The Wicked Stage

The Real Malloy

2013-05-23T11:59:00.001-04:00

I first heard about musical Renaissance man Dave Malloy when I graded the reviews for Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage for Critic-O-Meter back in 2009; the repeated comparisons of his rocking score for the show to Tom Waits piqued my interest. I finally met him doing this preview of Three Pianos, the oddball Schubert party he concocted with Alec Duffy and Rick Burkhardt, and we've exchanged our views about the state of musical both in person and online. Along the way somewhere he mentioned an opera based on War and Peace.

And now, in a scandalously short amount of time for a musical, it's here: As you no doubt have heard by now, a little show called Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was a sensation last fall at Ars Nova, is now an even bigger sensation in a custom-built tent under the High Line (and not just because of l'affaire de telephone). I interviewed Dave at length some months ago for my epic overview about band-performed musicals for American Theatre, a trend piece I included him in because, like Stew or the Lisps, he largely performs in what he writes, and I'd argue that that gives his shows a special frisson (and the Waits comparison is apt, by the way, though vocally I hear as much Elvis Costello croak as Waits gravel), not to mention a literal immediacy (more on that in a second). Here's how he replied when I marveled at how quickly his show had gone from page to stage:

Q: How long have you worked on the show?

Dave: I’ve been working on it about a year and half between writing the first song and opening night.

Q: That is so quick.

Dave: That’s what people say. But, for me, coming from a jazz world, especially, we would write songs in a day. Sgt. Pepper was done in a couple of months.

Q: I think this has something to do with the professionalization of musical theatre, or what Cesar Alvarez calls "over-curation."

Dave: I very much came from the mindset of the devised theater company where you go, "OK, this is our next show, and here’s the show date, so we have these six months to develop this show and create it from start to finish." It’s only in recent years that I’ve started working on pieces that don’t have firm commitments from theaters to produce them, and they go on and on, and it’s awful because you lose that immediacy.

There are those who may point out that the comparative speed shows in the final product—that Natasha, Pierre's libretto and lyrics don't work the way a traditional book musical does, that there aren't all that many song-songs with identifiable hooks; perhaps the best and fullest expression of this dissent is this well-considered review of the original Ars Nova run by David Barbour. But I would argue that what is gained from this immediacy—from literally removing obstacles from the process and allowing an artist's impulses and affinities to spring more directly from his musical/theatrical brain to the stage—is a quality of musical fluency and pungency that is as akin to a rock 'n' roll experience as theater (or at least musical theater) gets. Indeed, I was surprised, given how little of Natasha, Pierre is conventionally hummable, how much of the music kept buzzing in my head the next day and beyond; I guess I'd have to guess that it makes a palpable difference when music feels like it came from the gut and hasn't been overthought, and no amount of dramaturgical fussing or "development" can layer that viseral feeling into a work (I felt much the same about Here Lies Love).

The direct and full realization of all of his and director Rachel Chavkin's ideas is one theme I pick up in my new Times feature on Malloy. There's a sense in which writing about theater is a job, of course, but I'd kid myself if I didn't also see it as a privilege, and I must say I feel grateful for the chance to write about Dave and his work—to nerd out about orchestrations in the paper of record, for one, and more importantly to note the arrival of a major musical-theatrical talent.

Lee Melville, R.I.P.

2013-05-23T11:52:00.001-04:00

One of the subtexts of the recent news that Backstage would discontinue theater reviews altogether is that it was never inevitable that an actors' trade paper would review theater. Clearly Backstage's corporate overlords had looked at the metrics and at their readership—basically, beginning actors—and asked the common-sense question, Why are we covering all this theater?

This anomaly could be particularly glaring in film- and TV-dominated Los Angeles, where the local theater scene gets about as much respect as head lice. But when I started up Back Stage West in 1994, it was simply understood: We would write about film and TV casting opportunities...and write theater reviews and features. I never thought to wonder why, even if, in later years, my publishers certainly seemed to wonder why I, as editor, had become so singularly focused on L.A. theater, founding an awards show to honor it and even crossing the footlights on occasion.

The reason Back Stage West was on the theater beat, of course, was because Drama-Logue had paved the way, and we were competing with them. Drama-Logue, a scrappy mom-and-pop casting paper, founded in 1972, had grown up along with the rise of the "Equity Waiver" theater movement in L.A., and though I don't know the exact date that Lee Melville began as Drama-Logue's editor in chief, by all accounts it was he who made covering that burgeoning theater scene a priority and a mission for Bill Bordy's little paper. In 1977 he founded the (in)famously generous Drama-Logue Awards and headed a stable of critics that covered the scene with a thoroughness unmatched by any other publication.

I didn't know about this pre-history when I started at Back Stage West, as Lee was no longer editor of Drama-Logue by then. But by the time we founded our own awards to compete with Drama-Logue's, and soon after bought out Drama-Logue, the lore had reached my hearing (the late, great critic Polly Warfield, one of Lee's close associates, who came to write for Back Stage West after the merger, certainly had something to do with that). I can't claim in any real sense that Lee passed a torch to me; when we did eventually meet, he was gracious and pleasant and advisory, and after I left Back Stage West, he had me write a fair amount for the magazine LA Stage, which he had founded. But the environment in which it was simply taken for granted that L.A.'s actors' trades would cover the local theater scene with thoroughness and respect, and with the great honor of honest criticism—in short, the critical environment that largely shaped me and my sensibilities, and gave me a career—was to a large extent Lee's creation. So, though we didn't know each other well, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the late Mr. Melville.

For a more personal recollection, I turn playwright Luis Alfaro, who offered these lovely recollections on Facebook:

A few years ago I was invited to speak at a Grantsmakers in the Arts conference and Lee pulled me aside to interview me. He said, "I have a lot of questions, but I guess I am just wondering, what's in your heart?..." He just had a lovely way of being in the world. Another time we were taking the elevator up at the Getty Villa to see a performance and he introduced me to his friend saying, "This is one of those people that make the things that make me most happy." What a lovely spirit and it was always a pleasure to see him at opening nights with his pad and pen. Rest in peace, sweet man.

Indeed.

The Mamet Q&A: The Customer Isn't Always Right

2013-05-22T09:31:00.000-04:00

Remember when the most blazing controversy about David Mamet was his heterodox approach to acting training? The publication in 1999 of his terse, contrarian True and False, which posited, in essence, that 20th century acting training's emphasis on interiority and emotional truth had led actors astray, was the one occasion I had to interview him, for a piece in Back Stage West. I hadn't looked back on the entire Q&A until recently, and I think it's worth revisiting in full. I started by asking the obvious question about the acting school and theater Mamet co-founded, which, last I checked, is still charging students to learn to act.

Q: Has the Atlantic been a place where you’ve observed some of the problems you inveigh against in True and False--the students not wanting ever to graduate from school, or seeking something that training can’t really give them?

Mamet: Well, this is not a plague I’m talking about in the book. Rather, it’s the condition of students. First off, the ideas in the book aren’t just mine; they’re simply opinions. They happen to be opinions which I firmly believe in, and to which I trust for, among other things, my livelihood, but at the end of the day, they’re my opinions. Whatever articulateness or concision that is involved in the expression of those opinions comes from many, many years of thought about them. A student, by definition, is someone who hasn’t had the benefit of those years of thought and experience. Therefore, they’re going to be a little bit confused, and they’re going to be subject to a lot of countervailing influences. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have to study, they wouldn’t have to wonder, they wouldn’t have to work, they wouldn’t have to read this or any other book. In a long way, roundabout, responding to your question: It’s the condition of students to be confused, and to be searching for an answer.

Q: Did you write this book more to correct the bad acting you see onstage and in films, or more to address what you see actors put themselves through in rehearsal?

Mamet: Both. First off, I always wanted to write a book about acting. I grew up reading many, many books about acting, and that was always an ambition of mine, to add to that canon. Then, I think it’s in the nature of people as they age, if they have insufficient control over themselves, to become garrulous, and to say, “Oh, things were much better when I was a youth.” That may or may not be true. I think it may also be coincidentally true is that, as I mention in the book, is that something rather drastic has changed, which is that actors now do not as a rule come up through the fiery furnace of the theatre. Spending your time in trying to earn your living in the theatre will teach you a lot of lessons pretty quickly, because you’re working with an audience. The people working exclusively in movies and television, or in a studio, for that matter, don’t get the opportunity.

Q: I wonder, though, if saying that actors can learn only from the audience is a bit like saying, The customer is always right. I mean, it’s been pointed out that before the Stanislavski system, acting was very stagey, and there are still actors who seem to have learned from an audience only to be hams.

Mamet: That’s a very good point, but I disagree with you. It’s not saying the customer is always right. Learning from the audience does not mean learning necessarily to placate the audience. Many times, one has to make the decision that one is correct and the audience is wrong. But the point is, when you’re working with a paying audience, you’ve gotta be pretty goddamn sure you’re right, because your livelihood depends on it. In weak people, it may build subservience, but in people who are other than weak, who are building strength, it builds character.

Q: In your criticisms of the Method in the book, you seem to avoid naming names, other than Stanislavski. Essentially, you say that a lot of the techniques associated with Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler are hogwash and don’t work--but without naming their names, it seems that you’re pulling the punch a bit.

Mamet: It’s not my place--it would be impolite of me to name people’s names. But I’ve spoken very, very specifically about the practices which I think are deleterious, which I think are beside the point, and anyone who is interested can recognize those practices and determine for him or herself whether they think I’m right or not.

Q: Whenever there’s controversy about these issues, actors always say, “Whatever works,” and always stress that it’s important to respect the process of the actors they’re working with.

Mamet: Of course.

Q: But you’re putting out a strong point of view about what works and what doesn’t.

Mamet: No book is going to teach people to act, and frankly, no class is going to teach people to act. What the book concerns itself with is a way of thinking about acting, and I wrote it to express my opinions, certainly, but also, I hope, to help student actors with whom I work quite a bit, and of which company I was at one time, to think about acting, to enable them to profit from the application of observations of mine, which I hope are simply common-sensical.

Q: Your point about a lot of preparation--sensory techniques, historical research--seems to be that they’re ways for actors to hide, to shield themselves from the spontaneous. But aren’t some actors into preparation simply because they love it, and it’s their life--I think of someone like Kevin Spacey, or of Uta Hagen’s exercises, which were developed mainly to fill her time between acting jobs.

Mamet: Well, I’ve yet to see it make any difference for good. I mention my observation that a lot of people use the exercises--sense memory, emotional memory, and so on--as kind of a talisman, as magic to ward off fear. I think it’s very possible that some people do, as you say, use them as if they were a word-search puzzle to fill an idle hour. I’ve yet to see them do anything good. I think that good actors may act well in spite of them--once in a while, and perhaps more than once in a while. But I’ve yet to see--again, from my final prejudice as a member of the audience, and a director and playwright--anyone profit from it, and I have definitely seen quite a bit of harm from it.

Listen, finally, it’s not my business how anybody prepares to do what they do. Finally, I think, either as an audience or as a teacher, I’ve got no axe to grind that they’ve got to prepare a certain way; as an audience member, I love to be delighted by the fresh, the unusual, the intuitive, the spontaneous. It’s been my experience when I saw what was going on, working with actors, it generally does not come from the methods of preparation that I enumerate in the book, which is why I don’t employ them. But on the other hand, I go to the theatre, just like you, to be delighted. I don’t care how anybody prepares.

Q: How would you respond to the criticism that yours is very much a playwright’s perspective--that all this about simplicity and getting out the way is just a playwright’s way of protesting, “Just say my damn lines.”

Mamet: Yeah, well, Blah, blah, blah, I respond to that. I’m writing the book for actors, and people who may find my words and my ideas inappropriate certainly aren’t going to use them. Why should they? On the other hand, someone who might have been confused and/or shamed by a technique which he or she did not understand may garner hope from my observation that of course they were confused because, as far as I can see, it’s a bunch of gibberish.

Q: I also wonder if you think there may now be an audience for what you might call Method performance?

Mamet: Hey, listen, there’s an audience for network television.

Q: Point well taken. One of the points my critic, Matthew Surrence, makes in his review of your book, which I’m printing along with this interview, is that it doesn’t seem all that heretical to bash the Method--that the notion that the Method is bankrupt or hogwash is not a new point.

Mamet: If that’s a not a new point, then I’m thrilled, and I would suggest that the critic who’s taking me to task take a big Magic Marker and cross out the part of the subtitle where it mentions "heresy." I couldn’t be happier it’s supererogatory.

I guess you might say that one of the people it was written for was me 30 years ago, who studied and went to all these goddamn classes, could never understand a word they were talking about, and felt like a complete fool and a failure because of it. It took me many years of constantly working with actors as a director and as a teacher, much more than as a writer, to come the conclusions, through trial and error and a great deal of observation, that are in the book.

Q: The quote on the back from Alec Baldwin--""I agree with almost nothing Mr. Mamet says in this book and encourage you to devour every word"--is classic. Have you spoken to him about his disagreements with you? Is there a story behind that?

Mamet: Well, we seem to work very well together. I love to have him do my stuff; he seems to like doing it a lot. I’m thrilled that he enjoyed the book, and I’m thrilled that he likes my work. Listen, I have a friend, Donald Sultan, who’s a painter, and we were in the Louvre, looking at some magnificent paintings, and I said, “Oh my God, how did they do that?” And he said, “They didn’t know either.” And the same is true of actors. Not to say that actors are anti-intellectual, but that with any art--the only art I know anything about is writing--you strive and you work, bat your head against the brick wall, and sometimes something happens that makes you say, “My God, did I do that? Where the hell did that come from?” And I think that the same is true of acting--that the art of actor, which is a great, great art, is finally a mystery. Again, what I’m suggesting in the book is that my experience is that it’s easier to approach this mystery from the standpoint of simplicity, coupled with a certain humility, an acceptance of fear--rather than saying, "If I work hard enough, everything’s in my control, there’s nothing which I can’t influence."

