aggressive, smartass tone. He would love the laughs and the energy of it. Musical comedy has been satirically commenting on American culture and values as far back as No, No, Nanette in 1925 (our relationship with money), Of Thee I Sing in 1931 (political populism), Anything Goes in 1935 (our celebrity gangster culture), Finian's Rainbow in 1947 (economic justice), and lots of others.

Though we are in a new Golden Age of musical theatre, the age of the neo rock musical and the neo musical comedy, people still think of musicals as either Oklahoma! or Hello, Dolly! So by choosing what is perceived as an innocent art form as their vehicle, Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green are doing with Bukowsical what Bukowski did with his writing -- challenging ideas of "acceptable," "appropriate," "good taste." If it's truthful, if it's authentic, then how can it be inappropriate or unacceptable? Should artists and storytellers wall off parts of reality in the name of good taste?

Many scholars say that Bukowski changed American poetry, both in his rejection of strict form and also in his "adult" language and content. Though Stockdale and Green are not the first to the neo musical comedy party, it's still early and they've contributed something quite wonderful to the movement with Bukowsical. The more I read the script and the more I listen to the L.A. cast album, the more I fall in love with it.

The story of Bukowsical is about survival -- like any Hero Myth story, I guess. But it's also about ambiguity, which was the hallmark of Bukowski's own work. He knew that people are neither good or bad, wrong or right, mean or nice, happy or sad. Most of us live in the gray areas. While a lot of storytelling simplifies characters and stories down to their essence -- and for legitimate reasons -- Bukowski was a different kind of writer. He said in one interview (in the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This) that he really wanted to be a journalist, and if he could have gotten hired anywhere, he would've been one. And you can see that in his writing -- it's almost like he's a reporter covering his own life.

And that life included lots of alcohol, lots of sex, lots of violence, and lots of four-letter words.

In the song "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" in Bukowsical, four famous writers, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath, tell Bukowski to embrace sex and obscenity in his writing. It's a very funny song. But what they're really telling him is to be authentic. To write in his true voice. To tell the truth about his life. It's a very funny way of getting at a very important truth.

And really, "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" would be a pretty accurate label for the American musical theatre in this new century, shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bat Boy, Urinetown, American Idiot, Next to Normal, bare, Love Kills, Passing Strange, The Wild Party, and lots of others. Dark times call for dark art, to make sense of it all.

Though Bukowsical pretends to be a silly, shallow musical comedy, it's not. It's a smart, serious-minded approach to telling a really interesting story in a way that's relevant to our ironic, Stephen Colbert, meta culture today. Sure, Bukowski's life could have been told in a dark Sondheim musical or a dark Kander & Ebb musical. But Bukowski didn't have a dark heart -- he just led a dark life. He may have said fuck a lot, but he also fell in love and got his heart broken. We think of Bukowski as really fucked up, but he wasn't Sweeney Todd. He's more the Elephant Man, and it's that fragile, frequently broken heart at the center of his writing that draws us in. When he lets us get a glimpse inside, we see how much we are like him. We see the ordinary in the extraordinary.

Just as Company forces us to look at marriage honestly, just as Next to Normal forces us to look at mental illness honestly, just as Spelling Bee forces us to look at our culture of competition honestly, so too does Bukowsical force us to look at language honestly.

Like all good stories, Bukowsical isn't about Bukowski as much as it's about us, individually and collectively. I'd like to think of Bukowsical as a cultural bull in a china shop, shattering biases, fears, judgments, norms, preconceptions. We may get a few walkouts, but I think the most common result of our performances will be spirited conversations in the car on the way home.

My favorite thing!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Bukowsical

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 19:21:00 +0000

I discovered Bukowsical by accident.

Every so often I check Amazon to see if new musical theatre books or recordings are being released in the coming months. One of my favorite things about Amazon is that I can pre-order most things, and when they're released, they're just delivered to my mailbox. But also, I can find things on Amazon that my local music store would never carry. Things like Bukowsical.

From the moment I heard the first lines of the first song, I knew I wanted to work on this show:

What’s the feeling you get
When you’re down on your luck
And you’re too drunk to fuck?
Bukowsical!
What's the feeling you get
When you're scratching your crotch
And you've run out of scotch?
Bukowsical!
Never writes about trees.
How he elevates sleaze!
Every woman’s a hole
Out to swallow his soul.

Yes, I'll admit it, hearing the word fuck in the first few lines delighted me. I love transgressive, rule-busting theatre. But also, quite frankly, the use of that word in a musical also says something else -- that this is a contemporary, adult musical. After all, the majority of musicals New Line produces have that word in them. Not for shock, not for laughs, but just because it's real. People use that word. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals used to present an idealized America (or idealized Americans abroad), with a clear, traditional morality. But we don't live in that America today, if we ever did. Since the 1960s, Americans have wanted authenticity and truthful complexity in their art, not just pretty fictions.

Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski was a part of that change. He became an important literary figure in the 1970s for his raw, honest, spare writing about the dark side of the American experience. I had read some of his poetry when we were working on Hair, and though I'm not a big poetry fan, I loved it! Now, because of Bukowsical, I've just finished his first novel Post Office and have started Ham on Rye. And I love his novels too.

On the surface Bukowsical seems to be one of those silly, shallow musical parodies, like Silence! or Evil Dead. But it's so much more than that. Despite the surface silliness, there is real meat in this show, not just a fairly accurate portrait of the forces that formed Bukowski the artist, but also a chronicle of the shifting American culture against which he was straining. I sat down with the script and this great documentary called Bukowski: Born Into This, full of interviews with Bukowski, his friends and family, and other writers. And I discovered that this script gets much of the biographical information right -- it plays with time a little, it combines characters, and yes, it creates some complete fictions, but it largely gets it right.

And in doing that, this musical becomes the analog to Bukowski's own work. Bukowski's novels are autobiographical fiction -- recounting his own life experiences through his barely disguised hero Henry Chinaski. (Bukowski's real first name is Henry.) As Bukowski famously said, "Hey baby, when I write, I'm the hero of my own shit." And so too, this musical is biographical fiction, much like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. The story may not always be biographically accurate, but it is emotionally authentic.

Through the silliness of this earnest troupe of players putting on a high-energy, old-school musical comedy about the life of Bukowski, we actually do see how the relentless darkness of Bukowski's life led him to make great art. And the repeated comic statement by the cast that we can be (or are) "Bukowsical" too, has a serious streak running through it. The writers have invented this word that at first seems like a one-word musical comedy joke, combining Bukowski with musical. But it's more than that. When they tell us we can be Bukowsical, we realize it's also an adjective, presumably meaning like Bukowski. Notice that much of the lyric quoted above is in the second person. They're singing about us, the audience. And later in the song, they pull "us" into the song using the first person plural...

He brings a vital message for our time --
He said that being human's not a crime.
'Cause all of us are rude and smutty,
(Oh, yes we are!)
Obscene and crude and lewd and slutty.
(You bet we are!)
We're filthy, and we're grimy,
Corruptible and slimy, too,
Yes, even YOU!

It's true. We are all Bukowsical. We're all flawed. We're all worse than the world knows. We all revert to our primal, selfish, animal selves sometimes, as we stumble through life. We understand Bukowski. We suffer the same bullshit, make the same bad choices, encounter the same obstacles, and feel the same destructive emotions, just not to that extreme degree. And yet like Bukowski, we all survive. But it's that extremity, especially as it's presented comically in the musical, that lets us look at that darkness close up and maybe understand it a little better.

The first song (quoted above) asks us what's the feeling we get when we're repeatedly weighed down by life's little horror shows, and the answer is that the feeling is Bukowiscal. We feel Bukowsical. The poets of the Fifties used the word Beat to mean the same thing. Unlike Bukowski and the Beat writers, we don't all make great art out of that feeling, but we all know what it is to continually work at surviving the interminable bullshit of life. They get your order wrong at the drive-through. You wait on hold for a half hour then get disconnected. You get down-sized. You get dumped. As Bukowski himself wrote in his Barfly screenplay, "Endurance is more important than truth."

Notice that the lyric equates "being human" with being "rude and smutty... obscene and crude and lewd and slutty... filthy... grimy, corruptible and silmy." Yikes. But I daresay Bukowski would agree. As Bukowski did with his writing, this show gives us permission to acknowledge our animal side, our primitive "dark passenger," and to embrace it all as part of who we are. Maybe the lyric exaggerates the case for comic effect, but we really are all Bukowsical in one way or another. We are the hero here. The show's creators, Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green, have given us a Hero Myth story (just like our last five shows, now that I think about it). It's ironic and smartass and silly, but it's still a real Hero Myth story.

At the end of this first song, they sing...

It’s in me
It’s in you
You can be
Bukowsical too!

Not only is it something we are, it's also something to aspire to...? Are we aspiring to Bukowski's excess and hedonism or to his honesty and his art? Well, that's part of the joke...

I think the thing that so attracted me to this show is that it works on several levels at once. It has the obvious comic dissonance of treating this man's dark, damaged life as a perky musical comedy. But it also makes a smart, insightful statement about the relationship between an artist's life and his art, in a wacky parallel to Sunday in the Park with George, Passing Strange, and 8 1/2.

