The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre

Sigh and Shudder with Pleasure

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:11:00 +0000

I used to feel so out of control at this point in our process of putting a show together. There are so many moving parts to a musical, so many artists working on it, and only really working together at the very end, i.e., this coming week. But I realized a while back that I've never really been in control of our shows. They aren't mine to control. They belong to all of us who work on them. I'm just the leader of the expedition. I set us on our journey and make sure we stay together and no one gets lost. But I'm not really in control of it.

Believe me.

A director who thinks he's in control of his show will make a less interesting show.

It was when I realized all this, when I understood the massive contribution a good actor will make if you let them create (and the same is true with designers and musicians), when I began to see us all as equal collaborators, each with a job to do, that I started having the most fun. Call it the Tao of Musical Theatre. Wikipedia says, "Tao is not a 'name' for a 'thing' but the underlying natural order of the universe whose ultimate essence is difficult to circumscribe." Sure sounds a lot like making art.

In the early days of New Line (how crazy is it that New Line has "early days"?), a show (particularly the kind of show we do, like Songs for a New World, Floyd Collins, Passion, Assassins, Jacques Brel) felt like a bipolar tiger with a toothache that I was trying to ride. But these days, a show feels more like just an awesome adventure. I think part of that is because I started reading as much as I could about the experimental theatre movement of 1960s New York -- there's so much to learn there! One book in particular, Playing Underground, really opened my eyes to both their methods and philosophy. And so New Line has evolved over time into a hybrid of a regular, small regional theatre and a 1960s New York theatre collective.

It's an awesome place to be.

And part of that aesthetic comes from rock and roll, the American language of rebellion. Most of the shows we produce now are rock musicals. This whole season has been. Mostly because that's where our art form is heading. But you don't work on a rock musical the same way you work on a Sondheim musical. Sondheim is a genius and I love all his shows (and we've produced most of them), but his music is about control. Rock and roll is about wildness and freedom. And unlike non-rock shows, rock musicals are always part rock concert, sometimes more obviously (Passing Strange), other times less so (Next to Normal).

I've been thinking a lot about rock musicals lately and the changes our art form is going through -- all good ones -- and how that affects New Line. Allow me a tangent...

I finally got to watch the season finale of Smash. (Fun side note: Will Chase, who plays Michael Swift on Smash, was the original Rob Gordon in High Fidelity.) I have mixed feelings about Smash. The songs are great, the choreography is great, the cast is great... the plotting and dialogue are serviceable...

But I found myself getting really emotional during the finale -- and that always surprises me when that happens. (Like every year at the end of the Tonys, yes I'm that gay.) But this time I wasn't quite sure why it hit me so hard. The show's plotting was so clumsy. We could see so many plot developments coming a mile away. And we knew from the first episode that Karen would end up being the overnight-star because Katharine McPhee is the name that brought all the American Idol and Glee fans over in the beginning. After all, Megan Hilty is "only" a Broadway star (or at least on her way).

But I knew, watching Debra Messing tell us after the finale that Smash will be back in the fall, as Bombshell goes to Broadway, I knew how much I love that there's a network TV show about making musicals. I love that in the last episode, when Eileen wants Derek to switch Marilyns, he refuses, saying "I am an artist. I am a storyteller." And he isn't being ironic. These characters -- at least some of them -- take quite seriously the act of creating a piece of musical theatre.

It wasn't always like this. Nobody used to take musicals seriously.

I'm not a big fan of Wicked, but I owe that show something. And Hairspray and High School Musical and Legally Blonde, and now Bring It On. For the first time in my lifetime, musicals are becoming mainstream again. Back in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, show tunes were our popular songs. That only changed when rock and roll became America's popular music and the people writing Broadway shows refused to move forward with the rest of the culture. So theatre music and pop music split. Some people (including me, I must confess) thought it was because theatre music was getting more and more sophisticated -- the work of Sondheim, et al. -- and pop music was, by definition, simple, repetitive, primal (which is not to say bad). But the result of this fissure in American music was that I spent much of my life as a musical theatre freak, only occasionally listening to the music all my friends listened to. I was a pop cultural misfit.

But now rock and roll is finally becoming the default language of the musical theatre, and theatre music and pop music are coming together again. And musicals are becoming mainstream again. And young people are in love with musicals again, because the art form now seems relevant to them at long last!

And New Line happens to be exactly in the right place at the right time. While Stages and The Muny continue producing Rodgers and Hammerstein, we produce bare, Passing Strange, Love Kills, Cry-Baby, and coming in the fall, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

How does all this relate to where this post started? It's the rock and roll -- as distinct from Sondheim -- that has given me freedom from perfection and opened me up to the Tao of Musical Theatre. Perfect rock and roll is bad rock and roll. And perfect rock musicals, polished to within an inch of their lives, mass-marketed and commodified, are bad rock musicals. Our goal is truth and authenticity, neither of which is found in perfection because real life is never perfect.

I've always been incredibly proud of the work we've done at New Line over the past twenty-one years, but I am prouder now than I've ever been. I think we often hit home runs these days. And the secret is you don't hit a home run by calculation; you have to feel it. We don't just entertain people; we make them feel something. New Line shows are everything I think our art form has to be to survive and evolve -- adventurous, fearless, ballsy, self-aware, truthful. In a week we open High Fidelity, one of the greatest and purest of the rock musicals. I can't wait to share it with everybody -- this cast is so outstanding and the show is already in amazing shape!

High Fidelity is everything that New Line is about today, all in one show. Maybe that's why I love it so deeply and why I wanted to return to it. Championship Vinyl and New Line Theatre are kindred spirits. When Rob sings about the quirky little store he calls home, I really understand what he's talking about...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nothing Can Touch This

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:12:00 +0000

This is one of my favorite moments in our creative process.

Everything up to now has been hard work. First off, I hate teaching music, but somebody's gotta do it, right? And we really don't have the budget to hire someone else to do it just because I don't want to. And then once that's done, blocking the show is the hardest part of my job as director, the most intensely creative. With some shows, a lot of the blocking is really obvious, but other shows take decoding and deconstructing to figure out how they should look and move. It's by far the hardest mental work in the process. And during that time, it's very hard for me to focus on anything else, even outside of rehearsal. It's like the blocking just takes over my brain, and it exhausts me mentally and emotionally.

It's a little better than it used to be because I figure the show out over a long period of time now (and let's be honest, I figured out High Fidelity in 2008). This is my process... I make a copy of the script as soon as we decide we're definitely doing it, I read it over a few times, and then I let it just percolate in the back of my brain. And every so often, an idea or a solution pops into my brain, and I grab the script and write it down. So I end up solving the many of the big problems over the course of six to eight months. I live with the show in my head for so long that the style and tone and so forth often become very obvious, without a whole lot of conscious effort on my part. Just instinct, training, and percolating. Not always, but often.

We've now run both acts of High Fidelity separately three times. Last night, we had a dance review on the set for the first time, and tonight, we start running the whole show at every rehearsal. Unlike a lot of companies our size, we have the great luxury of two and a half weeks in the theater before we open and also nine full run-throughs, including three tech run-throughs.

As of this week, my hardest work is over. There will be problems to solve and I'll have to come up with new ideas to replace the ideas that don't work like I thought they would. But now the actors do their most important work, taking the pencil sketch I gave them and making it come to life.

Some directors spend tons of time on each moment in the show as they block. They work on two- or three-page sections and shape it and sharpen it till it's exactly what they want. Then they move on to the next moment. I work in the opposite way, sort of like the way that Jim Lapine works. We move pretty fast at first. We block 12-15 pages in each three and a half hour blocking rehearsal. I give the actors all the basics, entrances, exits, important character or plot info, the essential idea of what's going on, etc. But we don't polish it at all. We'll work through several pages, then we run through that section (usually only once, but sometimes twice), and then we move on. We won't return to that section until we're running the whole act. For me, blocking is the equivalent of the artist who draws the pencil sketches for comic books. He's providing all the essential information, but the inker and the colorist bring it to life, adding depth, detail, shadow, weight, intensity.

Many directors think the actors are their tools to bring a script to life. I think the actors are my collaborators and only together are we going to create something really wonderful. They don't work for me; they work with me. Long ago, I saw an interview with Hal Prince in which he said that he thinks being a director is being an editor. His job, he said, was to set everyone on the right road, make sure they all stay on that road, and then edit what they've created when they all arrive. I love that metaphor.

For the next two and a half weeks, I get to watch these fifteen amazing actors ink and color these fascinating, complicated characters, and like any good editor, I get to work with them to find the greatest insight and emotion and, above all, clarity. Sondheim once said he worries less about whether people like his work, as long as it's clear, as long as the audience understands what he's trying to say. If they get it, but don't like it, he can't control that. But if they don't get it, that's his fault.

I always remember that...

My job now with High Fidelity is problem solver, so my focus is on finding what's out of sync or unclear so we can fix it. But I also try very hard to remember to tell the actors when they're doing something wonderful. This is the most vulnerable part of the process for them, as they put themselves and their ideas out in front of us all (some of which will fail), and whether we mean to or not, we judge them. It's the nature of the beast.

Hopefully I can convince them that when I reject an idea, it's not because the idea is bad, but only because the idea isn't part of the fabric of the universe we're creating. The play is the thing, after all.

So now I get to enjoy the easiest and most fun part of the process for me. And the work we've already done is so cool, so much beyond our last production of High Fidelity, that I know the end product is going to be truly a thing of wonder. This cast and this show are just that good. It's so wonderful to work with artists this talented and this hard-working. I'm truly a lucky fucker...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Could Make the Chicks Dance

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:03:00 +0000

I often rave about our choreographer Robin Berger's work – and so do the critics – but I rarely get the chance to talk about why she's so great and why her work fits New Line so perfectly.

Robin has been choreographing for us since The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 2003. She's also choreographed New Line's productions of Reefer Madness, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, Urinetown, High Fidelity, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Spelling Bee, The Wild Party, Evita, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cry-Baby.

What makes her work special, and distinct from most of the theatre choreographers in the area, is that it always comes from character and story first. Always. Robin never – and I mean never – just puts steps together. Like Bob Fosse did, she approaches choreography as a storyteller more than as a dancer. Every move, every turn of the head is about something. She knows when the dance should look less polished and more spontaneous. She knows when everyone on stage should be in perfect sync but also when everyone on stage should be moving in their own individual way. She can get as vulgar as I can (and we both love doing that) and every bit as funny. But she can also create beautiful, wonderful moments that can take an audience's breath away. I'll never forget "Jackie's Last Dance" in The Wild Party. Really stunning. She can be both incredibly subtle and monstrously outrageous – the memory of the Reefer Madness dance number with Jesus and the nuns will forever make me giggle. Likewise the Indian orgy in High Fidelity. And significantly, she knows how to make men look masculine doing choreography, something many choreographers just don't know how to do.

Unlike too many other choreographers, Robin understands when dance is primary, when it's secondary to some other element, and when it's just background or atmosphere. In High Fidelity, most of the choreography Robin has done for us is essentially rock and roll back-up moves; in several cases, the people dancing are not the focus of the song. And Robin has no ego about that – she understands exactly how and why the dance fits. She serves the story.

She understands that it should always look like these characters are dancing, not like dancers are doing a show-off piece to convince you what a genius the choreographer is. Part of what delighted me about Robin's six numbers in The Wild Party was how brilliantly she can choreograph big, wild, thrilling numbers with very few trained dancers. With only occasional exceptions, when we're casting a show – even one with a lot of dance – we don't look for dancers. Hopefully, we end up with two or three, but we mostly want actors who move well, who can learn a combination, etc. We almost never want to create Leads and Chorus; we want to create a true ensemble. If there are fifteen people onstage, none of them is unimportant. And people like Madelaine True and the D'Armano Brothers (in The Wild Party) would not be trained dancers, so if they look that way on stage, that diminishes the reality we're trying to create to tell this story. Sometimes, Robin will literally tell the actors that she doesn't want precision, that a dance should look loose, spontaneous, even messy. I remember with Grease, it was really important to her that the Burger Palace Boys did not look like dancers when they did "Greased Lightning." It was exactly the right choice.

There are two revivals on Broadway right now that don't understand that, two shows in fact that Robin choreographed for New Line. These new Broadway productions of both Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita are just chock full of big, impressive, high energy dance numbers that look like they came out of a TV variety show, rather than being the language of this particular story. The dances don't advance the storytelling or reveal character; they just stop the show to impress us. Yuck! If I wanted that, I could go see Riverdance.

Which I would never do.

What Robin knows that too many choreographers working in New York don't know is that it's not about the choreographer. It's about the storytelling. Robin never gets in the way of the storytelling. And I mean never.

In short, she's just a really fucking good choreographer. And while all of the conceptual things above are important, it's also true that her dance numbers always look great. As good as she is at storytelling, she's also a hell of a entertainer. Here's what the critics think...

On Cry-Baby – Mark Bretz of the Ladue News said, “Cry-Baby rocks the room with an effervescent energy, exploding across the stage through an array of dazzling moves choreographed by Robin Michelle Berger.” Judith Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Berger's jailhouse romp, which sends the men rushing helter-skelter through the small theater, proves you don't need a big house to create a big effect.” Bob Wilcox at KDHX said, “Robin Michelle Berger's choreography peaks magnificently with the riotous ‘A Little Upset’ number for the men.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld wrote, “It’s wonderfully directed, smartly choreographed, and marvelously acted.”

On Two Gentlemen of Verona – Steve Callahan at KDHX said, “And the dancing! It's the best I've seen in a long while at New Line. Choreographer Robin Michelle Berger does wonders.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld, wrote, “Robin Michelle Berger's choreography enlivens the proceedings while bringing in the little bit of the Age of Aquarius that it demands.” Mark Bretz at the Ladue News wrote, “Robin Michelle Berger contributes the upbeat choreography, which adds to the show’s allure.”

On Evita – Mark Bretz at the Ladue News wrote, “Aided by the delicious support of choreographer Robin Michelle Berger, who accentuates the array of musical motifs with an eclectic mix of terpsichorean moves, the result is an engaging and absorbing account of not only one man’s interpretation of a time and place but a riveting theatrical experience.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld wrote, “Robin Michelle Berger's playful choreography livens things up considerably.” Joe Pollack of St. Louis Eats and Drinks, said, “Robin Michelle Berger's choreography is splendid.”

On High Fidelity (in 2008) – Judith Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Robin Michelle Berger, the canny choreographer, invests [the ex-girlfriends] with more spirit than Rob could have handled.” Richard Green of TalkinBroadway wrote, “Choreographer Robin Michelle Berger keeps the dancing simple and believable, though a girls' chorus busts a move every now and then with free-spirited ferocity.” And Mark Bretz at the Ladue News referred to the “winning choreography by Robin Michelle Berger…”

On Urinetown – Calvin Wilson at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said, “The cast is first-rate, and Robin Michelle Berger’s choreography is gloriously in step with the story.” Kirsten Wylder at KDHX said, “The choreography by Robin Michelle Berger is side-splitting.”

You get the idea...

It's hard to find a choreographer who is as good, as smart, and as committed as our actors, musicians, and designers; and even harder to find one who is in sync with my approach to musical theatre storytelling. I cannot stomach dance numbers in shows that are nothing but dance steps strung together, with no structure, no point of view, no arc, no storytelling. And I think Robin hates that as much as I do. We're amazingly in tune with each other. Only two other choreographers ever delivered what I need, John Ricroft (who choreographed several early New Line shows) and Michelle Collier (who helped me stage the very first New Line show). But as good as they both are, Robin is the best I've ever worked with. I've never seen anyone else's work locally that compares. And I've seen a few shows on Broadway that could have learned something from her...

I'm very lucky. I love my job -- and a big part of that is how much I love my collaborators.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

louder, faster, funnier, deadlier, more, more, choices upon choices...

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:09:00 +0000

People often ask me why we repeat shows. We've done it several times in our twenty-one seasons -- Assassins (1994, 1998, 2008); Hair (2000, 2001, 2008); Bat Boy (2003, 2006); and now High Fidelity (2008, 2012). When I get that question, I always respond, "Would you ask the Symphony why they repeat Beethoven's Ninth? Would you ask a classical theatre company why they repeat A Midsummer Night's Dream?"

We repeat shows because we think there's more to discover there. And High Fidelity is proving my point for me yet again.

Initially my plan was to recreate my staging from 2008 with the knowledge that some things would probably change, since we have two-thirds of a new cast this time. But as I blocked the show (stoned) on my living room couch, and also in rehearsal (not stoned), we strayed much further from our original production than I expected. Not only has a lot of the staging changed now (I bet less than a quarter of my 2008 staging remains), but we're also finding so much new depth and nuance in these characters and in this rich dialogue and lyrics.

Monday night, we were staging the first part of Act II and we got to this amazing monologue Rob has listing the Top Five things he loves about Laura (a list that eventually swells to ten). Jeff was so great with that monologue last time we did the show; he totally had the audience eating out of his hands every night. But as we worked on it this time, I suggested a couple things to think about, and Jeff found a whole new level of depth and truthfulness in these words. One thing I suggested was that Rob has not made this list before, that as he moves through the list, he discovers each one of these things as he says them, that they occur to him in real time, rather than reporting back to the audience on something he had already worked through. I thought that was a pretty minor note to give Jeff, but it must have opened a door for him, because instantly the monologue came to life in a way it hadn't before. It became more emotional, funnier, sadder.

It functioned as character development last time, but Jeff's new reading also now allows it to work as plot development. Now, Rob realizes as he talks to us how much he has lost, how deeply he regrets everything, and that propels him forward in the plot. We actually get to see him learn in real time now.

And yet I have to be careful. There are a lot of ways a director can fuck up an actor's performance, and the easiest way is to overwhelm them with fine tuning when they're just trying to get comfortable with the dialogue and staging. Expect too much too early, and the actor will feel either bullied or incompetent. Neither is good. Expect profound depth at this relatively early point, and the actor may just shut down. The kind of emotional and character depth we're dealing with in High Fidelity takes some time to find and figure out, even for those of us who've done the show before...

My job is to make sure we're all on the right road, and heading for the same destination, but then I have to let the actors work. I have to get out of the way as much as I can and let them create their brilliant performances. I've learned over the years how to do what I think of as "minimalist" directing, specifically for this point in the process. When an actor is having a hard time turning the emotional or comic (or both) dial up to eleven, I try to find really evocative words or phrases that will sound like fun to a good actor, that will open a door for them, like joy, adventure, rowdy, shattered...

In a couple weeks, I'll start tweaking and nitpicking, but for now, we just run the show and the actors get to play and experiment. They must have the freedom to fail without consequences. Otherwise, no one will take any risks. And risk-taking is where all the coolest shit comes from...

It's important for all of us who've already done the show to remember that we're creating a new show now. Some of the staging may be the same (although a lot less than I expected), but since two-thirds of the cast is new, that makes almost every scene and every song new in some way. Aaron is finding Ian now and he's so different from our Ian in 2008, that it automatically changes every scene he's in. The same is true of Dowdy playing Dick. Plus we're all four years older and wiser -- that may not sound like much, but you'd be surprised how differently I see this story this time around. It's kinda cool...