Q: You compare acting in the book to athletics, music, dance, and obviously, athletes and musicians and dancers have to go train a great deal, and go through a lot of coaching. They’re not always in the arena, learning in the arena.

Mamet: So your question is, Shouldn’t people get into studios? I’ve spent a lot of time in every aspect of this business; I started as a child actor in the 1950s. And I’ve never seen an idea more terrifying than a group of mutual criticism; it brings out the worst in people. In the theatre, we should be colleagues and supporters to each other, we shouldn’t be each other’s critics. And we shouldn’t be performing for each other. It brings out not only the worst in us as actors, it brings out the worst in us as an audience. So what I suggest, as was my very fortunate experience as a young man, is: Get out of those goddamn studios and start a theatre company, write your own plays, put on your own plays, and do something for an audience.

Q: The mutual-critique model, though, is contrasted with the masterclass model, in which the teacher does all the criticism.

Mamet: But also you have to understand, and I make the point in the book, you have to really use your common sense and look at who that teacher is. That teacher, with a few exceptions, is not someone who’s successful at their profession, but is successful in getting a job as a teacher in a school which he or she did not work to found. At the beginning, whether it was Lee Strasberg or Sanford Meisner or Vakhtangov or Joan Littlewood--those people attracted colleagues to themselves and their way of thinking through a great deal of energy, inventiveness, and some degree of charisma, and through the ability of having their tenets put into application. Most people who are teaching in schools nowadays--and God bless ’em, I spent a lot of time out of work myself--have joined ongoing institutions that have the imprimatur of longevity about them. And that’s a different kind of person than the first group I mentioned.

Again, what the book is about is, I’m not trying to damn anyone to hell, or be holier than thou. The book is written for actors, and I hope one of the things I’m doing is suggesting an alternative, and further suggesting that to embrace such an alternative is not foolish, but is, not only laudable but probably more geared to individual success than devoting oneself to the institutional model.

And the other thing you find out when you start working with a real theatre company, which is to say a theatre company made up of actors, directors, and writers, is that they cross-pollinate. The wonderful of the last couple of years have all come out of theatre companies, and most of them started out as actors. And that’s as it should be: It’s not only how you learn to act, it’s how you learn to write.

See also: "Mamet Vs. Brecht: The Wrong Fight."

Breaking Silence!

2013-05-21T09:32:00.000-04:00

Jenn Harris and Paul Kandel in Silence! (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Last week I got a news release that Silence! The Musical just clocked its 500th performance, and I couldn't be happier for the show, albeit for weird reasons. Let's call it reverse (or perverse) vindication.

When I was sent to review the original production of this unauthorized parody of The Silence of the Lambs at the New York Fringe Festival in 2005, I had just arrived in Brooklyn from L.A., and had begun freelancing for the New York Times. I didn't much care for the show, and I think my review lays out my case fairly well (basically, I thought the show's one joke—they're singing! and dancing!—wore thin quickly).

There was one glaring and painful exception, though. While I've been mostly happy with how the Times editors have handled my prose in the years since, the way one of my early points was edited made me sound like a bluestocking, and I still wince when I read it:

"Silence! The Musical" winks so hard it's nearly blind. Taking large swatches of Ted Tally's film script for the Oscar-winning 1991 thriller "The Silence of the Lambs" and weaving in intentionally cheesy songs and dishy asides, the librettist Hunter Bell and songwriters Jon and Al Kaplan miss as many opportunities for laughs as they hit.

The targets that they do aim for are dubious. The diabolical psychiatrist/killer Hannibal Lecter (Paul Kandel) delivers a terrible (and vulgar) power ballad about the scent of a woman.

Yes, it's the infamous "If I could smell her cunt" song, and I think I understand why the Times trimmed my description of it—I made it too clear what the offending word was, right up to supplying a rhyming adjective. I wrote:

The diabolical psychiatrist/killer Hannibal Lecter (Paul Kandel) delivers a terrible power ballad about the scent of a woman, employing a blunt four-letter word for the female anatomy that loses it meager punch with each repetition.

Maybe the difference seems petty—the editor cut my all-but-spelling-out-the-word description, then tried to tuck it all into that parenthetical "and vulgar." But that's the phrase that sticks in my craw. It's not a word I typically use, at least not to describe profanity, and that turn of phrase is among the few things that have appeared under my byline I don't recognize as my own writing. My not liking the show was one thing, but coming off like a clueless fuddy-duddy stung. As did this comment:

Silence! is a brilliant pop culture spoof that appeals to everyones lewd, crude and prurient interests. Too bad Mr. Kendt couldnt have embraced his inner sociopath to come out and play with the rest of us. Someone should buy him a South Park box set for Christmas.

I'm not sure how I stumbled onto the website of Silence! songwriters Jon and Al Kaplan, but some time later I noticed, on the show's press page, that they included a tiny squib of my Times review and followed it with a telling comment:

"Terrible (and vulgar)." —Rob Kendt, The New York Times"A negative review in The New York Times is the kiss of death." —Buddy Thomas, ICM, in his final correspondence with us

Critics are not (all) bitter parasites who wish ill on their art form, and it pained me a little to see my own dubiously edited words thrown back at me as what seemed at the time like the show's sure death knell. So I was strangely heartened to see that my review didn't kill Silence! after all, and that it in fact returned for an Off-Broadway run in 2011, got great reviews (an A- on StageGrade), and is still packing 'em in.

There have been shows I've hated enough to heartily wish they would die, but Silence! was never one of those, and I'm glad it's found its audience—though I also had to smile in noting that my colleague Jason Zinoman greeted the show's return with yet another lukewarm Times review. What the hey, if that can further the show's meta-narrative—it's the musical that's a hit despite the Times!—more power to them.

And while I'm sharing original drafts that the Times editors redacted, I can't resist recalling another one from the same Fringe Festival that they were probably wise to change. At the end of my review of the Neo-Futurists' delightful The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen, I reached for a terrible pun:

Would Ibsen approve? I think the Norwegian would.

John Lennon's ironic tale of infidelity and mod apartment design had nothing to do with this show, of course, so the pun was cut to simply, "Would Ibsen approve? I think he would." Now that I look back on that unambiguous affirmation of a show I sincerely liked, I do, too.

Ann vs. Imelda

2013-05-20T09:54:00.000-04:00

For America magazine I've done a combined review of two entertaining and popular shows about iconic women leaders at either end of New York's nonprofit stage spectrum: The Public Theater's Here Lies Love, the dance-party musical about Imelda Marcos (which I already posted briefly about here), and Lincoln Center Theater's Ann, the old-school solo show about Texas guv Ann Richards. The links between the these two women, it turns out, go beyond shoulder pads and immovable hair:

Neither show is entirely successful, even on its own terms; but both are worthy efforts with their share of entertainment value and food for thought, in varying proportions. Both depict women who at first reluctantly, then wholeheartedly, seize the reins of power with all its gratifications and complications and discover their mission (or their self-justifying rationale, as the case may be) only in the doing of it. This is not just a matter of biographical coincidence; in this shared motion from second fiddle to first-chair violin, the lives of both women dramatize a huge generational shift.

Born just four years apart, they were both transitional figures, straddling the pre- and post-feminist generations. They began life assuming, as Ann puts it, that “taking care of my husband and my children was my profession,” but soon enough realized not only that they could do anything men could do but that they were needed at the wheel after feckless male leadership had driven their governments into a ditch. As Imelda (Ruthie Ann Miles) defiantly sings, her decrepit, philandering husband Ferdinand (Jose Llana) cedes her more and more power, “It takes a woman to do a man’s job.

Read the whole thing here. Oh, and there's also a review of Here Lies Love in an unexpected place: HowlRound, which officially dips its toes into review-style, show-specific criticism with W.M. Akers' very fine inaugural effort. W.M. raises some of the same issues I had with the show (basically, that it's too much fun for a show about a brutal dictatorship), but I especially loved this bit about David Byrne:

In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

I rather liked Playing the Building, but the overall point sticks. Read that whole thing here.

To Text or To Hurl

2013-05-17T09:33:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday night I attended Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, the immersive Russian-indie-rock musical fashioned from a section of War and Peace; I'm reporting on the piece's gestation in the fertile musical/theatrical mind of Dave Malloy and its birthing in the capable hands of director Rachel Chavkin and assorted producers, or something like that—and I was witness to the now-infamous spectacle, in the midst of the show's second act, of a thirtysomething woman, an audience member, purposefully crossing the entire supper-club space, literally in the midst of the performance, flinging open the huge double doors that constitute the theater entrance, and being summarily whisked out of sight.

Only the next morning did I find out what spurred her exit: a particularly bold move by the New Criterion's theater critic, Kevin D. Williamson—also a spiky, occasionally reasonable columnist at National Review. Williamson reported on the incident at NRO, to the huzzahs of many. He liked the show, in short, but hated the audience. The women near him were, he says,

talking, using their phones, and making a general nuisance of themselves. It was bad enough that I seriously considered leaving during the intermission, something I’ve not done before. The main offenders were two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels, and insufficient attention span for following a two-hour musical. But my date spoke with the theater management during the intermission, and they apologetically assured us that the situation would be remedied.

It was not. The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

Two things: The immersive club environs that are unique to NP&TGCO1812, in which the audience is served a meal and drinks (albeit by waiters who are only present before the show and during intermission, never during the show) constitute precisely the kind of space in which theatergoing rules seem sufficiently bendy that it's not surprising that someone might feel it was OK to check their phone...and maybe check it again. But it's also the kind of intimate space—my wife and I were seated at a small table sharing plates of food with three strangers, and not talking to them was not an option—in which such breaches would be even more annoying than usual.

Annoying enough to justify throwing a phone? I'm not sure. I spoke to Williamson yesterday and he counted himself "proud" of his action, in particular its speed. And though he reiterated that he quite liked the show, he neither expected to write a review ("I guess that would be unprofessional, to review a show I haven’t seen all the way through") nor to return to see it to the end ("I don't know if they'll let me in again—their security guard was pretty annoyed with me"). He conceded that the boundary-blurring environment was likely to lead to mishaps ("I knocked over a glass myself before the show started"), but drew the line at the woman's behavior: "People just need to learn to behave."

The show's producers, perhaps understandably, see this a little differently. While making no excuses for the texting woman, producer Howard Kagan, one of the show's lead producers with his wife Janet Kagan, told me he was astonished that Williamson "hurled the cell phone it across a dark room; he could have killed someone." (In Williamson's slight defense, he told me, as he did the awed Gothamist, that he was aiming for a door on the theater's south wall—fair enough, except that that door also served, as did all the doors, as an entrance/exit for fast-moving performers.) And Randy Weiner, also a producer on the show, who knows a thing or two about immersive theater (he's also one of the forces behind the unstoppable choose-your-own-adventure hit Sleep No More), told me, "If it’s bad to text in a show, it strikes me as 10 times worse to take someone's phone and throw it across the room."

Meanwhile, on American Theatre's Facebook page, as on Twitter and on Gothamist and elsewhere, Williamson is being hailed as a folk hero. The impulse is understandable—he acted out a fantasy many of us have had—but in the cold light of day, it's fair to say that Williamson probably overreacted, and his gloating looks a little unseemly. I might be in favor of a solution like mandatory cellphone checking-at-the-door, except that iPhones are now default timepieces (did I look at my phone during the show to check the time? I might have). And I'm not sure more vigilant ushers are the answer, in this case at least—that would surely render the show's all-around staging untenably crowded.

One silver lining here is that the show itself is no shrinking violet, and the thick-skinned cast and band have been working with audiences as essentially their co-stars since the show's original staging at Ars Nova, so this kerfuffle neither shook their performance nor ruffled the audience for more than a few seconds, at least from where I sat. The woman's exit, in fact, was so matter-of-fact and purposeful that I almost thought for a moment that it was staged.

And it's not like this issue hasn't come up before. In an interview I conducted before that night's performance, director Rachel Chavkin told me about her conversations with producers:

It's been a lot of me shouting, "People can't expect to be coming to a club." They will be sorely disappointed when a 2-and-a-half-hour opera unfolds before them, and we will be disappointed when they want to text during the 2-and-a-half-hour opera.

Arguably, this may have been a previews issue; reviews like this rave from the Times' Charles Isherwood may help define (and refine) expectations of audiences coming in. Still, while this kind of behavior may be deplorable, I would expect to see more of it, not less, at shows like this, where the lines between staging and seating are blurred, and the show is designed to effectively close ranks and withstand it. "Immersive," after all, doesn't just mean intermingling audience with performers; a big part of what we're immersing ourselves in with such a show is each other's space. And in 21st century New York City—as in a genuine Russian supper club, I'd wager—that's not always a pretty or a comfortable arrangement.

The Other Imelda Musical

2013-05-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

The Public's new dance-club sensation Here Lies Love is pretty much as great as it's been cracked up to be (no. 2 on StageGrade, no less!), even if its retelling of the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos falters a bit in the "fall" portion; after the show's persistent party vibe has gotten under our skin, all the stuff about martial law and crushed dissent feels like a hectoring buzzkill (though, on the other hand, the show boasts a very rare asset: a near-perfect ending). Its great cast and inspired Alex Timbers staging aside, its biggest asset is David Byrne and Fatboy Slim's joyous score; though I'm not one to over-value the arrival of pop and rock stars into the theater (indie bands can be another matter), there is undeniably something special about music that's had to earn its living outside the theater being retrofitted so snugly into a theater experience. At the risk of dissing my colleagues in the musical theater trenches, there is something about great pop music that's just qualitatively more vibrant, more attractive, just all-around better than most music written expressly for theater.