We see the events of Bukowski's life as they form his artistic self, explicitly in "Art is Pain," but this idea runs throughout the entire show. The influence of other great writers on him comes to life here in the funny but pointed song, "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty." The constriction of mid-century American culture that Bukowski rebelled against comes to life in the song "Slippery Slope." Yes, the songs are silly and perky, and yes, they also offer up smart, insightful commentary for those who are looking for it.

The show satirizes old-fashioned musical comedy, but that's not all it does -- it also paints a portrait of Bukowski that is emotionally and existentially authentic. We actually understand Bukowski and his work better at the end of the show.

Bukowsical has been produced twice so far, once in Los Angeles and once at the New York Fringe Festival, where it won the Best Musical award. Both productions were very bare-bones. New Line's will be the first fully produced production. In its original incarnation, the show was in the form of a backer's audition, performed by a comically clueless theatre company. I asked the writers if we could jettison that idea, and they agreed.

The backer's audition was a device to set up for the audience the comic disconnect between content and form, but I don't think audiences in 2013 need that set-up. One of the central jokes of the show is that it shatters the Sondheim Rule, that Content Dictates Form, in other words, that the story you're telling will dictate the form of the storytelling. Most great musicals follow that rule. But here, the writers are intentionally breaking that rule, repeatedly and gleefully throughout the show, partly because it's really funny and partly because that's Bukowski.

He arguably changed the face of American poetry with his work, ignoring almost all the "rules" of poetry. He once famously said, "It appears that certain people think that poetry should be a certain way. For these, there will be nothing but troubled years. More and more people will come along to break their concepts. It's hard I know, like having somebody fuck your wife while you are at work, but life, as they say, goes on." The same thing could be said about the American musical theatre right now.

The audience doesn't need a justification or explanation or introduction to the show's subversion; they will discover that as they watch. It's always more fun for an audience to discover things on their own than for the writers to hand it to them. After seeing shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Passing Strange, Bat Boy, High Fidelity, Next to Normal, bare, and other rule-busting musicals, our audiences don't need their hands held.

Still, even though we're cutting the backer's audition, it's important for us to remember that the show's double-reality is the key. This dark life story "inside" the show chafes against the meta-reality of this cheerful company of players and their wrong-headed -- but often strangely insightful -- approach to the storytelling "outside" the show. And though the writers' point here is that Content Doesn't Dictate Form in Bukowsical, they slyly double-cross us. This dissonant, subversive, rule-breaking storytelling is exactly the way -- maybe the only way -- to write a musical about Charles Bukowski.

In other words, Content Does Dictate Form here -- by refusing to let Content Dictate Form. It's like the Mobius strip of concept musicals. In making fun of the worst habits of old-school musical comedy, the show is both parody of musical theatre and also a perfect example of the latest evolution of the art form, the neo musical comedy. It both mocks the art form's past and looks forward to its future. It uses the devices of George M. Cohan and the ironic self-awareness of American culture in this new century.

It's like our 21st-century culture is having a conversation with the early 20th-century roots of this indigenous American art form, embracing many things, adding new things, reinventing others, but unmistakably returning to our roots. This art form of ours was born around the tumultuous turning of the last century -- "an era exploding, a century spinning," as Ragtime puts it. It was reborn during the tumultuous 1960s and 70s. And it's being reborn again around the tumultuous turn of this century. And Bukowski is part of that.

Lois Spangler wrote in a review of the New York Fringe Festival production, "By adhering so closely to the tropes of the American musical, and treating its sordid subject with such earnest glee, Bukowsical manages to be both a satire and a real musical. Pure mockery is just drivel; it sounds shrill and empty when dropped on stage. The folks who have worked so hard on Bukowsical, however, have a real love for the musical art form, its charms and its foibles, and it shows in some of the truly outrageous—and outrageously funny—moments in the show."

Everything old is new again. We start work in a week.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Perfect for You

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 10:04:00 +0000

The hardest part of my job is closing a show. It kills me.

I pour my heart and soul into finding wonderful pieces to work on, dissecting and understanding the material and figuring out how to approach it, finding fearless, smart, talented actors to bring the story and my ideas to life, and convincing audiences to come share the experience with us. That last part turned out to be way easier than I expected with Next to Normal. It's been one of the biggest selling shows we've ever produced, and that surprised me a lot. Usually, the darker a show is, the less well it sells -- and Next to Normal is reeeeeally dark.

Despite what some local actors assume, we really don't pre-cast our shows, unless we announce it publicly. With Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, we pre-cast John Sparger in the lead because... well, because he's Sparger, and he's a kick-ass rock-and-roller. For our upcoming show, we pre-cast Zak Farmer as Charles Bukowski because sometimes an actor and a role fit so perfectly that I can't imagine anyone else doing it. In both cases, we announced the pre-casting in our audition notices. But we try not to pre-cast too often.

For Next to Normal, we didn't pre-cast anyone.

There were several women who work with us who really wanted the role of Diana, and I knew we'd get a lot of great women auditioning for both Diana and Natalie. So not only did I know we'd have a wide range of choices, I also knew my women friends who are actors would have killed me if we had pre-cast it. Kimi Short, who we ended up casting as Diana, has worked with us since 1998, but she wasn't a shoo-in for the role. Until she auditioned for it -- then there was no question -- Kimi had to play Diana.

I knew Kimi has a rich, warm, gorgeous voice, with a range that fits Diana like a glove. I knew that Kimi is a strong, emotional, expressive actor -- and really good at comedy. But she truly surpassed all my expectations. Her performance was nothing less than extraordinary (and the critics agreed), nuanced and surprising and honest and so deeply, fearlessly emotional. Kimi's Diana was very different from Alice Ripley's original portrayal. I loved Ripely in the role -- I loved the entire original production -- but I wanted to go in a different direction. Ripley's Diana was constantly on the edge of complete insanity, to the point that you almost thought Ripley herself would fall apart before the story was done. It was a freakishly precarious high-wire act and the sense of inevitable collapse into chaos was palpable. And that totally worked.

But Kimi went in such a different direction. Kimi's Diana is the lady next door. We know this Diana. We see this Diana at the store and never suspect her illness. Kimi made Diana "ordinary" in a way that intensified the connection to the audience and also lent a sense of everyday reality to the story that Ripley didn't really get at. Kimi's Diana was one of us, while Ripley was "other," a "sick person." Ripley was brilliant in the role, but her choices put something of a wall between her and the audience -- most of us have never met anyone as fucked up as Ripley's Diana. She was scary. And that kept us at arm's length. But in New Line's production, with Kimi's warmer, more subtle performance and a 210-seat house with a front row two feet from the action, we were in Diana and Dan's home with them. We were inside the story with them.

We felt Dan's struggle, because to some extent we struggled along with him to understand Diana and not get caught up in the maelstrom of her illness.

Maybe the greatest choice Mike Dowdy and I made as directors was putting Jeff Wright in the role of Dan, and bringing him back together with Kimi, after they played the two leads in High Fidelity (both in 2008 and 2012). They have such comfort with each other onstage; and in this show, they really got inside that amazingly complex relationship between Dan and Diana -- two people at odds with each other, but who have been married for almost twenty years, even though arguably they shouldn't be together. Kimi and Jeff really seemed like a married couple -- there was a genuine physical intimacy between them -- and that honesty went a long way in making Dan a stronger character and making their marriage more palpably real.

Jeff is one of those actors I work with whenever I can. He's incredibly easy to direct -- and when a director finds an actor like that, he never wants to let go of him. But more importantly, Jeff has an honesty and sincerity onstage that few actors can equal. He's utterly fearless, happy to leap into whatever weird ideas I may give him, and he accesses deep, dark emotions on stage so viscerally. We got a taste of that when he played Hinckley in Assassins and when he played Rob in High Fidelity. Here, he built the character of Dan throughout Act I, giving him such reality, and then he repeatedly tore our hearts out throughout Act II, as we watched Dan's world crumble around him. Dan is really a very selfish guy, but as he's done with other roles, Jeff gave him such humanity, such raw vulnerability, that we couldn't help but feel for him. Some nights, I wondered if Jeff and Kimi were going to get through "How Could I Ever Forget?" -- they got so "lost" in the grief and regret and shame and loss that they've buried for so long. It was positively gut-wrenching. And Dan's final moments with Gabe before the finale were almost unbearably emotional -- the only moment that choked me up every single night.

Every time they work with me, Jeff and Kimi give me the best gift an actor can give a director. They take the work seriously, they give everything they have, and they trust me even when they don't totally understand where I'm heading. And they're two of the most emotionally honest actors I've ever worked with.

When people told me how much they loved our show, I always reminded myself that we had a hell of a head start -- after all, we were working on a Pulitzer Prize winning drama. But few actors could navigate this dramatic tightrope like Jeff and Kimi did every night. As I often tell people, my analysis and my ideas have no value at all unless I have brilliant, fearless actors to bring those ideas to life.

Luckily for me, I do.