This is such fun work we're doing! Partly because the show is AWESOME and the songs are AMAZING. But also partly because we can already see how much our head start (from doing the show before) is paying off. Several of us already did all the heavy lifting four years ago; now we can sort of skip ahead to the more subtle, artistic work that usually isn't happening till later. Jeff and Kimi (as Rob and Laura) are finding very different, very powerful moments in their scenes together. Together Jeff and I are really discovering that "rock bottom" that Rob has to hit before his redemption. His fight with Liz late in Act II is really a fight now -- as in yelling at each other -- and it takes Rob to a much darker rock bottom. More so than we did last time, we are absolutely shattering Rob, and I think that makes him much realer, his story much more emotional, and his redemption that much richer.

All the blocking is done. There's just one piece of choreography left to do on Sunday, and it's really easy. Then we do nothing but run the show. Next week, we'll run the acts separately and do our best to work out the major kinks. Then we move into the theatre and start running the whole show at every rehearsal. That's the most fun part for me...

The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. In case you're wondering... I always title my blog posts with lyrics from whatever show I'm working on. And this post's title comes from the "tone poem" that opens High Fidelity's finale, "Turn the World Off (And Turn You On)."

It's No Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:17:00 +0000

High Fidelity was treated really badly in New York. It was given a clueless, money-centric production and greeted with (mostly) shallow, condescending reviews. I'll grudgingly stipulate that the fault for those shallow reviews might not lie entirely with the reviewers -- after all, it must have been tough to tell there was such a great show beneath that tricked-out, fast-and-furious mess of a production on Broadway. But Broadway critics are supposed to be the best at what they do, right? Shouldn't they be able to recognize strong material poorly executed?

I think the critics' real problem was that they didn't understand the story's content. They didn't understand who Rob, Dick, and Barry are. They seemed not to understand an entire American generation. Several reviews complained that the show wasn't a very good love story, oblivious to the fact that High Fidelity is not a love story. Would they categorize Star Wars as a love story? Probably not, and yet Star Wars and High Fidelity are exactly the same story at their core -- a coming-of-age Hero Myth. Luke has The Force; Rob has his music. But as they've done with countless other under-rated musicals, the New York critics treated this complicated, nuanced -- and primal -- story like it was The Book of Mormon or [title of show].

Exhibit A. The song “It’s No Problem,” sung by Dick. (That's Aaron Lawson as Dick in New Line's 2008 production. Mike Dowdy plays the role this time...)

"It’s No Problem” is a song that operates almost entirely on a subtextual level, like many songs in serious musicals. And yet some New York critics used this song as an example of how High Fidelity is “about nothing.” In reality, the exact opposite is true. This song is about so much, if they'd just listen to the damn lyric...

It's early in Act I. Rob has just assaulted Barry. Dick asks if he's okay, and Rob replies, "Yeah. Look Dick, Laura and I broke up. She's gone. So if you ever see Barry again maybe you can tell him that." Rob's offhand remark becomes for Dick a genuine honor, an Important Assignment, to be Rob’s “ambassador” to Barry, to be a Solution to a Problem. Dick doesn’t have a lot of human interaction outside the record store, so this new and strangely complicated situation is not only dramatic, but exciting for him as well. He takes his new charge seriously. He sings:

It’s no problem,
No problem, Rob, you’re on.
I’ll tell him when I see him next:
“Rob says to tell you Laura’s gone.”
My schedule’s pretty open,
So I’ve got some time today.
Plus I’ve got some other stuff to tell him anyway.
So I’ll tell him when I tell him all the other stuff,
Or I could even call.
So it’s no problem,
No problem at all.

As the song continues, Dick considers the optimal time and place for telling Barry, thinks through the logistics of his assignment, etc. Part of the “joke” of the song is that Dick’s life is so empty (by mainstream standards) that this offhand request from Rob seems monumental. But it also reminds us that Dick simply feels too much (as evidenced earlier by his first solo, “Hiroshima of the Soul”), and that he is profoundly empathetic, which is what will later save his budding relationship with Anna. This song tells us a lot about Dick, about his relationships with Rob and Barry, about the qualities Anna will find attractive in him, and about how closely intertwined Rob’s, Dick’s, and Barry’s lives are. It's a hell of a good theatre song.

It's not "about nothing."

And later in Act II, the reprise of “It’s No Problem” goes even further in defining Dick, showing us how he has grown and changed, as any fully drawn character does. And as the best reprises do, this one doesn't just repeat the earlier lyric; it uses new lyrics against the resonance of the earlier song to show us the changes in Dick. In the previous scene between Dick and Anna, Dick is forced to choose between the guys and Anna, and poor Dick chooses the guys. But he later realizes his mistake and this reprise is Dick’s Declaration of Independence from the “authority” of Barry and the guys. It's the moment we know that Dick has grown up...

And that change manifests itself in a redefining of the song's title. In Act I, the words "It's No Problem" means you're not inconveniencing me because I have nothing else to do. In Act II, "It's No Problem" means I reject your narrow definition of what's acceptable and not acceptable. That's pretty different. In Act I, Dick is accommodating and in Act II, the same words are now about forging his own path. Dick is taking control of his life for the first time. Before either Rob or Barry learn the lessons they have to learn, Dick has learned his. He sings, “And I’m thinking it’s not what you like that counts, but who you are…”

None of the three of them has ever had this thought before.

Anna may like John Tesh – an unthinkable crime in this world of music snobs – but she’s also smart, pretty, nice, the right height, she has a great laugh, and she really likes Dick. Surely all those things outweigh John Tesh. Dick finally realizes that if pop music defines his world, that world can be pretty narrow. He now knows that actual human connection is more important and more satisfying than just listening to songs about human connection (or the lack thereof). Dick rejects the safe, insular world of Championship Vinyl for the less predictable, harder-to-navigate, real world, and in the process he becomes a whole person. Though this is Rob's story primarily, to some degree, it's a Triple Hero Myth.

But Rob won’t learn his lesson for another scene yet. There’s an argument to be made that Rob only learns his lesson by watching Dick’s transformation. If Dick can suffer through John Tesh for Anna, maybe Rob can suffer through Art Garfunkel for Laura. A sacrifice is required from both Rob and Dick before they can complete their journeys.

Without "It's No Problem" and its reprise, Dick’s character would be far less well drawn. But, as with the rest of the show, too many of the critics refused to see what’s going on under the surface, to recognize the complexity and honesty and truthfulness of the writing. Was this because the world of High Fidelity is just too foreign to the senior citizens who review most New York theatre? Was it because the production itself was so clueless? Or was it because Broadway is so dumbed down that critics are no longer accustomed to giving musicals the same thoughtfulness and respect that they routinely give to plays that lack music?

And is it any different in 2012 than it was in 2006?

Exhibit B. The show's opening song, "The Last Real Record Store on Earth," sung by Rob and the company.

Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review, “The seeming credo of this production at the Imperial Theater can be found early in its lyrics: ‘Nothin’s great, and nothin’s new, but nothin’ has its worth.’ This declaration is sung by the show’s hero, the romantically bereft Rob, as he describes his uneventful life as the owner of a vinyl record store in Brooklyn. . . And that’s a problem.” He goes on to say that the problem is that the whole show is "about nothing."

No, the problem is that Brantley can’t see that this lyric introduces the central conflict of the show. It’s not that Rob’s life is uneventful; it’s that his life is too self-involved and lacking in the joy that comes from a giving, two-way, adult relationship. The “nothing” of the lyric refers on the surface to Rob’s outer life, but also subtextually to his inner life. He is emotionally empty, running on the fumes of a once great (though immature) relationship. The “nothing” that his and Laura’s relationship has become has the comforts of familiarity and little effort, but it can’t sustain either of them. Rob doesn’t have enough self-knowledge at the beginning of the story to assess his own problem, so we have to read between the lines – as audiences do routinely with plays by Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tracy Letts, etc.

Would Brantley have missed all this in a Williams play? Probably not.

That High Fidelity's opening number ends with everyone singing, “I wouldn’t change a thing” tells us exactly what the story's central conflict is and what this show is about: the stagnation of a generation. Could there be a more powerful or clearer metaphor for stagnation than a used record store in the mid-1990s? Rob’s story is the story of millions of people on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, caught between cultural forces, the expectations of the previous generation, and world-shattering changes in technology.

This is not a show about nothing, and it’s not the Seinfeld of musical theatre, as its clueless director said in an interview. It’s a deeply felt, deeply authentic show about America (the UK in the novel) at the turn of the millennium. It's about us and it's about now.

And isn't that the whole point of theatre -- of storytelling?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Number Five with a Bullet

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:01:00 +0000

I wrote in an earlier blog post about discovering High Fidelity. My love affair started with the songs of course. But as I've said before, a great score is necessary but not sufficient. What's even more important is a great script. When I finally got to read the High Fidelity script, it instantly spoke to me. I could immediately see it in my head. I really understood how it worked. The same was true with Love Kills and Cry-Baby, but that doesn't happen all the time.

Sometimes it happens later, as it did for me with both Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Sometimes I just have to stay on the road and the answers will come. But sometimes I have to scratch and claw my way to that understanding. Some shows are just tougher nuts to crack. But not High Fidelity. Not for me anyway.

So here are the Top Five Things I Love About the High Fidelity Script.

Number One. The characters in High Fidelity really talk the way people talk. I'm a big fan of stylized dialogue (when it's done well), but I also really love dialogue that sounds completely natural and spontaneous but is actually very carefully wrought. David Lindsay-Abaire does what he does in his play Rabbit Hole -- the dialogue is at once both poetic and naturalistic. Now that I think about it, the same was true of Love Kills. The Hi-Fi dialogue is funny in exactly the way that my friends are funny in real life. It's not about punch lines, but about pop culture and the social zeitgeist of the story. It's about shared experience. And the dialogue leaves so much unsaid -- again, just like real people do. I'm consistently amazed at how well crafted, how seriously funny, and how subtle this script is.

Number Two. I love the use of the narrator voice, and even better, that Rob as narrator steps in and out of scenes, sometimes within a line or two, both narrating and participating in the story, even commenting on his own words in real time. It changes the storytelling in a really interesting way for Rob to be such an obviously biased narrator -- we can't always know that his version of events is the truth. Rob even admits to exaggerating one of his flashbacks in Act I. What was so special about the novel -- its first person voice, and the confessional tone that voice lent to the storytelling -- Linsday-Abaire was smart enough to retain. Several of our reviews in 2008 mentioned that the show seems truer to Nick Hornby's novel than the movie did. And I think it's the intimacy of live theatre in a small space, and also the very dark, confessional first-person voice. It's so powerful to hear a real man standing in front of you admitting his darkest sins -- and demanding that you do the same. There's no distance here. No irony. Just a raw challenge. Because of its very live-ness, I think the show has balls in a way that the movie doesn't.

Number Three. The third thing I love about the script -- and what tripped up the Broadway creative staff -- is that Linsday-Abaire wrote a sad story with a lot of laughs in it, exactly as Hornby had. Lesser bookwriters would have tamed down the darkness, softened Rob's assholery, in a capitulation to commercial Broadway audiences. But Lindsay-Abaire gave us a story about pain -- lots of pain -- and bad choices, but he peppered it with so many laughs! Spoonful of sugar and all that. And yet every laugh delivers something else as well, information about character or situation or plot. This is a script written by a master craftsman, and also, unfortunately, a script too subtle and original for the Broadway director and designers to understand.

Number Four. The biggest mistake that musical adaptations make is putting a screenplay onstage and then just adding songs every few minutes. That's what a lot of screen-to-stage adaptations do. But High Fidelity is so different. Linsday-Abaire, Kitt, and Green found a musical theatre equivalent for Hornby's novelistic storytelling. They didn't just add songs and stage directions; they translated the story into musical theatre terms. They used devices a movie or novel can't use. The real genius of the show is the brilliant conceit of spending the whole show inside Rob's head and therefore writing every song in the show in the voice of Rob's rock gods. It's fun for the audience, but the choices also tell us so much. Of course Rob's nightmare of a sexually aggressive Laura sounds like Pat Benatar. Of course Rob sounds like Ben Folds when he finally opens his heart to Laura. Of course Rob imagines violence in the form of Guns N' Roses, The Beastie Boys, and Snoop Dogg. Every song provides us with subtextual and emotional information that involves us even more deeply in the emotion of the story. We want Rob to find his way to the light.

The reason it's so hard to write a good musical stage script is that singing words takes more time than speaking them, so that leaves much less room in a musical script than in a non-musical script. The dialogue has to be a model of economy. It has to accomplish so much in so few words. The music provides the emotion, but the script provides much of the necessary information. Because we New Liners believe musical theatre is first and foremost about storytelling, nothing matters more in choosing a show than a solid script. As we often remind ourselves, musical is an adjective, but theatre is the noun.

Number Five. With due credit to the source novel, the High Fidelity script never takes the easy way out and never lets the audience off the hook. The novel is uncompromising and so is the stage script. There's no attempt to mask the ugly, no desire to romanticize our hero. The Broadway staff didn't understand that this is not a love story, but a hero quest; but Linsday-Abaire knew it. Rob has to start out an asshole, has to have committed grave sins (the last line of Act I underlines this with a metaphorical Sharpie), in order for him to go on his journey toward growing up and being an adult. If Rob doesn't start in a very dark place (we hear the gory details of their very ugly break-up early in Act I), if he doesn't start out emotionally retarded and hopelessly childish, his eventual growing up would have lower stakes, less impact, less emotional heft. It would become less of a journey. (The same is true in Pippin, though most directors don't realize that.) The stakes have to be high and the journey has to seem impossible. Kudos to all three writers for not succumbing to the obvious temptation to turn the story into a love story just because that's what musicals are "supposed" to be. They resisted that impulse and instead they stayed remarkably true to Hornby's novel and created a truly adult musical.

We're all very lucky we get to work on material this strong and this artful. Some of us are lucky enough to get to work on it twice. Coming back to this rich script and score is such fun, as I get to find new and deeper moments all through the show, and find whole new areas to explore as different actors take on these fascinating roles. The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Wouldn't Change a Thing About It

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:34:00 +0000

I recently read an interesting column by Alexus Soloski on the Guardian website about pop stars in musical theatre. Her primary argument focused on Ricky Martin in the current revival of Evita on Broadway:

Ricky Martin has jaunty hair, shockingly white teeth, flexible limbs, shakeable hips, and a voice as smooth as oiled leather. Remarkable though it may seem, he makes an undershirt and suspenders seem a credible fashion choice. And yet, as many who have seen the recent Broadway revival of Evita know, he's just a little bit dreadful onstage. Yes, he hits every mark and every note, sneers when called to, smiles when needed, but he does it all with the air of a talented trained dog. In saying this, I do not mean to cast aspersions on Martin's intelligence – interviews and album sales confirm his savvy – or his looks, which seemed much admired by many people in the audience. But his Che offered no interiority, no immersion into character. He did exactly what was asked of him externally, but couldn't conjure any sense of inner life. Writing in the New York Times, Ben Brantley called his performance, "polite, vaguely charming and forgettable. You could add "tail-wagging," too.

And that takes the argument beyond pop stars on Broadway to one of the things that concerns and animates me most when it comes to musicals – the considerable difference between performing and acting.

In my opinion, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin are performers more than actors. Go to YouTube and watch them perform the Act I finale of Evita on the Tony Awards, and you'll see what I mean. There's no character there, nothing behind the eyes; it's all vocal pyrotechnics, posing, and indicating. LuPone is not inside her character and neither is Patinkin. Having worked on Evita myself, I've seen firsthand how complex and nuanced those characters are, but you'd never guess that from these performances. And they look even worse next to Bob Gunton's rich, subtle, textured portrayal of Peron. I guess no one told LuPone that Eva's successes didn't come from volume; they came from charm, warmth, manipulation, sincerity, political savvy. She was complicated. This isn't a cold story; it's a passionate, emotional, fiery story. But you'd never know that from two of the three leads. I had the same problem with Patinkin in Sunday in the Park with George – no inner character life, just that creepy mixed-voice tenor of his...

Hitting the notes isn't the only goal in a musical. Music takes precedence over all else in opera, but it's story that rules the artistic roost in musical theatre.

And quite honestly, far too often I see actors in local musical theatre and in national tours at the Fox performing rather than acting, giving us all the right moves and facial expressions, good singing and/or dancing, but with absolutely nothing underneath. These actors cross the stage because they were blocked that way, because it balances the stage picture, but not because their character wants to get up in the grille of the character on the other side of the stage. And this disconnect between actor and character is indirectly the reason New Line was one of the companies last year that walked away from the Kevin Kline Awards and its citizen judges who base their acting awards for musicals on singing and dancing but almost never on acting. The Kline process just wasn't meant for a company that works like we do.

And all this makes me even more adamant that we New Liners never fall into that trap. There are many elements that make up a piece of musical theatre – story, character, acting, singing, the band, movement, sets, lights, costumes, sound – but we think story is always most important. Always. No exceptions. Which is why we'll never produce [title of show], Evil Dead, or Silence! So when we're casting a show, we will always cast a great actor with a decent singing voice over an amazing singer who can't act very well.

And what we understand about High Fidelity that its Broadway creative staff did not understand is that High Fidelity is a show about one man's internal emotional life. Nothing matters more in this show than that we believe in Rob's internal journey, and that's why we have cast an exceptionally honest actor like Jeff Wright in the role. (Twice.) I insist on truthful acting in all our shows, even the wacky ones, like Return to the Forbidden Planet, Spelling Bee, Two Gents, Urinetown, Bat Boy, and Cry-Baby; but it's even more important in High Fidelity than just about any other show I've ever worked on.

People like musical theatre and buy tickets to musicals specifically (though not necessarily consciously) because it's the most intensely emotional kind of storytelling humans do. To me, producing a musical with phony emotions and superficial characters and relationships is akin to a jeweler selling someone a fake diamond without telling them. People come to musicals for the emotion, so to give them fake emotions for their money is fraud.

And it's a fraud perpetrated so widely, especially in commercial musical theatre, that audiences generally accept it without complaint. Or they think musicals are just inherently shallow and phony. Which they're not. But then people come see a New Line show and they're stunned and thrilled at the intensity and rawness of emotion roaring across the footlights at them, even in our wackiest shows. It's one of the big reasons our 2008 run of High Fidelity sold out, why the show's lyricist Amanda Green loved our production (especially Jeff) so much, why we earned such rave reviews for it, why people came to see the show multiple times, and why we're bringing it back.

We have such a brilliant, honest piece of writing in front of us, and a truly gifted, fearless cast ready to bring it to life. In a few weeks we'll bring on board our kick-ass New Line Band, all the design work will be made reality, and we'll have an unbelievably wonderful, truthful story to share with our magnificent, adventurous audiences.

What a joy to return to this show!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

All the Love You're Worthy Of

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:55:00 +0000

We are underway...!

We've finished our first week of rehearsal and are just about done learning the score. When I first got the idea of reviving High Fidelity, I assumed I'd ask back most of the 2008 New Line cast, but there are so many amazing new performers who have joined the family since then, that I eventually decided to only ask a few key people to return and then re-cast the rest of the roles. So about a third of the cast is returning from last time. That means I don't have to spend much time with Jeff or Kimi, who both pretty much knew their material by heart when they came into rehearsal this week, but I do have to teach the rest of the cast the score. Luckily, though the score is a little tricky sometimes vocally, it's not that hard to sing and it's an absolute blast to play...

Often music rehearsals are a drag, but this time, they've been a blast...

One of the reasons I music direct all our shows is that I like to direct character, relationships, style, etc. while I'm teaching music, to connect the singing directly to the acting from the earliest phase of the process. Often that makes it easier to learn the music, but even when it doesn't, it helps the actors so much in creating integrated performances, avoiding entirely the all too prevalent habit many musical theatre actors have for pausing their acting to sing...