My fuller review of Here Lies Love will be out soon in America, but in the meantime I got to thinking about the other Imelda musical, which began in 2005 at East West Players in Los Angeles and was staged in 2009 in an indifferently received production at New York's Pan Asian Rep. Its Los Angeles production was among the last shows I reviewed there before moving to New York:

It's just too easy to make fun of Imelda Marcos, the Filipino fashion plate whose shoe fetish and highly developed sense of personal entitlement dominated her nation's political and pop culture through more than two decades of de facto dictatorship and decadence.

It's also pretty easy to make fun of Imelda, A New Musical, which just opened at East West Players. Like its title character, the show has an unquestionable, even endearing eagerness to please - and some pretty odd ideas about how to go about that.

Constructed roughly on an Evita template, Imelda is a historical pageant buttressed by musical theater conventions as old as the Chocolate Hills. There are decision anthems, wish songs, makeover montages, debate duets and flashback lullabies. There are dutiful second-act reprises to remind us how far our story has come, from the needy ambitions of 1950s-era beauty queen Imelda (Liza Del Mundo) to her later incarnation as an international symbol of obscene ostentation at the side of her increasingly decrepit husband Ferdinand (Giovanni Ortega)...

Imelda, it seems, wants us to laugh at and revel in its subject's excesses - as in "Imeldific," a spirited disco breakdown in Act Two that celebrates an extravagant New York shopping excursion - while at the same time illustrating the gritty history behind the glitter.

More about the musical's gestation here.

Flashback: Als v. August

2013-05-15T09:42:00.000-04:00

On this day in 2007, I posted the following review excerpt:

“Radio Golf” is a formulaic work that illustrates why [August] Wilson was not, in the end, a great artist: his approach to examining the lives of black Americans was traditional, often cliché-ridden, and comfortably middlebrow...Barely thirty minutes into the action, we’re already on familiar ground: it’s Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” meets Lifetime TV...Wilson is the worst kind of moralist. He uses black people—which is to say, “real” or poor black people—as the barometer by which all others must be judged; anyone who doesn’t fit the bill is just plain evil...This essentially Puritan strain in Wilson’s thinking makes his characters reductive, simple silhouettes projected onto an even simpler backdrop....For Wilson, all blacks are brothers, whether clad in rags or Armani suits. But life doesn’t work this way—at least no lives spent under the yoke of this country’s astonishing and still prevalent racism. In the nineteen-sixties, academic philosophers and sociologists alike tried to address “the Negro problem”—the economic and racial disadvantages inherent in black life. Wilson came of age in that era, and was clearly influenced by the sanctimonious air of their reasoning. With his own lyrical-sounding agitprop, he, unfortunately, adopted the belief structure of the “concerned” oppressor, while claiming to speak for the oppressed.

The author: the New Yorker's resident crazy person, Hilton Als. I repost this as a reminder, in case anyone wondered, why Als is more scourge than truth-teller. (And to be clear, I don't think Wilson or his work are above criticism, even along some of the lines Als pursues, but what was perhaps most galling about the review was that it evidenced no familiarity with, and certainly did not cite, any other single work by the late playwright.)

Well, Albee

2013-05-14T09:15:00.000-04:00

Seeing it all before him (@Bettman/CORBIS)

Among the theatrical heavyweights I've had the pleasure to interview is America's greatest living playwright, Edward Albee. It was in 2008, and the occasion was a double bill at Cherry Lane of his early one-acts The American Dream and The Sandbox. But there are enough juicy bits in the interview, which I did for TDF, that I think it's worth revisiting in full.

Q: These two plays have a shared history, don't they?

Albee: Yes, they've been done together several times. In fact, I was writing American Dream when I got a commission from the Spoleto Festival to write a 15-minute play. So I took the characters of American Dream and put them in a different setting—sort of, 'The Further Adventures of the American Dream People.' It's nice to have them together, since it's mostly the same characters and the story just continues.

Q: Regarding his season at the Signature Theatre some years ago, John Guare said that it was a little unnerving—that seeing those old plays took him back to the person he was when he wrote them. Does that happen to you, too?

Albee: No, not really. Of course, I remember the experience of writing them. I remember the good times and the bad times, and you have both if you work in the theatre—more bad than good, if you consider what audiences like vs. what they should like. But I never write about me, so my investment is more intellectual than personal.

Incidentally, my own Signature Theatre season (1993) was terribly valuable for me. It was in the middle of that time when nobody would produce my work. I'd had three big commercial flops in New York, and no one even wanted to say hello to me. The Signature season let people see plays that I'd been writing all along, and brought interest back to me.

Q: Do you prefer to direct your own work?

Albee: Well, it took me a while to be a halfway decent director. I started with a production of Zoo Story, which was fortunately done in deep Pennsylvania; it was the worst production of my work I've ever seen. But I learned since then. I ended up winning my first Pulitzer Prize for Seascape, which I directed. So I'm not a bad director. It's just an awful lot of work. But even when I work with other directors, I have a very clear vision of what I want to see and hear.

Q: The American Dream and The Sandbox are about the family. Now that you've lived a few years since you wrote them, do you look at them now and think, "Yeah, I got the family right."

Albee: I'm still working on it. I'm still trying to get my craft under control, for heaven's sake.

Q: So you feel with every new play as if you're starting from scratch?

Albee: Yes, and that's what I tell my students: Every time you write a play it should be your first play. Not only that, it should be the first play that's ever been written by anybody. That's the only way for it to be spontaneous. I don't let any other voices from any other play in, including my own. You can't.

There's a new piece I'm working on that's even greater than real life. I'm upstairs working with all these characters, and then I walk outside and have to interact with all these people who claim to be real people, but they seem totally unreal to me.

Q: Do you hear the characters in the room with you?

Albee: Yes, I see it and I hear it as a play being performed in front of me. That's why I can be so specific as a director. I don't how anybody can write a play if they don't see it that way. It seems that some can.

Q: You don't seem like a playwright who uses humor…

Albee: You mean my plays aren't funny?

Q: No, they're very funny, but it doesn't seem like you use the humor the way some playwrights do: consciously, to disarm the audience.

Albee: No, you don't stick jokes in like raisins in cereal. Like, "Oh, I have a whole bunch of jokes—maybe I can find a play to put these jokes into." It has to be organic to the character. It's the same way I feel about profanity and obscenity; if it's organic to the character, there's nothing offensive about it.

Q: You have a fond history with the Cherry Lane Theatre, don't you?

Albee: I've spent a lot of happy hours there. In the early '40s, when I was 15 or so, I saw a play there by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin. It was a wonderful experience.

Q: Wasn't it Auden who read your poetry and told you you should consider playwrighting?

Albee: No, that was Thornton Wilder. Wystan told me I should write pornography.

Q: It's a good thing you didn't take his advice.

Albee: Who says I didn't?

Q: It's intriguing how writers—Beckett, August Wilson, yourself—start out writing one thing and end up writing for theatre.

Albee: You know, one of the most wonderful experiences I've ever had in a theatre was when I was teaching up at Brandeis University, and August Wilson came up to do a reading of his own work. Nobody spoke August's lines better than he did, and the poetry in his writing came out better than I'd ever heard it before. You'll often find that playwrights are the best readers of their own work, but August was the best I've ever heard.

Q: Do you ever read your work publicly, outside of rehearsals?

Albee: Just last night at the Cherry Lane there was a big benefit; people were supposed to see a preview of Sandbox, but it had been postponed. So I got up there for a hour and a half and did readings from several of my plays. I recite my own plays very well. That's because I hear when I write, and I retain what I hear.

The Shinn Files

2013-05-13T09:11:00.000-04:00

He's only had one other L.A. production previously (Four at Celebration Theatre), and one high-profile premiere at nearby South Coast Rep (On the Mountain), both in 2005. But now Christopher Shinn's lean, searing Dying City, which I saw and loved at Lincoln Center in 2007, will get its L.A. premiere with the estimable Rogue Machine Theatre. This gave me a great excuse both to revisit Dying City on the page, where it struck me anew, and to talk to Shinn (on the phone) for the first time for a piece in the Los Angeles Times. He was in good spirits despite his current fight with cancer* (on the subject of which, he sent me two minor corrections to the Times piece: 1. It's his left leg from which he's had a part amputated, not his right, and 2. Though Ewing's sarcoma often appears in bones, in his case it's turned up in his soft tissue).

One quote that didn't make it into the story was about his writing process. I wondered if his finely chiseled, often jagged dialogue, in which what characters don't say is at least as important, if not moreso, than what they do say, was the product of an actual chiseling process—whether he ever overwrote his characters' gut-spilling, then pared that away so their true thoughts would remain mostly subtext. His reply:

It’s pretty rare that I do that. Usually by the time I begin writing, even if it’s not conscious, some structure is very clear in my mind. That’s sort of how I know when to begin. One reason for that is that I tend to keep the plays in my mind for a very, very long time before I begin writing. It begins with dialogue, characters, an image. If I did begin writing sooner, I would have a lot of scenes I wouldn't use. I hear enough about what the characters saying, and then I know who they are as people. I’ve created them internally enough that what they say comes very easily when I begin writing. They’re inside of me, they exist as human beings inside of me.

What I always do is, I open a new file next to the old one, and retype it all from the beginning. I’m able to move very quickly, almost in real time, through the play that way. Then because I’m in that rhythm, I can usually keep going. When I used to start working on an old draft, I end up just reading through it over and over and I'd get stuck.

That process tip reminded me of an outtake of an interview I did with Tracy Letts (and Sarah Ruhl) last year. Letts was talking about how he'd moved off the computer to work an actual old-fashioned typewriter, but even before that drastic step he'd already begun a regimen akin to Shinn's:

What I had been doing with the computer was writing the thing on the computer, printing it out, then deleting it completely off the computer. Because the actual physical act—I would rewrite stuff that I would not have rewritten if it were just on the screen. So I was doing that already; now I’m retyping them from scratch.

I learned to type on a manual back in fourth grade, if memory serves. I don't miss much about that laborious process, to be frank...except the ding at the end of a line, which was like a little reward for getting to the end of another line. (Is there an app for that now?)

Loud Quiet Loud

2013-05-10T09:45:00.000-04:00

My old friend and boss at the Downtown News, Jack Skelley, used to insist that classical music should be played loud, and I took him to mean not only that he has a taste, as I do, for noisy 20th-century fare but that, no matter the era or aesthetic, orchestral music, played by large ensembles or small, wasn't, and shouldn't be relegated to becoming, soothing background music. I'm afraid that's the role too often played by "classical" music in our culture, and it's a deficit I've struggled with as a listener and a musician myself. But this background status is more than just a function of middlebrow snobbery, Mozart-is-good-for-your-baby classism, or our distracted iPod Shuffle listening habits; it's built into the dynamic range of orchestral music itself. As loud as the fortissimos get, the pianissimos need the breathing room to be as quiet as, well, breathing.

This is especially true of orchestral music written since the late 19th century, in which form and sound are as much a part of the content as harmony and melody were, roughly speaking, for 18th century music. The sound worlds of the post-Wagner orchestra aren't just riddled with dissonance, which is the bum rap that contemporary music has gotten for more than a century now, but by slippery textures, jagged effects, unsettling shifts and swells and surprises, and what I would call sonic scope. There's a good reason that the even tempos and relatively untroubling loud-soft dynamics of Bach or Mozart function so well as the equivalent of musical wallpaper; it's not just the nice tunes and consonant harmonies; it's that you can set the volume on one level and not be jarred. You can even put it on Shuffle with pop music and it doesn't interrupt the flow!

All of which is another way of sharing my recent revelation (or rediscovery, more likely) of one thing that 20th-century orchestral music, from Stravinsky to Adams, shares with live theater: Yes, it can be recorded and read, but it really only lives in performance. That was the point made by my wife's uncle, William Weinert, about Britten's War Requiem, which he conducted masterfully last weekend at the Eastman School of Music, where he's the professor of conducting and choral director; and his advocacy on this point was part of the reason our family made the trek to Rochester (the other part being, of course, family). As an intermittent Britten-head, I'm ashamed to say I had no familiarity with the piece; it is, to state the obvious, a stunning, emotionally riveting work, whose intertwining of the Latin Mass with Wilfred Owen's stark, graphic, but circumspect anti-war poems, and whose rattling, reverberant sound and fury, gave me the sensation of a cracking-open, a painful, raw exposure to the wounds of war, even as the music bound them up with a kind of fierce, defiant dignity. (I will pause to note here, as well, that the work shares one harmonic characteristic I would argue is emblematic of 20th-century music, as a reading of Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise demonstrated: the tritone.)

Apart from the Requiem's extraordinary content and impact, the bittersweetness I felt in registering both the work's hugeness (it employs a large orchestra, a small chamber ensemble within that, a huge adult choir, and a children's choir) and its intricate intimacy (there are three vocal soloists, sometimes accompanied by no more than a violin or two, or not at all) had all to do with its sense of immediacy, its unrepeatability, its complexity of feeling and means of expression, and again that issue of wide dynamic range, from booming to flickering—all things that are hard to register via headphones on my work commute, which, there's no use denying, is now the main way I experience music I don't otherwise play myself.

I felt similarly about the recent Gospel According to the Other Mary: I would like to own that on record, as I would the Britten, while realizing full well that, as with musical cast albums or operas, these will best be experienced in toto, and in relative quiet, all the better to register their range. Or, as Uncle Bill has retaught me, in person. With our whole selves and our whole attention, after all, is the best way to honor not only the dead but the living arts, as well.

Cross-posted at Train My Ear.

Breaking Theater's Code: The Final Installment With The Lisps' César Alvarez

2013-05-09T09:42:00.000-04:00

The Lisps et al in an earlier incarnation of Futurity

In this final installment of my three-part interview with César Alvarez (here are part 1 and part 2), we talk about the future of musical theater and where its next leaders might be found.

Q: This might be a matter of generations—that there are more of these band-driven musicals now because there are more people like you looking for this form of expression outside of just being the rock band. The problem, as you’ve noted, is finding the right venue and support.

César: That really is the problem. For the first two years of the development of Futurity I was the actor, the musical director, the composer, the book writer—and the producer! For whatever reason and mostly from the help I got, we were able to piece it together in this outsider way. My dream would be to start and indie Brooklyn musical theater festival, where you have two stages and two nights and there’s 15 musicals that are put on by these bands on shoestring budgets, with two hours of tech. That would be so cool! How many amazing musicals would you see? As opposed to having them go through their normal workshop process, which is basically impossible unless you get major theater people to help you do it. And once you do that, you start working under theater’s agenda, which is tricky. ART is incredible, and they’re a very unique space because they really booked us because of our hybrid nature and not in spite of it.

Q: What do you mean by theater’s agenda?

César: Every form of art has its own morality and orthodoxy; it’s the same in music. And people spend their entire lifetime figuring out how to navigate those orthodoxies. It’s like with the Pope—you can’t be the Pope until you’re 80 because you have to work your way up, but what would it be like if the Pope was 45? You know what I mean? It’s like this fact of life that the people with the power are the people who are inventing the status quo, so trying to find that entrance point where you can still be working in a challenging way and also get the support you need to create audiences--I mean, that’s the whole thing about being an artist.

Q: But as you say, places like ART are looking for work like this—they seem to recognize that something’s going on they should be part of.

César: That’s what Philip Bither said, too. He wrote on the Walker Center website about our piece, and he said that one of the great things about the Walker Center is not just that they have the opportunity there to really challenge their audience and the orthodoxy of the organization but that they are required to by their mission. Phillip was like, “We’re going to book a musical on our performance calendar,” which is radically unheard of. He was mildly terrified, and rightfully so, in the same way ART would be if they booked a piece of conceptual performance on their calendar. But he stuck his neck out and saw that what we make is contemporary and it should be considered as such.

Q: How did it go over there?

César: The Walker audience was thrilled. They have thick skin; they come to see a Walker show and have no idea what they’re in for—it could be one person sitting for an hour and a half, and it could be incredibly dense and abstract. They came to our show and they got a musical! They were like, “Whoa, everything is rhyming!” But it still worked in the context of their season. And the fact that we got Walker and ART working together was so cool. What if every regional theater had to collaborate with a contemporary art venue somewhere? What kind of theater would come out of that?

Q: Was there anything about working in theater that you especially learned from or appreciated?

César: Well, it’s what everyone loves about theater, that there’s such a code of collaboration, a code of working together, and even people who don’t know each other can immediately access this code together and create functional working relationships—and sometimes dysfunctional working relationships—but there’s just such an ethic and a code of honor of how you work with people. In bands, there’s not a code, and all the drama in bands is treated with such horror, and it breaks them up—there’s a lot more blindness about how you manage collaboration. We as a band have stayed together for 7 years because we know how to fight; we know how to beat each other up and not take it personally and to move forward the next day.

Q: You teach, also. What and where?

César: I taught at Bloomfield College in New Jersey for four years, music technology and songwriting, but now I’m a visiting artist at Sarah Lawrence. I work with one class there called the new musical theater lab, which is essentially a bunch of people working on new musicals. It’s a dream come true; I’m basically helping them turn all their work into music.

Q: So what’s the next generation doing?

César: I have a very small sample size, with just 12 students, but I think that what I’m seeing is that you can’t have a play that doesn’t have music. It’s not just about having a sound designer, it’s like with Lear deBessonet—she never has no music in her plays. There’s music in everything she does, and I think that’s really smart and that’s really emergent.

Q: I’m just surprised there hasn’t been like a giant country or hip-hop musical, because they’re such narrative forms.

César: There have been hip-hop musicals, they just haven’t made it to Broadway. In the Heights is more like a salsa musical, a Latin musical. And there was a bluegrass musical at 59E59. But they’re genre-fied, that’s what I’m trying to say. You take a show like Once; that’s an example of a show that’s stepping out of the form and it has been a success. Or Sleep No More: a commercial venture, with an extended run, completely out of the world of Broadway, a show that’s in a site-specific place and it’s, like, Wow, maybe we can start to get a new theater district, one that’s actually around the art galleries in Chelsea that’s going to embrace real hybridization and a different kind of cultural ethic; maybe this is gonna be the space where musicals can start. Like Hedwig, which started in some abandoned space over there...

Q: It started in a club but then played in a hotel ballroom, never in an actual theater.

César: Right. And I think that’s because the real theater is not a place for us, for whatever reason. We need Broadway to come to us. We can’t beat that, we can’t break the walls down. But I think it’s possible that there are a lot of ideas out there, and a lot of talent to create things like Sleep no More that are gonna be viably commercial.

You know, we all sit down for our jobs in front of computers. All of us: Composers, writers, every job now is sitting down in front of a computer. And theatre’s job, especially now, is a reminder to get us up, rather than to give us a rest and keep us sitting which is what historically has worked. That’s what I hope, that we start seeing a lot more new opportunities for this type of hybrid work.

Q: One question about these band shows is if they can have a life beyond the original version. So far Futurity hasn’t existed without The Lisps, but can you see a day when it might be licensed for other productions?

César: My dream is to go to Grimsley High School, which is in Greensboro, North Carolina, which is where I went to high school, and see a production of Futurity. I think it’s a show everyone should be able to do. So I’m not like “Only Lisps can do Futurity,” but I do think I want to do a more definitive version of it, which I don’t think we’ve done yet. I think that when the show goes up in New York, I’m hoping that’s what’s gonna be the definitive version of Futurity and I’ll be in it.

De-genre-ifying the Musical: Part 2 of My Chat With The Lisps' César Alvarez

2013-05-08T09:18:00.000-04:00

Part 1 of my interview with The Lisps’ César Alvarez went into some detail about his bands’ show Futurity, which originated in 2009, played at ART and at the Walker Center last year, and is headed for a New York production at some point in 2014, as well as about the band’s music for The Good Person of Szechwan, a hit at LaMama earlier this year that will be part of the Public Theater’s next season.

In this second part of our interview, we get down to more widely applicable notions about the gap between rock and theater, and between the traditional musical and band-created narratives, that were the animating ideas behind my April cover story in American Theatre and my recent chat with Stew & Heidi.

César Alvarez: I feel like musicals, because they’re so complicated, have over the years been overcurated. And the idea of a DIY musical is much more difficult than a DIY album or a DIY theater performance, right? Because there are so many elements and because there’s this complexity. When you wrote me and you were like, “I’m writing an article about bands and band-driven musicals,” I started thinking: Are bands writing more musicals now than they ever have been, and why? And I think it’s got everything to do with the MP3 revolution. Musicians have always wanted to tell stories with their music. They’ve just started to notice that there’s been a new interest in spectacle. It’s not enough to go into the studio and record the music; you also need to create a whole world around your piece in order to really stand out and to articulate who you are as an artist.

So actually I think this interest in bands writing musicals is really about bands distinguishing themselves and giving in to the natural impulse of every musician of how to tell each story, how to create a world. Whatever sort of upsurge of this thing that we’re seeing has everything to do with where we are culturally and technologically.

Q: I was speaking to Shanta Thake at Joe’s Pub, and she said they are consciously looking at musicians and the music business, now that income from recording has collapsed, and seeing that one way they can support musicians is to help them theatricalize their shows. Obviously you weren’t someone that Joe’s Pub had to introduce to the idea--you came to them with this thing already conceived.

César: Right, but the fact that Joe’s Pub said, “Yeah, we’ll give you four Saturday Nights in May” completely transformed our ability to get our work out there. Shanta specifically saw from a very early point what we were doing and how it made sense for their mission and how we really connected. We had a great run there. And there are venues that have to start letting their musicians think that way.

Q: Obviously, there are some venues, like Oberon at ART, where you did Futurity, and Joe’s Pub and Ars Nova, who are thinking this way, but not many.

César: Here’s the thing that I find fascinating. Even one step before that: Where do you rehearse a rock musical? We can’t even figure it out, it’s so hard. Like, just for Good Person actually, what would have been great was to have the band sing for weeks with everyone rehearsing. It was so difficult to even do that; we got three days before tech with the band. The reason is that the theatre world isn’t set up to allow bands to come into the rehearsal room and leave their gear set up, and music rehearsal spaces are these tiny, dingy, basement closets full of mold. So every time we think about this, a major, major consideration goes to,Where are we going to rehearse? We’ve ended up rehearsing in art studios, in big open spaces that our visual artist friends have, who say, “Yeah, you can use my studio,” and we can leave stuff set up there. There’s just not a lot of space to do what you really need to do. I think we’ve been creative about figuring it out. There’s all these instances where you see how hard it is to do the thing that we’re trying to do.

One of the things that was so exciting was that we never put on the musical without our band; you never had to hear Futurity with just like the piano or a guitar, which is very hard for people because they don’t have the musical imagination to know really what it would sound like with everyone. So by the time we got to Joe’s Pub for our second workshop the band was so tight, and we killed it. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing between the songs, but the songs were great. I think that really helped to propel us.

Q: Now, as much as the theater world may not be ready for rock bands, are rock bands ready for the rigors of rehearsals, of an eight-show week, etc.?

César: For musicians, it’s crazy, but I feel like my band has really felt the benefits from it. I mean, working at ART and on this Good Person are the biggest gigs we’ve ever had as a band, by orders of magnitude, in terms of the length, in terms of the support we got and the opportunities that opened up. Most of the reactions of our musicians have been, “This is so cool.” Especially our drummer, Eric Farber, who built his whole drum set to be this handmade mechanical percussion machine which was a musical instrument, a storytelling device, and an interactive set piece that is so intertwined in the way we’re telling the story. It was the most radical, transformative experience of his life. He’s been a professional drummer in New York for 10 years and this came to be so far above and beyond anything he’s ever done creatively. It was an absolute revelation. So we all got back from ART thinking, “Let’s do that some more; how do we figure out how to do that more?” Which is why Good Person has been really awesome.

Q: Do you ever feel, though, that the musician in you is saying, “Enough of this waiting around and playing the same show, let’s make a record and just play it for an audience”?

César: We’ve actually put out four records, and that’s easy! We do want to keep putting out records. But I think what we really want to do is put on these big shows and perform for tons and tons of people and innovate. It’s more exciting to feel like we’re really pushing the format rather than just putting out records. I think a lot of artists have felt the fatigue, that what used to work doesn’t work anymore. There was this incredible article I read online about the band Grizzly Bear, about how they’re an incredibly successful band and basically they can’t quite get over the hump where they’re really supporting themselves; they’re as successful as an indie band could ever get without going majorly mainstream, and they’re still living in their Bushwick apartments and don’t feel like they’re gonna go out and have kids or start a family—it was very eye-opening to me. Because I’m in an indie band, and it’s very easy to look at Grizzly Bear and think, “See if we just could get on the Warped Tour or open for Arcade Fire, then we’ll be set!” But actually the way this industry works, that’s not true. And we’re looking for, in a way, an escape hatch that will allow us to be artists to the fullest degree than we’ve ever been able to, and also get involved in something that’s more sustainable and more kind to our art, you know?

One of the most interesting facts about our band is that in 2009, when we did that first Zipper Factory show of Futurity, we had been a band for four years. We had fans and a couple albums. We were like a little Brooklyn band who could draw some people to a show if we booked it. Then we did our musical in two nights, and both nights basically sold out, so about 450 people came and saw it, which was so far beyond anything we had ever done. We thought it was a big risk, but in a way the best way thing we ever did for our audience was writing this musical. The minute we announced it our audiences were like, “Oh, crazy!!” which was great. Of course there were others who were like, “What the…? I thought this band was cool, now they’re pretty lame.” But for the most part that was not the response.

There’s a band in Philadelphia called The Extraordinares, and they haven’t gotten a big production in the way that Futurity has, but all their work is really concept-driven and they have written a musical and produced it. They’re a really good example of the complete DIY ethic of a band writing a musical and they’re doing it in an incredible way. There are other bands that are laboring in this way. And there are so many bands that are “theatrical,” but there’s a real leap, and it’s really about venue and about the structure of the performance. When a band says they’re theatrical, it usually means they have video and costumes and they might choreograph some moves and do some gags. But with the Extraordinaires it was a musical--it was like 16 songs and costumes and they put it on in a loft for 150 friends and videotaped it and then they sell the DVDs.

The other thing that’s incredible is that whenever we have a gig and we say, “You know, we wrote a musical,” and then we play a couple songs from it, so often bands come up to us afterwards and say, “We wrote a musical, too! We just don’t know how to do it,” or, “We have this idea for a musical, we just don’t know how to write it.” Everyone wants to write a concept album, and then everyone wants to put it onstage. Everybody’s concept album could work as a musical. I think it would be really cool to see more support for that type of creativity.

Q: Did you look at traditional musicals at all as a model, or did you intentionally try not to copy that form?

César: When we started Futurity, I was a grad student/composer looking at musical theater for the first time. I went to a conservatory and was always an experimental musician, a jazz musician, a computer musician, but never a theatrical musician. So I started listening to all these musicals and reading up on musical theater and I realized that musicals are an indigenous American form, just like jazz. It had never even occurred to me. And the musical is a form in the way a novel is a form. However because of the evolution and the power of people like Rogers and Hammerstein and the way the dominated Broadway for so many years, musical theatre became a genre, but it’s not a genre! The analogy I use--you hear from musicians all the time, “Oh, I hate musicals,” which is actually like saying, “Oh, I hate novels.” It would be like somebody invented the novel and then for hundreds of years the only one that became popularized was the mystery novel—so you read all these mystery novels and you think “Well, I hate novels!” So I say musical theatre has been genre-fied in a way that is a complete disservice to the form, which is indigenously American and is a brilliant open form which basically says: music, dialogue, and narrative on a stage, telling a story. And that’s it. It doesn’t say how to sing or what kind of music.

So that’s what we’re trying to do--I think we’re basically re-claiming the form from a specific genre, which is incredible--look at the classic musicals, they’re classics, but they don’t encompass the entire spectrum of what musical theater can be. Film, for instance, has just blossomed into all these branches, but for some reason musical theater never got the full treatment that film did in blossoming, and I think it’s our responsibility as theater artists to give it that and keep pushing for it and to make our field as thoroughly explored as film has been, or as straight theater has been.

Q: What you’re doing isn’t really reinventing the wheel; it’s actually going back to the roots of telling a story and singing songs, and going a different direction from traditional musical theater. And the most obvious difference with a band musical is that the writers are also the performers, which you typically only see in theater with solo shows or ensemble-devised work.

César: I mean, it’s really amazing to hear Frank Sinatra do a Cole Porter song, but it’s also just as amazing to hear The Beatles play The Beatles. That was the big revolution that happened in pop music, and I honestly think there’s a thing happening in musical theater which is: It’s incredible to watch the people who made the thing do the thing. And that’s what you get when you see a band perform a musical. You see that with Stew; it’s so exciting to see someone telling their own story on a Broadway stage.

Q: Yeah, it’s odd that that doesn’t happen more often, and that’s it’s someone like Stew, who’s not a huge superstar, who did it. But I guess it makes sense, because giant rock stars are on tour all the time and can’t afford to sit in a rehearsal room for weeks making a show.

César: But then you have someone like Ricky Martin who spent eight months in Evita.

Q: That’s true, I didn’t think about that. I guess I’m just saying that I think theater is a good match for bands more than rock stars, because bands are used to being more flexible and changing in small dressing rooms and—

César: Dressing rooms? More like “behind the bar.” That’s what’s so good to read about from Brecht in his essay about music and theatre: The main thing is that music should be its own thing. You should be able to take the music out of the show and the music is still interesting, which in a lot of cases, it doesn’t really stand up. It’s more powerful in a lot of cases to have like an autonomous and ensemble-driven musical force inside of a theatrical work rather than a few hired guns that are playing some underscoring. It would be so much fun to see more of that.

In the next and final installment: What theater gets wrong and what it gets right, and what about a Brooklyn indie-rock-musical festival?

UPDATE: A comment from Facebook by Joe Drymala: I really love this series, Rob. (And I've been having the same thought about bands turning to theater for income streams.) If nothing else, the "sound" of theater is going through an enormous upheaval right now, and I think that even the traditionally trained musical theater composers are going to be forced to take more care with the actual sound of their music (as opposed to hiring a slick professional arranger to make their material sound slick and professional and soulless). A band doesn't have that luxury--they have to think about the music as a final product, and listen to it as the audience member would experience it, so they're much more self-conscious about creating a unique "sound". Btw, it was kind of a bummer to see Hands on a Hardbody, if only because I thought the music was made to sound so bland, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a pop musician write the score. The best thing that pop musicians know how to do is use specific sounds that evoke certain moods and images in people's minds (think of the Beatles wandering through genre after genre and fusing them together, often in a single song, knowing full well the emotions and associations those genres will conjure in the listener's ear--and of course the great theater composers--Bernstein, Sondheim, Gershwin, Rodgers--could do this as well). I could go on and on about this subject, so I'll stop here, but please keep this series going.

Your Band-ness Is Showing: A Chat With The Lisps' César Alvarez, Part 1

2013-05-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

Like Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange, The Lisps’ Futurity features the band that wrote the show onstage performing the show, and as such it provided Exhibit A—literally, as it was the cover image—for my big feature on the band-musicals trend in last month’s American Theatre.

Unlike the semi-autobiographical Passing Strange, though, Futurity is a sort of science fiction parable about a Civil War soldier who invents a machine that could end war. The Brooklyn-based Lisps, led by César Alvarez and Sammy Tunis, staged a seat-of-their-pants workshop version of the show at the now-shuttered Zipper Factory in midtown in 2009; a run at Joe’s Pub and a workshop at HERE Arts Center followed, and led to the professional presentation last year of a new version with a book by Molly Rice and direction by Soho Rep’s Sarah Benson, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center.

The same day I sat for my audience with Stew & Heidi, I had a long chat with Alvarez about his show, about the ways he and his band have bridged music-making and theater-making, about technology low and high, and about The Lisps’ work in another production: Foundry Theatre’s sensational revival of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan (which the Public recently announced will be part of its 2013-2014 season). Though there was a lot of César in the American Theatre story, there was much more that didn't make it into print, and I wanted to share more of our conversation.

So, as I did with Stew and Heidi, I'll post an edited version of my talk with Alvarez in installments over the next few days (a special shout-out to Georgina Escobar for doing the transcription as part of her stint as an AT editorial intern). We began by talking about the genesis of Futurity. (And if you want to skip ahead, here are parts 2 and 3.)

Q: So had you worked in the theater before Futurity? Had you written a musical before?

César: It was my first musical. I had done a good amount of sound design and music for plays before that but stuff that was just low-budget, you know, this and that.

And Sammy [Tunis], actually, is an actress. We dated for a while and formed our band and then we broke up but kept the band going. Theater was her world and I kinda brought her over to the band world. So when I wrote the musical it was like the convergence of the two different fields.

Our band always had a very theatrical feel; we wore costumes. And ever since when we first started, people were always saying, “You should write a musical,” and we were always thinking, “Oh, ha-ha, very funny.” And then I came up with the concept for Futurity, which was essentially about a Civil War soldier who was a science fiction writer—that was the idea, and it turned into a Civil War soldier who was an aspiring inventor. That was originally the idea for a concept album, but the minute I started writing it, I thought, You know, this really needs to be more than a concept album, it should be a performance.

Q: How did you go about finding a place to perform it?

César: Originally I wrote it for my thesis, and so we spent all summer writing and working on these songs and the band just willingly went along with me. They thought I was crazy. And we did a little version of it which was basically nine songs and about 14 pages of text. It was more like an oratorio with haikus in the middle than a musical. And the month I finished grad school, we got a call from the Zipper Factory, which is now defunct, and they said, “We love your band, do you guys wanna play a show?” And I said, “Well. What about our musical? Can we do it two nights?” And they said, “All right.” And with my credit card, I spent $1,200 and we did a fully staged musical with costumes and everything; it was a completely ragtag affair. It was basically community theater; I mean, it was just my friends, even a cousin of mine who was 16 at the time. It was a completely “outsider” musical.

That Zipper Factory gig started the ball rolling that eventually led us to getting the attention of really big people like [agent] Morgan Jenness and [Soho Rep artistic director] Sarah Benson. Also at that very first performance was Philip Bither of Walker Center, who also started that ball rolling. When he saw it, to him it looked like performance art, because that’s his frame.

Q: You had some heavy hitters at your little outsider musical.

César: Paul Chan is really the reason Philip showed up. Paul is a conceptual artist who does theatre; he did Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. I knew him from Bard, and when he heard about this piece it sounded interesting to him because to him it sounded like contemporary performance: a band writing a musical about a Civil War science fiction writer.

Then we did four nights at Joe’s Pub. From there, Sarah Benson got involved, and so did Molly Rice, our bookwriter, and we ended up doing another workshop at HERE Arts Center, and from there American Repertory Theater came and they said we really wanted to do this. Also Walker Center at that point really wanted to bring us, but they are presenters, not really producers, so they needed someone to help build it; ART became that someone.

Now we are moving towards a New York production, and Soho Rep and Sara Benson are part of the group that is helping us figure it out. I can’t say when or where, but it’s definitely—we’re gonna be in New York.

Q: Well, Soho Rep just produced Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times at the Public...is that maybe where you’re looking?

César: We can’t say, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that we don’t fit in Soho Rep; it’s a 70-seat theater. So it’s gonna be somewhere else. But Sarah, who runs Soho Rep, really believes in the piece and wants it to have a New York life.

Q: I’ll be seeing Good Person of Szechwan this weekend, are you in it with The Lisps?

César: I actually am not in the show; I removed myself from the band to be the composer. The rest of the band is “the band.” It was a big choice because we’ve never done anything like that. But with a show that is this complicated it really was the right choice. I got to work with the director, Lear deBessonet, and Danny Mefford, the choreographer, and really articulate the music in the way we really wanted to rather than me standing up on stage going, “How does that sound?”

When Lear asked me to write the music, I read what Brecht had to say about music, and thinking about what the show really needed, I felt like having a band as an autonomous unit in the context of the show is actually really important, and it helped us tell the story in a way that Brecht would have intended.

And Futurity was really Brechtian in that sense, too—our “band-ness” was on display throughout the entire piece and that was part of the concept, that you’re not being transported into this naturalistic world, you’re constantly noticing that, “Oh, this is a band telling me a story.”

Q: But it’s not a story about a band.

César: Right. Also, it’s part of our band’s aesthetic that we always write songs about fictional worlds and stories and made-up characters, science fiction.

Q: Has writing for the theater changed the way you write music?

César: Totally. I’ve become completely fascinated with the ability of music to tell stories. I’ve always done that with my music, but now that I’ve been working in the theatre I feel very drawn to the process and toward the whole way that people work together to tell stories. It’s much more exciting to me in a way than just getting on our tour van and driving around the country playing at bars.

So yes, it’s totally changed my interests and my trajectory toward what I’m doing with my career. I’m really interested in continuing to push the way that music is viewed in a theatrical context. Right now I’m working on an immersive science-fictional electronic music-theatre work that is set in space, so it’s a musical that merges the experience of theatre with video game; I’m interested in seeing how we can use the music form or the form of a musical to interact the sort of transforming way that we’re experiencing culture.

Next: Why doing theater beats the indie-rock route, and where the hell are you supposed to rehearse a rock musical?

A Moses Moment

2013-05-06T09:30:00.000-04:00

Rooting around my back pages, I happened to come across a 2004 post about a number of religion-themed shows I'd seen at the time in L.A. (Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God, the Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, Hollywood Hell House), which comes to rest in a contemplation of a mega-production I had almost forgotten: a pop musical of Ten Commandments starring Val Kilmer as the stammering, reluctant rescuer, which I called

a smashing example of an increasingly rare cultural commodity: unintentional camp on a grand scale. There’s no winking here, no self-conscious acknowledgement of its own cheesiness, which somehow makes it all the more stunning. I went because Weekly Variety was interested in a story from the scene of a purported train wreck—there were reports that its performances had been cut back in response to bad press, and fresh talk that its planned January run at Radio City Music Hall in New York has been “postponed.” (Souvenir item of the year is a $7 totebag, for sale in the Kodak lobby, with the “Val Kilmer IS Moses” artwork and the following optimistic itinerary: “Hollywood New York Chicago Boston Las Vegas.”) Frankly, it doesn’t look like a train wreck; it looks a well-oiled vehicle utterly confident of its destination. It’s a crazy train, surely, but it shows no signs of going off the rails.

That is, except in the lead performance of Val Kilmer, who seems genuinely humbled by the scale of the show. He’s not a natural stage performer; he has a reticence that can draw us in on-screen, and while it’s often weirdly compelling onstage, he seems to be not entirely present but simply lets the show wash over him and take him. At one point on the night I saw it, while the cast was booming a closing number about saying a prayer for the children (favorite lyric, from the just-down-from-Sinai-with-the-tablets Moses: “Beyond right and wrong, we’re all the same”), Kilmer put his head down and stopped singing for about 30 seconds, either in sincere prayer or exhaustion. You just don’t see this on American Idol.

One thing we would eventually see on Idol, though: the performer who tore up the role of Joshua, one Adam Lambert.

Or Does It Explode?

2013-05-02T12:18:00.001-04:00

How big of a deal is it that Baltimore's biggest theater has at its helm a Brit, and not just any Brit but Kwame Kwei-Armah, the London-bred son of Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Grenada? If that unique cultural background, which resembles a sort of diasporic ping-pong, sets Kwei-Armah apart from your average LORT artistic director, it seems just as significant that he also happens to be a playwright who runs a theater—only one of a few doing so at his pay grade (I talked to two others a few years back).

Both pedigrees, the cultural and the professional, are salient to the timely profile I've written for the paper of record about him this week. In conjunction with his theater's mounting of Bruce Norris' scathing, deadly serious comedy Clybourne Park (discussed in this space as recently as this), Kwei-Armah has written his own response of sorts, Beneatha's Place, which follows the title character from A Raisin in the Sun, the Hansberry play that inspired Norris, who in turn provoked Kwei-Armah, and so on. It's a fascinating, and risky, gambit for a theater head, but for all the attention it will surely garner, I can't think it's motivated cynically but instead by Kwei-Armah's sincere wish to respond as a self-described pan-Africanist, and a new immigrant to the United States, to things in Clybourne that bugged him. Like:

“I find ‘Clybourne Park’ to be a brilliant play, all that we want a modern play to be —a magnificent catalyst for a debate,” Mr. Kwei-Armah said over dinner at an Afghan restaurant in Mount Vernon, the historic neighborhood where CenterStage has made its home since 1974. “However — and I don’t think Bruce set out to do this — but connotationally, the play says that whites build and blacks destroy.”

Gauntlet thrown. For more, and to read Norris' response, RTWT here.

When Tom Met Nora

2013-05-02T11:45:00.001-04:00

Tom Hanks and Maura Tierney in Lucky Guy (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Tom Hanks/Nora Ephron romance, which brought them so much success with romcoms onscreen, has continued even after Ephron's death with the current Broadway play, Lucky Guy. In this the romance is between Ephron and New York City's tabloid newsrooms, which she idealizes as places of rough-and-tumble civic chivalry. That's one reason I wasn't as taken with the show as most of my peers (are we sensing a trend here?), not to mention Tony nominators, but it did pass the time amiably. From my review for America:

McAlary is a great role for Hanks, in his overdue Broadway debut, and not just because he’s essentially a nice guy with a burning if bland ambition, whose only flaw seems to be a brand of ornery Irish stubbornness that hardens into hubris once he has a taste of power. Hanks conveys these qualities and hits the marks of McAlary’s overdetermined rise-and-fall-and-redemption journey adequately. But it is McAlary’s very averageness that makes him a perfect role for Hanks, because it’s a sketchy part that needs an actor as charismatic, as magnetically human, as this to keep us interested in his somewhat rote trials and tribulations. Even sporting a slight paunch and a furry Tom Selleck moustache, the 56-year-old film star has as much warmth and watchability onstage as he does on film, maybe more.

Read the whole thing here.

Iraq Flashback

2013-05-01T09:27:00.000-04:00

I just learned that Christopher Shinn's extraordinary three-character two-hander Dying City will get its L.A. premiere in the capable hands of Rogue Machine Theatre—a troupe whose existence postdates my time in L.A. but whose stellar rep has nevertheless reached my earshot: They did the L.A. premiere of David Harrower's Blackbird, Joshua Conkel's MilkMilkLemonade, Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, Sam Hunter's A Bright New Boise, etc., and one play they premiered, John Pollono's Small Engine Repair, was slated for this past season at New York's MCC Theater (but has been pushed to next fall).

The years since the play's 2007 premiere at Lincoln Center have been rocky for Shinn, with triumphs alternating with setbacks, including his most recent bout with cancer (this lovely, sympathetic profile from February should catch you up to date). But I look back fondly on that stark in-the-round production, starring Rebecca Brooksher and Pablo Schreiber (pictured above), and reprint below my thoughts on it from the time:

I was very worried that Christopher Shinn's Dying City had been overrated. I shouldn't have fretted; I loved it, and in a particularly immediate way I haven't loved, let alone responded to, a play in many a moon. The climactic moment, which turns on one manipulative but needy character reading aloud an email from a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq to another damaged, somewhat compromised character, felt like someone was opening a wound I didn't know I had and pouring...not salt on it, exactly, but not comfort either. It was a mind- and soul-bending squirm of self-recognition that immediately made me think of the thesis of Walter Davis' tendentious book Art & Politics (which I've had some trouble getting through, truth be told): that theater is uniquely suited to this sort of skin-crawlingly intimate communion, that it can expose and transform our shared pain in ways no other medium can. I remain skeptical that only theater can do this, but Dying City makes as strong a case as anything I've seen in a long time that art can speak to us where we live now without shouting, preaching, or cheating.

Rogue Machine's production opens May 18.

Suffering Made Flesh

2013-04-30T09:30:00.000-04:00

photo by Paul Kolnik

This is something of a genre by now, the not-quite-believer's Passion play: from The Last Temptation of Christ to Jesus of Montreal to Corpus Christi to The Gospel According to the Other Mary to, now, The Testament of Mary, the new solo-show staging for Broadway by actress Fiona Shaw and her longtime creative partner, director Deborah Warner, of Colm Tóibín's novella about the mother of Jesus (which just minutes ago received a Tony nomination for best play, though not, pointedly, for performance or direction; update: This snub has apparently led to a premature closing announcement of this coming Sunday, May 5).

It's a genre to which I'm instinctively drawn as both an everyday Christian believer myself and as a cultural consumer. I think it's because, except perhaps in the realm of music, I have a mistrust of purportedly pious works of art, of hagiographies, of tidy narratives, of attempts to rationalize or simplify the complexity and mystery of faith. I hate seeing religious material turned into reassuring pabulum with all the edges smoothed off, let alone turned into costume-drama kitsch; and I may flatter myself, but I think I've always been left cold by the kind of religious authority that has simply stood on authority, and seemed to be hiding something from me, Wizard of Oz-like, and asked me please not to mind the man behind the curtain. It has been my great good fortune to find teachers and guides throughout my life who have taken quite the opposite tack, who have shown themselves open to the world, to doubt, to questioning, even to what others might call blasphemy, and have modeled for me an approach that says, in effect, God is bigger than all that; if God exists, what harm could questioning do?

Another way to say this is that one reason I think I'm drawn to these not-quite-believers' Gospels is that I'm a fan of what artists do, and what artists do at their best is not hagiography. What's the point of grappling with this material in a work of art if you're not hitting at it, wrestling with it, doing it the profound honor of taking it seriously as dramatic literature about lived experience rather than as mere received wisdom? This is not to say that artists in this realm can do no wrong, for they themselves are prone to their own rationalizations and blind spots; if the Passion and its meaning are subjects too large and terrible to be approached lightly, neither can they be treated neutrally, and these artists, in their various ways, bring their own aversions and axes-to-grind to the enterprise, the most obvious one being their simple artist's need to change or challenge the offiicial story, which is where they always run into trouble with a certain kind of believer. For myself, I always find it fascinating to watch any serious artist grapple with this material; it may bear many things, even outright hostility, but it does not withstand indifference.

These were the impulses I recognized behind Scorsese's earnest, slightly woolly film of Nicholas Kazantzakis' Last Temptation, and behind Peter Sellars' and John Adams' prickly, sensuous, shattering Gospel According to the Other Mary. I discerned them again in the new Shaw/Warner/Tóibín concoction about Mary, which gives this iconic figure a voice and presence she doesn't have in the canonical Gospels, and which tries to imagine her searing grief after her son's death, and her scathing attitude about his followers, who seem to be propagating crazy, even creepy things about him. I'll have to confess something up front here: As a Protestant, even a partly Jesuit-educated one, Mary is a blind spot for me. I don't have an iota of special devotion or veneration for her; I taught myself the Hail Mary prayer in high school, more out of curiosity than anything (and as a side benefit I finally got the pun behind that underwear brand name), but I have never been taught, let alone believed, that praying to her, or to any saint, was a worthwhile practice. So there's a whole level on which The Testament of Mary, both its deconstructive and its reconstructive project (which Jesse Green's review astutely notes near the end), doesn't resonate with me as it surely would with anyone raised Catholic.

I bring few received ideas about Mary, in other words, except the usual puzzlement about the virgin birth (really, was that necessary?) and her seemingly distant relationship with her prodigy son, who seemed to have a tendency to wander away and/or rebuke her publicly. You could hardly ask for a more visceral portrait of confused, consumptive grief than Shaw's very contemporary, very contrary Mary; and Testament's most moving moments, as has been generally noted, involve her recounting of the Crucifixion and her anguished surrender to it. Less effective overall, for me, were the busy, artsy staging, the actorly business (gutting a fish, pulling on though never lighting hand-rolled cigarettes, nibbling on something from a bag), the schmacting that had Shaw upturning tables and twitching and screaming, like a parody of an Oscar reel. I felt in these gestures not showing-off, as some critics have alleged, so much as the artists' sincere frustration at the inadequacy of language and theater to portray the cosmic grief and suffering at hand; but this was a frustration I shared with them, through which I could not glimpse or feel said grief and suffering. (I would very much like to see this script in a less fussy staging, a la David Hare's of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, another portrait of maternal loss.)

As for Tóibín's interpretive project, and he has one, this ran along two tracks: humanization and critique. I was generally on board with the first agenda, in which he strives to give this iconic mother's grief full human due, and in so doing has her voicing anger, denial, and resignation about her dead son and his hangers-on. Much of this, even her ultimate "blasphemy" (weeping that if Jesus' death was needed to "save the world," it wasn't worth it), is entirely in the realm of imaginative empathy. I'm not sure, in fact, that I'd want to meet a Mary who told me coolly that, you see, well, her son had to die. (And more seriously, the question of why Jesus had to die is one that no believer should find themselves explaining away too easily; it should always be hard.)

Nor was I given much pause by Mary's skepticism about Jesus' followers, whom she calls "misfits"; this, in my experience, represents a fairly orthodox reading of the apostles' lack of education, low social status, and general comic bumbling (apologies to Terry Teachout). Where I started to question the show's take was in its notion that said "misfits" nevertheless had already developed a clear, even crusading sense of the doctrines of immaculate conception, substitutional atonement, etc., that the church would only later reify from the whirlwind of events around Jesus' ministry and death. This Mary recalls hearing her son call himself unambiguously the son of God, and of meeting starry-eyed disciples who sound like Jonestown cultists, who believe in advance of Jesus' death that it will effect some kind of redemption. To me, these sound suspiciously like Tóibín's proxy arguments with the priests and councils who came later, long after Mary; and her characterization of their doctrines, since they're not onstage to defend themselves, have a tin-eared, hectoring sound.

That said, in imagining and inhabiting Mary's grief, and by posing it as an explicit challenge to any palliative dogma that would explain it away, these artists have done a service, in their fitfully effective way, to any thinking, feeling believer, as well as to any who can encounter this intense work on its own odd terms (it's certainly not for everyone, and I have some sympathy for the view, almost self-parodied here, that it's all actorly fol-de-rol). After all, if we can't look suffering in the eye without theologizing it, even the very suffering that is at the center of our theology, what good is our theology, after all? It's here that I think I may be missing out on some of what I understand to be the Catholic experience of the saints and Mary, who serve to personify faith practice in ways no Protestant "relationship with Christ" seems to do. In its insistence on the primacy of personal experience, on feeling the wounds, The Testament of Mary, for all its heterodoxies, feels very close to Mary indeed.

UPDATE: The Catholic weekly America, for whom I occasionally review, has a fascinating review of their own; Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's objection to it surprised (and somewhat chastened) me.

"I Can Talk in a Fine Circle": Eliza Bent's Hotel Colors

2013-04-29T09:30:00.000-04:00

If Eliza Bent's new play The Hotel Colors hits the ear at an odd angle, that is by design: When we hear the play's six Italian characters, holed up together in a tatty hostel in Rome, utter lines like, "I ask excuse of Formal You," or, "It is not just. You have no furs on your legs," we're hearing Bent's odd, idiosyncratic "literal" translations from the Italian that is their native tongue. The premise is roughly that because these six are from different parts of the country, they're speaking in a slightly stilted formal Italian with each other, all the better to be understood—that is, all except Irish Nick, who's spent time in Dublin and who talks in slangy, recognizable-to-us contemporary English (or, as he tells a girl from Sardinia, "I don't speak normal"). The action that ensues, within the span of one eventful day and night, includes several calls home, a nosebleed makeout session, the singing of songs and the eating of pizza, and a strenuous party game called "Bite the Bag" (pretty self-explanatory, actually).

Bent's play, which opens May 8 at the Bushwick Starr, represents her first full-length production as a just-a-playwright (she's performed in her own self-penned work as well as in a number of plays with the acclaimed Half-Straddle; she's not performing in Hotel Colors*). She got her masters in playwriting at Brooklyn College with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, and happens to be co-associate editor with me at American Theatre. We decided to conduct an interview about her play via g-chat. What follows is an edited transcript, in literal English.

Rob Weinert-Kendt: I enjoyed the play, and found it moving, too. It was less strange to read than I thought it would be—either that or I just got used to the language.

Eliza Bent: Bravo.

RWK: Can you tell me about the inspiration for it? And then about the writing process. I'm particularly interested in whether you conceived the lines in Italian, then translated them back, or vice versa, or both.

EB: Va bene, I will tell it to you. I wrote the play because it was my first semester in graduate school and I was freaking out about what to write. Like, I had forgotten almost that going to grad school for playwriting meant writing a play.

RWK: Ha!

EB: In any case, I was interested in Beckett and how he has those sparse, poetic plays. And how when you speak another language (in his case French) you just gotta say what you mean. So Mac Wellman was like, "Write a play using your Italian." And of course also, "Give yourself some stupid restraints"...Actually he'd say "stoopid"...the stoopider the better.

So I was like, "Va bene," and would mess around with these little exercises. At first it was maybe going to be about a class learning Italian but I realized that'd be a ripoff of that Dutch film Bread and Tulips.

RWK: Don't mess with the Dutch.

EB: At any rate, a hostel seemed like a good idea, or at least an idea. And I always have found hostels to be sort of amazing and dreadful and hopeful and depressing.

RWK: Yeah, I almost smoked crack at one once.

EB: EW! Rob, I cannot handle these personal details of your life.

RWK: Sorry. I mean, it was offered and I was like, um, I have to go.

EB: Damn dude. What country?

RWK: U.S.!

EB: YOU STAYED IN A HOSTEL IN THE U.S.? Now THAT is depressing.

RWK: I was cheap.

EB: Clearly.

RWK: Anyhooo...I wanted to get back to your writing process, how you came up with the lines...

EB: Right, in terms of the language experiment, I would think of the line in Italian and then very quickly do a literal translation.

RWK: Right, I wondered, because with a line like, "That is exaggerated," for example, that reads like it's supposed to mean, "That is too much." So did you first think of the English phrase "too much," then translate that into some Italian word which means literally "too much," and it comes back "exaggerated"? Or do the Italians actually have a version of that phrase that when translated comes out as "that is exaggerated"? Does this make sense?

EB: In Italian people say "e esagerato." It kinda means too much but it also means that it's an exageration...to be over the top. But I love the sense of "exaggeration" as being totally over the top. And it's often said with a bit of a sigh or irked air. [here i would demonstrate for you in real life]

RWK: It's not hard to imagine. :)

So I do want to ask larger questions about the play but can I also ask really specific things about lines that I like or intrigued/puzzled me?

EB: Yes, of course. Ma certo.

RWK: Like the exclamation, "Porcine misery"—that is priceless. Is that like saying, "fucking hell"?

EB: Hahahaha, that's a good one. We actually have changed that to "pig misery." "Porca miseria" is the Italian. People were like, "'Porcine' is too weird." And in Italian I think "porca" is actually like slut or prostitute; it's not a nice term. But it always sounded like pig or pork to me. Allora, I made it so.

RWK: Oh, darn, I love "porcine misery," but you're right, it probably doesn't roll off the tongue. But your answer raises a few questions: One, isn't part of the point of the play to make these actors say stuff that doesn't roll off the tongue easily? And two, it sounds like you have some unreliable translations in there (I noticed a few others, like "Hippocrates" for "hypocrites" and "limpid" for "limp"). Is that part of the game, too?

EB: Sure. I mean...I'm not some amazing translator. That was part of the fun. Because as I was translating the play from brain to computer screen, my "translations," so to speak, aren't at all like Beckett. It's florid and weird and idiosyncratic.

RWK: Right.

EB: Hippocrates is a fave. Limpid is correct, though.

RWK: But limpid means "clear," no?

EB: I don't concern myself with meanings of words!

RWK: I saw you mention in another interview that this raised issues about language and communication, and how much we can't say with words, etc. Was it your intention at the start to examine these things, or did you discover a lot of these levels/meanings as you wrote? What surprised you or challenged you the most as you wrote this?

EB: I mean...yeah, talking is hard. Or at least...this is something that I think about a lot, both when I lived in Italy, when I do work with Half Straddle, and also in writing this play.

I remember in my youth as an undergrad kind of trembling when I was reading stuff by Saussure and those dudes about the limits of language, and it's curious how when you learn another language you can be freed, in a sense, from yourself. When I would have little arguments with my boyfriend in Italy it was vexing. I would always start to speak in English which would upset him, but actually being forced to use the words I knew helped me express the things I wanted to say...well, usually...whereas in English I can talk in a fine circle and get nowhere close to what it is I mean to say. And I think probably everyone feels that sometimes.

In terms of what surprised me as I wrote? I don't know...maybe how quickly it all came out in a jumble, and I didn't have a desk so I was writing in my bed in my old apartment. And I watched a lot of "Jersey Shore." Maybe that was a surprise: watching "Jersey Shore" was a little treat for when I'd write some stuff.

RWK: Those folks are Italian-American, aren't they?

EB: They are...but that has nothing to do with it...and everything to do with it.

RWK: Mmm.

EB: It's like they are living in an extended hostel. And going to the gym and going tanning and being very party-focused. And something about those confessionals was compelling to me, in terms of putting those confessionals with the characters in the play.

RWK: Did you like spending time with your characters, or was it like any relationship: sometimes you loved them but you needed a break, too? Or were any of them really hard to write/spend time with?

EB: Hahahaha. Um, no. I love the characters!

RWK: Which one is you? (half kidding)

EB: Oh please. They are all aspects of me.

RWK: Oh, good answer.

EB: But like they are also inspired in part by some people that I knew and met in Italy. Like there's a real Irish Nick out there. I am the most uncreative person ever.

RWK: Wow, was he as annoying/hilarious in real life?

EB: He was intense. He would give sloppy kisses on the cheek and you'd kind of have to wipe it off.

RWK: So I just really had one more question: Is "Bite the Bag" a real game?

EB: Yes. I have only played it once, on Fire Island. But a Canadian was leading the charge.

*This line has been corrected, per Eliza's comment below.

Stew & Heidi: The Final Installment

2013-04-25T09:57:00.000-04:00

In the last installment of my long interview with Stew and Heidi Rodewald (here's part 1, and here's part 2), we talk more about Shakespeare, why Homer was a bluesman, and how the theater world, for all its hidebound traditions and protocols, ultimately gives them more freedom than the music world.

Stew: I do have an ego when it comes to music, but even then, I love what other people come up with. Where I don’t have an ego is in playwriting, I really don’t; I feel like it’s a fucking privilege and a joke that someone even calls me a playwright, that I get to write things down that people say. I feel like it’s hilarious. I feel like they’re gonna take me away to jail one day and say, "He’s got a Tony?" It’s a joke. I’m this guy that walked out of a rehearsal room, and suddenly I’m writing things and people are studying them and memorizing them. These people can memorize Hamlet, and I’m like, “Say this, man.”

American theatre is still a literature-based art, and I feel like it’s a performative art; I feel it’s like a form of music. A lot of people look at it like it's something about literature. And I just don’t think that. You know why it’s not literature? Because even someone like Edward Albee—Albee, most of his plays are more rock and roll than any rock musical that’s ever been onstage, period. Why? Because you feel like something weird is gonna happen; something maybe bad is gonna happen. You’re not sure what’s gonna happen. That’s the rock and roll thing: Is he so drunk that he’s gonna fall down? Is he gonna really grab that chick in the front row? Is he gonna start screaming forever and they’re going to have to stop him? Is James Brown really going unconscious and crazy?

Q: Anything could happen.

Stew: You can construct some plays where you’re really concerned that some shit might go down. I think we get so trapped in this idea that it’s literature. I think the words are music, actually. I really think if we look at it like music, it allows us to step off that. This insistence on understanding everything...Nobody understands what the hell Bob Dylan is talking about; nobody really knows.

Q: But when you're listening to him, you know what he means.

Stew: Exactly.

Heidi: Do you know how many times, looking at the lyrics in a script, people are like, "What?" And we're like, "Well, no, you gotta hear the song."

Q: One difference I've noted talking to musicians who work in theater is the way it's rehearsed, and of course then the performance schedule.

Stew: I never like the way theatre rehearsals run, being told when to break.

Heidi: But I gotta say, being in a rehearsal—it's such a luxury that we were in there and got to do that. How many bands aren’t at that point, to have somebody pay to get all these people in the room.

Stew: Yeah, the biggest luxury in theater for a rock musician is that people are sittin’ there and they’re not going anywhere until that break happens. That in itself was hilarious to me. I was like, "Wow, you mean, they’re just gonna come here and we can do anything we want? That’s cool." When we're dealing with musicians, you gotta keep 'em there. But our director, Joanna Settle, will be like, "Is this is a six out of one or eight out of whatever?" I can’t think that way. Sometimes a rock band rehearsal is an hour and a half, sometimes it’s six hours. You don’t know.

Heidi: We’re used to showing up and getting some coffee.

Stew: I think it’s a privilege to be able to survive from your art in America. But I do wish there was some flexibility in the way theater is created, so that the institutions could allow for chance and the kind of zaniness that can happen in a rock and roll rehearsal. For me it should be so loose, or there should be moments...Like a free day every week, a free rehearsal, everyone walk in and be free. You don’t how many times actors look at us and go, "We never get to do anything like this, where people just jam." Sometimes the first 45 minutes of our rehearsals would just be the musicians playing some crazy shit. That makes them feel like they’re in the play and not actors anymore. It’s nothing we invented. I was talking to some theater person once about this stuff, and they were saying, "All these ideas are so innovative," and I was saying, "They’re not innovative at all, they’re like 300 million years old. They’re just music ideas; they’re the way people make music." It might be new for theatre. I don’t think it’s new for theatre, either, actually.

I mean, come on, man. Shakespeare is the scariest thing for anybody who didn’t get trained in it. I never learned it in school, and every time it came up I was always scared, because I never understood what was going on. But once I started doing a little bit of reading and realizing that the milieu of a lot of his work—rough neighborhood, people standing, holding alcohol while watching the play, people hooting at the crowd, people hooting at the stage, men dressed as women—I’m like: We’ve played that club all of our lives. That’s where we grew up. Moliere and his boys and girls comin’ into a town at noon, and he’d be like, "Yeah, what’s the local gossip?" And then they would integrate into the show. That’s what bands do—when you come into town you ask, "What team’s playing?" So you go, “Hey, go Dodgers!” They’re gonna love it; they know you’re not from there. It always works; they know you don’t care, but it’s bonding, bonding—all these tricks.

The more I read about the old stuff—like, come on, man, The Odyssey. Thank God I bought a translation of The Odyssey that had a really long foreword, and they talked about how it used to be performed by some guy with a lute and some guy with a robe, who would show up and crash parties, and go, “Hey, we’ve got this tune called the fuckin’ Odyssey.” And then they would go and play and sing this fucking thing and get money. I’m like, that’s exactly what blues guys have been doing forever.

Heidi: They probably came up with their own thing every time.

Stew: The roots of it are closer to rock and roll, so I feel very close to theatre. I don’t necessarily feel close to what you call the professional theatre.

Q: I'll push back just a little on the theater-isn't-literature point. I mean, one of the great things about theater is that it's a place where words and meaning are still taken really seriously.

Stew: Which is amazing. For me, the sweetest thing and the greatest thing about us being adopted by this world was that they were kinda looking at us like—the rock people always thought we had witty words and everything, but the theatre people were the first to go, “Yeah, we want you to tell these stories. We hear these stories.”

Heidi: When we started at the Public Theatre, we were getting paid to show up and hang around and have Stew tell stories, and have us all sit around going, "What are we going to do?" It was this amazing freedom—theater gave us that. And then at Sundance Theater Institute, their whole thing is about risks. It’s crazy, because theater—as much as we’re saying everything’s all locked in, they were the ones who really appreciated the words and said, "Do whatever the hell you want to do."

Stew: They paid us a really big compliment and supported us in a way that we would never have been supported in the rock world. It’s not like we were spring chickens, which is a big deal in rock and roll. They heard the stories and took them seriously.

Heidi: One of the great quotes was at Sundance, what Oskar Eustis said after our first big presentation when everyone gives their notes. All he said was, “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Stew: Everyone just closed their little notebooks after that. It was a very radical thing for him to do. He wasn’t even at the Public then. That was such a rock and roll note, to say, "Just let them do their fucking thing."

The dramaturg Janice Paran said something great; she said that with a lot of plays, the epiphanies are in the text, where the character realizes something, and she was like, "The epiphanies in this play are in the actual music, in the sound of the music." I was like, "Wow, I didn’t know that, but thanks for telling me! You’re right." That’s the beauty of dramaturgy, someone can show you a way to think about your own work. No one ever did that for any of our records.

The Notes: Stew & Heidi, Part II

2013-04-24T09:19:00.000-04:00

photo 2012 by Stephen P. Marsh

In this second installment of my talk with Stew and Heidi about rock and theater (part 1 here), we get deeper into the divide between the two, and talk about how they've bridged it.

Q: How did you navigate your first theater collaboration?

Heidi: We were lucky, we had already been through so much—we were so like beaten down by the music side of things, so that in theater, every step along the way we weren't afraid to question everything. They told us, "We don’t put the band in the program," I think that was our first thing where we were like, Why? And we wanted to bring our band out from L.A.

Stew: Our first struggle with the Public Theater was that they wanted us to use New York musicians. We were like, "You don’t understand, this is a band." They didn’t understand that this was not an orchestra pit. And when we initially said, "We don’t want musical theater singers," a lot of people said, "That’s not possible. You can’t do that in a musical. You can’t have people who quote-unquote can’t sing," and we’re like, "We don’t want people that can’t sing—we just don’t want people that sing like that." We want people that sing like me and Heidi sing, which is like human beings that have a voice. I’m stealing that from David Cale, our actor in The Total Bent; I was trying to explain to him how I like people to sing in theater, and he goes, "Oh, you mean like human beings."

So we’ve been living this divide between what is theater and what is music. And I pay theater the highest compliment: as much as I worship music, I think music is theater. All music. I think any time you’re doing it in front of somebody, it’s theater. But I’m into the inherent drama in music, not music as a servant of narrative. The absolute best moment in Total Bent is when one of our actors, our lead, during a rehearsal, goes over in the middle of a song and starts playing drums, the theatre—it electrifies the house. It’s like, Oh my God, this is actually happening! You couldn’t write that. I had no idea that was going to happen.

Heidi: Along the same lines as that, a friend of ours from L.A., said, and I thought this was great, when he saw us on Broadway, he said, “I felt like I was watching a real band—I felt like you could fuck up. Like something could go wrong.” And you don’t feel like that when you see a Broadway show. And it was a compliment to think we were actually human beings up there who were being ourselves.

Stew: We bring a kind of a learned swagger, a studied swagger, to the stage, and the actors bring this learned precision, this timing, which we kind of don’t have. What happened in Passing Strange, and what happens in every single play we do after that, is that there’s this learning process, this give and take between the actors and the musicians, so that the actors teach us about timing—how to get a laugh when you say something and then look, when to turn, literally to the second, I learned this by watching them onstage how they got laughs. And they learned some swagger from us.

Q: You say you're not in Total Bent, but part of the authenticity of Passing Strange was that you were in it. Are you going to be in any future shows?

Stew: We’re looking into whether we’re in Family Album (the show for Oregon Shakes) or not, actually. We’re investigating that in a workshop, so we’re going to have understudies on hand. It’s going to be a fun experiment to see. I’m torn. I’m certainly not dying to be in a play, but I’ll be in it if it needs it. This is really the experiment. It’s one thing for me to be talking to Daniel Breaker or Colman Domingo about rock performance when they’re doing a character that I wrote, but Family Album is going to be someone loosely based on me—my character, as Heidi's is based on her. So this is the first time that we’ve ever actually gone to someone and said, "You’re kinda gonna be us."

Q: Other people have played "you," though—you had an understudy on Broadway for Passing Strange, and that show has had a number of other productions. Have you seen any of them?

Stew: The productions that I’ve seen have been really wonderful. The farther away they get from us, the better. I’ve loved them. There was a college production where the narrator was a Greek chorus. There was no fat guy standing there singing; there was a bunch of kids there singing. I couldn’t stop thinking about how brilliant that was. There should be an all-female version. I would just hope that people would get a clue from the kinda show it is that they’re encouraged to reinvent. To “cover” it in an interesting way. To me, it’s like an album, and then you do covers. I’m fine for the covers to be freaky and weird.

Q: Have you learned anything valuable from the way theater is done, and on the other hand, are there things that drive you crazy about it?

Stew: The thing I love most about the theater are notes. No one ever does that with albums. I love hearing what people have to say. Often dramaturgs are very careful, and they speak in this kind of euphemistic way, and I’m like, "No, tell me what sucked. My ego’s not so fragile. If I like it, I’m going to keep it in whether you like or not; I didn’t get this far changing things because someone didn’t like it. I’m confident enough to want your notes, including the stuff you don’t like, you know?" I think it’s great that everyone chimes in and everyone cares. I’ve gotten some of the most amazing notes from everyone—from Oskar Eustis, who’s one of the greatest dramaturgs around, all the way down to some assistant of mine who just got out of Yale and has never held a theater job, but he’ll be like, "Yeah, I think it would be cool to see the father in this kinda situation, because you normally see him in that kind of situation," and I’m like, "Boom, that’s a great idea."

Heidi: Also, the bad notes make you stronger; they actually made us talk about stuff and go, "No, this is why we're going to stick with this." It’s good to hear bad stuff.

Stew: There were monologues and things that people said we should take out, like uniformly, there were opinions about certain things in our plays where more official theater people have said, "That’s not moving the story forward," blah blah blah. And we go, "That’s a great note, thank you, but we’re going to keep doing what we want, because there must be something there." It was striking a chord.

Heidi: Because it’s not a science; you can’t always go, "This relates to that..." It’s like listening to a record.

Stew: Something has to be said for this business of the rules, the Aristotelian situation, and in particular the idea of what’s supposed to happen to a character. My big contribution to theater theory is this: I think in theater, normal theater, drama, the protagonist is supposed to change. Fine, you can have that. In rock and roll, the audience is supposed to change. The protagonist doesn’t change. Bob Dylan doesn’t change; Bowie doesn’t change.

Q: But Bowie changes clothes.

Stew: Right, they change clothes, they change songs, they change the wig. But you are supposed to walk away from that concert changed. So the cathartic experience—I’m not saying the cathartic experience doesn’t exist in rock and roll, absolutely. But we don’t change; we’re just telling you the fuckin’ story. And if we are going through changes, those changes are only 3:58 long. It’s “Diamond Dogs” one minute, and it’s “Golden Years” the next. Those songs have nothing to do with each other, and it doesn’t matter; they create a narrative at the end of the day, at the end of the concert. They don’t create a necessarily logical narrative, but I think it’s completely valid to call it a narrative. You look at every David Bowie song in that set, I defy you to find a logical narrative, but you will absolutely find an emotional narrative in that that makes total fucking sense, that makes just as much sense as the most hardcore Aristotelian play you’ve ever heard of.

Heidi: I think we’re really lucky to be our age; I remember the first band I was in, where it was like, “The first song on the first side of the album, and the last song…” It’s so much fun to talk about. We’ve kind of carried that on, we’ve kind of thought that way.

Stew: If it’s done right, a well-sequenced record has a kind of story, even if it’s done by the producer after the artist has gone off to do a tour. Even if it’s by chance, you receive it, and it tells you something, the way it’s put together. Whether it’s a Cagean flip of the I Ching, or it’s something that’s completely thought out.

Heidi: In theater, everybody spends so much time talking about why things work and why they don’t, and what’s so beautiful is sometimes you just can’t explain it. That just works and I don’t know why. It felt right.

Stew: This is why, if musical theater was made more like rock bands make music, you’d have more moments like the moment in Total Bent where our lead goes and plays drums suddenly, because I would never write that. I would never be able to write that scene. We were just standing around, and we said, Why don’t you go get on the drums? And now it’s a showstopping moment in the show. I never could have written that, sitting at home at 7 a.m., “Lead singer walks over to drum set and starts playing in the middle of a song.” Most of the best melodies in Passing Strange were written when we were standing around waiting for fucking something to happen. We got a section of Passing Strange, “Why you wanna leave/Right when it was starting to feel real.” It’s like a main melody. That came up literally while we were standing there waiting for somebody to move something; I started humming it, and I asked the guy next to me, whoever the workshop actor was, "Sing this with me," and then we all started singing it. I would have never written that at home. That’s how rock band rehearsals go. That kind of looseness, giving it up.

Next: The final installment looks at Albee, Moliere, Shakespeare, and Homer through a rock and roll lens.

Drinking With Stew (and Heidi)

2013-04-23T09:30:00.000-04:00

If you made a list of the singer/songwriters whose work pointed them toward the theater, let alone made them seem likely to have a Broadway show built around them, let's be honest, would Stew—the pop polymath of The Negro Problem and L.A.'s Crazy Sound All-Stars—have made the cut? After 2007/8's Passing Strange, obviously, yes, but it took a big leap of faith on the part of the Public Theater to see in Stew's tunefully bemused tall tales (which he co-composes, it should always be noted, with Heidi Rodewald) a play, or plays, waiting to be born. (I actually floated a theory about why relatively obscure indie-rock auteurs make better theater-makers than giant pop stars back then, and in the age of Once I think it still holds up.)

Stew and Rodewald are sticking with the theater thing, with a new show in development with the Public (The Total Bent) and series of new commissions, including one for Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I had a beer with Stew and Rodewald a little while ago for my big American Theatre story on band-created musicals (something of a fleshing-out of the above indie-musical post), but was able to use a mere fraction of Stew's perorations on the subject in that vast, multi-sourced story. It was my wife, who happened to glimpse some of the interview transcript on the back of some scratch paper at home, who reminded me how intensely entertaining and quotable Stew's interview/lecture was, and insisted it be shared with the world.

Herewith, then, the first part of a lightly edited transcript of my evening with Stew (and Heidi), which I'll publish in a series (now up: parts 2 & 3).

Q: So you're sticking with the theater thing—you two make musicals now.

Stew: Our thing is weird because we really stumbled into another career—literally stumbled, no intention, and then were pretty unusually successful. I tried to write a play, and didn't know how, didn't know how to make a musical, Heidi and I didn't know how to do any of these things, and we kind of got to the pinnacle of what you're supposed to, and pretty much in no time. When we closed on Broadway, everybody else was like, "So now all the projects," and we were like, "Actually, we want to take some time off, play some shows, play some dive bars, see if we really want to do this theatre thing." It really took two years to figure out if we actually—I mean, we kept writing stuff, but we didn't really have this hardcore focus. I remember doing a workshop shortly after we closed of a new play; and I wasn't even into it, I was just kinda doin' it 'cause I was supposed to. It was like, I'm a successful Broadway playwright now and I'm supposed to do that, and I wasn't really feelin' it. I was like, "This is cool, it's fun, but I just think I wanna play these shows."

So we did these shows that nobody in theatre world knew about; we did these song cycles, one at St. Ann's Warehouse called Making It, we made a record of it, which is kind of about my and Heidi's relationship, going from point A to point B, to this weird Broadway experience. Which we were in, but it was a concert. Then we did this thing called Brooklyn Omnibus, and we did that at BAM, and again, it was a song cycle with a band onstage, heavy video projections, all of our backup vocals were actors. For us it was another hybrid. It was sort of like the Passing Strange experience, but leaning more toward our comfort zone, which was a concert. Those were completely unrecognized by the theatre community.

Now we're back with three commissions: Public Theatre, Oregon Shakes and Studio Theatre. Last summer we did a lab of The Total Bent at the Public, which for me was just a total joy. The theatre looked at it like a live workshop, and I looked at it like a play that we were doing in the moment, and there's going to be another version in 2014. The theatre mentality sometimes is like, you're working toward something, and for me, music is about whatever it sounds like tonight is valid. The Total Bent, which does not have Heidi and I in it, is about trying to find that thing in the actor that kind of connects them to what I feel rock and roll performers have, or all music performers have. I think all music performers are actors. Every guy in a band who knows that 500 people are watching him, he's not going to stand exactly like that when he’s at home. But the beauty of the musician as an actor is that they’re really smart actors, they’re smart enough to know that the game is really making it look like it’s natural.

What’s the best, the thing we all want out of acting is that it looks real, right? Musicians do that all the time. They pose, and you think that pose is the first time they’ve done that on tour, and they make it look spontaneous. Musicians do this naturally. And they’re just like actors: They hit the mark. Pete Townshend jumps the same way every time, but it doesn’t make it any less dramatic when he does it. It’s like when you come out at the top of Romeo and Juliet and you say here’s what the play’s about; that doesn’t ruin it for anybody, does it? Annie Dorsen, when we were doing Passing Strange, she said, "This play needs something to tell people what they’re going to see. Like in Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, he comes out and says it." And I’m like, "Really, that doesn’t fuck it up for them?" And she’s like, "No, theatre audiences are weird. They kinda don’t mind knowing." And I realized, you know what? Rock and roll crowds really don’t mind either. People go to see the Who, in the old days, to see what level of destruction Moon is going to render his drum set, and you go to see how high Townshend is going to jump, and when he’s going to jump. But at the same time, what they seemed to do is make it feel new every time. And that’s something…

When I go into schools, I talk only about rock and roll and what rock and roll has to do with theatre, because I don’t know anything about theatre, but I know something about playing a club at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, and what you do on that first song to get people to stay there. And to me that’s drama. Drama is like, we gotta do something in these first two songs to make these people be late for their job tomorrow.

Q: The Total Bent has musician/actors in it?

Stew: Some of them are learning the instruments in the play. We don’t like musical theater actors so much. I have learned that a great actor can do anything. Even sing. Certainly sing in a rock band. A great actor maybe can’t necessarily sing Oklahoma!, but a great actor can sing any song of mine. I’m convinced of it, because I’m not a great singer either, but I buy the songs I’m singing, and I sell it. I’ve seen actors who literally don’t have singer on their resume kill on our songs. Daniel Breaker, I don’t think he’d ever been in a musical. I’ve seen guys in workshops who say, “Oh, I don’t sing, man, I’m sorry,” and I say, “Dude, take this tape home and fucking learn it,” and they come back and they nail it.

Q: Of course, there are a number of good actors who also happen to sing and play really well, and not just "musical theater" types.

Stew: We’ll try anybody out. But there’s something about rock and roll, which is really just folk music—which means it’s the music that folks play. Folks can’t play classical music, regular folks can’t play jazz; you have to study that. But folks—anybody in this bar can learn “On Top of Old Smokey” within the next half hour, I can teach anybody in this room to do that; that’s folk music. It’s three chords and we can all do it. So to me it’s about getting someone to connect with that, which is actually not that difficult, really, but mentally I think that’s difficult, because they have such a formal approach to acting and performing. Rock bands are about taking that guy who hangs out with you, and going, “You know what? You’re the singer, you’re the bass player.” It’s functional.

Heidi: "What’s needed? OK, I’ll be that." That’s how I joined my first band. I actually lied and said I played bass when I didn’t, because they needed bass player.

Stew: That’s the way rock bands work.

Heidi: It’s like joining a club, you just want to be a part of it.

Stew: Yeah, and you pretty much have to do whatever isn’t being done. If there’s not a drummer, you’re going to play drums. I remember we forced this guy on our block to play bass. This was my first band in junior high. We even told him what bass to buy: He had to buy a Paul McCartney violin bass.

Heidi: You told him what to buy?

Stew: We told him what bass to buy. He was practically crying. My friend and I were guitar players, and this guy wanted to hang out with us, and we said, "OK, you have to play bass, and you have to play that kind of bass." He really wanted to play something else, like drums. But that kind of functional, informal, just-among-friends kind of vibe is to me what rock and roll is really about. And we like to try to bring that to the stage, to the theatre, and to get actors to believe that, that they really are musicians, that they could be in a rock band. And most of them figure it out pretty quickly. We’ll do things where we’ll do a gig with them, a real gig. Invite them a real gig. The Passing Strange band had gigs. As soon as you get a guy up in front of a crowd, he’s like, "Oh, here’s what it is."

Next: What Stew and Heidi love most about theater.

The Pong of Dissent

2013-04-18T14:50:00.000-04:00

My recent post on why I depart from the chorus of hallelujahs for Matilda led the paper of record to ask me to write about my (relatively) lonely position (though I see that Feingold has now joined the dissenters). The Times was less interested in me re-litigating my case against the show than in reflecting on the disorienting experience of feeling alienated from the crowd:

I try not to look too closely at reviews before I see a show, and when I go back and read them after the fact, I find myself alternately reassured and challenged, even at times persuaded to see a show differently in retrospect. But when my feelings are as divergent from the reviews as they were about “Matilda,” browsing through the raves can feel like an out-of-body experience, a near-Orwellian process in which my own memories are being subtly changed or replaced, my misgivings unseated by effusions. With every point I concede—yes, that song was charming, now that I think of it—I feel more and more unmoored from myself, and from the experience I could swear I had in that theater that night. Can that be taken away from me? Even if I might wish it so, I would hope not.

Read the whole thing here.

Drury's Lane

2013-04-17T08:48:00.000-04:00

A passage from We Are Proud To Present a Presentation etc. in which one actor coaxes another into the right emotion for a scene.

I don't usually get the chance, or at least I seldom take the opportunity, to revisit plays I've enjoyed. One happy exception is when I have occasion to write about them or their author, as was the case with Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose play We Are Proud To Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, made such a splash last winter at Soho Rep. I wrote a little about it, in relation to the film Lincoln, here, and am happy to report that it's nearly as stimulating to read as it was to experience (and not only because of the emoticons shown in the excerpt above).

Given that that play showed Jackie's facility for writing for an ensemble, and that her new play, Social Creatures, was commissioned by Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I., for its resident acting company, I smelled a story. Jackie's not the first playwright to write so well for ensembles of actors, but most writers who are able to do it so well are also members of theater companies themselves, which Jackie is not. And there's something about her approach—her economical dialogue and witty, transformative stage directions—that marks her as an especially sly, tricky but serious-minded new playwright to watch.

On the strength of that hunch, I was able to sell the paper of record on a story about Jackie, which you can read here.