I directed Next to Normal with one of our regular New Line actors, Mike Dowdy, who's appeared in almost all our shows since he first joined us in 2009 -- playing everything from a stoner servant in Two Gentlemen of Verona, to the romantic lead in bare, to the crazed villain in Cry-Baby, to a quirky, shy record clerk in High Fidelity to a US President in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Dowdy was recently named New Line's new Associate Artistic Director. He had some directing experience already, but he had never directed with New Line. And he turned out to be an ideal collaborator -- so full of ideas, 90% of which were really smart and insightful, and always ready with a Plan B when my initial ideas didn't work out in blocking rehearsals. He's got an amazing sense of theatre and storytelling, and he's a hell of a problem-solver. Best of all, it never bothered him if I rejected an idea because it didn't totally mesh with where I was heading. Part of why we worked so well together is that he and I really believe in a lot of the same things about storytelling and theatre, and we like the same things -- dark humor, complexity, irony, aggressiveness. I could not have asked for a better, smarter, more insightful partner.

The rest of our cast was also really exceptional. Ryan Foziey (Gabe) started working with us just a year ago, playing the title character in Cry-Baby, but he's so instinctively in tune with our ballsy, über-intense New Line style. He had a very difficult role in this show -- Gabe is as much device as character, but Ryan both made Gabe real and also found a subtly different style of movement and acting that placed Gabe "outside" the other characters. Our approach to the show was pretty different from the original, so our Gabe had about twice as much stage time as Gabe did on Broadway, and while the original production often put Gabe up on the second and third levels of their massive set, completely disconnected from the audience and the other actors, we kept Gabe inside the action, often right up in other actors' faces. His place in our production was another real acting tightrope but he nailed it. He literally "haunted" the entire evening, and it was riveting. He figured out how to sort of "float" around the stage and he got really used to walking backwards, so he could "fade" out of scenes...

Zak Farmer is New Line's resident character actor. He's been in all but two New Line shows since summer 2007. He's going to be playing the lead in our next show, Bukowsical. And he could not have been more perfect for the dual roles of the two doctors in Next to Normal. There are several men who work with us who could have played those two characters, but really, only Zak could have pulled off the "Doctor Rock" scene like he did -- hilarious, crazy, and more than a tad disturbing. But he also gave both doctors full, rich characterizations. The story doesn't work as well if the doctors aren't fully real, and Zak gave them that. For the most part, Zak usually plays our wacko roles -- Barry in High Fidelity, Charles Guiteau in Assassins, Dr. Prospero in Return to the Forbidden Planet -- but he's also played more serious, more minimalist characters like Sheriff Karnopp in Love Kills. And it's that mix of wacky fearlessness and serious acting chops that made Zak so ideal for this role.

And then there were our newcomers. Mary Beth Black was one of the first people to audition for us, and after she walked out, I told Dowdy and our casting directors that unless someone else walks in and blows my fucking mind, Mary Beth was my Natalie. She's got a killer voice, she's a really strong, subtle, natural actor, and she just seemed right for Natalie. I didn't know till later that she's only a junior in high school, but that's part of what gives her Natalie such reality -- she knows where Natalie's coming from, in a way that older actors wouldn't. Plus, she's a dream to work with.

Joe McAnulty also just walked in off the street. When he came in, I was struck by how much he looked like my idea of Henry, and then he sang, and he has this clear baritone voice that's just perfect for this pop-rock musical style. Not being a stoner himself, Dowdy and I schooled Joe on smoking a bong, what it feels like to be stoned, etc. Not that we have actual experience with that, of course. We realized as we worked that Henry is the stoner Zen master, Natalie's wise wizard, her spirit guide. And once we talked about that, Joe fully embraced that side of Henry, and it led to a really wonderful performance that fit Mary Beth's Natalie so beautifully. The two of them charted the progress and obstacles of their relationship so carefully over the course of the story -- rather than just asking the audience to assume the connection between Natalie and Henry, Mary Beth and Joe took us on that journey, step by step, and their relationship seemed much realer to me than in the original. And that paid off in spades in the second-to-last scene, at the school dance, when their story arc is resolved.

If I'm honest, when both Mary Beth and Joe walked into the audition I instantly knew in my gut we were going to cast them. My gut doesn't always venture an opinion, but when it does, it's never wrong, Like, never.

I've written here about how amazing the writing is, how rich the characters and themes and language are, but none of that matters without amazing actors. I think I've done some of the best work I've ever done as a director -- with considerable help from Dowdy and from Kitt and Yorkey's brilliant material -- but again, it doesn't matter how interesting or original my staging is, or how insightful my approach is, without amazing actors. If the audience doesn't engage in the story and the emotions, if they aren't invested in the outcome, no amount of clever staging or brilliant wordplay matters.

It's all about the actors. Always.

And we hit the jackpot this time. Judy Newmark wrote in her Post-Dispatch review , "If you go to New Line Theatre with any regularity, you already know one of its signal pleasures: a repertory company. There are relatively few around. But apart from building valuable, constructive relationships among actors, directors, designers and other artists who regularly work together, a repertory company also helps an audience feel at home. Recognizing actors from show to show, you feel like you’re 'in the know' -- and at the same time you enjoy watching them try new things." Now, we don't actually have a repertory company (how I wish we could afford that!), but we have something close -- a group of 10-15 actors who appear in most of our shows. Some of our actors, like Zak and Dowdy, appear in almost every show. Others appear in one or two shows each season. A few rejoin us only once every couple seasons. But equally important, we work very hard to make sure we bring in new people. Whenever possible, we try to make every cast half New Liners and half new folks. And the new folks this time totally earned their place in the New Line family. I hope they both come back to work us again.

The run of a show always takes a lot out of me. It usually takes me a couple weeks to recover, both physically and emotionally. I will miss this show, this cast, this production very much. We run our shows for twelve performances, and Next to Normal got twelve full houses and twelve standing ovations. And it has put some nice padding in our bank account.

Which is good, because Lord only knows how Bukowsical will sell...

There's nothing better in the world than doing really great work with really great people for wildly enthusiastic audiences and rave reviews. The people of St. Louis have given me the greatest gift of my life -- twenty-two years of continued support for New Line Theatre and the work we do. Like they say, without an audience, it's just a rehearsal. I owe St. Louis so much.

One last thought... I know there are companies in town that program their seasons in terms of what they think will sell well, in terms of what they think the audience "wants." But you know what audiences really want? Great storytelling. Audiences don't only like what they already know. They like what's good. They want an adventure. They want connection. Look at the incredible success we've had lately, with Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and now Next to Normal. Our audiences didn't know they "wanted" these shows until they saw them. It's my job as an artistic director to find exciting, interesting, original pieces of theatre that will delight and thrill and connect with our audience. I work for them -- literally, since New Line is a nonprofit -- and I abdicate my responsibility if I give audiences only what they ask for.

A line from 1776 always comes back to me -- "A representative owes the people not only his industry, but also his judgment, and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion." That applies to my job too. Our audience "hires" me (by buying tickets and making contributions) to find pieces of theatre that will surprise and thrill them. And I can't imagine a better job than that.

I get two weeks off now, to decompress and to prepare for Bukowsical rehearsals. We've got another ridiculously strong cast, and one of the craziest, smartest, wildest shows I've ever found, yet another show that will confirm once again New Line's status as "the bad boy of musical theatre." Another adventure begins.

But first I sleep...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

What Makes You Think...

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:27:00 +0000

The reviews for New Line Theatre's Next to Normal have been extraordinary.

But one of our reviews really bothered me because it revealed the big plot surprise that happens about halfway through Act I, right after "It's Gonna Be Good."

Don't worry. No spoilers here.

If you've seen the show, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't, I don't want to spoil it for you, because it's a huge surprise. It completely changes everything you've already seen happen. What you thought you were witnessing turns out to be really different from what you actually were witnessing, and as a result, the story you thought you were watching is actually a fairly different story after the big reveal. The stakes are now much higher, the story becomes more complicated, and the emotion gets dialed up to eleven.

It's really carefully set up and the big reveal is pretty powerful, often eliciting gasps from the audience.

When I emailed this reviewer about his spoiler, he pretended at first not to know what I meant. He wrote back to me, "The only thing I mentioned that occurs after the first 20-30 minutes of the first act..." Notice that "after the first 20-30 minutes" -- that's his dodge. Obviously nothing in the first 20-30 minutes could matter, right? Why do we even bother performing that first part...? So I wrote back and clarified which surprise I meant, and he then responded that it was actually okay for him to reveal that plot twist because it doesn't come at the end of the show. And that apparently means it's not important.

But at the same time, he also argued that it's impossible to write about the show without revealing that surprise, because everything else is built on that moment. He's right that the surprise in question is the show's "obligatory moment," toward which everything before it leads, and from which everything after it results. It's the one moment the story can't do without. But doesn't that negate his other argument, that it can't be all that important since it happens midway through Act I...? And after making the argument that this surprise is so central to the story, he then wrote in another email that when he first saw Next to Normal, he didn't really think this surprise was a big deal.

So let's review... it's not important because it happens early, it's vitally important because everything else comes out of it, and it's also not a big deal at all.

Okay... Pardon me while my head explodes.

Of course, our other reviews talked about the show without ruining the big surprise, as did the New York reviews, so it's clearly not that hard to do. I asked this guy why it matters where in the show the surprise falls. Whether it occurs early or late in the story, why take that surprise away from audiences...? Why not let them experience the first part of the show the way the authors obviously wanted...? As our other reviews prove, it's not necessary to rob the audience of that. Doesn't it matter that the authors want to surprise the audience with that moment? Why does this reviewer get to decide which surprises matter and which don't...?