In a complete break from my normal pattern, I've already blocked the whole show. (I usually wait till a night or two before I have to block the actors, or sometimes just a few hours before....) This time I had an obvious head start, having done the show before. And I had already decided that we'd use some of the blocking from the last production, at least as a starting place, although I ended up reblocking more of the show than I expected. Part of that is because our awesome new resident scenic designer Scott Schoonover has designed the coolest, most kick-ass set for us, and the set necessitates me redoing a fair amount of blocking.

One change I'm making -- during much of the show, the songs happen downstage, while customers continue to browse in the record store upstage. The idea is that Rob's music is always in the back of his head, no matter what else he's doing. Last time we did Hi-Fi the people in the background during these numbers were meant to fade into the background. But I think it'll be more interesting this time -- and more in tune with the idea that we're spending the entire show inside Rob's head -- if the customers in the shop are always moving to the music, even when they're not in a song. Sometimes in fairly subtle ways, sometimes much more obviously. In the last production, the idea was that Rob hears his friends' (and enemies') voices as the voices of his Rock Gods. But this time, Rob's entire world will become a rock concert, not just the person speaking/singing, when we're inside those songs. It's a subtle difference, but I think it'll have a cool impact.

We'll see, I guess...

Don't tell anybody, but lately I block most of our shows stoned. Not in rehearsal, but when I'm sitting on my couch at home working everything out. When I wrote my bizarre, subversive, political stoner musical Johnny Appleweed in 2005 (that's Aaron Allen in the middle, who's playing Ian in Hi-Fi), I made myself a rule from the beginning that I could not work on the Appleweed script unless I was stoned. The result was an incredibly weird show, but one that (some) people (stoners) really loved. And I realized that's because God's Goofy Green Goodness largely disables my internal editor, opening up a vastly wider array of possibilities to choose from. Some of the crazy ideas I come up crash and burn in the rehearsal hall, but most of them work out pretty well...

Thank you, Mary Jane!

The division of labor was an accident last time we did the show, but very much on purpose this time -- our amazing choreographer Robin Berger will stage the songs in which the five girlfriends are rock and roll back-up singers, and I'll stage the numbers for the guys in the record store, with what our actors call (sometimes lovingly, sometimes derisively) Millerography. So I'll stage "Last Real Record Store on Earth" and "Nine Percent Change of Your Love;" while Robin will stage "Desert Island All-Time Top Five Breakups," "She Goes," "Number Five with a Bullet," and "Crying in the Rain." Splitting the duties this way gives the women a much more polished look than the guys, which I think works really well in this show. This coming week, we'll have our first choreography rehearsal, we'll finish learning music, we'll have a full read-thru-sing-thru, and then we'll start blocking the show.

High Fidelity was the first show New Line "rescued" back in 2008. (Cry-Baby was the second.) It holds a special place in my heart. High Fidelity is like no other show I've ever encountered. And that's part of why it sold out our run in 2008. And that's why we're doing it again. It's that special.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

High Fidelity

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:24:00 +0000

As I do with most musical theatre cast albums (aside from the obviously crappy ones), I pre-ordered the High Fidelity CD on Amazon when it was first announced. When I got the CD, I instantly fell in love with the whole score, but particularly the opening number, "The Last Real Record Store on Earth" -- not only is it great rock and roll, it introduces every major character and the main themes of the show. It's a perfect theatre song, but it's also freakishly catchy. I still find myself listening to that opening number three or four times in a row sometimes...

At first, it didn't occur to me that New Line could -- or would even want to -- produce the show. After all, it had been a disaster on Broadway. But the more I listened to these amazing, funny, smart, original songs, the more I wondered how such a thrilling score wound up in such a bad show. And then I discovered that the playwright David Linsday-Abaire had written the show's script. And I started wondering, what if the show isn't bad, after all...? What if Broadway got it really wrong...?

I put on my musical theatre detective hat (only metaphorically, of course) and started searching the internet. Eventually, I found the show's composer Tom Kitt's band's website. So I emailed Tom and asked about High Fidelity. He sent me the script and I found that it's just as smart and insightful and emotional as the score and as Lindsay-Abaire's brilliant plays.

So we decided to produce the show in summer 2008. We were the first ones to produce it after Broadway.

We assembled a really strong cast (several of whom will return for this New Line revival) and went into rehearsal. I had worked with my lead Jeff Wright already on Grease and Assassins, and his portrayal of John Hinckley was both chilling and heart-breaking. I always knew Jeff was a strong performer with a nice voice, but I had discovered he's also an extremely intelligent and fearless actor. We also had two great comic actors who had only worked with us for about a year, Zak Farmer and Aaron Lawson, who we asked to play themselves... um, I mean... to play the sidekicks, Barry and Dick. Lawson's in Chicago now, but Zak is returning to the role of Barry, and one of New Line's finest character actors, Mike Dowdy, will take over the role of Dick.

The show become so meaningful to all of us as we worked on it. It's so relentlessly truthful and emotional, and though there are plenty of laughs, it's actually a very intense drama that almost everyone can relate to personally. We realized as we worked that High Fidelity is neither a love story nor a musical comedy (the original Broadway production team thought it was both); it's a story about a man who has to learn to grow up. Well, really, three men who have to learn to grow up.

As we worked, I started writing my background and analysis essay about the show, and I kept finding more and more in this material to write about, so my essay grew and grew. Eventually, it ended up in my latest book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals.

I had acquired a bootleg video of the Broadway production (shhh, don't tell anybody!), and I found that musical comedy director Walter Bobbie (who had emasculated Chicago with his bland revival) and his Hi-Fi design team had literally ruined the show on Broadway. First, I don't think I've ever seen a show paced faster than this one, almost as if there was a ticking time bomb in the theatre and they had to finish the show before it exploded. I shit you not -- they were racing through this very complicated emotional story, treating it like it was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or Young Frankenstein, and they were essentially ignoring everything serious in the script and score. Plus the show had been saddled with enormous, moving, trick sets that looked like they belonged more in a show like Wicked, not High Fidelity.

I was horrified by it all and I think that was the first time that I realized how badly great shows can be misunderstood and mistreated on Broadway. I encountered exactly the same thing when I saw the original Broadway production of Cry-Baby.

Getting Hi-Fi on its feet was hard work but it was so worth it. We all fell in love with the show, and we soon found we weren't alone. Our production sold out all but one night, and it even sold out on the night of the Fourth of July! We had no choice but to do a show that night, but we never thought it would sell out...

And the show's lyricist Amanda Green (in the photo at right, with Tom Kitt) came to see us during the run, and was really happy with our production. Amanda went out to eat with us after the show and she couldn't stop talking about all the things in our production she thought worked better than the original. My impression is that the writing team was not happy with the original production and its icy cold reception, and I think we proved to them that they had written a great piece of theatre; it had just been manhandled in New York.

We got rave reviews, including Mark Bretz in The Ladue News calling our show the best show in St. Louis that year. And Paul Friswold at The Riverfront Times wrote a really smart, really personal, extended "think piece" about the show, and though the RFT wouldn't run his whole review in their print edition, they did put it online. The best part of all (well, one of the best parts, anyway) is that since we produced Hi-Fi, dozens of other companies across the country have come to us to ask about production rights, and we've passed them on to the writers.

We rescued High Fidelity. We resuscitated it. We literally brought it back from the dead. None of the licensing agents in New York would handle it. No one would produce it because it had flopped so badly on Broadway, having run only 19 previews and 13 performances before closing. But we redeemed it. We earned the show the rave reviews it had always deserved. (We hope the same thing will happen now with Cry-Baby, which we just closed a couple weeks ago -- once again in its first production after Broadway and once again to rave reviews.)

Flash forward a few years...

So about a year ago, I was working on setting New Line's 2011-2012 season, and I had both Passing Strange and Cry-Baby in place, but hadn't decided on a third show. I called my perennial sounding board (and New Line board member and my occasional co-director) Alison to talk it through. She noted how much I like coming back to shows I really love and asked if there was a New Line show I was dying to repeat. I didn't even think about it until it was already coming out of my mouth: I wanted to do High Fidelity again. I called Jeff the next day and told him I'd only do it if he returned to it with me. He immediately said yes. Within twenty-four hours I had Zak, Kimi Short (as Laura), Margeau Steinau (as Marie LaSalle), and Todd Micali (as Bruce Springsteen) all on board.

But I also realized that we had so many incredibly talented new actors working with us now and I wanted them to get a chance at this rich, incredible material too. So I slowly assembled a new cast for the show around those returning leads, a kind of New Line All-Stars -- Jeffrey M. Wright (Rob), Kimi Short (Laura), Zachary Allen Farmer (Barry), Mike Dowdy (Dick), Aaron Allen (Ian), Talichia Noah (Liz), Terrie Carolan (Anna), Margeau Baue Steinau (Marie LaSalle), Ryan Foizey, Nicholas Kelly, Todd Micali, Taylor Pietz, Sarah Porter, Keith Thompson, and Chrissy Young. (It doesn't usually work out this way, but half of this Hi-Fi cast was also just in Cry-Baby, which will make rehearsals much more fun and much harder to control.) Amy Kelly will repeat her costuming duties, with Ken Zinkl designing lights, Scott Schoonover designing the set, and Donald Smith designing sound.

Ever since that call to Jeff, we've all been dying to get back to Hi-Fi and it felt like it was taking forever to get here. But this coming Monday, we start rehearsals. I can't wait.

I don't know if I've ever felt as connected to a show as I do to High Fidelity. We are so grateful to Amanda, Tom, and David for trusting us with their baby back in 2008 and we're so proud to have helped this show see the light of day again. It will be so wonderful to dive back into Hi-Fi and see what new treasure we find there...

I truly love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Top Ten Desert Island Musical Theatre Books

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 17:49:00 +0000

A while back, we opened the online New Line Bookstore (through the magic of Amazon), a one-stop shop for books about musical theatre. Our store has several departments, including books about the history and development of the art form; books about the creation of individual musicals; biographies and autobiographies of great musical theatre artists; musical scripts and scores; materials for and about auditioning for musicals; books that have been adapted into musicals; and DVDs of stage productions of musicals. It's important to me that I convince as many people as I can to take musical theatre seriously as an art form, and this is one path toward that goal, one among many.

And thinking about all this, it occurred to me that since I've written blogs listing ten really cool stage musicals and ten really cool film musicals, I ought to do a blog listing ten really cool books about musical theatre. So, with the full knowledge that High Fidelity's Rob Gordon would have me list only my Top Five, here are my Top Ten...

Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s (the book is way more interesting than the title) by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen is one of the coolest books I've read in a while. It chronicles really clearly the many changes in our art form during this period, including the mega-musical, the art musical, the new rock musical, etc. In one section of the book of particular interest to the New Liners, she writes, “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 New Line was part of that! New Line was founded in 1991 and through we didn't realize at the time that we were part of a movement, this book describes our original motivations and agenda surprisingly well.

I've described Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season, 1959 to 2009 by Peter Filichia as candy for musical theatre geeks. It's truly one of my favorite musical theatre books I've ever read. Filichia (who is a friend, full disclosure) goes through every season during that time frame and picks the biggest hit musical and the biggest flop musical and writes a few pages about each one. And they're often not the shows you'd expect. Just grab a season at random, like 1973-74, when Filichia's pick for biggest hit was the truly godawful (but very commercial) Stephen Schwartz musical The Magic Show and the biggest flop was Rachael Lily Rosenbloom (And Don't You Forget It). You've never heard of it? Exactly. And sometimes, his choices are exactly what you'd expect. For the 1989-1990 season, the biggest hit was Grand Hotel, one of the greatest of the concept musicals, and the biggest flop was Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge. 'Nuff said. Not only does Peter have a wealth of hilarious, semi-scandalous musical theatre stories in his head, which he shares generously, but he also knows more about the inside scoop than anyone else not actually inside the creation of these musicals. Peter is a columnist, Broadway reviewer, and author of many books, the latest of which is the also very cool Broadway MVPs: 1960-2010: The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons, which I'm about halfway through and enjoying thoroughly...

Everything Was Possible by Ted Chapin is the ultimate insider's look at the creation of Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, and Hal Prince's Follies, one of the genuine masterpieces of the art form (seeing the recent Broadway revival was truly one of the great thrills of my life). Chapin was a production assistant on the original production and he kept a really detailed diary, which he adapted into this book. It's without question the best book I've ever read about the creation of a show -- and what a show! The most expensive Broadway show ever up to that point, the most artistically ambitious, the most logistically complex, the most harrowingly emotional, created by the inarguable geniuses Sondheim, Prince, and Michael Bennett (Goldman's script is amazing, but he doesn't rank with the others), and we get a ringside seat to literally everything. One of the fun side benefits for me was reading about the massive troubles and missteps and rewrites and restaging that took place all through the out-of-town tryout and the previews on Broadway, all of which made me feel so much less insecure as a director myself... Even the geniuses don't get it right the first time... or the second time...

Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process by Bruce Kirle is one of those rare books on musical theatre that really fully understands and appreciates the art form and that has new, fresh, interesting ideas to put forward. It's about, more than anything, how our art form responds to and reflects the culture around it, and why a single show may have various versions to serve different times and agendas in the history of the art form. Anyone who loves musical theatre should check this one out. It's a smart, insightful book that is a real joy to read.

The Whorehouse Papers by Larry L. King may be one of the funniest books I've ever read. King wrote the original Playboy article that was the source material and he also wrote the stage script for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. As King tells the story, Peter Masterson came to him with the idea for turning King's Playboy article into a stage musical and King said, “Look, my ignorance of the subject is absolutely awesome. I’ve only seen three musicals in my life and didn’t care for any of them. I saw a number of dramas, but I quit musicals after three. Not my cup of whiskey.” He went on, “As a writer it irritates me when the story comes to a screeching halt so a bunch of bank clerks in candy-striped suits and carrying matching umbrellas can break into a silly tap dance while singing about the sidewalks of New York.” (Hmmm, now that you mention it, I hate that too.) But after hearing Carol Hall's opening number, "20 Fans," King said, “My God, that’s beautiful! This fucking thing may work!” His dark and funny tale of the insanity of bringing this true story to the musical stage under Masterson and novice director Tommy Tune is laugh-out-loud hilarious, as well as being a wonderful master class in the process of creating a truly original piece of musical theatre. (And by the way, another creation story book that's almost as funny is Meredith Willson's But He Doesn't Know the Territory, about the creation of The Music Man.)

The Great American Book Musical: A Manifesto, A Monograph, A Manual by Denny Martin Flinn is an outstanding book, one of the best I've read about musical theatre in a long time. It's a very smart, contemporary look at musical theatre, and thankfully, it's not one of those insufferable books that thinks musical theatre died in 1964. The author died shortly after writing it, but he said about the book, "I'm trying to leave a record of the technique, to create a blueprint for an ancient art." It's a really excellent read for anyone who works in or just loves the American musical.

The Show Makers: Great Directors of the American Musical Theatre by Lawrence Thelen is an amazing collection of profiles/interviews with twelve legends of the musical theatre, Hal Prince, George C. Wolfe, Tom O'Horgan, Arthur Laurents, Jim Lapine, Jerry Zaks, Jerome Robbins, Des McAnuff, Graciela Daniele, Mike Ockrent, Richard Maltby Jr., and Martin Charnin (okay, I wouldn't really call the last three "legends" but they're very good directors). I'm somebody who's read most books about musical theatre, but I learned a lot from this one, things like how these very different directors handle the rehearsal process (Lapine's process is the most interesting to me), pre-production, rewrites, etc. It's such an interesting read if you're into how musicals are made.

The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey by Joseph Swain was the first book to analyze musical theatre scores in-depth, to look at musical themes and other devices, to explore how the music contributes to storytelling. (The only other books that do this kind of in-depth analysis are Stephen Banfield's Sondheim's Broadway Musicals and my own books.) Swain does a really strong job of explaining in really clear terms (if you know music theory that will help, but it's not necessary) how music functions in works of the musical theatre over the history of the art form, in shows including Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, My Fair Lady, Camelot, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Godspell, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Chorus Line, Sweeney Todd, and Les Miserables. Pretty impressive list, isn't it? This is the book that inspired me to start doing my own analyses, which eventually led to me writing books. This is a really cool book, both for hardcore musical theatre fans, but also for people who just love seeing musicals and want to know a little more about what makes them tick...

The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art by Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg is an incredibly clear look into the business of making commercial musical theatre. The book's jacket says "Three out of four Broadway-bound musicals fail to get there, and many of those that do, ultimately fail. The Broadway Musical takes an engrossing look at the industry's successes and failures in an effort to understand the phenomenon of mass collaboration that is Broadway. The authors investigate the complicated machinery of show business from its birth around the turn of the century through its survival of the cost explosions of the 1980s." It's really eye-opening and really interesting. Another book on this topic just as interesting and more recent is On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way by Steven Adler.

Now complain all you want but I'm going to count this next one as a single pick. They're my rules and I can break 'em if I want to. Ethan Mordden wrote a series of seven books chronicling the history of American musical theatre, and five of the seven are really wonderful. His books Make Believe (about the 1920s); Sing for Your Supper (the 30s); Beautiful Mornin' (the 40s); Coming Up Roses (the 50s); and Open a New Window (the 60s) are all very cool, fun to read, full of interesting info, and often very funny. His books One More Kiss (about the 70s) and The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen (about the 80s through today) are hard to get through because he hates rock musicals. No, I mean he hates them. In fact, he hates all the changes the art form went through in the 70s and again in the 90s. He hates all the things that give me such hope for the future of our art form. So for me at least, the last two books kinda read like some musical theatre equivalent of Ebeneezer Scrooge wrote them. Yuck.

And finally, since both my other Top Ten lists included more than ten, I can't help but cheat on this one too and plug my own musical theatre books, all of which I'm very proud of, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals; Strike Up the Band: A New History of Musical Theatre; Rebels with Applause; Deconstructing Harold Hill; From Assassins to West Side Story; and Let the Sun Shine In: The Genius of HAIR.

I'd also like to mention a few really excellent books on theatre, that aren't specifically about musical theatre but still worth a read -- New Broadways: Theatre Across America: Approaching a New Millennium by Gerald M. Berkowitz; Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement by Stephen J. Bottoms; Broadway Theatre by Andrew Harris; and the truly amazing Connecting Flights by Robert Lepage, maybe the best book on theatre I've ever read.

Young actors often ask me what they should do to learn and improve at their art form. I tell them to read everything they can get their hands on (a stop by the New Line Bookstore would be a good start!), listen to every cast album they can find, and go see every musical anybody produces anywhere nearby. (I had the great luck to be an usher at the Muny for eight seasons.) I taught a class in musical theatre history a while back and I was astounded to find out that most of these musical theatre majors didn't know anything about the history or literature of their art form. Most of them had never seen The Music Man or Les Miserables or even Rocky Horror. But how can you do The Drowsy Chaperone or Cry-Baby if you don't understand old school musical comedy? How can you do Godspell or Grease if you don't understand Hair?

Honestly, I think these kids just love performing and it's never occurred to them that they're making art and not just "putting on a show." I see this mindset all the time when people come to work with New Line for the first time, and it blows their minds to discover the artistry and intelligence and deep human insight that goes into making great musical theatre. Once we've opened their eyes, they're converts for life.

The crusade continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Just an Endless Happy Ending

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:21:00 +0000

Well, we opened Cry-Baby last weekend and it has been an awesome ride so far. We've had great, responsive crowds, and one of the show's songwriters, Adam Schlesinger, was at our show Friday night. He really seemed to love the show, finally seeing it done small and intimate, with a 6-piece rock band -- the way they all wish it would have been produced originally. It always makes me so happy when we can take a show like Cry-Baby (or High Fidelity) and show Broadway that the book and lyrics are outstanding after all, despite a clumsy, manhandled Broadway production -- particularly because it vindicates the writers who worked so hard to fashion a cool show only to have it mutilated by Broadway people who just didn't understand it.

It was an awesome opening weekend, and it's just going to get better. Ticket sales are soaring!

Here's what the critics think...

“If you liked New Line’s productions of Return to the Forbidden Planet and Bat Boy, or if you just want to have a great time, then pick up tickets for its latest giddy extravaganza, Cry-Baby. You'll laugh too hard to catch all the hilarious lyrics. . . In fact, the whole ensemble captures the go-for-broke spirit that Miller, band leader Justin Smolik and choreographer Robin Michelle Berger relish. . . Now in its 21st season, New Line also stages serious musicals: Evita, Love Kills, Kiss of the Spider Woman and many more. And it stages them beautifully, albeit with unexpected twists. But Miller's intimate musical comedies have a distinctive charm all their own, part sketch comedy, part witty spoofs of musical-theater tradition. They don't come up that often, but when they do, they last a long time in memory.” – Judith Newmark, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Read Judy's whole review.)

“I couldn't stop smiling and laughing through this stage-musical version of John Waters’ film, though I have to admit I never really tried. From the opening chords, which (of course) sound like some 1950s movie about teen rebels, we know we're in for a counter-cultural extravaganza. Long and lanky Ryan Foizey is fantastic as a pacifist Elvis Presley in red-scare America, and director Scott Miller and crew surround him with a cast that bristles with talent and dance that crackles with excitement.” – Richard Green, TalkinBroadway.com (Read Richard's whole review.)

“Cry-Baby is a smash, a musical and cultural send up of drape and square mores, while at the same time, a parody of the typical ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ scenarios that we've all been exposed to in more traditional shows. At times, it’s like watching a throwdown between Little Richard and Pat Boone over who really sings ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ the best and most authentic. . . Scott Miller and New Line Theatre have once again given us something outside the norm, and it's a joyous ride. This revision of Cry-Baby is a sheer delight, full of characters and situations from the movie by filmmaker John Waters, but also standing on its own with a clever and hilarious score (music and lyrics by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger), having jettisoned the tunes from the film itself. Go see this play now. It’s wonderfully directed, smartly choreographed, and marvelously acted. . . This is a rave because this a rockin’ good show! Go see Cry-Baby and enjoy!” – Chris Gibon, BroadwayWorld (Read Chris' whole review.)

Four and half stars out of five. “A glorious and infectious American regional premiere by New Line Theatre. Under Miller’s devoted and painstaking direction, this Cry-Baby rocks the room with an effervescent energy, exploding across the stage through an array of dazzling moves choreographed by Robin Michelle Berger. . . Miller has a penchant for mining rare musical gems and, sometimes, resuscitating them from their moribund beginnings. Such is the case with this Cry-Baby, which will leave you shedding only tears of laughter.” – Mark Bretz, Ladue News (Read Mark's whole review.)

“Under Scott Miller's bull's-eye direction, Cry-Baby is bolstered by New Line's consistently energetic cast, including newcomer Ryan Foizey in the title role. His charismatic Elvis Presley inspired Cry-Baby has just enough seeming volatility to make him seem dangerous, but all the heart to make him genuine. Doesn't hurt that he has a great voice, too.” – St. Louis Theater Snob (Read Andrea's whole review.)

Three and a half stars our of four. “There’s an enthusiasm and energetic playfulness in New Line Theatre’s production of Cry-Baby that evokes some very clever laughs and lots of nostalgic friskiness. It’s a hallmark of the kind of amicably provocative show New Line likes to produce. . . Scott Miller has developed an enjoyable niche for his theater that is unique, important and always fun.” – Harry Hamm, KMOX

“Scott Miller almost always settles into a high-octane groove with his productions at New Line Theatre. That's true of his current offering, Cry-Baby, the musical adapted from John Waters’ film of the same name.” – Bob Wilcox, KDHX

“Scott Miller directs stylishly. . . Miller’s direction and the cast’s talent make it a fine diversion, something to see if you need a break from preparing your taxes.” – Joe Pollack, St. Louis Eats and Drinks

After a few days off, it will so wonderful to get back to this amazing show and this amazing cast tonight. Come see us -- details on the New Line website. I promise you will have a fucking blast!

I love my job!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Turkey Point Jukebox Jamboree

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:01:00 +0000

New Line Theatre's Cry-Baby previews tonight and opens tomorrow night. Hell Week is over.

Most theatre people call it "production week," but I've been calling it Hell Week since high school. Although, really, Hell Week is rarely hellish anymore -- our shows are almost always in awfully good shape by that point. So these days, Hell Week is really just the time to work out subtle details of staging, make sure the costumes and costume changes all work, trouble-shoot the mics, find the volume balance with the band (which will change again the minute the seats have bodies in them), that kind of stuff. Back in the early days of New Line (who ever thought New Line would have "early days"?), it really was Hell Week -- we'd move the set in on a Sunday, have three tech rehearsals and open. There was no time for a lighting cue-to-cue rehearsal or a band rehearsal or a preview. Now we have a lot more time.

Thank god.

Still, Hell Week is when I also have to take care of tons of producing details, like picking up programs, getting box office change, coordinating with Metrotix, picking up tickets, creating flyers and such for the lobby, that kind of thing. The biggest stress for me personally is that, as both producer and director, almost every question this week requires an answer from me. And there are a lot of questions. I don't know if you ever get this feeling, but my brain gets tired! Trying to answer questions and solve problems continuously for a week is exhausting. So all that doesn't leave me much time for blogging. Actually it doesn't leave me time for much at all beside my nightly chronic and sleep.

Sunday was the first time the band joined us for what's called the sitzprobe, the only rehearsal we have with the band and cast together before running the whole show. It's the number one most stressful rehearsal for me in the entire process (though significantly less stressful since the ever-awesome Justin Smolik joined us as accompanist). We have to show the band all our little idiosyncrasies with the score, things we've cut (instrumental music we don't need in our production), etc. for the whole score and run it all -- in about four hours. Add to that, this time around, that we're also dealing with all new orchestrations created just for our production by the show's original orchestrator, Chris Jahnke. And because Chris and his assistants have been writing all this new, they've been sending the band parts to us as they finish them. We got the last of them Sunday morning, the day of the sitzprobe. And though the new arrangements are extremely cool -- they've reduced the score from an 18-piece Broadway orchestra to a 6-piece rock band -- there were the inevitable typos and measures that don't match. It was quite an adventure trying to figure it all out...

Then we ran the show Monday night, with the band and full tech for the first time. And to our horror, we discovered the band parts frequently didn't match the piano score, something we only got a glimpse of Sunday. A little backstory... when we started working on Cry-Baby, the authors sent us the script and score. What we found out only very recently was that the piano score we've been rehearsing with is the version they went into rehearsal with -- but not the version they orchestrated. So they sent us a list the day before the stizprobe of "discrepancies," changes we'd have to make in the piano book and/or the band parts to make them match. Unfortunately, the orchestrators apparently didn't find all the discrepancies. So all week, as opening night creeps closer and closer, our musicians have been trying desperately to make sense of our band charts. I think they've figured it all out now.

Thank god we have smart, talented musicians. Otherwise, we'd be fucked...

Trying to lead us through this minefield is Justin Smolik, who joined us as our keyboard player and resident music director at the beginning of last season, for I Love My Wife. He's an outstanding pianist technically (way better than me), but also a really, really expressive player. And he can play rowdy jazz and pounding rock and roll like nobody's business. Few people could have handled the Passing Strange score that beautifully. He's also great at the hardest part of the job -- being a sensitive and responsive accompanist, in other words, performing with the actors, not behind them. I feel so safe leaving the actors in his care once I step away from the keyboard.

Our lead guitarist Mike Bauer first joined us in 1997 for Jacques Brel (playing both guitar and mandolin), when he was only 19, and he stayed with us for several shows before other priorities took him away. But he returned to us in 2010 for The Wild Party, and he's been part of The New Line Band since then. Mike doesn't know he's as good as he is -- but like Justin, he's a really strong, really expressive player, he brings so much to our shows, and he can play in virtually any style. It's very cool to have him back in the family.

Dave Hall first played bass for us during Cabaret in 2001, and he's been our bassist pretty much the whole time since then, as solid and dependable as can be. Back in New Line's early days, we sometimes didn't hire a bass player because our budget was so tight. Dave convinced me we should always have a bass player, and he's right. I don't know if his argument was an artistic or self-serving one, but he convinced me. Dave's in a relationship with our stage manager Trish, so he often finds himself doubling as assistant stage manager after performances, washing dishes, sweeping up rose petals, you name it...

Clancy Newell has been playing drums for us since Spelling Bee in 2009. He's one of those incredible, totally dependable drummers, who knows how to follow, who can jump measures if something goes wrong on stage, and who knows how to keep his volume at a reasonable level, even when he's playing rowdy rock and roll. Many -- most? -- drummers aren't very good at that. Most drummers like playing loud. Clancy is a real treasure and I think he plans to stick around for a while. Plus, he's one of the mellowest, most easy-going guys I think I've ever known. Totally a latter-day hippie (I don't know if he'd agree or not), just like me...

This is Robert Vinson's third show playing reeds for us. He also played Spelling Bee in 2009 and Evita in 2010. I so loved listening to his sax solo in "I'd Be Surprisingly Good for You" every night, such a warm, sexy, creamy sound. We've had good reed players before, but Robert is really amazing. He has such control of the sound, such a rich, true tone. He's played on Broadway (including one of the Grease revivals) and elsewhere, and he's really great to work with. We're lucky that someone of Robert's caliber wants to work with us -- 'cause it ain't for the money.

Rhythm guitar player Joe Isaacs is joining our New Line family for the first time with Cry-Baby. He's a student of Aaron Doerr's, the guitarist who played bare and Passing Strange for us, and who will be back for High Fidelity. But Aaron couldn't do this show so he sent us Joe, who's doing a really excellent job, despite all the crazy obstacles we keep throwing at the band... Talk about baptism by fire...

I often talk and write about how lucky we are to attract the incredible talent we get for our casts. Every show has such smart, talented, fearless actors. But we're just as grateful that these musicians choose to work with us -- for far less money than they deserve. But like the actors, the musicians don't do it for the bucks; they do it because we get to work on some of the most interesting, most artful, most exciting music you can imagine. It's a real adventure every time...

Though I'm sure they wish it had been easier this time, they're always bringing their A game, and it shows. We're very lucky to have them.

Come see Cry-Baby and hear this amazing band rock your shit!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

It's So Hard to Be Sixteen and Schizo

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:49:00 +0000

I think one of the biggest things that will make New Line's Cry-Baby distinct from its Broadway production (in the picture) will be the acting. I don't mean to be snarky about it, but as it is with too many big-budget Broadway musicals, the focus in the original production was not on character development or relationships or story. Just laughs and gags. Our production will be really funny, but it won't be only that. There's so much more to this show.

I'm so proud of how much our actors are bringing their characters to rich, full life, because it proves what a good show this is, what a strong, smart, subversive script and a pitch-perfect, ironically period score.

The material was not the problem in New York.

Someone taught me years ago that the key to playing drunkenness is not to play the effects of the alcohol but instead to play the struggle to overcome the impaired motor skills and verbal skills, to play the attempt not to look drunk, to play the altered reality that someone who's really drunk perceives. In other words, don't play the stumble, play the attempt not to stumble. I didn't realize it until very recently, but what that person was really telling me was just to play the truth, to play the inner reality of the moment, not the appearance of the reality.

Likewise, the key to playing the batshit crazy Lenora in Cry-Baby is not to play the crazy, but instead to play the character from inside her fractured reality. Lenora doesn't think she's crazy, so if the actor plays her crazy, the actor will be in conflict with the character. Everything Lenora says and does makes sense to her, so the actor has to come from that warped perception of normalcy. Lenora's reality is so at odds with ours that she actually thinks "Screw Loose" is a serious love song, complete with a stalker-ish invitation for sex at the end, and the hilarious implication in the last two words that she might just be the town pump. She doesn't think the song is funny, and so neither can the actor when she's onstage. And yet the more serious Lenora is, the funnier it gets. Our Lenora (Terrie, in the picture with Ryan), has really found this balance, to the point where you actually feel a little sorry for her a couple times, in between her bouts of shouting, fainting, and talking to people who aren't there.

Ryan and Taylor are just as assuredly finding Cry-Baby and Allison from the inside out. Instead of just playing the leather-jacketed "bad kid" (as James Snyder did on Broadway), Ryan is playing Cry-Baby from the inside, his decency, his sensitivity, his emotional wounds, his intelligence. After all, as David R. Shumway writes in The Other Fifties, "Elvis does not come across as cruel in spite of the aggression of his performance, and he certainly does not seem the sophisticated and insinuating adult. Innocence, rather, is the dominant characteristic of the Elvis of the Fifties. . . The official Elvis is marked by modesty, deferential charm, and the soft-spoken assumption of commonsense virtues. . . The lyrics of his major early hits almost invariably present a wounded or vulnerable lover." At the same time, Shumway writes, "His motions suggested intercourse and his performance was read as a public display of sex. Elvis thus put the sex that the name rock 'n' roll described explicitly into his performance. But in presenting himself as an object of sexual incitement or excitation, he violated not just Victorian morality, but more importantly the taboo against male sexual display." Cry-Baby is both innocent and corrupter at the same time. And Ryan has found that delicate balance.

And instead of just playing a cardboard "good girl," Taylor is playing Allison the individual, not conforming to any stereotypes and far less "good" (i.e., conforming) than the "good girl" label implies. Allison is smart, adventurous, open-minded and open-hearted. Instead of playing her in opposition to the Drapes (as they did in the original show), Taylor is playing Allison as the real misfit of the story, trapped in the squeaky clean world of waspy upper-class when she really belongs in the rock and roll world of the Drapes. She discovers that the Drapes aren't the misfits – they're comfortable in their world. And really, the same is true of the Squares. But Allison is a Drape at heart, even if she lives in the Square world when we meet her. Or as John Waters put it to me, "She's a good girl possessed by a bad girl."

In creating Cry-Baby on film (and most of his other films, now that I think about it), John Waters was essentially celebrating and satirizing exploitation films, movies that dealt with "forbidden" subjects that mainstream film studios wouldn't touch, particularly back in the days of the Motion Picture Code – sex, nudity, drugs, gender, gangs, rock and roll. And so Cry-Baby onstage becomes an exploitation musical. (The only other example I can think of in that category would be Reefer Madness, which is really more sketch comedy with songs, than satire or exploitation.)

You'll notice that Cry-Baby has all the standard exploitation character types: The Innocent (Allison), The Corrupter (Cry-Baby), The Parents (Mrs. Vernon-Williams), The Crusader (Baldwin), and the Charlatan (also Baldwin?). But because John Waters is the musical's source material, there's a lot more than shock and exploitation here. Though in classic exploitation films, the characters are built more on moral positions than on human psychology, Waters and his stage adapters retain the exploitation models but bring them into the richness and complexity of modern storytelling.

Allison, after all, is the real protagonist here, not Cry-Baby. She's the one who goes on the journey of discovery, just as in other Hero Myths like The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Johnny Appleweed. She's the one who changes, who learns about herself. Cry-Baby is her "wise wizard," her Obi Wan Kenobi. He shows her the path, but she has to choose to take it. In the book Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, Eric Schaefer writes, "Each character [in an exploitation movie] functions to either receive, promote, stifle, or create the need for education about sex." Allison is in a completely different place at the end of the story from where she starts out. The central conflict of the show is her desire to explore and learn, while Mrs. Vernon-Williams (at first) tries to stop that from happening. It's the universal conflict between the child leaving the nest and the parent trying to hold them back to protect them. But thanks to John Waters' unique view of the world, Mrs. V-W gains self-knowledge herself and ultimately understands that she must let Allison grow up.

It's such fun in rehearsal now to watch Taylor/Allison as she discovers the Drapes and their music, ventures into their world, does her best to learn the Drape ways, falls in love, and then ultimately finds her place with the Drapes – not just because she's in love with Cry-Baby, but because this is where she belongs. As Allon White writes in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, "What is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central."

As an example of why it's important to come at a role from the inside instead of from the outside (you'd think this would be obvious to actors, but it often isn't), in my latest book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, one section of my Grease chapter applies to Cry-Baby as well. After all, Johnny Depp said in an interview that Cry-Baby is "Grease on acid"...

Many people are uncomfortable with Grease's ending because they miss the fact that Sandy doesn’t actually become a slut in the finale; she just learns how to dress like one, finally letting go herself of the tendency of too many Americans to stigmatize sexuality as dirty and shameful. She gives up the desexualizing poodle skirt that hid away her female form and replaces it with clothing that reveals and celebrates – and takes ownership of – her body and its adult curves. This is not a descent into decadence for Sandy; it is a throwing open of the doors of her moral prison. The authors’ intentions are clear in a stage direction in the final scene. After describing Sandy’s new hypersexual look – the tight pants, leather jacket, earrings, wild new hair – the script says, “Yet she actually looks prettier and more alive than she ever has.”

The end of Grease suggests that a lasting, healthy relationship is only possible when both partners are openly and completely themselves, without regard for other people’s opinions, social conventions, or personal insecurities – and also when neither of them are afraid of their own human sexuality. This was not the message of the conforming adult world; this was a uniquely teen perspective. Both Sandy and Danny have to learn to be themselves, to shake off the masks of “cool” and “respectable.” If there is any question about who the protagonist of the show is, Sandy is primary; she’s the one who has changed, who has learned something significant. The same may be true of Danny, but to a much lesser extent.

But the ending of Grease isn’t a “moral” and shouldn’t be read that way. It doesn’t declare what we should or shouldn't do; it's an objective and accurate description of America in the 1950s. Sandy is America in its progression from puritanical repression in the 50s to sexual freedom in the Sexual Revolution of the 60s. And yet, as she tells Danny in “All Choked Up,” she isn’t ready to give up her virginity quite yet. Too many people believe that the message of Grease is that to win the man you love, you have to be a slut. But there's not a single line or lyric anywhere in the show to suggest Sandy has changed anything but her looks. Like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady, Sandy learns the secret that anyone can fit in just by talking and looking the right way (and don’t we all do that to some extent?). Her overnight transformation proves that it’s all just play-acting – and that they all know it! She has learned what Rizzo and the girls have known all along. Sandy has become one of them just by changing her clothes! She allows herself the freedom of the coming 1960s, a refusal to fear her own sexuality or to see sex as dirty, the freedom to be able to talk and laugh openly about sex.

But behind all the rest, there’s a simpler, more subversive message. Sandy isn’t just saved by how she dresses; she’s saved by singing rock and roll. It isn’t until she can achieve the authenticity and sexual frankness of rock and roll by singing “All Choked Up” that she can be healed. Grease doesn’t moralize; it just reports. Sandy’s triumphant line late in the show, “Goodbye to Sandra Dee,” puts away not only Sandy’s false good-girl persona, but also the 1950s as a whole, a world in which the goody-goody Sandra Dee can be a role model, in which facades were cracking. We were moving on…

For both Sandy and Allison, the journey isn't from one group to another, from one culture to another; it's a journey from living a lie to living truthfully, from being oppressed to being free. Authenticity is the holy grail Allison seeks, and she's lucky enough to be living right at the birth rock and roll, an art form built entirely, specifically, on emotional authenticity. It's why Cry-Baby's nickname (and the show's title) is explicitly defined by emotion – Cry-Baby is literally emotion incarnate – to capture that massive cultural shift from John Wayne to Marlon Barndo, from swing to rock and roll.

Like Sandy in Grease, Allison finds herself when she discovers rock and roll. And all of this is why these characters have to be played truthfully, from the inside-out. You can't be phony and superficial when you're telling a story about the quest for authenticity. The biggest laughs in the show come not from punchlines, but from the moments that reveal either the freakish inauthenticity of the Squares or the uncomfortable, even sometimes ugly authenticity of the Drapes.

As I've said before on this blog, Grease takes place just five years after Cry-Baby, so the cultural zeitgeist is nearly the same and it's such an incredibly interesting – and transformational – moment in American cultural history. No wonder we love the 50s. It was the beginning of so much. Despite all its considerable wackiness, Cry-Baby has some really smart, really insightful things to say about our culture, both then and now, and the more we work on the show, the more impressed I am with it. I can't wait to share it with our audiences. Tickets sales are going really well, so get your tix early!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Switchblades Laughin' at a Butter Knife

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:10:00 +0000

We're running the whole show at every rehearsal now. This is such a valuable part of the process, the editing, the repetition that leads to muscle memory, the working out of problems. It can get boring sometimes. But not with Cry-Baby. This show is such crazy fun to watch. One by one, all the problems are getting ironed out, the blocking is getting more and more natural looking, and I can see growing in front of me some really amazing performances.

Cry-Baby is a neo musical comedy and the show's wickedly off-kilter style of humor is shining through every actor in the cast -- they really get it. The Teardrops have found their Grrrl Power. Dowdy is crafting one of those classic comic villains you just love to hate. Terrie is utterly fearless in diving into Lenora's deep, deep dementia -- and "Screw Loose" is going to bring the house down. Taylor has found the joy and adventure in Allison, and Ryan has found the honesty and core decency in Cry-Baby. Every comedy I work on proves it to me again -- nothing is funnier than the truth. If you play the characters, the emotions, the relationships truthfully, the comedy rises to even greater heights.

One of my pet peeves and most ferocious crusades centers on the plague of mindless, shallow productions of smart, well-crafted musical theatre. Yeah, I know, lots of theatre people who don't know any better will reply that all musicals are mindless and shallow. Well, you're wrong so shut the fuck up. That hasn't been true in decades and today the art form is moving in amazing new directions. This is no longer the art form of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The worst offenders inject their fourth-grade humor into well-crafted comedies, with the apparent conviction that anything that gets a laugh is Good, and the arrogance to believe that they're actually funnier than the people who wrote the show. As I've argued many times before, animals on YouTube make us laugh -- shouldn't there be a higher bar than that for theatre? Shouldn't a night at the theatre deliver more than America's Funniest Home Videos?

It's one of the reasons Cry-Baby sorta sucked on Broadway.

What routinely drives me crazy is that people choose to produce shows that are already incredibly funny -- Spelling Bee, Bat Boy, Little Shop of Horrors, Into the Woods, Chicago, Urinetown, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and yes, Cry-Baby -- and then they try really, really hard to make them funny. Which invariably makes them considerably less funny. I look at New Line's productions of Urinetown in 2007 as an example -- we followed the writers' intentions and approached the show on its own terms, as subversive, political (and artistic) satire. The key to Urinetown is that every single character takes everything so incredibly seriously, with such insanely high emotional stakes, that it's hilarious. It didn't need our "help" to be funny. We just had to follow the outstanding road map Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann laid out for us. The more seriously we took the characters and the story, the funnier it got. Our audiences were roaring with laughter through the entire show, partly because we never violated the world of the story. They could believe in these crazy people and their story, and that made the comic ride a hell of a lot more fun.

The same is true of Bat Boy. And Cry-Baby.

One of the reasons the Laughs-At-Any-Cost approach so often fails is that the shows I'm talking about are really funny, but they're a lot more than funny. Cry-Baby, for example, is about class and injustice in America, but it makes its serious point through outrageous satire. Bat Boy is about moral hypocrisy in American culture. Urinetown is about the shallowness of American politics. Load them up with funny voices, mugging, schtick, unmotivated gags, and you kill everything cool about the shows.

There's nothing less funny than the effort to be funny. When you try really hard to make a show funny, when you look for schtick to add, when you cram a show full of "bits," you essentially end up with a straight-to-video Pauly Shore movie. And nobody wants that. If the audience can tell you're trying to be funny, they'll find it far less amusing. Comedy is at its best when it sneaks up on you and surprises you. If you see it coming a mile away, it's less funny. Comedy needs two things to work -- it has to tell the truth, and it has to be a surprise, or in the best of both worlds, it tells a surprising truth. When an actor or director is just throwing in silly bullshit to try to get a laugh, the audience sees it coming, so the surprise is lost. And when the director or actor's agenda is getting laughs instead of telling a good story, the truth gets lost too.

One of the biggest problems with the original Broadway production of Cry-Baby was that the cast was working like dogs to get laughs, with lots of enormous mugging to the audience, lots of stopping the show for a punch-line and then leaving lots of room for laughter (which didn't always happen). The substantial truth at the heart of Cry-Baby got lost in the mess of middle school hijinks. Cry-Baby himself was a joke. And because the actors didn't take the characters seriously, and the characters didn't take the story seriously, neither did the audience, so they didn't give a shit if Cry-Baby and Allison got together or not. There was no emotional investment, because sketch comedy doesn't traffic in emotion, just easy laughs. The result was bad storytelling.

I've seen the same thing happen with productions of Bat Boy, Spelling Bee, and Urinetown over the years. Take them seriously, focus on character and story, and the laughs come by the bucketful. Try to make them funny and you cripple them. Sure, audiences may still laugh at actors making asses of themselves, but you've stopped making good theatre; instead you're just making great shows look stupid. When New Line produced these shows, we didn't have to "make" any of them funny; they are already brilliant. We just had to stick to the show the creators had written. The actors and directors who mangle otherwise wonderful shows with clumsy comedy bits either don't understand the shows they're working on, or they have no respect for the shows and their writers -- or their audience.

Over the years, we've produced some of the most outrageous, most unconventional musicals ever written (that's New Line's Bat Boy, in the picture), and we get full houses laughing uproariously at our comedies -- because we take our comedy seriously. The realer the characters are, the more convincing and involving the story is, the more rooted in truth the laughs are, the better and more memorable the experience will be for everyone on and off the stage. Maybe it seems counter-intuitive, the idea of taking comedy seriously, but all the great comedians and comedy writers will tell you the same thing. TV comedies like Third Rock from the Sun and The Beverly Hillbillies are so funny because the characters take everything so seriously, even as they seem to us wacky and bizarre. If you've seen New Line's Bat Boy, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, or Forbidden Planet, you'll know what I'm talking about; if not, come see Cry-Baby.

I think, generally speaking, the people who try that hard to be funny, who go out of their way to come up with comic bits, who don't seem to realize how funny the material itself is, are not actually funny people. Not everyone is. Some people are funny and some just aren't. (One of my favorite indie movies, Funny Bones, is about that.) And yes, people who aren't funny can still get laughs from an audience, in the same way that cat in the hamster ball or the bear on the trampoline on YouTube gets laughs from their audiences.

I just wish more theatre artists knew how much more funny and more satisfying the comedy would be if they'd just get off its fucking back...

I'm just sayin'...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

One More Vivid Verbal Picture

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:30:00 +0000

One of my Cry-Baby actors has said to me several times recently, in regard to a piece of business or staging, "Well, you can decide once you're out front watching." Though they won't say it outright, I think it really makes our newer actors anxious -- or at least uncomfortable -- that I'm still playing piano and I'm not out front taking notes. But I've been making theatre this way for thirty years. Yes, I'm that old.

There are a lot of ways in which New Line just doesn't work the way a conventional, union theatre works. I've spent the last thirty years developing and tweaking the process we use. In some ways, we are very conventional, but in many ways, we're not.

Case in point. When we started New Line in 1991, I had to play piano for both rehearsals and performances because we couldn't afford to hire someone else to do it. After a few seasons, we were finally in a position to hire a pianist for performances, although I still played a show now and then if I really loved the score (like A New Brain and Hair). But it was so valuable for me to be free during Hell Week, to sit out front, take notes, and shape the work.

But even then, I was still playing rehearsal piano, as I do now. And though we could now afford (maybe) to hire someone else to play rehearsals, I don't want to. I love our process the way it is, though I assume we'll continue to tweak it over time. What I've discovered is that because I'm on the piano until the last two weeks of rehearsal, the actors enjoy a lot more freedom than they would otherwise. They get six full run-throughs before I start taking detailed notes. During my time on the piano, I'm awfully good at watching a fair amount of the show anyway (after all, I've been doing this since the early 1980s), but I can't see everything, and I certainly can't stop and take notes.

So after we've blocked the whole show and I've given them what I think of as a pencil sketch of the show, then they get time to experiment and play, to try things, to explore line readings and physical work -- and all without me judging that work (much). And without me trying to polish each moment. (After all, I don't think a piece of theatre is made of moments; I think it's made of arcs.) I realize now that our early financial restrictions led me to a wonderful artistic choice. Never in twenty years of New Line shows have I ever moved off the piano and into the audience during Hell Week, and found the actors on the wrong road. It just doesn't happen. The first part of our process is in-depth enough that everyone knows what road we're on and where we're headed.

Still, some actors hate all that freedom. They want to know now whether or not they're making the "right" choices. They don't trust themselves. But the truth is there are a bunch of "right choices" for any given moment or character. And me giving them notes and correcting things while they're still building their performance seems silly to me. Would I judge an painter's work based on sketches or studies? Would I judge a novelist's work based on a first draft?

Long ago, the A&E cable channel had an arts news magazine, and they did a story on the development of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Hal Prince said in this interview that he thinks of himself as an editor. He gets the actors (and designers, etc.) all heading down the same road, then he lets them work for a while, and then he edits their work. I love that image of "editing" the actors' work. The simple truth is that I'm not creating these performances; the actors are. But I'm responsible for making sure we have good, clear storytelling, aesthetic and artistic unity, and a clear point of view.

I think the actor I mentioned at the beginning is just feeling insecure. She wants someone to reassure her she's on the right road or to tell her if she's on the wrong road. But I already know she's on the right road, even if she doesn't. I know she's really smart and really talented. I also know she has excellent instincts, as do the vast majority of actors I work with at New Line.

I think too many actors are used to dictator-directors (I was one in my early years), who dictate every single moment in the show, every gesture, every step. I have no interest in making theatre like that. Theatre is supposed to be collaborative. If I give our actors a lot of freedom to create, they will create wonderful things, because that's the kind of actors we work with. And our actors will create much quirkier, more interesting, more personal, much realer performances -- the kind of performance that we would never get from me telling all the actors exactly what to do throughout the show. I will never be able to create fifteen interesting performances nearly as well as fifteen really great actors can. I love actors. In my ideal world, my shows would be bare stages with nothing to look at but the actors. And I often find that I have way more confidence in my actors than they do in themselves. I think many of them have been trained by mediocre teachers and directors to search for the "right" answers, which really is a fool's errand.

And it makes for boring theatre.

I remember, a number of years ago when the late, lamented Hydeware Theatre Co. produced Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. It's a two-character one-act, and they performed it twice for each audience, with a different set and the actors swapping roles the second time. And it was a revelation for me! Both "versions" were equally amazing, equally compelling, equally text-based, but I found myself switching allegiances the second time around, having totally different reactions to the same moment. Blew my fucking mind.

It taught me that there are no right answers. Ever. So searching for them is pointless. This was reinforced for me when I saw the off Broadway revival of Rent this fall. All new choices, but every bit as emotional and powerful. And fresh.

I have virtually no worry and angst during Hell Week anymore. If there are no right answers, then these are just our answers, right? Hopefully, audiences will embrace our choices and they will love our show. But if some folks don't, that's okay too. These are just our answers.

We've been working this way for a long time, and we sell out shows and collect rave review after rave review. We know how well our process works. Even if it makes some of our actors a little anxious once in a while...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We'll Live in Peace and Love and Rock & Roll Forever More

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:47:00 +0000

Cry-Baby rehearsals are going really, really well.

We're done blocking the show, everything's choreographed, and Tuesday night, we ran the whole show for the first time. And it was really great! Sure, there were bumps along the way, mostly just brain farts, but it had great energy, a great sense of fun, and some wonderful surprises...

For example... I had suggested to Mike Dowdy that it might be fun if his character Baldwin (the story's squeaky clean villain) starts to really lose his shit in Act II when everything and everyone is turning against him. I thought it would be fun if, by the end of the show, Baldwin was as batshit crazy as the self-mutilating Lenora. (I have to say, I sorta stole this idea from Sondheim's Passion.) And Dowdy fucking ran with it. And he's HILARIOUS as Baldwin slowly slips into musical comedy madness... Wait till you hear him bellowing at his mother to stop honking her car horn. We all crack up every time he does it.

I have the continual privilege of working with some amazing character actors, but Dowdy is truly one of the best character actors I've ever worked with. That he has a gorgeous, killer voice is just a bonus...

And holy shit, speaking of great character actors... Terrie has given Lenora not just a complete and total break with reality, but she also gives her this strangely endearing strength and optimism that eventually Cry-Baby will be hers. You gotta admire her tenacity. I sometimes wonder if Lenora would seem as deeply deranged if she were in love with someone who actually loved her back. Yeah, she probably would. I've got poor Terrie literally running around the stage throughout the show, getting continually pushed and shoved and generally manhandled, passing out on stage, screaming (one time with an awesome Exorcist voice), and then of course she gets what may be the funniest song in the whole show, "Screw Loose," the outrageously bizarre power ballad lovingly ripped off from Patsy Cline's "Crazy," but taken to its logical, comically terrifying extreme.

I heard someone say in an interview one time that the heart of all great comedy is desperation. I never thought about it that much until I the other night when I watched the remake of Once Upon a Mattress, with Carol Burnett, Tracy Ullman, Tommy Smothers, Matthew Morrison, and Denis O'Hare. It's really good! And in one of the bonus features, someone mentioned that every major character in the show acts out of desperation. And I immediately thought about Cry-Baby and realized it's true there too...

Our "Teardrops" -- Cry-Baby's girl gang -- are also doing such a wonderful job, and the three women playing them (Marcy, Sarah, and Chrissy) are obviously having as much fun with each other as they are with the show. I told them recently that I thought the only thing that we hadn't gotten at yet was these kids' childishness. A lot of John Waters characters act and talk really childishly. I think that's his way of showing us how socially and emotionally retarded his characters (and our country?) are, but it also points up how kids (and immature adults) will often attack first if they think an attack is coming. Kinda like George W. Bush, except nobody dies. I think it's also Waters' way of commenting on how childish we all really are a lot of the time, even though most of us usually hide it better. Usually. And also, I think a central point of the show is that these are kids; they're not bad and they're not hardened criminals, although I think we can bet they shoplift.

These girls are essentially innocents (though maybe not sexually), looked down upon -- and arrested and jailed -- for no real reason other than irrational prejudice. So the more childish their behavior is, the easier it will be for the audience to recognize them as kids and see through the lie that they're "bad." There's a kind of social tragedy here, but also real strength of character, I think. On the one hand, they're damaged, defensive, walled-off, 11-year-old girls, who aren't letting anybody near them because they know that always ends in abuse and/or pain. On the other hand, these are strong women surviving in a less hospitable world than a more generous god would have allowed. As both defense and offense, the Drapes essentially perform a caricature of the Squares' perception of them. Their sexuality (and Mona's face) is their weapon to scare people away. But notice how quickly they accept Allison into their ranks. The Drapes aren't reflexively judgmental like the Squares are.

Ryan is really finding Cry-Baby's voice and his physical style, and though most of his songs are really funny -- my favorite song title in the show is "Baby Baby Baby Baby (Baby Baby)" -- he's also finding that sincerity that's so important to his character. He's really starting to nail that tightrope walk between wacky and dead serious. It's that Bat Boy style that I can't seem to stop talking about -- "the depth of sincerity, the height of expression" -- and even though Ryan and several others in the cast have never explored that difficult style with us, they're totally finding their footing.

One thing Ryan and I have talked about a lot is this new male ideal that surfaced in America after World War II, which Cry-Baby represents, rejecting the "strong, silent type" like John Wayne and Gary Cooper for the more emotional, more openly sexual, more damaged, more socially subversive Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Montgomery Clift. World War II changed our country in subtle ways that most people didn't understand at the time. After the chaos of wartime, adults now wanted strict conformity. One of my favorite lines in the show: Mrs. Vernon-Williams says to Allison, "Now, darling, didn't I ask you never to have problems?"

Taylor is also really finding Allison. I think it was hard for her, first of all, to be playing the "normal" one (essentially playing herself to a large degree) amidst all these other crazy characters (although the more we work on the show, the more I realize Cry-Baby is "normal" too), and at the same time to be stylistically inside that old-school musical comedy style. But I think one comment from John Waters really helped -- that Allison is a good girl possessed by a bad girl... I love that image. Taylor and I have talked about Allison a lot. What I loved so much about this character in Waters' movie is that she's so completely open to new experiences, so completely lacking in judgment of others, so in love with the adventure of life -- most of which was lost in the original Broadway production of the musical. Allison is the audience's way into this story; she's our surrogate. She learns about the Drapes as we do. And she also learns about 1950s social hysteria once she joins the Drapes and all the fear and bigotry are suddenly directed at her too!

Not too long ago, I watched the 1955 film The Blackboard Jungle, a really great drama with Glenn Ford, Sidney Poitier, Anne Francis, Richard Kiley, and a very young Jamie Farr. It's about a young teacher, back from World War II and having just gone to college on the legendary G.I. Bill, who gets a job in a really tough, urban school. Some of it is melodrama, and early on, it feels like the poor kids are automatically the "bad kids" -- exactly as it is in Cry-Baby -- but as the story progresses, it gets a lot more complex and a lot less predictable. Released just one year after Cry-Baby is set, there are some really interesting sociological insights in the movie both about the teacher's generation ("the Greatest Generation") and also the "juvenile delinquents" that are at the center of Cry-Baby.

But at the same time that the musical Cry-Baby is an insightful social document, it's also a fascinating statement about this moment in the evolution of the musical theatre. I saw the national tour of Rock of Ages last week and had an absolute blast! It's much smarter and funnier than I expected, and how can you beat those tunes? And it made me think about how much fun it is watching our art form move towards creating a new, specifically 21st century American musical theatre. These new rock musical comedies, Rock of Ages, Lysistrata Jones, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (which we're producing this fall), Cry-Baby, and others are grappling with the old forms, experimenting with what to embrace, what to discard, what to deconstruct, and what to openly mock. Many elements of old-school, mid-century musical comedy are present in these shows, but in altered, often more self-aware forms, because much of what made those old shows tick no longer works in our current culture. But musical comedy is still an iconic piece of American pop culture, so that shared cultural reference forms the basis from some really funny tearing apart of the old forms. At one point in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Jackson says to the audience, "Uh-huh. Underscore, motherfuckers. That means it's our time. Time for the real people of this nation -- you and me -- time for us to take this fucker back!"

But what are we taking back? America? The American musical comedy...? And from whom? It's hard not to hear echoes of the Tea Party and current conservative politics in both BBAJ and Cry-Baby. And it's hard not to see in Cry-Baby's story of class oppression today's Republican members of Congress who declare that the people who are out of work in this recession are just lazy, and that getting unemployment insurance makes them lazier. Cry-Baby focuses social injustice down to the personal level, and we all feel it

There's so much depth and richness in Cry-Baby, though it's easy to miss it and get caught up in the surface wackiness. Now that we're done with the nuts-and-bolts part of the process, it's time to focus more fully on the artistic end, characters, relationships, motivations, the big emotional arcs, textual and musical themes, etc. Unlike most companies our size, we get eight or nine full run-throughs before an audience sees us. It's a wonderful luxury. And whereas a lot of directors like to polish each moment to a high gloss before putting the pieces together, we do the exact opposite. We put the whole show together fairly quickly, and then we polish it. I think it's easier and more effective to polish and shape the show as a whole than as separate pieces. It's easier to achieve real artistic unity and coherence, which makes the storytelling all that much stronger.

The hardest work is over for me, and the hardest work for the actors is just beginning. My job now is to keep us all on the road together while the actors play.

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Don't Mean to Be Rude

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:38:00 +0000

One of the coolest thing about my job and the kind of work we do is that I frequently get to talk to the writers of the shows we produce -- Jason Robert Brown, Bill Finn, Andrew Lippa, Adam Guettel, Steve Sondheim, Tom Kitt, Amanda Green, Kyle Jarrow, and others. It's so helpful to hear them talk about what elements are really important to them, what their original intentions were, what they thought of their shows' original productions, etc. But now I've had what may be my coolest writer conversation yet...

I had the intense honor yesterday of talking on the phone with John Waters!

First of all, he's every bit as charming and funny as he seems in interviews. And really smart and incredibly literate. He talked about the story, the period (and films of the period), the style, the tone, the cultural context (apparently he did a shitload of research when he wrote the film), and he also gave me a lot of great Drapes vs. Squares background detail. And lest I forget, our guitar player Mike Bauer told me to ask Waters who would win in a fight -- Kathleen Turner or Ricki Lake. You'll have to ask me next time you see me what his answer was...

As much as I've already researched this show, I learned so much from listening to Waters talk about the story, the time period, the social context, etc. Here are some things I learned more about...

After World War II, America saw incredible prosperity but the price for that prosperity was conformity. More than perhaps any other time in American history, conformity was the dominant moral concern. And Cry-Baby (like almost all of Waters' films) is about that culture war between the conformists and the nonconformists. As terrified as American adults were by rock and roll later in the decade (in what I call the Grease era), they were even more terrified in 1954 when Cry-Baby is set, because no one (well, no white people) had ever heard music like this. Not only was it loud and rude and implicitly (sometimes explicitly) sexual, but it was "race music," a polite 50s way of saying black music.

Waters told me that he thinks Mrs. Vernon-Williams would be completely happy to consent to Cry-Baby and Allison's marriage if only Cry-Baby would dress like Baldwin, in other words, that the Drape designation was almost entirely about clothing. The Squares had money and so they could wear the "right" clothes. The Drapes (so named for the drape of the collar on their zoot suits, in the era before this one) didn't have money, the "right" clothing stores weren't in their part of town, and so they wore used clothes, cheap clothes, durable, work clothes. The Drapes were working class; the Squares were upper or upper-middle class. Waters said that in real life, the Drapes were all rednecks, hillbillies, and racists, though he softened them a bit (at least their racism) for the film. And in the musical, one of Cry-Baby's gang is black.

Waters said good models for Cry-Baby and the Drapes are Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Elvis, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Sal Mineo...

He said a good Drape girl model is Debra Paget (who was in Love Me Tender with Elvis). He said the role of Allison is an unusual one for him because it's the only heroine he ever wrote who was totally normal (when he said that, I scrolled through all his movies in my head and realized he was right!). He said the secret to Allison is that she's a good girl possessed by a bad girl.

We talked about our approach to the show and he confirmed for me that we're on the right track stylistically, thematically, comedically. He also confirmed for me that the Drapes are not at all bad people (after all, they're the heroes of the story), and that they perform the false image the Square world has of them, exaggerating it, as both protection and as a mocking of their Square oppressors. The Drapes were entertained, even vindicated in a weird way, by the considerable power of fear they held over the Squares -- much as it was with the Greasers in the late 50s and the hippies in the 60s. But Waters also made the point that the Squares aren't all losers and nerds -- they're just Square. He said the Squares would grow up to be hippies in the 60s (and, no doubt, investment bankers in the 80s); but the Drapes would always be Drapes (much like the Greasers in Grease), I guess because they're inexorably trapped in their socio-economic status.

He said he thinks the main reason Cry-Baby failed on Broadway -- not long after Hairspray had been such a massive hit -- is that Cry-Baby is truer to his movie. It's rude, gross, aggressive, disrespectful, and very sexual. The Drapes are conscious cultural terrorists (a term I think Waters coined, maybe for his hilarious Cecil B. Demented). Waters was very clear that the Drapes are not criminals (some petty shoplifting notwithstanding), they're not destructive, they're not mean. They're not actually "bad," but their response to the weight of their social oppression is to culturally terrorize the mainstream Square culture that oppresses them. They fight back with the only weapon they have -- their Otherness. In the musical, they not only assault the Squares with rock and roll, but also with crudity and cultural disrespect, using words like ass and singing about kissing with tongue...! Not your usual Broadway musical fare. But tailor-made for New Line. As Waters put it, it was the dirtiest family-friendly musical on Broadway. You can see the commercial problem. Hairspray really is Fun for the Whole Family. Cry-Baby is not. Cry-Baby itself is a bit of a cultural terrorist within the musical comedy form.

When we were done talking, he told me to call him or email him if I had any other questions. I had such a blast talking to him -- partly because I got such good information and insight into Cry-Baby but also because he's really one of my all-time top cultural heroes. I love his movies. I love his wacky, subversive, dark-as-pitch sense of humor. I love that he opened artistic doors for so many of us with his ballsy, brilliant films. I'm reading his memoir Shock Value and the way he talks about his circle of friends who made movies with him -- the Dreamland family -- is so much like the way we talk about the New Liners. I guess in a way, the New Liners are minor cultural terrorists... At least for musical theatre geeks...

So much to think about! Thanks, John!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We're Lucky to Be Us

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:08:00 +0000

Still working on funding applications for next season... Part of that process is asking people in our community to write "letters of support" about how cool New Line is, to include with our applications.

This year, the three support letters we'll be including in our applications are so heartfelt and so complimentary, that I have to share them with you. One letter is from Kyle Jarrow, writer-composer of the brilliant rock musical Love Kills, which New Line produced in 2009. The second is from Jake Fruend, college student and former New Line intern. And the third letter is from Larry Quiggins, the head of the theatre department at Lindenwood University. I think you'll see why I wanted to post these...

To Whom It May Concern:

I love New Line Theatre. Not just because they did a great production of one of my plays — not just because Scott Miller is one of the most thoughtful, passionate and engaged artistic directors I’ve ever interacted with — but because New Line Theatre is saving the Musical. The musical is one of the most iconic American popular art forms. And yet, it’s struggling to stay relevant. As I see it, this is the result of a number of factors: ticket prices rising, the average age of theatergoers rising, as well as the commercial pressures that bring more and more unnecessary film adaptations to Broadway. For the next generation of audience, for whom theater is competing with film and television and video game systems, it’s not surprising that musicals often don’t feel like a very good investment of time and money.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A great piece of musical theater can have incredible power. Music has the ability to drill straight into our emotional cores, to elevate drama in a profound way. New Line Theatre understands this. From my discussions with Scott, it’s clear that his company approaches musicals as drama — committed to digging deep to excavate the best in the works his company chooses to produce. In every production, they work to prove why the musical form is important. They demonstrate why this form deserves to live on, and why it deserves to evolve with the times.

I don’t know of any other theater that does the kind of programming that New Line does. They take chances on new, cutting-edge works. They revisit quality shows that flopped on Broadway but deserve another look. And they do game-changing reinterpretations of classics. It’s a varied, exciting mission, and I’m honored to have been included in it. I very much hope to be again. New Line deserves your fullest support. What they’re doing is truly important.

All the best,
Kyle Jarrow
New York, NY

To Whom It May Concern,

There are days — many, in fact — when I wake up in my full-size bed, blocks away from Wrigley Field on the southern bit of Chicago’s north side, and think, “Do I really want to call myself an artist today?”

The answer, more often than not, is an unyielding and resounding, “No.”

It is easy to run away from the challenges presented to the theatre artist. The pressure to connect with every viewer on a philosophical and sometimes political level can be intimidating. However, there are a few individual performers, directors, designers, and companies that can embrace the challenge, embrace the work, and create something sincerely unique and inspiring. St. Louis’s own New Line Theatre is one of those companies. And I firmly believe that my artistic education truly began with my introduction to New Line and the work of its artistic director Scott Miller.

I really came into contact with New Line’s core ideas when I was given the opportunity to work as assistant director for their 2010 production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita. Through the application of Brechtian dramaturgical principles — stop me if I’m talking too fast — which have for too long eluded the musical theatre form, Scott is able to transform these classic, sometimes stale pieces into charmingly funny, provocative, volatile, socially and politically relevant works of living, breathing art.

At a New Line show, we are not presented with a casually frivolous stroll through the musical days of yesteryear. Instead, we are invited to take part in a musical reflection of where we, as a society both political and theatrical, are collectively headed.

New Line also supports St. Louis’s aspiring young artists by offering a musical theatre scholarship each year to a graduating high school senior. I was the first student ever to receive this gift in 2009, and I suspect that New Line’s generosity is partially to blame for my journey to this city that I now lovingly call my home.

Mr. Miller talks a lot (in his books, on his blog, and in his exhaustive program notes) about a “new golden age of musical theatre” happening right here, right now. I believe that this golden age can never really be experienced in a Broadway theater. Instead, it can be found in cities like Chicago and St. Louis, Seattle and Minneapolis, in basements and storefronts, on the streets, in classrooms, and bathtubs all across this country. Musical theatre is returning to the people. New Line has been leading this charge for nearly 21 years now, and they’ve been changing the lives and opening the eyes of young artists for just as long.

So it is with a grateful heart, a sometimes artistically reluctant mind, and absolutely no shame that I ask you to give generously to this unquestionably authentic force for good. Because this morning, thanks to New Line Theatre, I am proud to call myself an artist, an advocate, and an ambassador to Chicago for the brilliant theatre of St. Louis.

Cheers,
Jake Fruend
college student

To Whom It May Concern,

I have been a supporter and patron of New Line Theatre for the last 16 years. I have found that New Line is the most diverse and entertaining theatre company that St. Louis has to offer. Season after season, New Line produces cutting-edge productions that fascinate, shock, move, and put their audiences in awe. These are productions that make the audience think and leave them wanting to come back and experience more.

Some of the past New Line shows that should be highlighted are The Nervous Set, Reefer Madness, Kiss of The Spider Woman, Return to Forbidden Planet, The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee, Bat Boy, Hair, and Man of La Mancha. The talent that performs in New Line productions is always the best that St. Louis has to offer. New Line Theatre is affectionately nicknamed "The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre" for its cutting edge productions but I think of the company as "The Cool Kids of Musical Theatre."

St. Louis is blessed to have such a wonderful and professional theatre company housed in its city and those who support the arts should line up and help New Line to continue to bring their excellent brand of theatre to St. Louis.

Larry D. Quiggins
Associate Dean of Fine and Performing Arts
Director of Theatre
Lindenwood University

It's so wonderful for me to read letters like these and know that everything we aim to accomplish we are actually accomplishing: bringing St. Louis works of theatre and a performance style that no other company attempts, educating the next generation of musical theatre artists, supporting the musical theatre writers who are taking great risks and writing breathtakingly original musicals, and letting New York and the whole country know that St. Louis is the place where new, vibrant, exciting work in the musical theatre is being done by committed, talented artists at the top of their game, unfettered by the soul-crushing market forces of commercial theatre. (Can you tell I feel strongly about this?)

Like those we serve, New Line is unique. And that's why we're given production rights to cool shows like Love Kills, She's Hideous, High Fidelity, Cry-Baby, and others. Writers trust New Line. They know we're on their side and we have no desire to "leave our mark" on their work. We're just here to tell these amazing, funny, emotional stories as clearly, as truthfully, and as faithfully to the writers' intentions as possible.

I'm so proud of all the work we've done in the last twenty years, and of all the work to come...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

See, I've Got a Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:30:00 +0000

There's a fine, fine line, as Kate Monster would tell us.

We walk a potentially treacherous tightrope with a lot of our shows, quite a few of which have wacky, outrageous surfaces and serious, intense, sometimes even depressing subtext. But the Cry-Baby tightrope may be the hardest to balance on. After all, it's concept musical in which the style of old-school musical comedy wars with the style of the modern rock musical, and this stylistic battle serves as a big, blazing metaphor for the central conflict of the story.

But that's not all there is to it... The story is also originally a John Waters movie, which I'd like to think of as its own film subgenre, which has an outlaw, even antagonistic sensibility, even though Waters' Cry-Baby was more mainstream than his earlier films. How does that translate into such a joyful, old-fashioned form like musical comedy? Well it's an altered form of musical comedy, more postmodern I think than even the Sondheim shows, more a neo musical comedy like Bat Boy and Urinetown.

Waters' movies generally want to tell you to fuck off (though they're really only kidding) and musical comedy wants to wrap you in its warm and happy arms. It sounds like a mash-up that couldn't work. But it really does. And I think it's that very tension that makes the show interesting and complex and political enough to hold an audience who wants a little meat in their theatre. Metaphorically speaking.

Because our production of Cry-Baby will be much smaller than the original, we're constantly having to make decisions about how to handle various elements of the show with a cast of little more than half the size of the original. Add to that the fact that the original Broadway production got the show pretty drastically wrong, so most of their choices are of no use to us at all. And with each decision and each choice comes a question of style and tone. What are the rules in this hybrid universe? What can we do and what can't we do?

Because of this Battle of the Styles, half our characters live by one set of rules, and the other half live by another set. The Squares live in a rosy 1950s musical comedy, in which "Squeaky Clean" is one of those Clever Charm Songs. The Drapes live in a gritty, off Broadway rock musical world, in which sexuality and The Beat (which, as we all know, You Can't Stop) rule the day, and the driving "You Can't Beat the System" at the end of Act I serves as a powerful indictment of our unequal society and an American justice system which rigs the game in favor of the rich and the mainstream.

If you've ever seen footage of the original productions of Grease and Hair -- or the more recent shows, Love Kills and American Idiot -- you'll know what I'm talking about. These rock shows are raw, ragged, intense, aggressive, violent, spontaneous, sexual. These shows (when they're done right) are the punk rock of musical theatre.

Add to all of this conceptual complexity the fact that half our cast plays both Squares and Drapes at various times during the show. So many of our actors have to live in both worlds at one time or another.

It's been fun watching Robin choreograph wildly different numbers in the two styles. She staged this hilariously goofy, posy confection for "Squeaky Clean," and on the flipside, last night she finished "A Little Upset," this heavy, masculine, angry number with a short football game in the middle of a prison breakout. On my end, I get to have fun because in rehearsal because I get to play all these awesome old-school songs and also these pounding rock songs. Our scenic designer Scott Schoonover has had to find a way to accommodate both worlds at once but also separately. Our costumer Amy Kelly has to give the Squares slightly more styled, less naturalistic clothes than the Drapes will wear. Like I said, it's a tightrope. A very high-concept tightrope.

And let's be clear -- it's not important that the audience understands all this stuff consciously. Like much in our art form, all this will work subliminally.

Now that I think (and write) about it, I realize that Cry-Baby fully embodies the revolution that I've been talking about for the last year or more, the fact that we're at the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era and that the rock musical is now becoming the primary form of the American musical theatre. Just as Show Boat in 1927 marked the end of the first era of musical comedy and the beginning of the serious musical drama by combining the two forms in one show, just as Follies in 1971 marked the end of the mid-century musical comedy and the ascendance of the Prince-Sondheim concept musicals, so too Cry-Baby marks an epochal change in the art form today. Its New York production was too big a clueless mess for the critics to see the intelligence and complexity at the heart of this clever, rich, political piece of theatre, but all that is there. This is one of those shows like Rocky Horror and Grease that have so much more going on under the surface than some critics are able to see.

When you think about how much people dismiss Grease now, partly because of the fun but tamed-down movie version and partly because of the awful, empty-headed revivals that keep coming back over and over like something out of a George Romero movie, it's important to remember that some people really understood how smart and authentic Grease was when it first opened. Critic Michael Feingold wrote about the show for the first publication of the script the same year it opened on Broadway, and what he wrote is just as descriptive of the Drapes in Cry-Baby as it was of the Greasers. After all, Cry-Baby takes place only four years earlier than Grease, so Rizzo could easily be Wanda's older sister... Feingold wrote:

The people of Grease are a special class of aliens, self-appointed cynics in a work-oriented, upwardly mobile world. We know from the prologue that history has played its dirty trick on them before they even appear. They are not at the reunion; they will not be found among the prosperous Mrs. Honeywells and the go-getting vice presidents of Straight-Shooters, Unlimited. Nor, on the other hand, did they actively drop out; that was left to their younger siblings and cousins. (Memory of a line too explicit, and cut from the script early on: "Course I like life. Whaddaya think I am, a beatnik?") They were the group who thought they had, or chose to have, nowhere to go. They stayed in the monotonous work routine of the lower middle class, acquiring, if they were lucky, enough status to move to one of the more nondescript suburbs, and losing their strongest virtue – the group solidarity that had made them, in high school, a force to be reckoned with. It is appropriate that the finale of Grease celebrates that solidarity, with the saving of its heroine, and the reclamation of its hero from the clutches of respectability – a good lusty razz at the sanctimonious endings of those Sal Mineo j.d. [juvenile delinquent] movies (Somebody Up There Likes Me, remember?) wherein the tough punk is saved for society at the end. Everybody knew you didn’t go to those films to see that part...

I hadn't realized until now that the kids of Cry-Baby's Baltimore and Grease's Chicago are essentially of the same generation. Rock & roll had matured more by the late 50s of Grease, starting to find its authentic voice, but it was just being born in 1954 when Cry-Baby is set. And in both shows, the 1950s easily stand in for our own tumultuous times of cultural and political upheaval. There is so much under the surface of both shows, there for those who want to see it, subtle enough for those who choose to ignore it. Feingold also wrote in that introduction:

Grease does not discourse about our presence in Saigon. Nor does it contain in-depth study of such other 50s developments as the growth of mega-corporations and conglomerates, the suburban building boom that broke the backs of our cities, the separation of labor’s political power from the workers by union leaders and organization men. Although set in and around an urban high school, it does not even discuss one of the decade’s dominant news stories, the massive expansion of the university system, and the directing of a whole generation of war babies toward the pursuit of college degrees. Grease is an escape, a musical designed to entertain, not to concern itself with serious political and social matters. But because it is truthful, because it spares neither the details nor the larger shapes of the narrow experience on which it focuses so tightly, Grease implies the topics I have raised, and many others. So I think it is a work of art, a firm image that projects, by means of what it does contain, everything it has chosen to leave out. And between the throbs of its ebullience, charm, and comedy, it conveys a feeling, about where we have been and how we got to where we are…

The same is true of Cry-Baby. It's pure, rowdy fun. Goddamn is it fun! But it's also a sardonic and clear-eyed look at our fucked-up culture, still not progressed far enough beyond the petty bigotries of the 1950s. And it's also a look at our art form. The old forms can only act as jumping off places now; they can no longer stand on their own. But we're in luck, because amazing, exciting, daring new musicals are being written every day. And we New Liners are lucky enough that we get to work on a lot of them.

It is such an honor that the Cry-Baby writers have trusted us with their creation, and also that we get to work on a show this interesting, this fun, this fearless. I am so often humbled before the amazing, beautiful theatre pieces we continually have the privilege of working on. And there are more to come – Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Next to Normal, and other really cool shows...

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You People Think You Know Me

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I've been working on funding applications lately, something I really hate a lot. I usually procrastinate till the last minute but I decided I'd try to do them early this year, several weeks before the deadlines, before I get too busy with Cry-Baby rehearsals.

Each year we get written feedback on our applications from the "peer panel" that reviews them. Some of these comments are helpful and some are just weird, but the ones that really bother me are from people who want to cram New Line into some mold they have in their mind and slap some preexisting label on us.

I've learned over the years that it's hard for some people to accept anything that doesn't fit into their existing categories. And of course, New Line doesn't fit into most people's existing categories. I'm constantly getting emails and Facebook messages from young musical theatre lovers who are absolutely astounded -- and thrilled -- that a company like New Line exists. Too many people think musicals are all Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hello, Dolly!, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera. But we're doing musicals like The Wild Party which includes plenty of singing and dancing, but also a rape and an orgy, and Love Kills, about teenage spree murderers. And though we take our musicals very seriously, sometimes they can also be as outrageous as Bat Boy or Reefer Madness. One of the our peer panelists was so desperate to label our company that she referred to us in one of her comments as "avant garde."

Seriously? Nothing we've ever produced even comes close to avant garde. Okay, maybe Jacques Brel...

One panelist wondered why we don't get more kids at our shows, presumably because musicals are Fun for the Whole Family...? (Clearly this person has never bothered to see our shows.) Last year, one of the panelists found it "troubling" that we didn't survey our audience to pick shows. Huh??? If we surveyed our audiences to pick our shows, St. Louis would have never seen Love Kills, Woman with Pocketbook, Return to the Forbidden Planet, High Fidelity, and so many other shows -- or for that matter, Cry-Baby. The idea of an audience survey is built on the false assumption that people are already aware of everything they could possibly like, and we know that's not true. People like what's good; not just what they know. And our job is to find exciting work for them. As Edmund Burke once said, "Your representative owes you not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion." (I only know that quote because it's in 1776.) But too many theatre artists either don't know that's their job or they don't really trust their own judgment...

And I think all this is the reason Cry-Baby was so manhandled in New York. It doesn't fit into any existing categories, other than maybe my newly minted label, "neo musical comedy." The production team (director, choreographer, designers) tried to make it old-school musical comedy, but this is a show that works on two levels from beginning to end, and they were only recognizing the surface layer. They did not understand this show. They tried to make it trendy, self-conscious meta-theatre, where the actors are "commenting" on their characters and their performances, but that's not what this show is either. They tried to make it into one of those shallow-ass revivals (and artistic rapes) of Grease, with castrated, cartoon Greasers and tons of frantic dancing that aims to make you forget how bland everything else is. You can see from my description what a clueless mess it was. The director spent the whole musical just begging the audience for laughs, and that's the last fucking thing John Waters would ever do! John Waters slaps you in the face and then blows cigarette smoke at you. Dammit.

I've been thinking about all this after seeing Sunday in the Park with George at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. These lines always catch me...

Stop worrying if your vision
Is new.
Let others make that decision --
They usually do.
Just keep moving on.

"They usually do." Ain't that the fuckin' truth. All my life people have wanted me to fit some idea they were already comfortable with. And I never could. When I was four, I knew I was going to work in the musical theatre. I started my own theatre company at age 27 and then quit my "real" job six years later. And now for the last twenty years people have tried to make New Line fit into some idea that's easy to understand and file away. But what fun would that be?

I love giving our audiences wildly different experiences, from Love Kills and bare to Bat Boy and Two Gents. You never know what you'll get when you come to a New Line show -- except you know you'll get an adventure. As you will with Cry-Baby...

In the last several years, a few other companies have popped up that are 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; and Slow Burn Theatre Company in Fort Lauderdale.

Maybe together we can all form our own category...

I think New Line's greatest strength is in taking each show on its own terms. I'm not sure the New York commercial theatre is capable of doing that anymore. They ruined High Fidelity and Cry-Baby both. And New York couldn't sustain runs of either the wonderful Lysistrata Jones or the amazing The Blue Flower.

I never forget that, though I do create a lot in my work, my first job is to follow the road the writers have laid out for us. The show is what they say it is; not what I say it is. It seems New York directors and designers (and producers, I assume) are less willing to do that. And I think that's one of the biggest differences between commercial musical theatre and what we do.

Watch as the New Liners make Cry-Baby work, even though the Broadway team couldn't...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Life Is a Long Road to Death

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:07:00 +0000

We used to start our first day of rehearsal with a read-through. A lot of directors do that. But doing that with a musical means I have to play and sing all the songs that first night, since the actors won't necessarily know them yet. And if I do that, the actors don't get as good a sense of the show as they might otherwise. So a few years ago, we changed our process. Now we do all our music rehearsals first and learn the score. When that's done, then we have a read-through-sing-through, and the cast gets a much clearer sense of the show. We did that Thursday night.

But I've found that first read-through is still really nerve-wracking for some actors, even if it's not on the first night. They sit there, juggling script and score, trying to jump back and forth between books as the songs come and go, and some actors start feeling really overwhelmed. Then they screw up a piece of harmony or miss a phrase or whatever, and then they start beating themselves up for fucking up in front of the whole cast, and then their focus is off... And that critical self-editor starts yammering at them inside their head... And so they spend the evening thinking they suck.

And then afterwards, at least one or two of them come up to me to reassure me that they know their music. But I already know that. I know exactly what they're going through. I've been doing musicals since 1976, and writing them and directing them since 1981. There are so many parts of the process of making a piece of musical theatre which can fuck with the actors' heads -- not the least of which is the barbaric practice of auditions. How awful that an actor has to come into a room and sell himself to us. He is the product we may be rejecting later by carelessly tossing his audition sheet into the No pile. It can be soul-crushing.

So New Line created a new rule a few years ago that any actor who's worked with us during the past eighteen months does not have to audition for us anymore. You have no idea how happy our actors were about that. That doesn't solve the problem, but it does make it better. And it also makes it easier to keep our (modified) repertory company intact. Even though we try to balance each cast with about half new people and half people we've worked with before, the New Line regulars often come back show after show after show. And there are a handful of them that will happily do pretty much every single New Line show. Especially now that they can skip auditions...

And it ain't for the money...

But the whole process is an ego-buster. I try not to use the word No too often as we work, because I want to be as encouraging as I can be, but I often find myself saying it anyway. I try to keep rehearsals relatively light and fun, to keep the soul-crushing to a minimum, but sometimes the work is really hard and the fun has to wait. And if an actor is really struggling with something, I try really hard to come up with a solution to his problem before I talk to him about it. That doesn't always work out, but I try.

I've also taught myself over time not to judge an actor's performance too harshly in rehearsal. Maybe it looks like this actor is heading in a totally wrong direction, but maybe he's trying to create something complicated and he needs some time to work it out, before I charge in and tell him it won't work. After all, I allow myself first drafts when I'm writing; shouldn't I give actors that same luxury? On the other hand, sometimes I really do know right away we're on a wrong road and it's better to fix that early.

As you can see, it's a tough job I have.

And I do all this stuff to try to make it easier on my actors because I really love actors. I love watching them work, watching them create, watching them make magic. And the really good ones can really surprise and delight me with their unexpected but often brilliant, truthful choices.

The good news is that we always have the most amazing theatre artists working with us, and this show is no exception. From my perspective, I thought our read-through-sing-through went pretty awesomely. We laughed all night long (this is a really smart, funny show!), most of the songs sounded very good, and a few sounded amazing already. As much as I often feel like a blind man groping his way through casting our shows, the end result is always wonderful. So it was such fun to hear these characters for the first time, to hear how perfectly each actor fits his role. I honestly don't know how it works out show after show, but it does.

I can also see at this early stage that not everybody understands this Bat Boy style we're going after yet. It's a difficult style to master -- really exaggerated and outrageous, and at the same time completely, utterly honest and truthful. Unless they've seen a lot of New Line shows, or caught Bat Boy or Urinetown in New York, they've likely never seen a show done in this style. It's a hell of a tightrope for an actor to walk. But we've become pretty expert at it, if I do say so myself...

I don't usually give the actors too much direction for the read-through; I wanna see what they've been thinking about and what cool things they may bring to the table. But the one note I gave to the Teardrops, Cry-Baby's Drape back-up girls, is that whenever they're talking to Squares, every word is an assault. Each sentence is a dirty, cracked baseball bat with some dried blood on it and they're slamming it down on the Squares' squishy little heads. It's like a six-year-old who's mad at her parents for making her go to bed early, so she's gonna say the meanest things she can think of, with the meanest face and meanest delivery she can muster. With the Drapes, it's almost always a preemptive strike, more a general reaction rather than a specific one. But they're not bad people; they're just performing their "badness" as a kind of body armor to protect against the simplistic moral judgment that's always radiating out of the Squares like a crayon sun. Most importantly, the Drapes aren't cartoon characters; these are real people, behaving in a childish, cartoonish way. Their "bad kid" status becomes a performance -- a mask -- for the world.

How often have I seen that, living here in South City? Constantly.

After the read-through, I told the whole cast (as I always do when we work on comedies) that if they get an idea for a bit of stage business or a reaction or something, and they think, "This is funny! I bet it'll get a laugh," then they must immediately discard the idea. If, on the other hand, they get an idea and think "This will really define my character," or "This will set up that revelation at the end," then they're on the right road. Never for a laugh. Only for storytelling. If the storytelling is good, the laughs will take care of themselves.

We've got two choreography rehearsals over the next two days (there's a lot of dance in this show!), and then we start blocking. I don't like blocking because it's the hardest work I have to do in the process (depending on the show, I guess). But I do love getting a show up on its feet...

After all, it's not theatre on the page. It's only theatre when actors, directors, musicians, and designers bring it to life in front of an audience.

It's going to be such fun putting this show together. The actors are starting to realize that they're the second people ever to do Cry-Baby the Musical, that there's only the original Broadway cast and the New Line cast. I've had this experience several times (check out our High Fidelity promo video on that topic), but it's awfully cool the first time that hits you...

More soon... The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Your Fear of Other People

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:30:00 +0000

The first words Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker sings in Cry-Baby are:

Well, It’s a perfect day to scare a square
For no apparent reason:
By singing, dancing, standing there,
Maybe just by sneezin'.
Your fear of other people
never ceases to amaze.
You call that class?

The show's central joke -- which doubles as potent social commentary on our world in 2012 -- is that the bad kids are really the Good Guys, and the good kids are really the Bad Guys. As far as these Squares in 1954 Baltimore are concerned, rock and roll is "race music" and it's Bad, so anyone who sings or listens to rock and roll is, ipso facto, Bad. No other details are necessary. As we all know, in the real world those who claim to be morally superior frequently aren't. Today conservatives accuse liberals of "moral relativism," but this is the worst kind.

The Drapes can scare the Squares merely by showing up, but that gives them a certain kind of Power.

It puts me in mind of the infamous quote from Newt Gingrich to the Occupy Wall Street movement: "Go get a job. Right after you take a bath." His condescension, his wild generalizations, and his false assumptions would be breathtaking if we didn't already know what a crazy dumbass he is. But it's a view held by many people, both in 1954 and today, that The Others (blacks, Jews, gays, Muslims, Drapes, mixed race Presidents...) are both alien to "our way of life" and therefore also morally inferior. I can't help but think the pro-segregation protesters in this photo look an awful lot like the Tea Party. Gingrich has said about Obama, "This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president." He couldn't possibly have won fair and square because he is Other.

Wow. Seriously?

This show of ours seems to be about this exact moment we're living through today, even though it was written several years ago, before the national onset of Obama Derangement Syndrome. But the outsider Cry-Baby can now easily stand in for Obama, rejected by "upstanding" Protestants, not for what he says or does, but for who he is.

One of the creators of Bat Boy had read that societies tend to scapegoat three types of people -- the unusual, the vulnerable, and the gifted. So the Bat Boy team made Edgar the Bat Boy all three of those things. But in a way, Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker is all three, too. He's different because he was born poor, he lives in the wrong part of town, and his parents were executed as criminals. He's vulnerable because society sees him both as an orphan, with no place in the Squares' carefully balanced social structure, and as the "bad seed" of his "criminal" parents. He has no place in the world and no place in the social structure; he has no protection. And last, he's also gifted in that he's a talented musician and singer. Like the Bat Boy, Cry-Baby is an outcast not for anything he's done, but for who he is.

And to some extent, all three things are true about Obama too. He's certainly different and gifted. And he was arguably vulnerable as a biracial kid in the 1960s.

Or for that matter, as a black man in America in 2012.

Cry-Baby gets at a fundamental truth of the postwar era. Many of the so-called "juvenile delinquents" of the early 1950s were born during the Depression, then lost their fathers to World War II during their most formative childhood years, and then got really damaged fathers back after the war, many of those fathers now suffering under the weight of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. Cry-Baby having lost both his parents stands in for that whole transition generation, the ones lost between The Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, falling into that crack between the generation of deprivation and the generation of abundance.

This is the peak of American Cold War hysteria and racial hysteria, of nationalized, legitimized paranoia, of air raid drills and of seeing other Americans as “enemies” for no good reason other than the need for a boogeyman. Sound like any cable news network you know? Notice in this picture that these are kids protesting having to go to school with black kids. Fuck! And significantly, these are all things we're still doing – just replace Commies with Muslims and replace black folks with... um, well, black folks -- and it's like looking in a mirror. Well, a funhouse mirror.

What makes Cry-Baby so relevant to today's audiences is that it shows us a world of two mutually exclusive realities, exactly like our America in 2012, where we can't agree even on fundamental questions of fact and morality, where it feels like we don't all even live in the same world anymore. Cry-Baby lives in the 1950s that many of today's conservatives want to return to, a paradise for white, upper- and middle-class males, but purgatory and worse for everyone else.

One of the reasons we can laugh at all this darkness in Cry-Baby is that the writers have created an exaggerated reverse morality in this world, one exactly opposite to what most people in the audience believe in, a world in which the audience is automatically on the side of the oppressed. That didn't happen much in musicals before the 1960s, with only a few exceptions, like The Cradle Will Rock. Most old-school musicals did their best to reinforce their audiences' worldview, not challenge it.

But the rock musical changed that, with shows like Hair, Grease, Dreamgirls, Rent, Hedwig, Spring Awakening, Hairspray, bare, Love Kills, Passing Strange, American Idiot, and lots of others. Rock and roll was never meant to be for the mainstream culture; it was a rebel music form. Adults already had their own slick, bland, aggressively inoffensive music in 1954, from Doris Day, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher, et al. Rock and roll was for teenagers. It was for outcasts. Jazz was made for the brain; it was about detachment. But rock and roll came straight from the heart and the groin. It was about primal feelings and desires. Rock and roll was animal, outlaw. It was sweaty. It didn't float like jazz. It exploded. It pounded. Rock and roll was actually banned in major cities across America. It terrified white adult America. Listening to rock became the ultimate rebellion, especially for white kids. Their parents saw it as the biggest danger to all that’s decent. Early rock and roll was the punk rock of its time.

And Elvis was the Sid Vicious of his day. Imagine if Sid Vicious wanted to take your daughter to Turkey Point. No wonder adults were so afraid...

To some extent, Cry-Baby works like Huckleberry Finn, in that what the characters find “wrong” or “anti-social” we the audience find innocent and innocuous, even praiseworthy. Rock and roll doesn't scare us today. The cultural backdrop of the show is about how much our perspective, values, norms have changed, and how not fabulous the 1950s really were for many people…

And also how much we haven't changed...

And by extension, Cry-Baby also says something about old-school musicals. What we ask from a musical comedy today has really changed since 1954. Cry-Baby argues subliminally that "Golden Age" musical theatre (1943-1964) may be a jumping off place for new works of art, but in their original form most of those musicals no longer speak to us. The shows and the form itself have to be retrofitted in order to work in the 21st century. But when the retrofitters really know what they're doing, the new work can be really interesting and really exciting.

Our Cry-Baby adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nobody Gets Me

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:30:00 +0000

It's an interesting position I'm in with Cry-Baby.

With most shows we produce, we can assume that the original production is at least close to what the writers intended, or even their ideal, so I know I can learn things from those original choices even if I don't use them. But I've found over the years that I can't always make that assumption. I've discovered that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber were not happy with the original Broadway productions of Jesus Christ Superstar or Evita; in both cases, the shows became much bigger than they intended and the rock and roll got lost along the way. (New Line took them both in completely different directions and got rave reviews.) I also know Sondheim wasn't all that happy with the concept for the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, which he wanted to be a small, scary, chamber musical. (Which is what New Line did with it.)

In some cases, the original production of a show just flat out sucks, and sadly, it can effectively mask really wonderful material, making it appear mediocre and amateurish. It can kill a great show. That happened to High Fidelity, bare, and Cry-Baby.

All of that to say that we have a model for what our show isn't supposed to be, but only hints at what it should be. It's essentially like working on a show that's never been produced, except that they got a chance to polish the material. As I said in my last post, I think the fundamental misstep for the original director and designers were misunderstanding what kind of show this is. It's neither old-school musical comedy or the new trendy, self-referential meta-musical (which I hate).

It's a neo musical comedy -- lots of laughs and lots to say. I like to think of it as "poetry, politics, and popcorn;" in other words, great storytelling, genuine substance, and lots of fun. It's the New Line formula in a nutshell. If you sprinkle a few fucks over the top...

What that means is that even an outrageous comedy like Cry-Baby is to be taken seriously. The more truthful and the more committed our performances are, the funnier it will be. And the more authentic it is, the more emotional it will be. We know how this works; we do it all the time. In the climactic scene of Bat Boy, we had audiences laughing, then crying, and then laughing again. We did it again at the end of Return to the Forbidden Planet. We do it a lot. We're diabolical that way.

I think the key to Cry-Baby is the Drapes, the "bad" kids. They know everybody looks down on them, so they perpetually strike preemptively by being intentionally, childishly nasty to everyone, by performing their bad kid status as a layer of protection. Kinda like the fat kid who makes his own fat jokes before anyone else can, or the gay kid who knows he can't hide his gayness so he brandishes it like a weapon. And the childishness of their insults is like an extra, added fuck you to the intended victim, as if they're not worth more. But the Drapes' nastiness is not who they really are -- they're not bad people -- it is their armor. As they say in politics, they're attacking from a defensive position. So the actors have to be careful not to play these extreme characters as cartoons. They're not cartoons. These are real people acting in extreme ways. For a reason.

And the key to the Squares is fear. I saw a quote getting passed around Facebook not too long ago from a rabbi, telling us to listen to everything that's said and done in the world, always with one question at the back of our minds: does this bring fear or hope into the world?

It's a great question in politics (and I think it's what separates the parties), but I'm realizing that it applies to everyday life as well. The Drapes offer Allison a kind of hope -- the lure of sexual and emotional freedom and the relentless self-expression of rock and roll. But Baldwin and the Squares offer her only fear. If you don't count global thermonuclear war, the Squares are most afraid of difference. They're afraid of The Other, a basic, primal, human instinct that probably served us well back in the cave man days, but not so much today...

Late in 2010, researchers in London announced a pretty stunning discovery about brain structure. According to this study, the brains of conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala than liberals. This is the most primal part of the brain at its very center, and it controls reflexive impulses, like anxiety and fear. Conservatives also tend to have a smaller anterior cingulate in the front of the brain, which controls higher functions like optimism, curiosity, and the reconciling of conflicting information -- in other words, nuance. Another study that year found that liberals tend more to have a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4 which causes them to seek out novelty, and to be curious about the people and world around them, and this tends to make them more accepting of difference. The researchers found that if someone with this receptor gene also has an active social life in adolescence and meets lots of different people, those two factors together will likely make that person a liberal.

Now, if you know the story of Cry-Baby, if you've seen the movie, re-read that last paragraph with the Squares and the Drapes in mind. The Squares know the Drapes are Bad. No nuance there, no hope for redemption, case closed. You can't beat the system. Poor Baldwin and his puny amygdala.

When I watched the presidential debates this weekend, I couldn't help but think about all this. I listen to Romney, Santorum, and the others go on and on about who we should afraid of, and how dark our future looks, and all I can think about (other than Back to the Future II) is how their brains must be structured differently from mine. Lucky for me, I don't fear much. I suppose if I did have an enlarged fear center, either New Line wouldn't exist at all, or we'd be producing Joseph and Nunsense.

Shoot me now.

But I also thought to myself, Baldwin will grow up to be Mitt Romney! It's an interesting way to look at the Cry-Baby story -- who's afraid and who's not? And what does that mean about how they perceive the world and people around them? Maybe Allison is the only truly fearless character, at least at the beginning of the story.

Lots to think about... Rehearsal continues apace...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Cry-Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

We had our first Cry-Baby rehearsal last night and all of us are soooo stoked! After our meet-and-greet, we set to work on the music. We got through three of the biggest numbers, "Misery," "You Can't Beat the System," and "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again." It's moderately challenging stuff (though compared to Wild Party, nothing seems that hard anymore), but the cast picked up the music quickly and they already sound really good. These vocal arrangements are so cool!

Once again, against greater odds than more generous theatre gods would allow, we have assembled a thoroughly kick-ass cast for this show. Everyone is so engaged, so committed, and they all seem so perfect for their roles...

So now I have to take all the ideas that have been swimming around in my head and turn them into concrete choices in the music and onstage. I've been thinking about this show for more than a year, so I have a lot of ideas...

Probably the most important overarching idea for me is to put aside the original production's misguided musical comedy approach. This show is not old-school musical comedy; and the fact that it isn't is one of its central devices. Cry-Baby starts off as a full-throttle 1950s musical comedy -- the populist art form of its period -- but the opening number is not even allowed to end before the Drapes (the "bad" kids) invade not just the picnic, but the show itself. They assault this 1950s musical comedy world with rock and roll, and transform the musical comedy into a rock musical; and the two forms war with each other for the rest of the show, with Baldwin and his Whiffles (that sounds vaguely dirty, doesn't it?) living and singing musical comedy, but slowly losing their turf to the rock musical of the Drapes. And Allison, having to choose between the Square world and the Drape world, has one foot in each musical world during much of the show. In the last scene, there's even a literal sing-off between Baldwin and Cry-Baby. And by the end of the show, everybody is singing rock and roll -- just as it did in the real world, rock and roll supplants the old-school show tune.

And the Rodgers and Hammerstein hangers-on are still bitching about that...

What's wonderful about the score is that songwriters David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger absolutely nail both styles. The show's opening number, "The Anti-Polio Picnic," sounds like it came right out of the score for Kiss Me, Kate or The Pajama Game. But when DJ and Schlesinger interrupt that song to turn to the rockabilly of "Watch Your Ass," it's just as authentic.

The biggest of many missteps made by the original production team was that they treated the musical comedy elements as cheap, self-aware, Book of Mormon style gags, rather than allow them the faux authenticity that the writers' flawless pastiche gives them; and at the same time, they treated the rock musical elements like bland musical comedy. With both styles effectively crippled, the battle of the styles at the heart of the show doesn't work. Believe me, the brilliance is there in the writing, but a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the box office...

The show's creators (in the picture at right) used another device of old-school musical comedy but with a postmodern twist. In most classic musicals of the so-called Golden Age, the central conflict boils down to whether or not the Hero will assimilate into this established community or be removed from it. In Carousel, Pal Joey, No Strings, and West Side Story, the outsider is removed because he or she can't (or won't) fit into the community. In The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun, Hello, Dolly!, and Brigadoon, the protagonist successfully becomes part of the community. South Pacific managed to do both: Nellie is assimilated into this exotic island community, but Lt. Cable can't overcome his prejudices and he is removed through death. The same is true of The King and I, in which the King is removed but Anna is assimilated. We also get both outcomes in Show Boat and Fiddler on the Roof.

That assimilate-or-die device fell out of favor in the 1960s and 70s because America became a fundamentally different country, now far more suburban than rural, much less dependent on community in a more technological but disconnected world. (Today, we've come full circle and our technology has returned us to the idea of community, as we each construct our own small town on Facebook and Twitter.) With the 1960s counter-culture came a new focus on the inner life of the individual, and we saw that illustrated in shows like Man of La Mancha, Company, Follies, Rocky Horror, A Chorus Line, Nine, Sunday in the Park, and others. (There was still the occasional show that explored community, like Hair, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Grease, but the choice between assimilation or removal in those shows became a much more complicated, more socially meaningful act.) The comic genius of Cry-Baby is that it seems to return to that out-dated assimilate-or-die device, but this time it's dripping with irony and social comment (what else could we expect from Javerbaum, alum of both The Onion and The Daily Show?), and a comic deconstruction of exactly those expectations. In Cry-Baby, we start the show thinking that it's the Squares who are the established community into which the Drapes must assimilate, but that would never happen in a John Waters story. Ultimately we discover the opposite is true -- the Squares have to find a place in this new world of rock and roll.

In yet another example of musical comedy subversion, at the beginning of the show we think it's Allison's grandmother, Mrs. Vernon-Williams, who is the antagonist, the one who will keep the star-crossed lovers Allison and Cry-Baby apart. But we discover during Act I that Mrs. Vernon-Williams is not the real antagonist; Allison's freaky boyfriend Baldwin is. By Act II, the writers have also set up the old-school device of the second comic couple who mirror the central romantic couple, but here that second couple is the mentally ill, self-mutilating Lenora and the selfish, amoral Baldwin. Not exactly Ado Annie and Will Parker, if you know what I mean.

The show repeatedly sets up expectations and then shatters them, and always in very funny ways that also say something interesting about the story's social and political context...

I invented a new label recently that fits Cry-Baby perfectly -- "neo-musical comedy." It's old-school, 20s-30s musical comedy, but with a self-aware irony on top that the older shows didn't have. In these shows, there are always two layers operating at once. Examples include some of my all-time favorite shows: Bat Boy (the masterpiece of this new form), Urinetown, Lysistrata Jones, Spelling Bee, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson; and there are even a few examples further back in history that pretty much fit the mold, like The Cradle Will Rock, Pal Joey, Of Thee I Sing, and How to Succeed. These neo-musical comedies use the style and devices of musical comedy and the socio-political content and the Brechtian devices of the concept musical, developed by Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Bob Fosse, and Kander and Ebb. It makes for a heady mix, more complex than its precursors, more ambiguous, and therefore, more interesting and more fun.

But the Cry-Baby creative team didn't just do all this for laughs. The split personality of the score is the whole point of the show -- it's about the 1950s vs. the 60s, "nice music" vs. rock and roll, conformity vs. freedom, sexual repression vs. sexual openness, all of that. As Sondheim likes to say, content dictates form.

I have this Grand Theory of American Politics I've been thinking about for a long time, that every political and social issue in America boils down to one thing. Since 1968, America has been in a 43-year cultural war between conservatives who want to return to the black-and-white safety (i.e., oppression, conformity, strict morality) of the 1950s, and liberals who want to finish the work of the 1960s (inclusiveness, compassion, sexual and intellectual freedom). Never was that more obvious than in the 2008 election. You just had to look at McCain and Obama to see it. Conservatives don't like sexual variance, dirty words, drugs, challenges to authority -- all the things we finally (sort of) embraced in the 1960s. Cry-Baby is about that ongoing American cultural chaos.

And like all well-made theatre, Cry-Baby may be set firmly in 1954 but it's really about our fucked up world today. Just as the opening does, the show's finale, "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again," encapsulates the entire show with its ironic split personality, as the characters all look ahead to a bright, sunny, optimistic future for America that we know in 2012 will never exist. Like the best theatre, the show implies far more than it ever says, and it asks from the audience active participation in teasing out the contradictions and implications of what we see. What's actually on stage is only half the picture. And that's a big part of the fun here...

Cry-Baby delivers a message parallel to the message of Hair, that we Americans have yet to solve so many big problems that have been with us for so long. With Hair, that message was less present in the original production and only really emerged later with time and perspective, but it's a depressing thing to realize. With Cry-Baby, it still might be a bit depressing, but we're laughing too hard to notice...

This is going to be so much fun!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Merrily We Roll Along...

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

2011 was a pretty great year. We produced three very cool shows that people absolutely loved, Two Gents, bare, and Passing Strange. I had a great time in New York this fall and saw five really interesting, exciting shows. It was the year my sixth book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, was published. It was the year I began to more clearly see and understand the tremendous changes happening in our art form -- beautiful, amazing, exciting changes. Like people once watched the end of vaudeville, I can see the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, and I think that's a good thing. Those shows are well-crafted and they served their audiences well, but it's a new dawn, it's a new day, and it's a new art form. It has evolved. Musical theatre is part of popular culture again. Musicals have gotten political again. Things are different. And New Line is up at the front of the parade -- like Stork at the end of Animal House.

Steve Woolf, artistic director of The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, once told me that often, halfway through a season, he'll realize that the season has an over-arching theme, that all or most of the shows he has programmed explore a similar theme, whether it's money or family or faith or whatever. But Steve says it always comes as a surprise to him -- it's not something he plans. The theme slowly reveals itself over time. Steve is responsible for the theme -- he chooses the shows -- but it's not a conscious act.

Since New Line Theatre has, by design, a narrower palate than the Rep's, it's probably easier to find themes in any given New Line season. You know sex will be there, along with drugs and politics; and topics like violence, obscenity, religion, the creation of art, etc., will often find their way into our work too. The accidental theme of our 2010-2011 season was the destructive power of sex -- I Love My Wife, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and bare.

But looking back on calendar year 2011, I also find something else even more interesting...

This year in world events was one of the most exciting, earth-shattering years I can remember. I was alive for the late 60s/early 70s but too young to be truly aware of what was going on, although my folks did let me watch Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, so I did get a little taste of the period's politics. But 2011 changed everything, and now as a political junkie, I had a front row seat. It started with the Arab Spring (also called the Arab Awakening, which always makes me think of Spring Awakening with burkas), with revolutions and uprisings in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria... the list goes on and on... Everything we thought we knew about the Middle East is now up for grabs. We still don't know what the end result of most of those uprisings will be, but a bunch of dictators are gone...

And then the uprisings spread to Western Europe, to Spain, Italy, Germany, Finland, the UK, and elsewhere -- and these protests were different but also the same -- citizens outraged at growing inequality and apathetic government. And then the Occupy movement began in New York, and quickly spread across our country. All this in the past year...

And what do all these world events have in common? What is everyone so enraged about?

A failure of institutions.

All the institutions human beings have created to make a "civilized" society, government, religion, education, the media, the market economy, the legal system, the military -- and, some (conservatives) would argue, also the arts and the institution of marriage -- are breaking down. The Tea Party movement is angry over the failure of government, and the Occupy movement is angry over the failure of capitalism. And amidst all this chaos, somehow New Line really captured that zeitgeist in our shows this year. The theatre will not be one of the institutions that fail us, if we have anything to say about it.

Our spring show Two Gentlemen of Verona may have been just a messy romantic comedy as a play, but as a musical it is also about the 1970s-era breakdown of institutions -- which mirrors our own moment -- corrupt politics, an unjust war, the military-industrial complex, arrest without cause (War on Terror, anyone?), and the confusion of sexuality and gender (the Religious Right's worst nightmare). This breakdown of institutions in the show parallels a one-on-one breakdown in civility and empathy among the characters (Tea, anyone?). It portrays a world turned upside down, where nothing is sure or clear, and everyone is out for themselves (what conservatives call "rugged individualism" and what I call "selfishness"). Through our eyes today, Two Gents is America 2011 reflected in a fun house mirror.

I'd like to think our audiences at Two Gents were laughing so hard because they saw real relevance and truth in our wacky story. Or maybe it was just because our cast was full of comic geniuses. Much like audiences for our 2007 production of Urinetown (which should be the Official Musical of Occupy Wall Street, by the way), sometimes people need to be able to laugh at the horrors of our world...

In June we presented a very young but wildly talented cast, led by the truly amazing Mike Dowdy, in the regional premiere of the searing pop opera bare, a show entirely about the breakdown of institutions -- family, education, religion. We watch as the central character Jason pays the ultimate price for those breakdowns. Where Two Gents ended happily, bare did not. But bare's finale did sound a bit like a rallying cry for the Occupy movement that was still three months away from its birth...

It's so hard to find your way
When you have no voice to guide you on.

No voice, no sound.
No sound, no words.
No words, no song.
No song, no heart.

One heart, one love.
One love, one light.
One light, one truth.
One truth, one life.
One voice.

And then in September and October, New Line produced one of the coolest shows I've ever worked on, Passing Strange, another rock musical, about the failure of institutions to nurture and encourage the individual to find his space in the world. Our "Youth" is failed by his religion, his family, his community, his politics, even his art (notably, his drugs don't fail him...), until he finds his own "one truth" and his own "one voice." The Youth may well be first cousin to Pippin, Candide, and other Hero Myth protagonists, but Passing Strange is so utterly unlike any other show I've ever encountered, and our brilliant cast embraced its unique quirkiness and created a piece of rock theatre so beautiful, so thrilling, so deeply emotional. This was the real theatre adventure in St. Louis this fall.

As it always has, the American musical theatre reflects our culture and our times. And because our country continues to fight the decades-long battle between the conformity and control of the 1950s and the freedom and inclusiveness of the 1960s, theatre from the 60s and 70s continues to find relevance in our contemporary world. References to Vietnam in Two Gents were easily translated by our audiences into references to Iraq, just as the failure of the Catholic Church to save Jason in bare reminds us of the Church's other big failure...

I'm so proud of all three shows we produced in 2011, all of them shows that most theatre companies would never even consider producing, and that's a real shame.

And coming up in 2012...

Our March 2012 show Cry-Baby is a story about judging people based on a false morality, about the condemnation of a community for nothing more than its poverty. Like Jason in bare, every institution fails Cry-Baby Walker, but rock and roll and love will save the day. This is a smart, wise-ass rock musical that wasn't well served by its original Broadway production. We're gonna give it another chance -- we know how to do this kind of work. I think the reason it misfired so badly on Broadway is that the production staff thought it was a musical comedy, but it's not. It's a neo-musical comedy. It's the old-school George M. Cohan-George Abbott-Jerry Herman model with a thick layer of irony and a dollop of Brechtian socio-political commentary on top, like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Little Shop of Horrors, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Lysistrata Jones, and a lot of others.

In old-school musical comedy, the actors are constantly "winking" at the audience. In neo-musical comedy, the actors take the characters and situation so seriously it's funny. The neo-musical comedy has taken the more vaudevillian style of old-school musical comedy and refracted it through it the lens of Brecht, Prince, Sondheim, and Fosse. It's the Age of Irony. I think this is going to become, more and more, the dominant musical theatre form, alongside the dramatic rock opera.

It's hard not to see in Cry-Baby's story of class oppression today's Republican members of Congress who declare that the people who are out of work are just lazy, and that getting unemployment insurance makes them lazier. The show focuses social injustice down to the personal level, and we all feel it. In John Waters' rock and roll fable, the bad kids (the "Drapes") are clearly the Good Guys, and the good kids are obviously the Bad Guys. Like they did with Hairspray -- and a lot like Mark Twain did, now that I think about it -- Waters and his adapters reverse and exaggerate mainstream morality to expose its dark side. If ever there was a musical about the 99%, Cry-Baby is it. (Okay, I guess Urinetown and The Cradle Will Rock are too.)

And then in June, we will bring back High Fidelity, a brilliant, dark, funny piece of rock theatre about a small businessman struggling to keep his small, independent store open. What could be more zeitgeisty than that? This show fights an ongoing battle with Bat Boy for the title of My Favorite Musical. Neither of them ever wins for very long. Hi-Fi was wildly misunderstood by its original production staff but it sold out New Line's entire run in 2008 to cheering, laughing, delighted audiences. Ours was the first production after Broadway and it was so cool for us to be able to deliver the show's creators the rave reviews they deserved. People keep asking us to bring it back, so we will.

And then in the fall, we will open our 22nd season with the most relevant show we've done since Hair back in October 2008. This time, it's the rowdy, riotous, emo rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, about our first populist President and creator of the Democratic party. I'm reading books about Jackson and about the pivotal election of 1828. And sometimes I almost forget that I'm not reading about the Here and Now. The parallels to today are numerous and a little scary...

We can already see that 2012 is going to be every bit as surprising and assumption-shattering as 2011 has been. America -- and perhaps the world -- is at a major turning point. And so is the musical theatre!

I've been on this crusade lately to convince people to stop thinking of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model as some kind of ideal -- because I believe theatre is useless unless it helps us grapple with the challenges and obstacles we face. Humans tell stories to sort out the mess of life, to make some kind of order out of the chaos of our world, to connect us, to help us understand ourselves and the world around us. Rodgers and Hammerstein shows can tell you a lot about America 60-70 years ago, but they don't really tell us much about today. The Stages St. Louis audience (median age about 89, I'm guessing) enjoys the nostalgia of reliving those times, but those of us who didn't live through them the first time find very little of use there...

Meanwhile shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson speak to these times we're living in now...

It's been an amazing year for the New Liners, of rave reviews, enthusiastic audiences, people coming literally from across our country to see us, and many repeat customers seeing our shows over and over... We must be doing something right. And the year ahead looks just as exciting, as challenging, and as mind-blowing, as we continue our 21st season of alternative musical theatre. Beneath the surface of these three comedies lie deep and profound truths about what it means to live in these times. And after all, that's what theatre is for.

Long Live the Musical! And Happy New Year!
Scott

P.S. I just now noticed, after posting this, that my very first blog post, back on January 1, 2007 was also titled "Merrily We Roll Along". Full circle and all that.