We know from talking to people after performances, that most of the folks coming to see us have not seen the show before. They don't know the plot twists ahead of time. Unless they see his review, of course.

As if all this isn't enough, he also said in his review that the story is not very dramatic because Diana's struggle is entirely internal, and "that's hard to dramatize on a stage." I asked him if he'd ever seen Hamlet. And I reminded him that Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Just sayin'.

Hero Myth stories can be internal, external, or both. In High Fidelity, Company, Sunday in the Park with George, Nine, Love Kills, Grease, The Wild Party, Cabaret, and thousands of other stories, the hero's journey is entirely psychological. After all, the Hero Myth story is just a human life in miniature; most of us take internal hero's journeys over and over throughout our lives.

When a story tells of a physical journey, the Hero Myth acts more as a metaphor for a human life; Dorothy Gale and Luke Skywalker's journeys aren't actually like anything most of us go through, but they do reveal our real human journeys through their symbols and metaphors. And because storytelling is such an integral part of human existence, we're all really good at reading those symbols and translating them, even if only subconsciously. On the other hand, when the Hero Myth is presented as a psychological or emotional journey, as in Next to Normal, it actually becomes a more concrete representation of the journeys we all take.

I suggested this reviewer check out Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment.

I guess what's so frustrating about all this is the reviewer's refusal to think much about this show he's reviewing. There are many more reviewers in St. Louis now than there were even a few years ago. It's really terrific that as our theatre community grows and evolves, a robust critical community is evolving around it, to have an ever larger and more interesting conversation. We now get 8-10 reviews for every show, occasionally more, and it's very cool to get so many perspectives, to get so many responses from people of differing tastes and backgrounds. And this expanded pool of reviewers means the actual reviewing keeps getting richer and more thoughtful and more sophisticated. This larger conversation is enriching everybody, including our audiences -- some of whom write their own reviews of our shows on their personal blogs.

As a result, theatre in St. Louis is being afforded more respect today than ever before.

Which is part of why the Spoiler Reviewer bugged me so much. His dogged insistence that there's no harm in ruining a big plot twist speaks volumes. He shows a lack of respect for this show and its authors, for our audiences, and for us. We produce very complex, challenging work, and many of the other reviewers in town write really thoughtful, intelligent reviews of our shows; but this guy rarely takes our work seriously or looks beneath the surface. He dismisses much of what we do, often by bemoaning the superficiality or blandness of shows when he himself has failed to look under the surface and see what's really there.

After all, they're only musicals...

Usually I don't worry much over what reviewers write (which is admittedly easy for me to say since 90% of our reviews are pretty much raves), but in this case, anyone who saw this guy's review before they saw the show had a lesser experience in the theatre, and that's a shame.

All I ask is that reviewers give us and our audience the same respect we give the work. After twenty-two years of doing serious, challenging, adult theatre, surely we're owed at least that, aren't we...?

You bet your ass we are.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

There Will Be Light

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Brian Yorkey's dialogue and lyrics for Next to Normal use several textual themes. References to light, death, and madness appear throughout the show, but light is at its heart. The word light appears throughout the text, along with related ideas, like daytime and electricity. Just as the word rent in Rent takes on multiple meanings, all very resonant within the narrative, so the word light takes on multiple meanings in Next to Normal. Sometimes it means literal light, sometimes it means enlightenment or revelation, sometimes it means easy or lighthearted.

But actual physical light is also a theme in the show. The show begins with Diana turning on a light, and the show’s finale, “Light,” begins with Natalie turning on a light. Midway through Act I, Diana even brings on a birthday cake covered with lighted candles. This is story – a Hero Myth – about the quest for light.

When Dr. Madden tries to hypnotize Diana to unlock her past, he asks her to imagine going down a dark staircase, and in her passive-aggressive resistance, she quips, “Should we turn on a light? You know, with the stairs?” It's funny, but in the context of this action, light takes on a double meaning. Perhaps Yorkey is hinting that Madden might just lead Diana toward real enlightenment at last.

The next time we hear the word is in “I Dreamed a Dream,” as Diana slips into fantasy. She begins the song, “I saw you light the ballroom with your sparkling eyes of blue.” Here, light is beautiful, romantic, joyous.

This next time is a conversation late in Act I, in which Madden tells Dan that he recommends Electroconvulsive Therapy – shock treatment.

Madden: ECT is indicated.
Dan: Wow. I mean – they still do that?
Madden: We do, yes. It's the standard in cases like this. She's got a long history of drug therapy and resistance, she's acutely suicidal – it's really our best option.
Dan: That's kind of terrifying.
Madden: It's not. The electricity involved is barely enough to light a hundred-watt bulb.
Dan: (wry) Oh, if it's just a hundred-watt bulb...

Here light is connected to electricity, danger, risk, and it also takes us back to Diana’s reference to turning on a light in the hypnosis scene, and that opening moment of the show.

The Act I finale, Dan’s plea to Diana to agree to the ECT, is called “A Light in the Dark,” and once again the word light takes on all these different flavors of meaning – illumination, enlightenment, happiness, peace, but also life. Dan sings:

One light shines in the drive –
One single sign that our house is alive.
Our house, our own –
So why do I live there alone?
Tell me why I wait through the night,
And why do I leave on the light?

Though the first images are concrete ones, this song operates in metaphor. They are living in a world of darkness, and Dan desperately wants to find the light. Later in the song, he sings:

Take my hand,
And let me take your heart.
Keep it far
From what keeps us apart –
Let us start
With a light in the dark.

And at the end of the song:

I swear that somewhere in the night
There's a light...
A light in the dark.

He’s right, but it may not be the light he’s looking for. Dan is desperate to find the light, but Diana fears light, and he doesn't understand that. Like many of the songs in the show, this one operates on both concrete and metaphorical levels at the same time.

As we begin Act II, we go inside Diana’s head as she undergoes the ECT, in the song “Wish I Were Here,” and her first line is:

In an instant, lightning flashes
And the burst might leave me blind –
When the bolt of lightning crashes
And it burns right through my mind.

Again, light is dangerous, destructive, painful. To Dan, light is salvation; to Diana, it’s the enemy. Later in the song, both Diana and Natalie sing, “I’m the light and heat of every sun…” Light illuminates but it also burns and consumes.

When Diana comes home, Madden suggests to Dan how to jog her memories – “Keep it light at first, that's best. Careful that she's not distressed.” Here, light is about lightheartedness.

In “How Could I Ever Forget?” one of Diana’s recovering memories is “The lights of the city flew past.” Whether Yorkey intended it consciously or not, the phrase works on two levels, both as a concrete memory, and also as a description of her returning memories – her enlightenment – rushing past her grasping mind.

In “Promise,” Dan’s desperate recommitment to Diana later in the same scene, he sings:

To the girl who was burning so brightly
Like the light from Orion above,
And still I will search for her nightly –
If you see her, please send her my love.

Again, light is about burning. Is Dan the moth drawn to the flame, only to be consumed by it?

When Diana returns to Madden in the “Make Up Your Mind” reprise, he asks her to “Make up your mind there are moments of light.” Light as enlightenment, hope.

In the final scene, Natalie enters in the dark and says “Dad? What the hell? Why are the lights off?” Why is Dan choosing darkness? Now light takes on a final meaning, of facing up to truth, to life, a first step toward enlightenment. The finale, “Light,” is a summing up, tying together the themes of the show, and giving each character a moment to reflect on where they’ve been and where they are headed. Each character uses images of light and dark in different ways. Natalie sings:

We need some light.
First of all, we need some light.
You can't sit here in the dark,
And all alone –
It's a sorry sight.
It's just you and me.
We'll live. You'll see.

This is the first time Natalie uses light as metaphor, and she also physically turns on the light. She’s growing up and gaining enlightenment of her own. In the next verse, Dan sings:

Night after night,
We'd sit and wait for the morning light.
But we've waited far too long
For all that's wrong
To be made right.

Dan has not found the light yet. Later in the song, Gabe sings:

And when the night has fin'ly gone,
And when we see the new day dawn,
We'll wonder how we wandered for so long, so blind.
The wasted world we thought we knew –
The light will make it look brand new.

And then they all sing, “So let it shine,” repeating the word shine. Like the finale of Hair, this song recognizes the dark and implores us – all of us – to let the sun shine, to let the light in to vanquish the dark. The "we" they sing about is not just the Goodmans, but all of us. The song and the show end with this incantation, this celebration of the human spirit:

Day after day...
We'll find the will to find our way,
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done...
There will be light.
There will be light...
When we open up our lives,
Sons and daughters, husbands, wives
And fight that fight...
There will be light.
There will be light.
There will be light.
There will be light!

Despite the darkness of the story, this finale offers some hope, limited and narrow though it might be. The light is out there, the characters are telling us, but we must be open to it and we must fight against the dark. While Hair asked us, begged us, to let the sun shine in, Next to Normal ends on a declarative statement – there will be light. (Notice Yorkey's exclamation point on the last one!) Diana and Natalie have both found self-awareness and some kind of enlightenment – or at least, they're on their way. Dan has even taken a first tentative step toward his own enlightenment. Will these people be okay? Who knows? That's not the point. The point is the journey, the ongoing quest for light.

Very much like the search for The Real in Passing Strange.

Textual themes like this don’t always register consciously on an audience, but they do work on us. They create connections and associations. They underline important moments and ideas. And this particular theme of light registers with all of us on such a primal level. We humans are always in search of light.

It's part of why Next to Normal connects so powerfully with audiences. We need light too.

What a run it's been. Just three performances left...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Look back over the lyrics I've quoted in this post, and notice the amazing alliteration all over the place. Yorkey does this throughout the show and it's so incredible once you start noticing it...

The Hope, The Heat, The Fear

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:27:00 +0000

There are so many things I love about Next to Normal, and it's such fun watching the show now, night after night, as it gets subtly richer and deeper at each performance.

The absolute best is sitting in the back of the house and listening to the audience, hearing the gasps when certain things happen in the story, hearing the crying and sniffling throughout the last twenty minutes (and, to be honest, also in several other places throughout the show), the big tension-releasing laughs, and the dark, low chuckles that spread through the house.

Three examples...

First, at the end of "My Psychopharmacologist and I." After weeks of mixing and matching medications, Diana says to Dr. Fine, "I don't feel like myself. I mean, I don't feel anything." Dr. Fine grunts and writes down in his notes, "Patient stable." The audience laughs, but it's a muted, ironic laugh. We see the dark humor from the outside, but we also see the horror from the inside. And that recognition from us sets up "I Miss the Mountains," making it even more resonant.

Also, late in Act I, Dan asks Natalie, "Is this Henry a good influence?" Natalie replies, "Like, compared to what?" Dan says, "Okay, that's fair." And we get a big laugh from the audience, sometimes even a double laugh on both Natalie's and Dan's lines. The audience sees the difficult truth in the humor, and they also desperately need the release of laughter at this point in the story.

Okay, one more (which you won't understand if you haven't seen the show, but I don't want to give away any surprises here). In Act II, Diana is trying to jog her memories after her shock treatment, and Henry shows up. Diana stares at him and says, "You remind me of someone. How old are you?" And Henry says, "Seventeen. Why?" And everyone in the audience tenses up. You can just feel it. At one performance, one guy actually said out loud, "Oh, shit."

And there's also a different kind of "listening" moment that really delights me every night. Before "I Dreamed a Dance," Diana sits down to go through a box of Gabe's baby stuff. She takes out a stuffed dog and sets it down. Then she takes out a baby blanket, carefully folds it, then holds it up to her face and smells it. It's such a personal, emotionally naked moment. Everyone in the audience both understands the impulse and recognizes the trap Diana's emotions have built for her. What's amazing about this moment is the complete silence in the audience -- no one moves, no one coughs, so one looks at their program. With Kimi's subtle, shaded performance, this moment is utterly mesmerizing and heartbreaking. I always smile when I hear that silence, because I know that means our audiences is 100% engaged in our story and characters.

Maybe my favorite thing, above all, about Next to Normal is the fights. On opening night, one of our Tweeters, created the hashtag #songfight. There's nothing so riveting onstage as a good, knock-down-drag-out fight. For some reason, a lot of actors are afraid to have a full-out fight, but conflict is the heart of drama, and a great fight is the height of conflict. Luckily, New Line actors are generally pretty fearless, so when I ask for a big-ass fight, they always bring it, in bare, High Fidelity, Evita, JC Superstar, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and other shows. With scenes in Next to Normal like "You Don't Know" and "I Am the One," and later, the "Gonna Be Good" reprise and "Why Stay?", either there are fireworks onstage or you're not doing it right...

Another thing I love is the roller coaster of Act II. Though the whole show is mostly music, with only small bits of dialogue here and there, Act II is even more wall-to-wall music. And composer Tom Kitt keeps the tension up by not really finishing most of the songs in Act II, robbing us of a button (the final boomp at the end of a song which cues applause), and often overlapping the beginning of one song over the end of another. And more than once, he creates that overlap in two different keys, to evoke in the music the tension and conflicts of the action. He's created the musical equivalent of a roller coaster, and it's part of the reason Act II is so emotionally draining -- there's no release, no pause, no moment to reflect. Like Diana, we have to just hang on and go for this wild ride. Sondheim used music this way in Sweeney Todd but I think Kitt is pushing it even further here, to extraordinary effect.

At New Line we rarely have strings in the band (other than bass), so it's especially cool that we have a violin and cello in the band this time. Sometimes when the whole band is playing, it actually sounds like we have a whole string section, rather than just three string players. And for those quiet, more emotional moments, there are these beautiful phrases by the strings between the vocal phrases, that lend such beauty and such fragile emotion to the action. The violin and cello play in harmony a lot, which is gorgeous, but they sometimes play in very dissonant harmony, telling us musically that there is something "wrong" happening in the scene, even if only subtextually. The band arrangements are incredible, and like Kitt's score for High Fidelity, the music does a lot of the storytelling in Next to Normal.

I'll end with the thing that makes all our work worthwhile. Every night at the final blackout after "Light," this roar of cheering goes up and as the lights come back for curtain call, the entire audience leaps to their feet for a standing ovation. Not just clapping, but cheering. And this show and this cast and this band deserve every bit of it. There's nothing better than an audience who's just had an amazing ride.

Ticket sales are soaring, the reviews are all raves, and I could not be prouder of what we've created. And I could not be more grateful that we get to do work like this, and that there's an audience here in St. Louis who wants to share it with us. What could be better than that?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Sing a Song of Forgetting

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:42:00 +0000

We opened Next to Normal last week and it has been a wild ride -- the biggest pre-sale in our 22-year history, huge houses opening weekend, and as of right now, seven rave reviews, calling our production "nothing less than extraordinary," "superior," "brilliant," "affecting and thought-provoking," "inspired," "surprising and exceptional," "emotionally packed, captivating," and my favorite, "with scorching intensity."

When we work on a show this difficult and complex -- and this challenging for the audience -- it's always so wonderful when our audiences fully embrace our production. And I gotta say, that happens almost every time -- we have such smart, fearless, adventurous audiences in St. Louis, and they never shy away from even our darkest, most intense work.

But even beyond this amazing reception, the biggest joy for me is getting to just sit back and watch this amazing piece of theatre every night, as it evolves in subtle ways, getting richer and deeper every night. It's such fun to hear the audience gasp when the various plot twists are revealed.

But more than that, it's fun to discover the endless treasure inside this script and score. Brian Yorkey's incredible musical rhyming dialogue is so naturalistic, yet so well-crafted, chock full of so many little jokes and hints and foreshadowing. I'm not exaggerating when I say almost every line of lyric contains thematic material and/or subtle foreshadowing.

One of my favorite numbers is "Song of Forgetting" in Act II. The more I listen to it, the more I find there. It's an interesting song structurally, because the verses are dialogue; but the choruses are commentary, a kind of Fourth Wall-busting that acts as a cool meta-moment because they're singing about singing. In the original production, Dan sang the chorus to Natalie, presumably enlisting her into his warped agenda, but that staging changes Natalie into a more active player in the family psycho-drama, which doesn't mesh well with the rest of her character arc. Natalie stands outside the central storyline for most of the show, and that's important for the resolution of her story. The script doesn't say that Dan's singing this to anyone in particular. If he sings the chorus to the audience, it makes us accomplices, and it leaves Dan's dark agenda "unspoken" inside the reality of the story, which makes his motivations richer and more complex, only to be gradually revealed to Natalie in "Better Than Before."

The phrase "Sing a song of..." has Biblical roots, but it's intentionally ambiguous here. Throughout human history, why do we sing songs? To celebrate and to remember. Is Dan celebrating Diana's memory loss? Notice specifically what he's celebrating:

Sing a song of forgetting...
A song of the way things were not.
Sing of what's lost to you,
Of times that you never knew....
Sing of not remembering when,
Of mem’ries that go unremembered, and then
Sing a song of forgetting again.

He's celebrating the way things were not, times that they never knew. And then he sings of not remembering, and of unremembered memories. Also, notice that the first two lines don't rhyme -- they stick out, in order to underline the most important idea -- "the way things were not." This is a poetic way of articulating Dan's agenda, which is to reshape Diana's -- and the family's -- past to his liking. This is a dangerous road he's going down, but we only gets hints of that here. The rich music gives it a romantic feeling, but when you listen to what he's saying, we realize the song itself mirrors Dan's duplicity, operating on two levels at once.

The song starts with the discovery of the breadth of Diana's memory loss after her treatment. Notice how natural the dialogue sounds, but also notice that Yorkey never violates the structure and rhyming.

Dan

This house and all these rooms?

Last Christmas or last year?
Out back the dogwood blooms?

Diana

Do I really live here?

Dan

The paint, the walls...

All this glass and wood...

You don't recall?

Diana

How I wish I could.

Dan

Our house on Walton Way

The house with the red door?

Our trip to St. Tropez,

The whole week a downpour?

Natalie

My first few steps...

And my first lost tooth...

What, nothing yet?

Diana

To tell the truth...

Natalie

Jesus.

Dan

Sing a song of forgetting...

A song of the way things were not.

Sing of what's lost to you,

Of times that you never knew....

Sing of not remembering when,

Of mem’ries that go unremembered, and then

Sing a song of forgetting again.

That day our child was born,

Our baby girl's first cry?

That grey and drizzly morn,

I've never felt so high.

Diana

The day we met...

And we shared two beers...

Dan

Then?

Diana

I forget.

Dan

But that's nineteen years.

Diana

That doctor Mitchell said there might be some memory loss.

Dan

Doctor Madden.

Diana

Well, see, there you go.

Natalie

What a lovely cure...

It's a medical miracle.

With a mind so pure

That she doesn't know anything.

Dan

It's there I'm sure

‘Cause memories don't die.

Natalie

Why?

Dan

They don’t die.

Natalie

They die...

Diana

I'll try...

And then all three of them sing the chorus, but the words mean something different to each of them. Dan's idealized past is phony. Natalie's past is all pain. And Diana's past is gone. From these three conflicting perspectives, these words take on layers of meaning that slam up against each other and foreshadow the emotional collisions to come.

Dan, Natalie & Diana
Sing a song of forgetting...
A song of the way things were not.
Sing of what's lost to you,
Of times that you never knew.
Sing of not remembering when...
Of memories that go unremembered, and then
Sing a song of forgetting again.

It's remarkable writing. It functions both as a Brechtian commentary song, but also as as a conventional book scene, in that it moves the story forward, and it foreshadows Dan's desperate decision to try and rewrite their family history.

The song "Better Than Before" uses the same kind of musical dialogue, but minus the commentary.

I noticed when we were working on bare a couple years ago that we've reached a new level of lyrical sophistication in the musical theatre. Oscar Hammerstein invented the musical scene almost a century ago, with "Make Believe" in Show Boat, and later with "If I Loved You" in Carousel. Stephen Sondheim developed it further in Sweeney Todd, Passion, and other shows. But in bare and Next to Normal, it's been developed even further. Hammerstein's musical dialogue was always a bit stilted, sometimes having to rely on inverted sentences, odd word choices, etc. to make the trick work. Sondheim's musical dialogue was almost too skillful (look at the amazing "Weekend in the Country"), often calling attention to its own artistry. But Jon Hartmere's work in bare (just look at the remarkable "Wonderland" number) and Brian Yorkey's work in Next to Normal have taken us to a whole new level. And that's very exciting.

We truly are in a new Golden Age of musical theatre, and Next to Normal is a shining example of that. It's pretty fucking thrilling to be in the middle of all this...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Let It Shine

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:47:00 +0000

Next to Normal is one of the great modern American dramas, fully equal to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Death of a Salesman, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This isn't just a great musical (though it is that) and it's not just a great score (though it is that) -- it's a great work of art.

I'm ridiculously fortunate -- far more so than I probably deserve -- in that I routinely get to work on great art with really talented people. Pieces of theatre so transcendent, so beyond the rest of the art form, that they leave you forever changed. Shows like Sweeney Todd, Company, Assassins, Hair, Floyd Collins, Passing Strange, Jacques Brel, A New Brain, bare, and others. With all due gratitude to the theatre gods who watch over our weird, improbable little company, Next to Normal now takes its place on my list. I am such a lucky fucker.

Almost all the shows New Line produces are extraordinary works of theatre. If they weren't, we wouldn't produce them. And the few not in that category are intensely interesting but flawed works, that are still worth producing because they're just that interesting -- shows like Anyone Can Whistle, I Love My Wife, The Nervous Set, and Reefer Madness.

So what does a director do with a great work of art? Get out of its way. Or as doctors, put it, first do no harm. Don't add schtick, don't subvert, don't impose a "vision," just get out of the way.

Sometimes actors ask me at the first rehearsal, "What's your vision for the show?" I hate that question. There's only one right answer. To tell this story as clearly as possible. Anything beyond that is masturbation.

Looking back, I realize I've never had to direct a mediocre show in my life. Ever. I've never had to make up for the deficiencies in a so-so script or score. A lot of directors have to do that from time to time, but I never have. I'm very lucky. And it makes my job different from someone directing The Pajama Game or Annie Get Your Gun, both shows with a few decent elements but not nearly enough of them. I never have to shape or mold a show. My job is to reveal it. I remember reading that Michelangelo believed he just had to look inside the stone to find the figure he was seeking, then chip away everything else. He even created a series of sculptures, known as the Captives, that are in the process of being released by the artist from the stone that is imprisoning them.

With the expressionistic Next to Normal, the sculpture metaphor is really potent for me. We started with just Form -- script and score. And we've spent the last few weeks chipping away at this rock, revealing the emotion and subtext, excavating these rich, complex characters. And I've seen over the last week that we have now fully revealed this beautiful piece of art. And it's a stunner. Knowing what the set or the staging will look like ahead of time -- the show's physical incarnation -- doesn't tell you what the show's heart looks like. That you have to discover.

It must sound weird, maybe even pretentious, to people outside the theatre to hear me talk in such abstract, metaphorical terms about the work we do. But it's the only way to really get at the essence of what is essentially very abstract, instinctive work. We are storytellers, which means we are the makers of experiences. Subjective, individual, non-repeatable experiences. Because everyone's past colors each new experience, we artists have no control over the experience each audience member has in the theatre, watching our show. All we can do is tell the clearest, most resonant, most truthful story we can, and the audience provides the other half of it. Audiences don't want to be passive; they want to be engaged. It's so much more exciting and more fun.

All we have to do is ask it of them.

It's pretty heady stuff, being in the presence of such great art, living inside these lyrics and music, and these rich, soulful characters. I used to feel this crushing responsibility when we were working on pieces this good. Now I just feel lucky and grateful and I do my work. I know why I'm this lucky, why I get all the chances I get -- because I put the work first, because I am devoted heart and soul to making art, not making a lot of money, not getting famous, not making connections, just doing really good work. An artist always gets rewarded for that. Not always in money, but there are other kinds of reward -- like getting to resurrect and redeem High Fidelity and Cry-Baby, and getting to bring shows like Love Kills into the world.

And getting to work on bare, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and now Next to Normal, all in a row, without a single King and I or Nunsense anywhere to be found. That's the reward.

And it's plenty.

We got to sing through the entire Next to Normal score with the band for the first time today. It was thriling. That's the reward.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

It's Time for Me to Fly

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:04:00 +0000

Having worked on Next to Normal for several weeks, and now being able to watch the whole show at every rehearsal, it's almost overwhelming to fully appreciate the incredible complexity and craft in the writing. Every rehearsal reveals even more evidence for why this show won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Tom Kitt's music is extraordinary. Not just great pop music -- driving pop anthems, muscular guitar rock, gorgeous ballads -- but structurally very much an opera score, with arias, duets, quartets, sextets, recitative. The vocal arrangements are spectacular. But beyond that, this is a bipolar score, following the Sondheim Rule, that Content Dictates Form. Music primarily brings emotion to a story, and this story requires a special kind of emotion. So Kitt has expressed Diana's bipolar mood swings through his music. But not just Diana's. As much as they talk about Diana's mood, notice how erratic Dan is, from his weirdly manic "It's Gonna Be Good," to the conflicting emotions -- and musical styles -- of Dan's big solo, "I've Been." And notice the several musical fights in the show; the darker the emotions get, the more rock and roll the music becomes. As he did with High Fidelity, Kitt does as much storytelling here with his music as his collaborators do with words.

Kitt and Brian Yorkey have written musical dialogue scenes that both sound entirely naturalistic and also boast really economical, well-crafted lyrics with wonderful, original, surprising rhymes, including tons of interior rhymes, some almost hidden. Yorkey's lyrics are among the best I've ever had the pleasure of working on, and I've worked on almost all the modern masterpieces. Several times in each song, Yorkey reimagines a cliche, turns a phrase, or left-turns a sentence in an unexpected way that keeps us engaged and provides important foreshadowing or the development of textual themes. And sometimes a dark laugh too.

'Cause what doesn't kill me doesn't kill me,
So fill me
Up for just another day...

Or get a load of this amazing alliteration in the same song:

In the hustle and the hurry,
You want to wipe your worry
Clean away.
For just another day,
I will keep the plates all spinning
With a smile so white and winning
All the way.

It's really skillful, powerful writing. And beyond the remarkable craft here, these few lines tell us almost everything we need to know about this family, even if we don't consciously realize we've taken in all this information. Later on, we may think back to Dan's desire to "wipe your worry...away" and realize how ironically it foreshadowed the dark choices he makes.

Dramatically, the show is just as extraordinary. It uses interior monologues for all the main characters, a device most people today think of as a Rodgers and Hammerstein staple, but it really goes back to Shakespeare. Diana's "I Miss the Mountains" is a close cousin to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Both are deeply felt, desperately complicated, wrapped around metaphors, and focused on a choice to be made. Diana's song has companion pieces in Dan's soulful wail "I've Been," Gabe's defiant "I'm Alive," and Natalie's existential "Superboy and the Invisible Girl." In old-school musicals, they called these the "I Want" songs, though like I said, the device goes back a lot further than Rodgers and Hammerstein or Cole Porter..

But Kitt and Yorkey are at their dramatic best in the fight scenes -- real, visceral, knock-down-drag-out fights. The double number, "You Don't Know" and "I Am the One" is just one example among many of a powerful book scene quite artfully set to music and rhymed lyrics.

The show is also very cinematic. (I wonder how much that may be the influence of the original director Michael Greif.) Almost every scene dissolves into the next, sometimes even interrupting each other. Throughout the show there are moments when an actor in one scene simply turns around and now he's in another scene, in another time and place. There are often two scenes going on onstage at once, juxtaposing the action in really interesting, revealing ways. As just one example of many, Natalie fucks up her piano recital on one side of the stage, while at the same time, Diana's telling her doctor about not being able to hold Natalie as a baby. The two scenes slam up against each other in a powerful, emotional way, but only implying the connection that we in the audience then complete, delivering more character and relationship information than a much longer dialogue scene could. And this happens throughout the show, often in a cinematic split-screen effect.

This is an evolution of the form. All these things are also true of bare, Passing Strange, American Idiot, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. These new rock shows demand a very minimalist physical approach -- there's no time or place for traditional set changes -- and a less naturalistic, more fluid, more expressionistic, more cinematic kind of staging. Michael Bennett taught us, in Dreamgirls, how to use film devices on stage, close-ups, pans, focus pulls, dissolves, split-screens; and today's audience accept those devices on stage as easily as they accept them on the screen. No one today goes to a musical expecting the old Rodgers and Hammerstein faux naturalism.

Next to Normal lives in a metaphorical world as much as in the physical world. Many of the devices Yorkey and Kitt use are designed to keep the audience off kilter, to disorient them, to hold them in suspense, to not allow them time to think about and judge the things they're witnessing, to force them to experience these events rather than thinking about them. The audience is on this roller coaster ride with Diana, strapped in right beside her.

And that ties into the central point of the story, that a person's illness affects not just them, but everyone in their orbit. And because of the way Kitt and Yorkey have told this story, we the audience are among those in Diana's orbit. We have to live in her illness, her delusions, her twisted world, with her for two hours. When she sees the doctor as a metal rocker, we see that too. When she finds herself inside a delusion, we're there with her. That both binds the audience to Diana and gives them a more profound empathy than lesser writers could have allowed.

It's always interesting for me to work on a show when I love the original production, which was the case with Next to Normal. It used to worry me, not wanting to copy but wanting to be faithful. But over the last several years, I've come to think about my work very differently. I used to decide on the final product, then work toward it. Now, I figure out the road we need to follow, and then we all take the journey together, my job being to keep us all on the road and moving forward. After all these years, I'm really good at figuring out the right road to take; though sometimes I even doubt myself during the process. But it always turns out to be the right road in the end.

Because of all this, sometimes I know what the end product will be and sometimes the end product surprises me. This time, it's surprising me. I can see now that our production will be more surrealistic, more expressionistic, more Brechtian, more fluid, more cinematic, more of a perpetual motion machine, and a bit more presentational than the Broadway production.

This show reminds me a lot of Lippa's Wild Party. Minus the sexual debauchery. It's highly stylistic, very original storytelling. Following the Sondheim Commandment, that Content Dictates Form, Kitt and Yorkey have written Next to Normal in a storytelling style that mirrors Diana's world. The music itself, even without the lyrics, could not be set to any other story. Kitt uses the 7/8 time signature (essentially dropping half a beat out of each measure of music) frequently throughout the score. He sometimes plays two key signatures against each other. He almost always refuses to give numbers clear "buttons" at the end, which holds back the audience from the release of applause, and holds back the show's ever increasing tension. In many ways Kitt's music works like a horror film score, and like Sweeney Todd, which was consciously built on the horror movie music of Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Vertigo).

It's been so wonderful and so soul-nourishing to live inside this score for a few months. It's so cool to sit in the audience and watch our run-throughs, amazed time after time at some new subtle reference I catch that advances character or foreshadows things the audience never even imagines that are coming. We New Liners have been so lucky for the past twenty-two years to work on some genuine masterpieces of our art form. None of us get paid all that well, but we get to do something almost nobody else does. We get to make amazing, beautiful, meaningful art and we get to share it with an enthusiastic, intelligent, adventurous audience.

I don't care how much they pay me -- where could I ever find a better job than this?

We open next week and the show is in such great shape, with really just tiny little things to fix now. I am so grateful that we found these six actors. I can't wait to share this.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You Can't Tame Me

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 03:13:00 +0000

The 1937 agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock is one of my all-time favorite shows. We were very lucky to get to produce it back in 2001. One of the things I love about it is the characters' clever label-names -- Reverend Salvation, Dr. Specialist, Editor Daily, Larry Foreman, and the rich capitalist Mr. Mister, along with his family Mrs. Mister, Junior Mister, and Sister Mister.

I think what I love about it is its honesty. It's a fable and its characters are types, so instead of trying to disguise that fact, Marc Blitzstein openly admits it in the way he names them. I did the same thing with a few characters in my 2006 musical Johnny Appleweed, naming the White House characters President John J. Birch (invoking both Dubya and the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society) and his chief of staff Carla Roe (invoking both Karl Rove and Roe v. Wade). The main character was a closeted gay man named Mark Dodger. And then there was Johnny Appleweed himself. Use your imagination.

There are several plays and musicals that do this, but not many. And of those that do, some make it very subtle and others outright announce it. There's the Christ figure Jason and his companion Peter in bare, but there's also Orphan, Angel, and Edgar Allen Rich in Celebration. I think my favorite is Gitlow in Purlie.

Next to Normal does it more subtly.

Now before I proceed, I don't know that the writers did any of this on purpose. But I believe that writers often use very sophisticated storytelling devices even without being conscious of their use, just because it feels right, because it feels like good storytelling to them. That said, in this case, I think it's intentional.

In Next to Normal, the bipolar woman at the center of the story is Diana Goodman. Right away, her last name sounds like a label-name to me, as if to suggest that these are decent, normal people -- and by extension, that mental illness plays no favorites. Bad things happen to good people. Her first name references the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon and birthing, who was also associated with wild animals and the woods (often the dark place of self-discovery in storytelling). Diana was widely known as "the virgin goddess of childbirth and women." But her first name takes on more serious resonance once we start hearing Dan refer to her as "Di," which he does throughout the script. It's pretty potent for this damaged woman on the edgy of sanity to be called a name that sounds like die. And that nickname takes on even deeper resonance once we get to "There's a World."

And then there's Gabe, named for one of the most famous angels in Christian culture, the archangel who serves as a messenger to humans from heaven, who announced the birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary. With that in mind, Gabe's first lyric takes on even more meaning:

For just another day,
For another stolen hour,
When the world will feel my power
And obey.
It's just another day,
Feeling like I'll live forever...

Gabriel appears to various people throughout the Bible, and in the Old Testament, he appears to the prophet Daniel, delivering explanations of Daniel's visions; though, according to Wikipedia, "Daniel does not explicitly identify Gabriel as an angel: he is a visionary figure whom Daniel calls 'the man Gabriel'." Daniel is a Hebrew name, literally meaning "God is my judge."

Is that a hint about Dan's feelings of guilt? And does that reshape our response to that last conversation between Dan and Gabe before the finale? And really, Goodman is Dan's name -- Diana just married into it -- so maybe this label name is more about him. She refers to him in the song "Why Stay?" as "steadfast and stolid and stoic and solid." And not in a good way. Maybe the point here is that being a good man isn't enough in this situation. Maybe nothing's enough.

Earlier in Act II, Gabe says, "Until you name me, you can't tame me," and it's not until then that we realize no one has mentioned Gabe's name yet. The moment when someone finally does is all the more potent because of that. All this seems to argue that these carefully chosen names are supposed to have meaning within the story.

But wait, there's more... Where does the name Natalie come from? It's the English form of Natalia, which is derived from the Italian natale, meaning birthday. It specifically refers to the birth of Christ -- the Italian phrase for Merry Christmas! is buon natale! (literally "good birthday!").

Then there are the two doctors. The less empathetic, more drug-enthusiastic Dr. Fine has only one goal -- stability. He wants Diana to just be fine, nothing more. Dr. Madden seems to care about Diana more, but his treatment arguably maddens Diana even further.

Henry is a name shared by British, French, and German kings, and one Catholic saint. It comes from a Germanic name which combines the words for home and ruler or power. I'm not sure why, but this one seems less intentional and/or meaningful to me. Henry as "master of the house"? Or maybe it's more about Henry representing home to Natalie, a safe place. In terms of Natalie's Hero Myth story, she finds her magic amulet in Henry's love. She finds real human connection after a lifetime of being denied it. Maybe the reference to all those kings means nothing more than that Henry will be a strong man -- different from Dan.

And maybe all of this is accidental.

But that seems hard to believe, when the names' meanings fit so perfectly to their characters. Then again, maybe it was just a gut feeling that led the writers to each name. Whatever the impetus, it's cool. (If you haven't seen the show yet, some of this may seem a bit puzzling. The show's story has a couple really big plot surprises, and I don't want to ruin those for anyone who hasn't seen it, so I'm consciously leaving out some pieces of information. Sorry about that.)

Since Next to Normal won a Pulitzer Prize, I guess I don't have to argue (as I often do) for the show's bona fides. But thinking about stuff like this is my second favorite pastime. My first favorite is actually putting stuff like this onstage and sharing it with an audience. Lucky me, I get to do both most of the time...

Tickets are already selling even better than usual, so it looks like we'll have packed houses for this one. This astonishingly hard-working and artful cast of actors deserves no less. You'll be amazed at the rich, textured, layered characters they're creating. We're really going to do this beautiful piece of theatre proud.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Wandering Through the Wilderness

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:37:00 +0000

We are emotional adventurers.

The thing that makes a good story a good musical is emotion. And the thing that makes a production of a musical really wonderful and powerful is the honesty and authenticity of its emotions. That's one of New Line's top priorities -- second only perhaps to clear storytelling -- but unfortunately, it's not a universal priority. There are way too many shallow, phony productions of musicals, which sometimes give audiences the mistaken impression that the shows themselves are empty, when it's really just lazy directors and actors who are more emotional tourists than adventurers.

As I've argued before, people come to see a musical specifically because it's a more emotional kind of storytelling, so if a production delivers phony emotions, they're committing fraud as surely as someone selling glass diamonds.

When young writers ask me how they can know if a story is worth adapting for the musical stage, I tell them it's about whether or not the story is primarily an emotional one. Because its language is music, emotion is the lingua franca of musical theatre. If a story is primarily about action, songs might well get in the way -- which is why there are very few successful musical farces or musical mysteries, because those forms are about intricate plotting, not emotion.

A lot of older musicals follow a similar arc -- we watch as the Hero tries to assimilate into a community, and a "happy ending" is one in which the Hero succeeds in that assimilation, like in The Music Man, Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma!, or Brigadoon. In more serious musicals, the Hero often is unable to assimilate, so he has to be removed, sometimes by death, like in Sweeney Todd or Carousel. In South Pacific there are two Heroes (Cable and Nellie), so we get both outcomes. You might argue the same thing about The King and I and Man of La Mancha.

But in order to have a community to assimilate into, a musical needs a big chorus. And starting in the mid-1960s, choruses starting shrinking on Broadway, mostly for economic reasons. By the 70s, the leads became the chorus, as in Company and A Chorus Line. And if you don't really have a "community" onstage, that assimilation story loses its power. (Bat Boy sort of mocked that problem by creating a community of a couple dozen characters, but all played by five actors.)

For that reason -- and also because of the philosophical underpinnings of the 1960s counter-culture -- musicals began to turn to a different kind of story, the classic Hero Myth, in which our Hero starts out on a journey (sometimes concrete, sometimes psychological), meets a "wise wizard," finds his "magic amulet" (ruby slippers, light saber), picks up companions, navigates various obstacles (sometimes including a trip into "the underworld"), does battle with an "evil wizard," and finally gains new wisdom, often returning home to share it with his community. It's an incredibly powerful form because the Hero Myth is just a stand-in for a human life. We each have our own journey, wise and evil wizards, companions, and magic amulets, so we connect to that story form in a really powerful, personal way.

And the Hero Myth has become progressively more relevant in American culture because more people are living alone today than at any other time in human history -- mostly just because we can, thanks to various technological and economic developments. I'm in the middle of a great book about this trend, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

Just think about how many contemporary musicals follow the Hero Myth model -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, American Idiot (times three!), Shrek, Billy Elliot, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, Spring Awakening, Taboo, and lots of others. This trend started in the 70s, with Company, Pippin, Follies, Jesus Christ Superstar, then later Nine and Sunday in the Park with George, among others. But it really exploded in the 1990s, when musical theatre started to decouple itself artistically from New York commercial theatre on and off Broadway.

Because these new American musicals were being written with less thought to commercial potential, they were much more personal works, which generally steered them toward the form of the Hero Myth. In Next to Normal, Diana's arc follows a classic Hero Myth structure, even as far as a journey to the "underworld," in the form of the ECT and her memory loss. As Bruno Bettelheim writes in The Uses of Enchantment (the book that inspired Into the Woods), "Since ancient times the near-impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered the wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity." Yorkey and Kitt have used this ancient device but removed its metaphoric cloak. Here, Diana literally journeys into her own unconscious.

Even more relevant to Next to Normal, Bettelheim also writes, "From the earliest versions, fairy tales [and Hero Myths] stress that both desires reside in each of us, and that we cannot survive deprived of either: the wish to stay tied to the past, and the urge to reach out to a new future. Through the unfolding of events, the story most often teaches that entirely cutting oneself off from one's past leads to disaster, but that to exist only beholden to the past is stunting; while it is safe, it provides no life of one's own. Only the thorough integration of these contrary tendencies permits a successful existence."

But Next to Normal is actually a double Hero Myth. Diana follows her Hero Myth and Natalie follows a secondary Hero Myth; and key to Natalie's character, the two journeys are very similar. Natalie's awareness of that is what creates her fear that she will live a life as fucked up and damaged as Diana's, that her relationship with Henry will be as scarred and empty as her parents'.

Diana is also aware of these parallels, and of Natalie's fear of these parallels. At the beginning of "I Miss the Mountains," Diana sings:

There was a time when I flew higher,
Was a time the wild girl running free
Would be me.
Now I see her feel the fire,
Now I know she needs me there
To share.
I'm nowhere.
All these blank and tranquil years,
Seems they've dried up all my tears.
And while she runs free and fast,
Seems my wild days are past.

That's quite a jam-packed lyric. It's about missing her manic past, worrying that Natalie will suffer the same fate, her shame for failing as a mother, her inability to feel anything because of her meds, and even a tinge of jealousy of Natalie's youth and freedom. Despite the abundance of rhyme here, the language and sentence structure are completely natural, and the self-awareness Diana expresses moves her character forward and propels her to action. But beneath that, there's such extraordinary lyric-writing craft here. There are wonderful, almost hidden interior rhymes, like blank and the first part of tranquil, a trick Yorkey uses that throughout the score. And there's also a ton of alliteration -- the w's in the first three lines and the last two lines, the f's in the fourth and tenth lines, and the n sounds in lines 4-7, particularly in the fifth line.

This intro works as important self-awareness for Diana, but it also makes sure the audience recognizes these two parallel journeys. Just as Oklahoma! sets up a secondary love triangle to mirror the primary love triangle, here bookwriter and lyricist Brian Yorkey and composer Tom Kitt do the same thing with the Hero Myth. But Next to Normal is an incredibly complex piece of writing, so I'm still struggling with identifying all the various Hero Myth elements.

For instance, could Gabe be both magic amulet and evil wizard... and companion...? Could Dr. Madden be both wise wizard and evil wizard?

The one advantage Natalie has in her Hero Myth is self-awareness. While Diana is desperately trying to understand herself and her journey, Natalie is very clear-eyed, though maybe a touch too pessimistic. To Natalie, each disaster for Diana is a future disaster for Natalie. While the end of Diana's story is totally ambiguous -- especially as we see at the end that her journey has been mirrored by a hidden journey Dan has also taken -- the end of Natalie's story is more hopeful. It's still ambiguous, because let's face it, life is ambiguous, but less so...

The one significant difference between Diana's and Natalie's stories is in their partners. In Hero Myth terms, Dan fails as Diana's faithful companion, while Henry succeeds as Natalie's. It seems that Dan may not have known about Diana's problems when he married her, and to some extent he was "forced" into the marriage, if only by his own sense of duty and decency and whatnot. After all, Dan sees himself as the martyred Good Guy (which may be his great tragic flaw). On the other hand, Henry does seem to know exactly how fucked up Natalie is, and he chooses to be with her, without any external pressures, with his eyes fully open. Natalie and Henry have a much more honest relationship than Diana and Dan do, and so the younger couple will probably have a healthier relationship.

It's not important that an audience consciously recognize all this stuff. The Hero Myth works because we instinctively recognize the elements of the story, even if only subconsciously, as elements of our own lives. But it helps the actors and me to recognize these elements so we can tell this story as clearly as possible. Some directors and actors believe all you have to do is say/sing the words and the rest will take care of itself. I think that's really wrong, and it leads to a lot of very shallow, unsatisfying theatre. The more we understand the storytelling, the better we'll tell the story. Just by "underlining" a word, just by adding a pause to let something sink in for a second, we can make the important stuff clearer and help the audience get the most out of the story.

But we have to know what the important stuff is.

I've seen so many productions of Spelling Bee that are nothing more than sketch comedy, because the director and actors have no idea they're working on six Hero Myths. So they speed by all the important moments, they ignore all the character arcs, and they look for any way to get a laugh. They don't try for real honesty or authenticity, because it doesn't even occur to them that what they're doing is great art, that it feeds the audience's souls, that it connects us all on a fundamentally human level, that it explores the complexity of our human emotions.

As Ben Kingsley once said in an interview, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you."

We're very lucky at New Line because we've always worked in small spaces. Though our current space is a little larger, at 210 seats, it's very intimate because there are only seven rows. And that gives us the luxury of more subtle acting, not as minimalist as film acting, but (depending on the show) still pretty subtle. As I often tell our actors, you don't have to "show" the audience how your character feels; you just have to feel it. We humans are amazingly skilled at reading human faces. It's what we do all day. So even the tiniest, most subtle changes in a face are easy to read, because we all get so much practice at it.

And that will change Next to Normal. After all, despite its three-story set on Broadway, this is a chamber musical, a small, personal, intimate story of five people, and it belongs in a chamber setting. I think this powerful story is going to be even more powerful when you're sitting only eight or ten feet away from Kimi Short singing "I Miss the Mountains."

We are emotional adventurers. In a few weeks, you can join us on our adventure.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott