The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre

And For Those Who Have No Cake, There's Plenty of Bread

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:12:00 +0000

When I turned twenty-one, my mom wrote to a bunch of theatre and movie people (without me knowing it!) and asked them to send me birthday greetings up at college. A whole bunch of them did! For more than a month, going to my mailbox every day was a great adventure.

The first thing I received was a letter from Lucie Arnaz and Larry Luckinbill about a month before my birthday. I was stunned. They knew I was a Muny usher! It was an incredibly nice letter, but I was baffled as to why they sent it. On the back was a P.S. from Larry that literally changed my life.

He wrote, "Go broke if you must but always overestimate the intelligence of the public. They'll thank you for it!!"

I was never the same again, after reading those two sentences.

At the time, I didn't know I'd be starting a new theatre company six years later. And I didn't know that Larry's postscript would become that company's guiding principle. It made me think about theatre and storytelling and audiences in a whole new way. Every time New Line produces a challenging show, our audiences prove Larry right.

And that's happening again right now with Promenade. It's an unusual show and it breaks so many rules, but New Line has done a ton of shows that break the rules (Assassins, Jerry Springer the Opera, Bukowsical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Floyd Collins, Spelling Bee, Hands on a Hardbody, A New Brain, and so many others).

These wonderful shows have taught me two other lessons. First, never fear the audience! Second, audiences don't only like what they know; they like what's good.

Again, our audiences prove both things true with Promenade. It's about as unfamiliar as a show can be, on several levels, but it's really really good. And our audiences and the critics are responding to that. And also, to my great relief, the reviewers really "get it." They're seeing all the cool things under the surface of this amazing piece of theatre.

Reviewer Gerry Kowarsky wrote for Two on the Aisle, “New Line Theatre is up to its old tricks again, and we should all be grateful. The company’s last four fully staged musicals were revivals of successful shows from its past. These safe choices were understandable, given the financial challenges facing New Line and many other theaters. With its current staging of Promenade, however, New Line reclaims its place among the boldest producers of musicals. . . In taking a chance on a provocative, seldom produced work, New Line has lived up to its billing as ‘the bad boy of musical theater’. . . The opportunity to see this rare and historically important work should not be passed up.”

Reviewer Michelle Kenyon wrote for her blog Snoop’s Theatre Thoughts, “New Line Theatre is known for shining light on off-beat and lesser known shows, and their latest offering is one of their quirkiest yet. Promenade is an experimental musical from 1969 that features a catchy score and a markedly absurdist style. It’s sharply satirical and surprisingly relevant to today, featuring a cast and creative team that have gone all-in on the absurdity, making for a thought-provoking, entertaining and challenging production that highlights the best of what New Line is about. . . It’s a production that brings out the best of what New Line can do while satirizing some of the worst of what humanity has to offer in terms of economic disparity and abuse of power. It’s certainly a show that will make you think, and you just might find the songs playing in your head as you leave.”

Richard Green wrote for TalkinBroadway, “Delightfully absurd, 1965’s Promenade is a mad tea party in act one and a sprawling, nutty gadabout in act two. You keep shaking it like a Christmas present, going crazy trying to figure out what’s inside. But a playful nonsense rules the day. . . ‘What does it mean, and where is it going?,’ I kept asking myself during this production. Those questions become the ultimate joke in a show that’s gleefully evasive, where powerful idiots delight in flummoxing one another, as the powerless sneak in for a closer look. . . The whole show comes along at exactly the right moment, with its unexplained war and our own wealth gap at the worst it’s been since the French Revolution. And every wise word twisted into ridiculous nonsense. What a surprising relief, finally, to be able to laugh at it all.”

Jack Janssen said in his online video review for Jack Reviews Musicals, “New Line’s production of Promenade is lighting in a bottle. If this were helmed by a lesser crew, it would have crashed and burned. . . New Line makes it look easy, effortless, accessible even. And it’s all thanks to an enthusiastic cast, a lush jazz combo, creative visuals, and great directing.”

All this again reinforces my belief that the director's job is not to have "a vision" or to be "fresh" or "original." The director's job is to make sure every moment, and the story as a whole, are as clear as possible. Directing Promenade all I could think about was clarity. There's no room in this show for "vision" or cleverness. Fornés and Carmines have stuffed this show with relentless, perpetual-motion brilliance. If I'd try to impose my own "vision" the whole thing would collapse. It's as intricately built as a Swiss watch and I'm not about to tinker with that.

I frequently remind myself -- we serve the show; the show does not serve us. It is not a vehicle for showing off or being impressive. I knew, from working on so many other weirdo shows, that I just had to trust the material, no matter what. So we did. And the result is a terrific production.

As we plan for next season (the fun never ends!), I remind myself that New Line doesn't exist to sell out or to get rave reviews; New Line exists to share with our community the very best of our art form, the American musical theatre. Money is a necessary evil, but money is never the point. The point is we're storytellers -- that's our role in the world -- and storytelling is absolutely vital to the survival of our society and species.

These are very dark, Back to the Future Part II type times. To quote Chess, "These are very dangerous and difficult times." Yeah, no shit, Molokov. So more than ever, we need the Light -- the enlightenment -- of storytelling. It's not about escape, it's not disconnection; it's connection.

Connect, George!

Our absurdist adventure continues....

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

All is Well in the City

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:54:00 +0000

I almost can't believe it. We opened Promenade last week. Holy shit.

I was a freshman in college when I first discovered the cast album for Promenade. It baffled me and thrilled me. This was not the kind of musical I was used to, but there was something about it I absolutely loved. I listened to it obsessively for several weeks before I moved on to other thrilling discoveries, like The Robber Bridegroom and Little Shop of Horrors and March of the Falsettos and King of Hearts.

At the time, I didn't know the Promenade cast album contains only about two-thirds of the score, because the record label was too cheap to produce a two-record set.

But Promenade always stayed with me. I finally found the script in a collection called Great Rock Musicals, although I can't imagine anyone thinking Promenade is a rock musical. It's more of a show-tune-vaudeville-jazz-blues-folk-waltz-Gilbert-and-Sullivan-operetta-pop musical. This script collection also included Hair, Tommy, Grease, The Wiz, and JC Superstar, among others. I don't know how Promenade got in there, but I'm glad it did,or we might not be doing it right now.

So I read the script and it made absolutely no sense to me. I had yet to encounter much non-mainstream theatre, and it didn't even occur to me that making sense wasn't really the show's priority, that in fact, sense-making was the target of much of its satire. I had no idea what it was -- at the same time, much of it was very funny, and all of it was really interesting. Even just reading it, it was a genuine page-turner. I could tell that there was a lot beneath the surface that I wasn't fully getting. Now I know the obvious -- it wasn't meant to be read; it was meant to be experienced. Exactly like Shakespeare's plays.

On the 1969 poster, under the title, it said, "A Musical Entertainment." This show wasn't about its text, but about the experience of the performance. But when would any of us ever get to experience Promenade?

In a 1965 interview with Richard Shepard in The New York Times, Promenade's bookwriter and lyricist María Irene Fornés said, “Playwriting has less to do with language than novel writing does. It’s language in a very special way. Language is like the motor that starts a machine. How the machine performs, what dynamics it creates, that’s what counts.” Specifically about Promenade, Fornés said, “My script was not delightful, it was just a possible setup for something delightful.”

When I was in college, that idea would have terrified me. Now it delights me. Now that we've opened the show, I understand that quote even better.

Despite my mixed reactions, I've always wanted to do Promenade. But the New Line board members (quite rightly) always steered me away from it, season after season. Until now. I was adamant this time. Promenade is from 1969, but it's about our culture right now in 2026, in so many weirdly specific ways. It speaks unmistakably to this current zeitgeist.

We started rehearsals in early January, and our entire creative process has seemed sort of unreal to me. I feel like I'm rebelling against the Matrix by producing this show we "shouldn't" produce, this show that nobody produces, this show that breaks every rule.

But I learned a fundamental lesson about directing unusual shows when I worked on Hair the first time, in 2000 -- if a script or score doesn't make sense to me, it's probably my fault, not the show's. It's probably just that I haven't figured it out yet. So much about Hair didn't make any sense at first, but when we figured it out, we found that it's an intricately constructed, brilliant, masterpiece of musical theatre. I was so amazed at how much my understanding of the show changed as I learned more and more about the show and its creators' intentions -- and the culture that gave it birth -- so I wrote a whole book about everything I had learned, Let the Sun Shine In.

That same lesson has served me well with Promenade. I knew from reviews and other documents that this show is extraordinary. I knew I just had to trust it, trust Fornés and composer Al Carmines, trust the show's original director Lawrence Kornfeld, who helped shape it, trust all those reviewers who saw such brilliance in it.

It's easier for me to do this now, to just surrender myself to the material. It always works, and it has worked again with Promenade. Watching the last few rehearsals before opening was so much fun, because I'm sure we've gotten it right. Our production is what this show is supposed to be.

So we've actually opened Promenade, and my decades-long desire to share it is finally coming true. The best feeling in the world is watching the audience come out into the lobby after a performance -- some are delighted, some are gobsmacked, some are still thinking about it, some are wiping away tears because the show's emotions were just so overwhelming -- knowing that a whole bunch of them now love the show as much as I do.

I am the Johnny Appleweed of the musical theatre.

Part of my astonishment at our unlikely feat comes from the incredibly talented people who signed on for this whack adventure and worked really hard to bring this show back to life. The cast has found the multiple styles and tones at play, the goofy humor and the subliminal humor, and they're having huge fun doing the show. Thank the gods, they are all fully up to the considerable demands of this eclectic score.

New Line's resident music director Jason Eschhofen reconstructed and arranged the score for us (the music they sent us with a MESS), and he leads our 7-piece New Line Band, playing this wonderful, catchy, tricky, oddball score. There's so much underscoring beneath dialogue that the band almost never stops playing all evening.

I've gotten such terrific reactions from our audiences after performances. One patron said to me, "I'm not sure what that was, but it was mesmerizing!" True to our intentionally checkered past, we've had a few people walk out at intermission. And that's okay. Despite its age, this is not your grandfather's musical. Not everybody will love it.

Most people have come out smiling or laughing. Quite a few have thanked me for bringing this almost-never-produced, historically important, and relentlessly entertaining musical to St. Louis.

This show totally fits the New Line test: If not us, who?

It is a particular joy for me to see for the first time this musical I've always loved only from afar -- and finally to hear the entire score! But it is an even greater joy to share it with hundreds of people. Love it or not, you'll never forget it. It will stay with you a long time. In a good way.

And now I finally have people to talk about Promenade with!

Don't worry -- this show is not "abstract" or "avant-garde;" but it does ignore most the rules of storytelling and of theatre that we've all grown up with, rules we take for granted, rules most of us probably never even consciously noticed. So Promenade won't tell you a story; it'll simply present reality for your examination -- not the surface of reality, but its essence. To re-quote my favorite new quote, the theatre isn't a mirror; it's magnifying glass.

Promenade is a giant cultural magnifying glass, and it's looking at 1969, but it's also looking at 2026. And at us. And yet we keep laughing. What else can we do?

It's such a cool show! We run through March 28. Don't miss this genuine once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see this fascinating piece of history!

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

Transvest! Impersonate!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:01:00 +0000

There are few things more fun for me than discovering a musical that I didn't know, or at least didn't know well. I've had the Promenade cast album since college, but it's missing more than half the score! Why hasn't anyone made a complete studio recording of this brilliant score?

It has been a real joy getting to splash around inside Promenade and figure out how it works. It really is a creature of off off Broadway and a genuine oddball absurdist masterpiece, so different from anything I've ever worked on before. And that's a huge part of what's so cool about it -- it's an outlaw musical!

After its 1965 debut, Promenade was revised and expanded in 1969 for the off Broadway audience, but the show still retained its off off Broadway philosophy and still centered on the interplay of social status and role-playing. Despite its more conventional two-act structure now, it still wasn’t interested in plot progress or three-dimensional characters who advance toward a goal, nor in psychology, morality, empathy, motivation, or backstory. It still was lightyears from a Broadway musical.

Its story of two prison inmates escaping to observe the world outside is a wild, psychedelic variation on Alice in Wonderland and Candide, as the prisoners encounter increasingly grotesque people and circumstances – but in the real world, not in Wonderland. As Dian Lynn Moroff writes, “The characters of Promenade all display a defiant nonchalance and happy-go-lucky attitude that draws attention to what it would ignore: all is not well in the city.”

Stephen Bottoms writes in Playing Underground, “Promenade, by striking contrast with Fornés’ first play Tango Palace, breaks away from this closed system by envisaging a world in which the characters’ identities and relationships – far from being fixed into predetermined patterns – are constantly being reimagined through performative role-play. The prisoners, for example, are portrayed less as criminals than as childlike innocents, abroad in a strange world like latter-day Candides. Lacking clear identities of their own (they have only numbers, not names), 105 and 106 observe the behavior of those around them in order to decide what roles they should adopt for themselves.”

In a foreword to a collection of plays Robert Pasoli wrote, “Miss Fornés’ minimal art says certainly not all, but something and something with implications for more. This is why her theatrical moments are delightful. Delight in her plays is simply the sensation of surprise that what seemed like nothing does, in fact, amount to something, sometimes to a great deal. Take 'The Finger Song' in Promenade, the musical that Miss Fornés wrote with Al Carmines:

Whenever my fingers went like this,
I said: Hell, my fingers went like this.
I said: Hell, my fingers always go like that.
Until one day somebody said to me:
How original it is that your fingers go like that.

Since then, every time
Since then, every time my fingers go like this,
I say: Look.
I say: Look at my fingers go like that.
How original it is that my fingers go like this.
One of these days I’ll sell them.

Pasoli explains, “The delight and surprise of which I speak is not in the joke of the last line. It is in the psychology of the first three lines of the second stanza, a revelation erupting from something very tame. That is an example of delight in Miss Fornés’s work. The last line is something else, which Miss Fornés does wickedly well. It is the revelation of an attitude, a specialty of her characters: an off-hand, flip attitude that is based on an outrageous and entirely natural ignorance of ‘the facts.’ One of the things that Miss Fornés knows about people is that reality is what’s in their heads, not what’s outside. Fantasy and imagination, the mental embrace of what is impossible according to the laws of physics, is as real as what is every day counted, codified, or used to hold up tall buildings.”

The Servant takes on the role of truth-teller in the show as well as mentor to the childlike prisoners. She sings to them at one point about the Aristocrats, “Riches made them dumb. Yes, riches made them dumb.” The Prisoners ask, “It’s not worth it, then?” She answers, “It’s worth it.”

As Bottoms writes, “Performing the role of the idle rich might render one mentally vacuous, but who would not choose wealth over poverty? Such perverse (a)logic recurs throughout the play almost as a formal principle, alongside the equally persistent concern with the transformability inherent in role-play.” He goes on, “Promenade epitomizes the off-off-Broadway movement’s widespread rejection of the psychological determinism that dominated American theater at the time, thanks particularly to Method-school acting and naturalistic dramaturgy.”

Director Lawrence Kornfeld, says, “The biggest thing that actors have to get over is what they’re taught about motivation. ‘The character can’t do this, they’ll say: It’s not in their psychology.’ Nonsense! People can do anything, and people do almost anything.”

In another interview, Kornfeld said, “What happened in these off off Broadway productions was what happened to the people who did them; the words and music were not what happened: what happened was that the people who acted and sang and danced were the action, the music, and the dancing Many of them didn’t know this or don’t believe this, but it’s true and they are mistaken: they were only doing what they were doing at that moment on that stage, even though they repeated the same thing night after night and were not improvising.”

Theatre artists like to believe they "transport" their audience to another time and place when they perform a show, but that's not true. There is no such thing as "suspension of disbelief" -- no one actually believes what's on stage is "real." Except it is. But it's not the reality of the story that thrills and engages an audience, Kornfeld was arguing; it's the reality of the performance. In fact, a theatre performance transports an audience to a magical, communal Here, Now, and This.

About Promenade, Fornés says, “My script was not delightful, it was just a possible setup for something delightful.” The actual act of live performance is everything. Promenade is less about the outside world than it is about us – audience, actors, musicians, etc. – at this moment in this place as we watch this performance.

And that can never be repeated. It's literally a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And that's the point.

Critic Michael Smith, wrote about the show in the Village Voice in 1965, “The dominant emotion is romantic melancholia but the tone is vapid frivolity, and the delicate tension this creates gives the event its distinction. Only occasionally we come upon the bitter rejection implied by cynicism; more often we confront ironic acceptance.”

Many of the critics applauded Al Carmines’ eclectic score, borrowing from Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, W.C. Handy, Sigmund Romberg, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, and other composers, playing with gospel, pop, ragtime, honky-tonk, and much more. Though some called his music derivative, Carmines recognized the effect of popular music forms on an audience, and the established connections and conventions that act as a musical shorthand, cluing the audience into the content as well as the sound of these songs.

Critic Daphne Kraft in the Newark Evening News called the score a hybrid of “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide.” Today, lots of critics deride Andrew Lloyd Webber’s scores for the same reason; but he knows what Carmines knew.

Stephen Bottoms writes, “Drawing on Carmines’ usual range of eclectic influences, from torch songs to operatic arias, the music is mostly brisk, exuberant, and thoroughly enjoyable. Yet there is also a darker, more abrasive edge lurking beneath the high spirits – perhaps suggestive of some sleazy Berlin cabaret. The cast recording features elements of dissonance, minor keys, and the use of deep, rasping male vocals set jarringly against soaring, high-pitched females. The music perfectly complements Fornés’s deceptively simple lyrics, which in songs such as 'The Moment Has Passed,' mix blithe joviality with a bleak subtext of emotional isolation and violence.”

Kornfeld says about Carmines’ music, “Every show had what we called a compulsory tango. Sometimes the tango was funny, sometimes it was scary: it was just a formalism. But what a lot of people forget is that formalisms like that can contain many subjects and ideas, and that’s what we tried to do: say serious things in a comic way, and not irony for irony’s sake. comic things in a serious way. Al’s music had a deep sense of irony, but it was not irony for irony’s sake.”

Marilyn Stasio wrote in Cue, “Carmines is a genius at assimilating every musical style from grand opera to gut blues and transforming them into an ecstatically slap-happy style that is clearly his own.” She went on to explain that the show was “structured on a mood, a kind of manic exuberance so exaltingly good-natured that is would take a ridged soul indeed to resist it.”

In the book American Drama: The Female Canon, Catherine A. Shuler writes, “If Fornés remains on the periphery of the mainstream, it is because large, popular audiences come to the theater to have their most cherished beliefs reinforced, not challenged. They do not want to examine the implications of gender hierarchy or the dynamics of patriarchy too closely. Fornes’s refusal to compromise, her refusal to write to please men, her rejection of romantic sentimentality ensures that she will remain on the fringe.”

It’s interesting in this musical with a script written by a woman, that the rich women characters are far more constrained by social customs than the men – or the poor! – and their priority in life seems to be looking attractive to men. These women are defined in terms of the men. Only the Servant and Miss Cake, who have fewer social constraints, can really speak the truth.

Moroff writes, “A vaudevillian element characterizes most of these early Fornés plays, and a playfulness characterizes all of them. Each is irreverent, sometimes inconsistent, occasionally preachy, frequently silly. They each also have moments of exceptional theatrical sophistication, a keen awareness of their own contexts, limits, and reach. Each is at least in part about the theater itself, particularly about the way characters are characterized by those on the stage with them, by the stages and sets themselves, and by the audiences for which they perform. . . using the paradigms of certain symbiotic roles in relationships, theatrical and otherwise, to show how roles are defined and controlled in antithesis to others’ roles. Promenade suggests the possibility of transcending certain roles within a theatrical context; an audience, for example, someone to play to, can alter the nature of the play.”

Moroff goes on, “In Promenade, any character provides something against which another character can find definition. The rich are not the poor, the Servant is not the people she serves, the Mayor not the people he rules, and the Jailer not the Prisoners he pursues. The play’s mantra recited by the Servant suggests that the game of role-playing is inherently transformative, but the reverse appears to be true within this drama. Accompanied by the Prisoners, named 105 and 106, the Servant sings:

Be one and all,
Be each and all.
Transvest,
Impersonate,
‘Cause costumes
Change the course of life.

Yet, although nearly every character in the play trades one costume for another, none of their dramatic fates is altered in turn. The rich women undress and redress; the Prisoners exchange their jail clothes for the Soldier’s jackets; Miss Cake, by wrapping a stole around her shoulders, rises in rank to become the Mayor’s mistress – but the rich are rich at the drama’s end, and the Servant wanders off, lonely and poor.”

In the middle of Act One of Promenade, the Servant does some important truth-telling:

We’ve come to one conclusion
That’s readily discerned:
A lot of satisfaction
Does away with discontent.

Doesn’t it?
A lot of satisfaction
Produces happiness,
And the source of satisfaction
Is wealth.
Isn’t it?
All that man possesses
Displaces discontent.

Village Voice critic Jerry Tallmer compared the original 1965 production of Promenade to “a Jeanette MacDonald movie co-scripted by Bertolt Brecht and Jean Genet, directed by Groucho Marx.”

In another Village Voice review of the ‘65 production, Michael Smith wrote:

The plot is inconsequential and exists to provide opportunities for set pieces of entertainment; at the same time the entire play is a set piece of entertainment, achieving unity through coherence of texture rather than form. The style is similar to old-time movie musicals, say, The Big Broadcast of 1938, and the production is an excellent example of high, as distinguished from homosexual, camp.

Irony enters in the written words. Within this preposterous setting, the talk shines with sophistication and intelligence and is more often than not concerned with actual feelings. The ideas that are used for comic effect are by no means trivial, and the glassy glibness of their expression is devastating. The dominant emotion is romantic melancholia but the tone is vapid frivolity, and the delicate tension this creates gives the event its distinction. Only occasionally do we come upon the bitter rejection implied by cynicism; more often we confront ironic acceptance, which penetrates the target’s defenses by denying the need for them.

All this is gravy. The core experience of The Promenade is its exquisite and delicious humor. Great stretches of it are marvelously funny, and most of the time it is funny on the broadest and the subtlest levels at the same time. Miss Fornés’s words are unfailingly witty; no less admirable is the manner in which musical numbers are conceived. One is continually involved in puns and multiple references.

Fornés says, “It’s like a lot of movies from the 1930s, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Everybody is lightweight, you know, you run, you cry, there’s a meeting and then something happens and you go somewhere else.” But we find during the show that the characters’ lightweight-ness is also a fatal flaw which keeps them from engaging with the world meaningfully.

In a review in The New York Times of a 1983 New York revival, Stephen Holden linked the production to the Theatre of the Absurd: “This work, which suggests a mixture of Candide and Samuel Beckett viewed through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, is a little too avant-garde and absurdist to appeal to mainstream tastes. But in its odd way it’s an exquisite piece of musical theater.”

In a Village Voice review of a 2010 revival, Michael Feingold wrote:

First performed Off-Off Broadway by Judson Poets Theatre in 1965, then expanded for its Off-Broadway run in 1969, Promenade marks the apex of Fornés’s earliest playwriting style. A cartoon-baroque extravaganza with a dark, sardonic undercurrent, it evokes but never mimics Absurdist writers like Ionesco and Arrabal. Two convicts, motivated by the desire to know evil, break out of jail. Instead of evil, they discover the privileged obliviousness of giddy rich people, the perpetual bitterness and docility of the working poor, and the soothing effect of even misplaced motherlove. Meekly, they go back to jail. ‘And for those who have no cake,’ runs a final chorus that may or may not mean what it says, ‘there’s plenty of bread.’ Sure.

Carmines floats the barbed ironies of Fornes’s lyrics on a fizzy outpouring of mock-operetta vocal acrobatics, drawing playfully on a staggering range of musical vocabularies, from bel canto to honky-tonk. Orchestrated with equally imaginative wit by Eddie Sauter, Promenade’s score is a gigantic joy to hear, and a daunting challenge for even the best-equipped theater singers to tackle.

In a 2019 review of the City Center concert version of the show, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in The New York Times:

Promenade, the bizarre and sneakily thrilling 1960s musical with a book and lyrics by the then-fledgling playwright María Irene Fornés, is by no means a conventional piece of theater. . . Emerging Wednesday night from New York City Center was like waking refreshed from a glittering, nearly sung-through fever dream – something about two comical, dewy-eyed prisoners on the lam, searching Manhattan for ‘the appearance of sin’ and hanging out with a bunch of swells. . . it’s an episodic satire of haves and have-nots that achieves an ingenious sleight of hand. Occupying us with comedy, vocal splendor and more than a little bafflement, it builds stealthily – through more than 30 musical numbers – toward a surprisingly moving finish. With a vast, stylistically voracious score by Al Carmines, an ordained minister and a composer with magpie instincts who ran the influential avant-garde Judson Poets’ Theater, Promenade is as comfortable with old-school show tunes as it is with operetta and even opera.

Reviewing the 1969 off Broadway production, critic Leo Mishkin in the Morning Telegraph called the show “a dazzling and bewildering extravaganza . . there is nothing quite like it to be seen anywhere else in the theater today.”

Veteran critic Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times:

Promenade will be one of the more controversial musicals this year – it will also presumably be one of the most successful. It is a joy from start to finish. . . There will be those who will question the slightness of the story line, but there will be more, many, many, more, who will glory in the show’s dexterity, wit, and compassion. Miss Fornés’s lyrics, like her book, seem to have a sweetly irreverent relevance. There is a Dada zaniness here that creeps up on you where you least expect it, and a topsy-turvy Brechtian morality that is most attractive. At times, the book and lyrics are perhaps coy – but always with a certain knowingness that prevents the coyness from becoming cloying. And a very cool madness is everywhere – extravagant, wild, and diverting. . . The style of the show is the perfect reflection of the show, wickedly amusing, joyously blithe, and yet with a serious if lightly touched layer of protest and social comment beneath.

The off Broadway 399-seat Promenade Theatre opened in 1969 with the expanded, two-act Promenade, and the theatre stayed in operation until 2006. Among its other famous productions were the original Godspell, William Finn’s In Trousers, and the 1984 revival of Pacific Overtures.

No matter how much or how little an audience “understands” Promenade, everyone agrees it’s really funny. But what is "funny"? We humans find something funny when it both surprises us and tells the truth. Promenade does both, quite ferociously. There are surprises everywhere and a whole lot of truth about us, our society, our world, our times.

America was in the midst of horrendous turmoil in 1965 when the one-act The Promenade opened, and in 1969 when the two-act Promenade debuted, and again today. So what can the world of 1969, even if through a funhouse mirror, teach us about the world of Now? In this case, a hell of a lot.

And besides, theatre isn't really a mirror of reality; it's a magnifying glass.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

But Me, I See Everything

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:49:00 +0000

In my last post, I wrote about the off off Broadway scene where Promenade was born. Now meet its birth mother.

Cuban-American, queer director and playwright María Irene Fornés first discovered her deep love of theatre seeing a production of Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1954. She says it changed her life. A little more than ten years later, in 1965, she won an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting for two works in the same season, her musical Promenade and her play The Successful Life of 3. She won seven more Obies in the years since.

In Theatre and Literature of the Absurd, Michael Y. Bennett compares Fornés’ work with Beckett’s, writing, “Instead of two flat lines that comprise Act I and Act II of Waiting for Godot, her scenes, one after another, tend to have a rising action, but neither climax nor resolve; much like Godot, the audience is left hanging, but with Fornés, more on the edge of their seats.”

In a 1965 interview with Richard Shepard in The New York Times, Fornés said, “The play comes very deeply from my own consciousness. I didn’t sit down and figure out who were to be the characters. The explanation is an afterthought; there are images I believe in completely. . . Playwriting has less to do with language than novel writing does. It’s language in a very special way. Language is like the motor that starts a machine. How the machine performs, what dynamics it creates, that’s what counts.”

In a 1966 New York Post article, “Rebellion in the Arts,” critic Jerry Tallmer reported, “There were those who thought Promenade – an opera-farce of practically everything – was the best and funniest work in its season, off-off-Broadway or wherever.”

In 1969 Robert Pasolli wrote in the Village Voice, “Fornes’s minimal art says certainly not all, but something and something with implications for more. This is why her theatrical moments are delightful. Delight in her plays is simply the sensation of surprise that what seemed like nothing does, in fact, amount to something, sometimes to a great deal.”

In 1994, in a special section of the Performing Arts Journal devoted to the avant-garde, Fornes described her creative process to Bonnie Marranca, “I believe that there’s a creative system inside of us. It’s a system that’s almost physical. I can compare it with the digestive system or the respiratory system. . . The writing is not asking me for permission but it is taking force and just going.”

María Irene Fornés was called by some the Mother of the Avant Garde in 1960s New York. She wrote thirty-nine plays, and twenty of them have been published. Famed playwright Lanford Wilson said about Fornés, “She’s one of the very, very best – it’s a shame she’s always been performed in such obscurity. Her work has no precedents, it isn’t derived from anything. She’s the most original of us all.”

In his essay “Irene Fornés: The Elements of Style,” Village Voice critic Ross Wetzsteon writes, “From the first, her writing has involved a process of distillation, stripping away the behavioral and psychological conventions that pass for realism, and seeking instead a kind of hyperrealism (whether it appears in the guise of exuberant fantasy or severe documentation). And from the first, her plays have been formally shaped by an intuitive search not merely for a new theatrical vocabulary but for a new theatrical grammar.”

Her goal as a writer was to “catch” and surprise herself with what happens on the page, letting her subconscious and the simple logic of each moment take over. She never had a plan or a message or an agenda when she sat down to write. It was as natural and organic as she could make it.

To write Promenade, she made three piles of cards; one pile listing character types, one pile listing places; and one pile with a first line of dialogue. To begin writing the show she picked up two cards, “Aristocrats” from the character pile and “Prison” from the place file. How could she navigate that? Since Aristocrats can’t be in jail (or can they?), she began with two prisoners escaping from jail and encountering the Aristocrats.

Wetzsteon writes, “Fornés' trademark as a director is a gestural and informational formality, an emphasis on declamatory line reading in particular, that rejects the cumulative effect of naturalistic detail in favor of the spontaneous impact of revelatory image, that rejects emoting, behavioral verisimilitude, and demonstration of meaning in favor of crystallization, painterly blocking and layers of irony. The contrast, in many of Fornés’ plays, between the surface and the subtext helps account for their disorienting paradoxes: the simpler her work, the more mysterious its meanings, the more virulent the action, the more tender its feelings.”

“The Cigarette Song” in Promenade is just a random record of a tiny sliver of a life. In an interview, Fornés explained, “This really happened to me. One day I was walking down Fifth Avenue with a cigarette in one hand, a toothpick in the other, just thinking how wonderful it was to be able to sing when you wanted to, eat bread when you’re hungry. I grew up so poor in Cuba there weren’t even any breadlines – there wasn’t any bread. To be able to do all those wonderful things – that’s what that song means.”

Fornes never pulls her punches. She just shows us, no matter how ugly, no matter how trivial, no matter how maddeningly ambivalent. At the end of Promenade the prisoners’ mother (or is she?) sings a lullaby, but it’s not comforting, just disturbingly truthful.

I saw a man lying in the street
Asleep and drunk.
He had not washed his face.
He held his coat closed with a safety pin.
And I thought, and I thought,
Thank God, I’m better than he is.
Yes, thank God, I’m better than he.

And then the mother leaves her sons and sings to us, with brutal honesty:

I have to live with my own truth,
I have to live with it.
You live with your own truth.
I cannot live with it.
I have to live with my own truth.
Whether you like it or not.
Whether you like it or not.

At first blush, we accept this as a strong statement of individuality, but it’s a claim that we each have our own truth, so contradictory to others’ truths, that they can’t coexist. Good and evil don’t exist in the world of Promenade, because they would require consensus of definition, and there is no such thing.

So how did María Irene Fornés, decades ago, describe so accurately our current culture today in this new millennium, when what’s true is forever up for debate, and alternative facts are competing successfully with actual facts?

I know everything.
Half of it I really know,
The rest I make up,
The rest I make up.
Some things I’m sure of.
Of other things I’m too sure.
And of others I’m not sure at all.

Here at the end of the show, she turns her gaze on us in the audience, and she names our crime.

People believe everything they hear,
Not what they see,
Not what they see.
People believe everything they hear.
But me, I see everything.
Yes, I see everything.

Including her own obvious faults and failures as a member of society.

Wetzsteon ends his essay, “Fornés’ work is like a cross between Brecht and Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Eric von Stroheim and Gertrude Stein standing in the wings.”

In Fornés: Theatre in the Present, Dian Lynn Moroff writes, “The progress-less stories of Beckett’s theater also echo in Fornés’s theater. Her plays are rarely plot driven; more often, structure is the consequence of characters represented by their participation in small and frequently absurd scenes whose juxtapositions equal dramatic events. Fornes’s characters talk, pose, and posture incessantly, and Fornes’s theater lends significance to those ‘small’ acts with scrupulous theatrical framing; characters and audience alike are continually subjected to the carefully crafted and manipulated extraliterary spectacle of the body, light, music, color, and space. . . Her increasing emphasis on the gravity of role-playing, the character as determined by his or her context, and the slipperiness of language resurrect Jean Genet’s The Maids and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And lugubrious atmospheres conjure the dramas of the Irish lyrical playwrights William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory.”

Later in her book, Moroff writes, “Intimacy, pleasure, truthfulness, and an innocence willing to be taken by surprise – these are all crucial attributes of Fornés’s theatre.”

Stephen Bottoms writes in Playing Underground, “New plays like Irene Fornés’ Promenade, were defined not only by aesthetic innovation but by their immediate accessibility as entertainment.”

One of Fornés’ central concerns was the present-ness of theatre, that live actors are presenting this show to you right now in this moment, and the show they’ll present tomorrow will be a different one. Why is this? Fornés tells us in her lyrics “Once a moment passes, it never comes again.”

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

I Know What Madness Is

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:15:00 +0000

Michael Smith, theatre critic at the Village Voice, wrote in 1963 about the new theatre alternative, “Off Off Broadway is decidedly clubby. To some extent, it has a coterie audience; to some extent it is snobbish and self-glorifying; to some extent it is a playground. Sometimes it is despicable. But all these weaknesses are inseparable from its strength, which is it human scale.”

Sounds like my kind of theatre.

Off Off Broadway is where Promenade was born in 1965. Sixty years later, it seems as timely as ever, like it was written about 2026. So the New Liners are bringing it back to uproarious life.

The birthplace of Promenade, the Judson Poets’ Theatre, was one of the four cornerstones of off off Broadway, and the only one to produce musicals as well as plays and other performance pieces. In his (excellent!) book Playing Underground, scholar Stephen Bottoms refers to the Judson’s “unabashedly joyous sense of vaudevillian showmanship.”

Judson was just as radical and experimental as the other companies, but Judson shows were also entertaining. Good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle (on a budget!) in the service of very serious, very complicated ideas. Bottoms calls this moment in theatre history “radically promiscuous in its creativity,” and he tells us these artists found inspiration in poetry, soap operas, Greek tragedy, Hollywood movies, burlesque, even opera.

Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie said about this moment, “It was like, OK, this is ground zero, and you’ve rejected the usual forms, which for us were Broadway and psychological realism. And then you think, now what’s possible?”

Judson’s resident director Lawrence Kornfeld (who directed Promenade) said of those times, “We needed to get out. To get out from inside. To get out from Eisenhower time. To get out from those constraints. To create a very, very American form.”

We usually don’t think about Theatre of the Absurd and musical theatre together, even though absurd originally meant out of harmony musically. The word has since come to mean out of harmony with reason or logic or purpose. Still, these two forms of theatre don’t seem to go together, since musicals are about emotional connection and absurdist plays are about ironic detachment.

But ultimately, musical theatre and absurdist theatre are both aiming for the same thing, honesty and truth. In The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin writes, “For all its freedom of invention and spontaneity, the Theatre of the Absurd is concerned with communicating an experience of being, and in doing so, it is trying to be uncompromisingly honest and fearless in exposing the reality of the human condition.”

By the Sixties, off Broadway had abandoned its identity as the place for weird and wonderful experiments (like Threepenny Opera and The Fantasticks); it had become just a smaller but still commercial version of Broadway.

So, off off Broadway stepped in.

Lots of new physical spaces emerged in the early 1960s to host all the new kinds of theatre, most of those spaces very nontraditional. Off off Broadway (originally "off-off-Broadway") was led by four theatres, all of them in New York's East Village (where Rent is set), Caffe Cino, La MaMa ETC, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poets’ Theatre.

(Village Voice critic Michael Smith argued for adding The Open Theatre to the list as well.)

One of those spaces was in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church, a landmark in Greenwich Village. The Judson’s Gallery had presented the very first “Happening” in New York in 1958, and in the audience that night was a theology student named Al Carmines.

Soon after, the senior pastor hired minister Al Carmines to create a theatre in the church’s basement, dubbed Judson Poets’ Theatre, which debuted in 1961. The church’s congregation as a whole voted to hire Carmines, as part-time minister and part-time artistic director. They also voted never to censor any material presented in their space. Carmines told interviewers that they considered art-making to be as much a form of worship as Sunday services, and that the cornerstones of Christianity are salvation and creation.

Within its first five years, Judson produced fifty-nine plays by forty-three authors, including the one-act musical Promenade in 1965. At the same time, Carmines created Judson Dance Theatre and reignited the Judson Art Gallery. Carmines was openly gay and had two degrees in theology. He wrote scores for several off off Broadway musicals throughout the Sixties that played the Judson Poets’ Theatre and in some cases went on to commercial runs. Carmines openly admitted that Judson was a child of the legendary ensemble, The Living Theatre, not only in philosophy but in actors, directors, and designers as well.

In her book Fornes: Theatre in the Present, Dian Lynn Moroff writes about Carmines and his co-artistic director Lawrence Kornfeld:

They came to define the theater’s aesthetic, which from production to production mixed camp sensibility, abstract movement, social commentary, zany and grotesque humor, bright melodies, grinning irony, pop culture symbols, surrealistic flights of fancy, open sexuality, and, above all else, an unapologetic joy in life. The plays did not promote church orthodoxy, but for Carmines and the Judson leadership, art and performance were an extension of ministry, so it was natural that an ecumenical and somewhat programmatic celebration of life became a Judson hallmark. Two key traits of the Judson Poets’ Theater -- a free and experimental approach to performance events and a madcap often ironic delight -- became important aspects of [María Irene] Fornés' work in her first decade as a playwright. Nowhere is that affinity more apparent than in Promenade, her most Judsonesque play.

In their book Restaging the Sixties, James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal write about the theatre scene in Greenwich Village, “Making theatre was as much an experiment in radical democracy as it was an exploration of the possibilities of theatre as such.” One actor enjoyed calling the off off Broadway scene “the criminal psychedelic homosexual avant-garde.”

Michael Smith wrote in The Village Voice, “Off off Broadway isn’t a place or an idea or a movement or a method or even a group of people. It has no program, no rules, no image to maintain. It is as varied as its participants and they are constantly changing. At its best, it implies a particular point of view, that the procedures of the professional theatre are inadequate; that integrity and freedom to explore, experiment and grow count more than respectable or impressive surroundings.”

There was no Fourth Wall at the Judson. It was just too close-up and intimate. That old idea of “the suspension of disbelief” was utterly impossible here, in practical terms as well artistic.

This is the world that brought Promenade to life, and we're doing our best to honor that artistic worldview, and bring back this wondrous, audacious piece of theatre history, as faithful to its creators intentions as possible. It's a different kind of theatre from what any of us are used to, but that's what makes it such a terrific adventure! As we New Liners have been heard to say, "If it's not scary, what's the point?" Or maybe to put it more accurately, if it doesn't challenge us, what's the point? If we don't learn something, what's the point?

I never thought I would see a production (or video!) of Promenade. In fact, I never thought I'd hear the entire score, since a lot was left off the cast recording. But not only do I get to see it and hear it now, I get to study it, and I get to share it! My fanboy heart runneth over!

Come join us! And then, forever more, when musical theatre nerds mention Promenade, you can say, "I've seen it!"

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

Ho, Ho, Ho, I'm Carefree

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:51:00 +0000

We've finished blocking Promenade, we ran each act separately and tonight, we ran the whole show for the first time. And it's all starting to make a kind of sense as we assemble all the crazy pieces. And it's really entertaining!

One funny thing I've noticed -- so many of the characters act like children. The two prisoners, 105 and 106, have the innocence and curiosity and openness of children, while the aristocrats display the greed and selfishness and ego of children, as well as the tendency toward shameless showing off and very short attention spans. You might say the prisoners are child-like while the aristocrats are childish. And we leave the audience to decide what they think that means about America.

Likewise, several of the songs sound like children's songs, simple and direct on the surface but loaded with layers of meaning underneath.

"Unrequited Love" is funny in its obvious contradictions, but it's really about emotional walls and the inability to make human connection.

Passionate lips are sweet, but oh,
How much sweeter
Are lips that refuse.
Don't love me, sweetheart,
Or I might stop loving you.

That's pretty neurotic, but we also recognize it as truthful. There are people in the real world like this. Sondheim tackled the same emotions in "Buddies Blues" in Follies. In The Robber Bridegroom, the idea goes to an even darker place in the Act I finale, "Love Stolen."

The lyric to "Unrequited Love" shows us these aristocrats as shallow, trivial people, but these characters don't realize they're also revealing their darker depths.

Much of the song "Isn't That Clear?", sung by the aristocrats to the servant, sounds almost like nonsense...

Your unprosperous status
Produces a dubious,
Fallacious, and tedious
Outlook on life.

You do not know what we're about
We do not know what you’re about
Or care to know.

It’s sad your career
Depends on our whim.
On with your work, my dear,
Or you'll get thin.

But it's not nonsense. It's class warfare. It's the starkest statement in the show about class status in America -- and it comes very early in the show, to establish this theme that runs beneath everything. This song is a declaration of separateness and it's a flexing of social power, to belittle the Other and to remind the Other of their place.

You see,
Even if you're here,
And we're also here,
You are not near,
Isn't that clear?

These lines almost sound like a Dr. Seuss book, but the aristocrats are telling the servant that physical proximity is not the same as social proximity. It's a nasty way of putting her in her place and a it's bouncy, catchy song that's what composer Al Carmines does best, throw us off balance. And he'll do that through the whole show.

In another seemingly silly song in Act I, "Four Naked Ladies," the women aristocrats are jealous of the attention the men are showing Miss Cake, so the women start taking their clothes off. But we soon understand that this song is about social competition and conformity more than anything else.

"The Cigarette Song" is another deceptively complex song, in which the servant and the prisoners muse about the mundane, everyday freedom of being upper class. In the song "Bliss" the trio muses further about being rich.

Eating is a blessing,
Money is a joy.
Drinking is a pleasure
And riches a delight.
We've come to one conclusion
That's readily discerned:
A lot of satisfaction
Does away with discontent.
Doesn't it?

A lot of satisfaction
Produces happiness,
And the source of satisfaction
Is wealth. Isn't it?
All that man possesses
Displaces discontent.

It goes by so fast, we don't completely register the horror of the understatement. "Eating is a blessing"...? "Drinking is a pleasure"...? No, those things are necessary to life. But to these Others, they are luxuries. It's a direct, blunt response to the cliche that Money Can't Buy Happiness. On the contrary, says Promenade, "A lot of satisfaction does away with discontent. . . and the source of satisfaction is wealth."

Nothing subtle about that.

The song "The Clothes Make the Man" is another insightful commentary on social status, but coming at it from a different angle. Here, it's sort of the same idea as My Fair Lady, but in this case, it's the appearance that bestows status, not speech.

You see, a costume
Can change your life.
Be one and all.
Be each and all.
Transvest!
Impersonate!
'Cause costumes
Change the course of life.

There's so much going on in this lyric. It starts with the idea that our outward appearance is all important -- it can literally "change the course of your life." The song lists a series of professions, every one of them defined by their "costume" -- gigolo, businessman, cop, clown, priest, and the Jailer.

But this song also tells us to take that knowledge and use it, to use the power of appearance to get what we need. (I love the command, "Transvest!") The song tells us that our outward appearance is only a costume, a deception, a role we play. Once again, this seriously catchy song catches us off guard with its serious undertones. And it also reminds us of the everyday deceptions we all practice, the costumes we wear, the roles we play.

Later in Act II, the prisoners sing "I'm Carefree," a deeply ironic song about the ugliness of the world.

When I was born, I opened my eyes,
And when I looked around, I closed them.
And when I saw how people get kicked in the head,
And kicked in the belly,
And kicked in the groin,
I closed them.
My eyes are closed but I’m carefree.
Ho, ho, ho,
Ho, ho, ho,
I’m carefree.

In other words, you can be happy only if you ignore the world around you, because it's just too ugly. 105 and 106 are the only decent characters in the show, the only ones with any dignity or self-awareness. Though they are child-like, they are also anthropologists exploring a lost tribe -- the American upper middle class -- who commit (social) atrocities with a smile. And Carmines has written sad, dissonant, minor music to accompany the prisoners' obviously false claim to oblivious happiness in a world like this.

And Carmines has written beautiful music for "Spring Beauties," during which the aristocrats blithely turn two wounded soldiers into a maypole, and they dance around their "maypole" holding onto the soldiers' bandages, merrily wrapping the poor men up tighter and tighter. The song's lyric is all about celebrating the spring as a time for coupling, even as our soldiers are being wounded and killed half a world away. The aristocrats "don't see" our troops in Act II, the same way they "don't see" poor people in Act I. And then the aristocrats leave to go to a party at the Mayor's mansion, leaving the wounded men on the ground.

This subtle but powerful statement about Americans' attitudes toward our soldiers in Vietnam sneaks up on us, gradually emerging out of the silliness and the pretty music of this number.

The most disturbing number is surely the show's gorgeous finale, "All is Well in the City," because we've just spent the whole evening witnessing how much is not well in the city.

All is well in the city;
People do what they want.
They can go to the park.
They can sleep all they want.
And for those who have no cake,
There's plenty of bread.

But what "people" are they talking about? Who can do whatever they want, go to the park, or sleep all day? Rich people and the unemployed.

The last two lines of the finale are the most subversive of the entire show. Reversing the famous Marie Antoinette quote is funny but it implies two uncomfortable ideas -- that poor people should be grateful for whatever scraps they're given; and also that nobody is going hungry, because there's "plenty" of food.

In 1969 when the show debuted, New York City was at the beginning of a decades-long problem of homelessness that lasted throughout the Seventies and Eighties. There wasn't plenty of bread.

Even more unsettling (and depressingly truthful) is that 105 and 106 -- the Others, the Poor -- have bought into those two lines. They believe in the ideas that oppress them. These prisoners (as our stand-ins) have been on a wild anthropological odyssey; they've seen some of the worst of human behavior and impulses, and the only conclusion they draw is that everything is as it should be. They're back in jail. All is well.

Yikes!

I'm not exaggerating when I say you've never seen anything like Promenade. How I wish Fornés and Carmines would have written more musicals together! This show is both laugh-out-loud funny and seriously deep, and in a weird way, really beautiful. Don't miss your once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this thrilling piece of theatre history live!

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

Who Can Reason With a Clown? Who Can Dance With a Priest?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:44:00 +0000

Working on Promenade is a little different for me as director, but it's really different -- and sometimes baffling -- for the actors.

From the 1970s on, mainstream theatre, even commercial theatre, began to adopt certain ideas and devices from the Theatre of the Absurd, and soon those absurdist devices had become mainstream devices, so pure absurdism mostly faded away.

Because that happened, I've directed lots of shows that used elements of absurdism, like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Assassins, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Rocky Horror, Cry-Baby, Bukowsical, Reefer Madness, Anyone Can Whistle, and of course, Threepenny Opera. So I'm pretty comfortable with those tools.

We do so many shows that have their own unique set of rules, that are unlike all other musicals, so that's not scary. To be honest, that's a huge part of the fun, figuring out how each new oddball show operates, and helping the actors understand each new universe.

But Promenade is pretty close to pure absurdism, and that's not something actors are asked to do very often. Or ever. And unlike my job, Theatre of the Absurd explicitly rejects most of the actor's toolkit.

There's no backstory, no interior life, no psychology, no subtext. There's just now in this moment saying these words. It's about extreme liveness, presentness, about only this live experience in this moment. Or as Jonathan Larson put it, "There is no future, there is no past."

The explanation for all this is that all that complexity in creating a role is "false." No real person is ever thinking about her backstory, her interior life, her psychology, her subtext, so in order to be truthful, in order to represent reality, an actor playing a person shouldn't think about those things either. (For the record, this is terrible advice unless you're dealing with absurdism.)

We've blocked half the show. One of the actors playing the Aristocrats, was puzzled because they were all getting enraged over having their jewels stolen, and yet the next minute they're all dancing offstage singing a waltz, "Can You Bear This Bliss?"

I think the true absurdist answer would be: No, it doesn't make sense, because people don't make sense, because the world doesn't make sense.

My answer is probably halfway between absurdism and how we usually approach characters. I think the Aristocrats are outraged not over the loss, but over the effrontery! They're likely outraged about effrontery a lot; and outrage can be fun while it lasts, but not worth losing sleep over. They'll just buy more jewelry. There's probably a lot in the safe at home too.

And though maybe that approach is not pure Theatre of the Absurd, it certainly does present an absurd world, in which people are so rich, they can lose all their jewelry, and it doesn't really bother them. Who's that rich? Sound familiar?

The six Aristocrats are constantly chasing and flirting with each other but never really hooking up, because they're all terrible at flirting and they seem to possess zero empathy for anyone. Again, it's all silly in the moment, but it presents an absurd world, in which most human relationships are hopeless and fucked up. Sound familiar?

Yet again, here we are, working on this much older show -- it first debuted in 1965, it was expanded and revised, and it opened off Broadway in 1969 -- and yet it feels so much like this show is satirizing us in 2026. I think doing this show will be cathartic for all of us, including the audience, to be able to laugh at so much stuff that bedevils us.

We all cracked up in blocking rehearsal the other night when the Jailer declares confidently, "We have the best crime!" To our ears, that was a Trump reference, but María Irene Fornés wrote that fifty-seven years ago.

Maybe part of the reason the show still feels so timely is that our current zeitgeist isn't that much removed from the late Sixties and early Seventies, another very dark, angry time for our country. Though I think today is worse. Even though Fornés and Carmines were writing specifically about the society and problems of 1969, they were also writing about 2026.

They just didn't know it.

Fornés died in 2018, so I don't know if she realized how well her only musical has stood the test of time. She didn't live to see the well-received 2019 concert of the show as part of the Encores! Off-Center Series at New York City Center.

Great art always speaks to us. We find different things at different times, depending on what we need. Maybe Promenade will always feel timely. Because we humans will always treat each other like shit.

And speaking of that, I have noticed in the Promenade score the clear influence of Kurt Weill's amazing score for Threepenny Opera, which had just enjoyed a long run off Broadway from 1954 to 1961. It was off Broadway's first megahit. Another production of Threepenny in a different translation ran briefly on Broadway in 1966. So Irene and Al Carmines must have absorbed some of that dark awesomeness when they wrote Promenade in 1965 and 1969. It sure sounds like it.

I never thought I'd get to work on Promenade. I didn't really even know for sure exactly what it was. It's been a blast to work on. It's such a crazy adventure. And beyond the fun, the best part is I get to share this work I love so much with fifteen wonderful, fearless actors, and in a few weeks, with our audiences -- who likely have no clue what exquisite madness -- the madness of reality -- they're about to witness!

Promenade is an important slice of theatre and sociopolitical history but it's also a brilliant, whip-smart, wildly entertaining show that's so worth bringing back to life! And boy, is it a New Line show! I can't wait for you to experience the mad wonders of this beautiful show.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

Half Of It I Really Know

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:31:00 +0000

I've been wanting to do the musical Promenade since I first found the cast album in college and I fell in love with the Carmines-Fornés score. I could tell the show was weird -- let's be honest, I loved that it was weird -- but I did not know I'd have to learn about a whole bunch of new things in order to direct this show decently.

But that's okay. I love research. People ask me sometimes why New Line doesn't hire a dramaturg -- it's because that's my second favorite part of the process. (My "first favorite part" is polishing the show at the very end of the process. Nothing's more fun that that.) I figure, if I have to do the hard part (like blocking!), why give up the fun part?

Now that we're in the midst of blocking Promenade, I'm so glad I did all that research. Although, to tell the truth, I feel a little like one of the show's lyrics:

I know everything.
Half of it I really know.
The rest I make up.
The rest I make up.

For months, I've been studying Theatre of the Absurd; the off off Broadway movement; Judson Poets Theatre; the gay minister and composer Al Carmines; and the Cuban-American lesbian playwright María Irene Fornés.

If the Missouri Arts Council hadn't already blacklisted New Line for our content, this would do it.

Frankly, I had a blast learning about all this stuff. Some of it completely blew my mind. But it has made it much easier for me to lead our foolhardy but intrepid expedition into this wild and wacky musical comedy that is truly like no other.

If I do my job right as director, all my research will help this wonderful show operate the way its creators intended. Carmines and Fornés were rabidly, gleefully unconventional and experimental with their creations, but both of them saw their primary goal to be entertaining the audience. This isn't one of those oddball "masterpieces" that you have to study up on, in order to enjoy it. You don't need to know any of what I've learned to have a good time watching this show -- but I do need to.

Besides, I know there are lots of theatre nerds like me out there (well, not exactly like me, let's hope), especially those who read my blog. So if you're interested, I'm going to share what I've learned in my next few blog posts...

I'll start where my research started. What is Theatre of the Absurd?

Theatre of the Absurd isn’t merely silliness in the service of a serious point (which is what I always thought); in fact, the silliness is more the result of absurdism than its point.

In 1961, Martin Esslin wrote the book The Theatre of the Absurd, which is still widely recognized as the definitive text on absurdism. Absurdist theatre first emerged in the mid-1950s. The increasingly complex, consumerist, postwar world of the Fifties and Sixties – and America’s oppressive conformity culture, known as “the Establishment” – demanded a new kind of response to events of the real world, a new kind of storytelling, a new kind of art-making. Off Broadway once had been where the interesting theatre experiments happened, but by the Sixties, Off Broadway had become much more commercialized, more like a mini-Broadway.

Esslin wrote about the impact of the horrors of World War II on the theatre, “A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile.”

Playwright Eugѐne Ionesco wrote about Franz Kafka’s work and absurdism, “Cut off from his religion, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all actions become senseless, absurd, and useless.”

The absurdist playwrights were not trying to understand or explain the horrors of the war; they were simply trying to write in a rapidly changing world in which those unspeakable horrors had been committed.

So many of the devices and conventions of absurdist theatre have become commonplace in mainstream theatre today. The big names in this movement included playwrights Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugène Ionesco, Václav Havel, and Jean Genet, among others; and plays like Waiting for Godot, Rhinoceros, Zoo Story, and The Homecoming.

But to be clear, absurdism wasn’t an intentional movement – most of the playwrights we now think of as absurdists never used the label themselves. But they all challenged the traditions of mainstream theatre in generally similar ways, so it’s useful to think about what they were all doing, why they were doing it, and what the result was of them doing it.

In his book Theatre and Literature of the Absurd, Michael Y. Bennett writes about Beckett’s plays, and by extension about Absurdism, “The amount of words or the amount of silence does not quantify how much is being said. It is, rather, as if Beckett realized that realistic language could not express the inexpressible, so Beckett needed to destroy language, making it inexpressible, to adequately express the inexpressible.”

Or as Beckett himself explained it in his “Three Dialogues” essay, “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”

It’s why absurdists used music a lot, because music is an abstract language that does not try to express concrete ideas, but can convey what is otherwise inexpressible.

Theatre of the Absurd has two basic premises. First, the world is inherently absurd, without meaning or purpose. As Bill Finn’s Spelling Bee reminds us, Life is random and unfair, Life is pandemonium.

The second premise is that language is useless in expressing actual human thoughts and feelings, because words can never fully communicate exactly what another person thinks or feels. We are all trapped inside our own brains and experiences, and forever shut off from the brains and experiences of others. We can only process other people's words in terms of our own experiences.

So we can’t trust language.

Language can be used to deceive. So in an absurdist play, what happens is always more truthful than what is said.

Esslin wrote, “Exposed to the incessant, and inexorably loquacious, onslaught of the mass media, the press, and advertising, the man in the street becomes more and more skeptical toward the language he is exposed to.” He wrote that in 1961, decades before Fox News, the internet and social media emerged, and it’s only gotten worse today. “Language has run riot in an age of mass communication.”

These two basic assumptions mean that no absurdist play ever ends happily. Life can’t have a Happily Ever After because life is inherently without meaning or purpose. These ideas also guarantee that an absurdist play never has a message, since words are unreliable. Absurdist plays only present the insanity of the world, without comment or argument, and let the audience decide what to think about that.

Esslin tells us that one aspect of absurdism is that “it castigates, satirically, the absurdity of lives lived unaware and unconscious of ultimate reality.” A search for ultimate reality sounds a lot like religion minus all the magic stuff, particularly back then in the late Sixties, when traditional religion was fading, ill-equipped for the times. After all, these ideas represents a return to the original purpose of theatre, to grapple with the Gods.

Theatre of the Absurd is not particularly interested in the conventional notions of character, motivation, exposition, backstory, plot, or dramatic arc, the pillars of traditional storytelling. It follows the rules of neither comedy nor tragedy, because it’s almost always both, like real life. Absurdist theatre is expressionistic, conveying emotion and psychology, not relaying information or a message.

And that’s why it’s so appropriate for these befuddling times we live in (then and now), when we’ve lost faith (again) in all our institutions, and in our fellow humans, and in facts, and in language itself. The only honest theatre, the only honest storytelling must acknowledge all that. In this world stripped of certainties and rituals, the most ancient ritual of dramatic storytelling has to fill that void.

And we all know what that is. Live Theatre.

Ionesco said, “The aim of the avant-garde should be to rediscover – not invent – in their purest state the permanent forms and forgotten ideals of the theatre. We must cut through the cliches and break free from a hidebound ‘traditionalism;’ we must rediscover the one true and living tradition. . . To give the theatre its truest measure, which lies in going to excess, the words themselves must be stretched to their utmost limits, the language must be made almost to explode, or to destroy itself in its inability to contain its meaning.”

I love that so much.

In writing about America in 1961 – though he might be writing about now – Esslin says, “There is a kind of horror about, and I think that this horror and absurdity go together. . . If life in our time is basically absurd, then any dramatic representation of it that comes up with neat solutions and produces the illusion that it all ‘makes sense’ after all, is bound to contain an element of oversimplification, to suppress essential factors – and reality expurgated and oversimplified becomes make-believe.”

Instead of literal truth, instead of imitating life, imitating reality, the absurdists believed in presenting the essence of reality, its metaphysical truth, not its appearance. As Esslin reminds us, the stage is a magnifying glass, not a mirror.

And sometimes tiny, harmless creatures can look like terrifying monsters under a magnifying glass. Now that I think about it, that's about as apt a metaphor as I've heard to describe Promenade. Although to be honest, Promenade is more like a magnifying glass combined with a funhouse mirror.

It's a hell of a ride. You will love it. The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

PROMENADE!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:20:00 +0000

I'm a bit giddy.

Despite all the problems and troubles and obstacles of everyday life right now, I'm getting to fulfill a lifelong dream. I'm getting to work on a show that is a genuine legend of musical theatre, known by most musical theatre people only through its tragically incomplete cast album, because nobody ever produces it.

Flashback. When I arrived at college in 1982, I found out within a few days that the Harvard bookstore was called The Coop (short for The Harvard Cooperative Society), and it was a massive, multi-floor, two-building department store -- including the largest record department in New England!

When they told me that, I almost wet myself. My inner drama nerd swooned.

It was thanks to the Coop that I discovered March of the Falsettos, Little Shop of Horrors, The Baker's Wife, They're Playing Our Song, The Robber Bridegroom, Fiorello!, Celebration, The Threepenny Opera, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, Anyone Can Whistle and all the other Sondheim shows -- and Promenade.

Every time I bought a new cast recording, I listened to it obsessively for weeks. And then I discovered Boston had a bunch of excellent used record stores, and none of them knew how valuable their cast albums were. I was helpless to resist. When I graduated, I realized I had acquired an average of one hundred cast recordings per year while I was at college. When I graduated high school, I had one hundred cast albums; four years later I had five hundred. All on LP.

Promenade thrilled me when I first put it on the stereo. It was so playful and silly and really funny, and yet the lyrics had a weirdly dark, cynical edge to them. Who were these characters? I fell in love with the score, even though the recording is only about two-thirds of the show, even though I knew nothing about the show itself.

(One funny aside, in order to fit more songs on the LP, they sped all the songs up just a little, which made all the voices a little higher. I never even noticed until I listened to the CD and heard how it's supposed to sound.)

Years later, I found the Promenade script reprinted in a collection called Great Rock Musicals. (No offense to the collection's editor -- Promenade is many things, but it's not a rock musical.)

So I read the script. Twice. And I still had no fucking idea what was going on. But it was awfully funny! Plus, I reminded myself, I felt the same way about Hair the first time I read that script.

It wasn't until years later when I was writing theatre books, that I did further research into Promenade; and as a result, into the Cuban-American book and lyric writer María Irene Fornés, who was a major figure in Sixties theatre; into Theatre of the Absurd; into composer Al Carmines and the off off Broadway theatre he created, Judson Poets Theatre; and into the off off Broadway scene where Promenade was born.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to work on this show.

Year after year, as we talked about programming New Line's next season, Promenade was forever my personal Questing Beast. I knew we could never produce it because it was just too risky "commercially," but I really wanted to work on it. More than that, it was so outrageously, relentlessly special that I wanted to share it with people.

Then, about a year ago, as we planned this season, I called Chris Moore, our associate artistic director and told him it was time for Promenade. This show was initially about 1965 America when it debuted at the Judson Poets Theatre, and then it was expanded and became about a pretty different 1969 America when it opened off Broadway. But as it often is with great works of art, suddenly it felt, last year and still now, like Promenade is about America today.

Chris made the totally legit point that New Line is awfully wobbly financially right now, and that maybe we should be producing shows that we know will "sell" really well, instead of a lesser known 1969 experimental musical comedy with a strange title. He was absolutely right, of course. But if New Line can't do what it was meant to do, why bother? Every show in this season, Bat Boy, Broadway Noir Deux, Promenade, and We Will Rock You all speak to this moment -- regardless of when they were created. That's what New Line does.

A few months ago, our audiences were stunned at how much the twenty-five-year-old show Bat Boy seems like it's about America in 2025. A few months earlier, they were stunned by how the fifty-year-old Rocky Horror felt like it was written yesterday. You'll be even more stunned by Promenade for all the same reasons. But that's what New Line was created to do.

No, that's what theatre was created to do.

And surely the best way to look at the darkest aspects of our current zeitgeist is through humor. A spoonful of sugar, as they say. We have to face the darkness in order to understand it. But in the hands of Fornés and Carmines, that task is a little easier and a little less scary. And a lot funnier.

But trust me, though you'll laugh throughout the show, you'll be thinking about it afterward for a loooooong time. It's sneaky that way.

For most people, this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this brilliant, crazy, rule-changing, absurdist masterpiece of musical theatre. I know we say this a lot, but more than ever, there is nothing else remotely like this show. It scares the shit out of me as director! But we can't wait to share it with you!

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

BROADWAY NOIR DEUX!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:09:00 +0000

It won't surprise many people when I say that I often drive my collaborators crazy in various ways. For instance, when someone brings an idea to me, especially if it's not something I've thought about before, I need to take it in, then let it percolate. It swims around in the back of my head and at some point, I realize that it's either a great idea or a terrible idea. Sometimes the percolating takes minutes, sometimes weeks or even longer.

Por ejemplo...

It was two years ago, during the run of my seriously fucked-up Christmas musical, Jesus and Johnny Appleweed's Holy Rollin' Family Christmas, and I was spending a lot of time sitting in the lobby with Chris Moore, New Line's associate artistic director. And one night, Chris said, "We should do a show that's all black people singing the songs they never get to sing in shows."

Chris and I talk a lot about issues around race and representation in musical theatre. New Line has been assembling diverse casts for its entire history -- it's incredibly rare that a New Line show has an all-white cast. But as a middle-aged white dude on the cusp between the Boomers and Generation X, it's important to me that New Line never becomes middle-aged and that our cast and staff always look like our community.

That night, Chris' comment didn't get an immediate response from me, but it surely did start percolating...

After the show, Chris was standing in the aisle talking to some of our friends. I walked up to him and said, "You know, we've been doing these concerts at the Sheldon every few years. We should do your idea at the Sheldon!" We explained the idea to the others, and everybody thought it sounded great.

We toyed around with various titles, many of which were very funny but totally inappropriate. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was Chris who suggested we call it Broadway Noir. It was the perfect title. For me, using a French word evoked Josephine Baker, the black American singer and dancer who in the 1920s could only become a star in Paris. It also just sounded cool.

I decided that night that we would produce Broadway Noir at the Sheldon Concert Hall in January 2025. And totally out of character for me (still a recovering control freak), I told Chris that I would probably suggest things, songs, etc., but this was his concert. He curated the song list, and he directed the show.

And people loved it. Despite an awful snow storm, the two performances drew nice big crowds. We saw a lot of our regular audience there, but also a lot of new people. And the reaction from everybody was so positive, that we decided to do a sequel and make this second one a part of our regular season, not just a special event.

Of course -- also at Chris' suggestion -- we called the sequel Broadway Noir Deux! (To be fair, I added the exclamation point. To me, it's both fierce and funny.) And once again, Chris has assembled the cast, directed the show, and curated the song list with the concert's music director Jermaine Manor.

The fun for me is threefold. First, I don't have to do any work on this! Second, I get to see actors who've done shows with us take on something really different. For instance, this time, DeAnté Bryant, who played Will in New Line's American Idiot, is taking on the classic 1945 song, "If I Loved You," Rodgers and Hammerstein's soaring ballad of barely hidden emotion from Carousel. It couldn't be further from American Idiot. That's what's so cool about these concerts of ours.

Corrinna Redford played Mimi in Rent with New Line last season. I loved working with her. I loved watching her navigate the enormous range of intense emotions that Mimi suffers through. I also loved that sometimes she would come up to me and ask to change my blocking or direction, and she'd explain her reasoning behind the change -- and almost every time, her change made the moment or the scene better. She has killer instincts. In Broadway Noir Deux!, she jumps into something completely different, Jeanine Tesori's playful "Morning Person" from Shrek.

The incorrigible Kimmie Kidd played the outrageous, glamorous, hilarious French movie producer Liliane LeFleur in New Line's production of Nine. One of my favorite moments in the show was when Kimmie got to invoke LeFleur's Folies Bergeres performances. She was funny, naughty, sexy, and it was great fun working with her. In a stroke of genius, Chris has given Kimmie "Climb Every Mountain," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. It's oceans away from the playful carnality of Liliane LeFleur, and it will be such a treat to see it.

During our run of Rent, Chris and I had several conversations about how terrific Aaron Tucker was in the role of Benny. It was the first Rent I've seen in which Benny isn't a dick. He's just an adult. And let's be honest, Roger and Mark really are just slackers, right? This was the first time I liked Benny, and I understood more deeply his position, caught between his child-like friends and his desire to lead an adult life. After the scene with the homophobic pastor at the church, Benny and Tom exited with their arms around each other. I loved that. I am thrilled that in our concert, Aaron is going to sing "Johanna" from Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Aaron's got a beautiful voice!

Victoria Pines first worked with us way back in 2001 on the amazing 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock. She most recently worked with us in Sweet Potato Queens. She's an incredibly versatile, honest performer and her voice can pretty much do anything. In Sweet Potato Queens, she broke our hearts every night with "Cherries in the Snow." But in New Line's Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Victoria played Jewel and she brought the fucking house down every night with the joyous, raunchy "Twenty Four Hours of Lovin'." When Chris told me Victoria was going to sing Kander and Ebb's torchy "Maybe This Time" in the concert, I was thrilled. She will nail it.

I just met Ronmal Mottley a few months ago, as we started rehearsals for Bat Boy. He's new to our company, but he easily proved himself as both the loudmouth Mrs. Taylor and the nurturing Reverend Hightower. I remember calling him to cast him in Bat Boy, and I made sure he knew one of his roles would be in drag. Without a pause he said, "That's cool. I'm up for anything." Keep this guy around. He's also in both our upcoming shows, the weird but wonderful Promenade in March, and We Will Rock You in June. For Broadway Noir Deux!, Ronmal is singing Jason Robert Brown's gorgeous ballad, "Wondering," from The Bridges of Madison County. After the insanity of Bat Boy and the coming insanity of Promenade, it's so cool to give Ronmal a song like this.

Though I haven't worked with De-Rance Blaylock yet, I know she's a really great performer, and I LOVE that Chris has given her Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch," from Company, one of the all-time great musical theatre character songs.

I haven't worked with the others in the cast, but I can't wait to hear them all. Chris and Jermaine did such a wonderful job last year, I know this year will be awesome too.

One of the reasons I love doing concerts of theatre songs at the Sheldon is that normally, people hear these songs in context, and they're thinking about story, sets, jokes, music. Concerts like this allow the songs to shine by themselves, to let us really listen to the lyrics. Most of us humans are primarily visually oriented, and if you give our brains a choice between visuals and some other sense, like hearing, the visuals will win the attention war. So for these concerts, we take everything else away. It's just the performers, the songs, and you.

Besides, the Sheldon is world-renowned for its acoustics. Singing there is a huge joy all its own. And when we can share wonderful theatre songs at the same time, it's doubly awesome.

And let's not forget the original reason for these Noir concerts. Though diversity in musical theatre casting is getting better and better over time, there are still lots of directors and others who can't imagine a black woman playing Sally Bowles, and can't imagine a black man playing Billy Bigelow or Anthony Hope. It's stupid. And these extraordinary local performers are the proof.

Join us this weekend at the Sheldon for Broadway Noir Deux! What could be better than sitting in an historic concert hall, listening to wonderful actors singing wonderful theatre songs? To me, that's pretty much heaven. And a great way to start the new year.

2026 just has to be better than 2025... right?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Broadway Noir Deux!, click here.

P.P.S. To get tickets for the other shows in the season, click here.

P.P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

'Twas a Year Full of New Line, 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:35:00 +0000

'Twas a year full of New Line, still lurching toward stable;
Our budget's quite tight, but we do what we're able.
They say that we all have to suffer for art,
But the making of art is the easier part;
It's the bowing and scraping and begging for money,
To pay for the art and the artists to run free;
We suffer alright, and that suff'ring ain't done, G...

The Missouri Arts Council, which once we could trust,
Decided to yank all their funding from us!
For thirty-three years, they had funded New Line,
Now they've blacklisted us, to send us a sign:
Our founding philosophy makes them so sad,
'Cause we value diversity; they think that's bad.
See, Missouri's a red state -- and stark raving mad!

We started the year going back to the Sheldon;
Our Broadway Noir concert was 'specially well-done --
Performers of color recaptured the show tune,
In dazzling displays, like a big Broadway typhoon!
So eye-op'ning, mind-blowing, gob-smacking too,
For these much gifted artists, their message came through --
Just let them, and they'll show you what they can do!

What a joy to return to the Frankenstein Place,
And a re-mounting of Rocky Horror, to face
All the horrors of Now, when our world is so mad,
To remind us that differences aren't always bad,
That queer folks and trans folks and other non-normies
Are just like the rest of us, so we perform these
Subversive rock tuners with important stories.

It was more than a decade since we last did Rent,
But these times, they demanded a cry of dissent
Against hatred and bias and misinformation
That slices and dices our nattering nation;
So Roger and Mark and their friends all returned
To remind us again what we each should have learned,
That empathy's how our humanity's earned.

We brought back the Bat Boy for one final time,
'Cause we need the reason inside of his rhyme,
'Cause we need reminding that scapegoating sucks,
'Cause morality, decency both are in flux.
It's now that we need what our musicals do,
Reveal the real world, with a fictional skew,
To show us the truth 'bout ourselves that breaks through.

Yes, New Line has lasted for thirty-four years,
Through poverty, challenges, setbacks, and tears,
But we're all still plugging along, as we do,
To bring all the quirkiest, best shows to you,
With Promenade's wacky, insightful satire,
And We Will Rock You, full of Queen's rockin' fire,
Plus more of the musical art you inspire.

Stay Sane and Safe, and Have a Happy New Year!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. I started these year-poems on a whim way back in 2013. If you're a glutton for punishment, here are my poems from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024. (Yes, I skipped 2021.)

P.P.S. To buy tickets to our 2026 shows, Broadway Noir DEUX!, Promenade and We Will Rock You, click here.

P.P.P.S. If you'd like to contribute to New Line Theatre (you know you would!), just click here.

The 2025 New Line Theatre Gift Guide is Here!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 07:29:00 +0000

Happy Holidays from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre! We're here again to help you find the perfect gift for that musical theatre fanboy or fangirl on your list who has everything! Tickets, calendars, books, and more!

Broadway Meets STL Rhythm, Passion, Style
For two nights only, Jan. 9-10, the New Liners return to the acoustically magnificent Sheldon Concert Hall in the Grand Center Arts District. BROADWAY NOIR DEUX!, features a cast of all local actors of color, sharing with you a powerhouse celebration of Broadway musicals through the lens of their own lives, staking their claim to this most American art form, and reminding us that the Broadway musical belongs to all of us.
Click here to buy tickets.

Come for the Party!
Stay for the War!
Don't miss your once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this uproarious experimental musical comedy from 1969! Beneath its dizzying comedy and catchy songs, PROMENADE follows the exploits of two escaped prisoners taking an unexpected tour of Capitalism and The Big City, where the poor and homeless mingle with the Idle Rich, exploring some big issues along the way, like wealth inequality, law and order, war, corruption, body image, gender, sexuality, and more.
Click here to buy tickets.

Will You Do the Fandango?
New Line Theatre wraps up its 34th season with the global sensation, the electrifying rock adventure WE WILL ROCK YOU, a fantastical rock fable featuring 24 songs by QUEEN! Set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic dystopia, WE WILL ROCK YOU follows two revolutionaries on their mission to save rock and roll. In an age where algorithms control our every choice, this musical is a rallying cry for our times, a fist-pumping, foot-stomping anthem to individuality.
Click here to buy tickets.

Bring Great Musical Theatre to our City!
Make a Year-End Donation to New Line!
Donate in the name of your favorite fanboy or fangirl. Donate in the memory of a loved one. Donate in honor of the teacher who turned you on to musicals. Donate in the name of your parents who drove you to rehearsals. Donate in Memory of Sondheim. Or just get an extra year-end tax deduction!
Just Click Here!
New Line Theatre is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

New Line's 2025-26
Photo Calendar
Every year, we produce a wall calendar with high-quality photos from our shows by Jill Ritter Photography. Enjoy gorgeous production photos from some of New Line's coolest shows, Rocky Horror, American Idiot, Something Rotten, Dracula, Lizzie, Anything Goes, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Johnny Appleweed, Sweet Potato Queens, Return to the Forbidden Planet, and Jesus & Johnny Appleweed's Holy Rollin' Christmas!

The Poster Art of
New Line Theatre
Yes that's right, we've published a coffee table book of all our posters over the last thirty-three years, all designed by St. Louis graphic artists Kris Wright, Matt Reedy, and others. It's a fun look back over New Line's amazing, unique history, and the company's first hundred shows. It's perfect for lovers of New Line and anyone who loves poster art, available now in hardcover and softcover editions.

New Line's "First Hundred Shows" Poster
One 36" x 24" poster that includes all the posters from New Line's first one hundred musicals (plus six Sheldon concerts). Get your Poster of Posters today!

New Line Bumper Stickers
Collect 'em all!

Go See a Musical;

Make Musicals, Not War;

got musicals?;

Bat Boy for Prez;

or the New Line logo.

Bat Boy
You loved seeing Bat Boy on our stage -- and we loved sharing it with you! Now you just can't get enough of him, right? No problem! We've got you covered.

Get ALL the Weekly World News articles about the Bat Boy, all in one crazy volume, Going Mutant!

Or how about a volume of the craziest WWN articles ever, Bat Boy Lives!

La Vie Boheme!
the RENT novel
You saw Rent last season, but have you read the novel? People say the musical is based on the opera La Boheme, but it's much closer to Henri Murger's very funny, very truthful 1851 French novel about young artists, Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, now in an all-new, easier-to-read English translation! Every character from Rent has a parallel character in this original version of the story. Especially if you know Rent, you'll love this book!

Rocky Horror
Our audiences went crazy over our production of The Rocky Horror Show! For those of you who already knew the show, and for those who've just discovered it...

Get yourself the new 50th anniversary coffee table book, Rocky Horror: Featuring Unseen Photographs and Exclusive Interviews!
AND
Also the new Official Rocky Horror Late Night Double Feature: The 50th Anniversary Two-Volume Collector's Edition

The Wonderful Music of BOZZ
The new novel from Artistic Director Scott Miller, a fairy tale for the new millennium! In a dark world without music and without empathy, drama nerds Shellie and JoJo, and their new traveling companions, carry the fate of humankind on their artsy teenage shoulders. Can a musical save the world?
When L. Frank Baum first published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he wrote in his introduction, "The old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as 'historical' in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer 'wonder tales' in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale." Baum wrote that in 1900. Miller thinks the time has come again.

JESUS & JOHNNY APPLEWEED'S HOLY ROLLIN' FAMILY CHRISTMAS
You loved this wild, vulgar, rowdy, outrageous, and hilarious musical satire in 2023. Now you can get the script and the vocal selections for yourself and for your nastier-minded friends!
“What if Seth Rogen, Charles Dickens, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cheech and Chong, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Waters decided to have a baby?” – KDHX
"A pot-laced, Dickensian, Cheech & Chong-esque holiday spoof that is reminiscent of Saturday Night Live in its heyday." – BroadwayWorld
"A snarky (and oddly charming) holiday event." – TalkinBroadway
"Resembles the audacious dark comedy material that John Waters and Charles Busch specialize in." – PopLifeSTL

The ABCs of BROADWAY MUSICALS series
These terrific books from New Line artistic director Scott Miller are a series of fun, easy-to-read books, a totally not intimidating way to get a basic understanding of this most American of art forms, including a very brief history of musicals, a survey of important and well-known shows, examples of the wide and wild variety of musicals, a look at the amazing people who create musicals, and a sense of how Broadway musicals reflect and comment on our culture. You’ll never feel lost again in a conversation about musical theatre, and you’ll enjoy seeing musicals more than ever. These books are short enough to read in one sitting or you can flip open to any page and find something interesting. Even hardcore musical lovers may learn something from these little books! Now available -- The ABCs of Broadway Musicals; The ABCs of Acting in Musicals; The ABCs of Directing Musicals; and The ABCs of Writing Musicals.

REPRINTS!
So many interesting books and scripts have fallen into public domain lately, so it's possible to reprint them at long last. Here are just a few gems that are back in print after many decades out of print!

42nd Street, the novel

Go Into Your Dance, the novel

Stage Mother, the novel

Oh! James!, the novel that inspired No, No, Nanette

No No Nanette, the original 1925 script

The Fantasticks, the original play

Liliom, the play that inspired Carousel

A Day Well Spent, the play that inspired The Matchmaker and Hello, Dolly!

Sondheim & Grimm & Perrault, the original fairy tales that inspired Into the Woods

Twenty Years on Broadway, George M. Cohan's memoir

BROADWAY MUSICAL
CHRISTMAS CAROLS
A piano-vocal songbook, full of 25 well-loved Christmas carols refashioned by Scott Miller for the hard-core fan of Broadway musicals, in new vocal arrangements with all-new lyrics related to musical theatre – funny, serious, smartass, cynical, reverent, poignant songs that will make you laugh, that will make you think, that will remind you why you love musicals so much.
The songs include “O Little Shop of Bethlehem,” “God Rest Ye, Mad Thenardiers,” “Away in a Mame Tour,” “I Heard You Screlt On Christmas Day,” “What Squip Is This,” “Here We Come A-Chorusing,” “O Come, All Ye Rent Heads,” “Jolly Old Steve Sondheim,” “Shrek, the Herald Angel, Sings,” “O Hamilton,” and other future classics.

ANYTHING, ANYTHING, ANYTHING GOES! A Deep Dive
We all get a kick out of Anything Goes. Find out why. One of the most performed musicals in history, Anything Goes has become a classic of the American theatre, and yet most people don't really understand the show and its wild mashup of musical comedy, screwball comedy, and gangster movies. Far from being an old-fashioned, old-school musical comedy, Anything Goes is a razor-sharp satire of America, as much about today as about the Thirties, the way we make celebrities out of criminals and make religion into show biz. It's irreverent, smartass, insightful, fearless, and very funny. Plus, it's got some of Cole Porter's best songs.

HE NEVER DID ANYTHING TWICE
Get ready for a mind-blowing trip through the Broadway musicals of the most fearless and influential artist in the history of the American musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim. Here are sixteen in-depth explorations of all the great Sondheim musicals, West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Anyone Can Whistle, Evening Primrose, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion; plus some brief stops at a few of his other musical and non-musical projects over the years.

GO GREASED LIGHTNING!
The Amazing Authenticity of Grease
So many people underestimate the intelligence and authenticity of Grease. So it’s time to set the record straight. Originally a rowdy, rebellious, piece of alternative theatre, written by two guys who really lived it, Grease was inspired by the rule-busting success of Hair, rejecting the happy trappings of Broadway for a more authentic, more visceral, more radical theatre experience. It’s an authentic snapshot of the end of the 1950s, a moment when the styles and culture of the disengaged and disenfranchised became overpowering symbols of teenage power and independence.

HAMILTON AND THE NEW REVOLUTION:
Broadway Musicals in the 21st Century
How lucky we are to be alive right now! With this new volume, musical theatre scholar, director, historian, and fanboy Scott Miller takes you on a phantasmagorical journey through the second decade of this millennium, every stop along the way a Broadway musical truly like no other, all of them brilliant, original, and unique, all pointing toward an even brighter future for the art form and all the young artists creating amazing new work for us every day in this Golden Age for the musical theatre, including Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, A Strange Loop, Hadestown, The Color Purple, Bonnie & Clyde, Hands on a Hardbody, and The Scottsboro Boys, all shows that break the rules in smart, fearless, and surprising ways.

LET THE SUN SHINE IN:
The Genius of HAIR
In 1967, Hair launched a revolution. It rejected every convention of Broadway, of traditional theatre in general, and of the American musical specifically. It paved the way for the nonlinear concept musicals that dominated American musical theatre forever after. With more regional productions of Hair than ever before, Scott Miller gives us an incisive and fascinating analysis of the show. He looks at its place in theatre and cultural history, and its impact on recent musicals, including Rent. He delves into the mystical power Hair has over performers and viewers alike and its ability to literally change lives today -- including his.

RESCUING CATS:
The Musical That's Better Than You Think
No matter how you approach it, Cats is so much more than a silly dance revue based on some silly poems, so much more than a punchline. Why has Cats been such a huge, longstanding commercial success around the world? Why do people see it over and over? Cats is literally about life and death. Cats is about us. Scott Miller takes another revelatory deep dive into this overly maligned but iconic musical, to see how it was made, what it's about, why it works, why so many people love it and so many people hate it. If you love Cats, you'll find here so much more to love. If you hate Cats, this book might just change your perspective a little.

SEX, DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL, and MUSICALS
More deep dives into ten musicals that engage with sex, drugs, and rock & roll in one way or another, from the artistic earthquake that was Hair to punk pop that is Hedwig and the Angry Inch. These are all shows that New Line has produced over the company's history, including The Wild Party, Grease, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Show, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I Love My Wife, Bat Boy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and High Fidelity.

STRIKE UP THE BAND
The whole history of musicals, pulling back the curtain on the amazing innovation and adventurousness of the art form, its political and social conscience, and its incredibly rapid evolution over the last century. Strike Up the Band focuses not only on what happened on stage but also on how, and why it matters to us today. Its a different kind of history that explores the famous and, especially, the not-so famous musicals to reveal the lineage that paved the way to contemporary musicals.

LITERALLY ANYTHING GOES
Another musical theatre book from Scott Miller that takes deep dives into more than a dozen incredible, quirky musicals spanning the history of our art form, all shows that New Line has produced, including The Threepenny Opera, Anything Goes, The Nervous Set, The Fantasticks, Zorbá, Two Gentlemen Of Verona, The Robber Bridegroom, Evita, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Kiss Of The Spider Woman, A New Brain, Reefer Madness, Bukowsical, and Love Kills. Nobody does deep, insightful, penetrating analysis of musicals like Miller does.

IDIOTS, HEATHERS, and SQUIPS
In this volume, Miller takes you on a short but fantastic journey through the first decade and a half of the new millennium, guided by deep dives into eleven of the musicals that represent the astonishing variety and fearlessness of this new Golden Age, including bare, Urinetown, Sweet Smell of Success, Jerry Springer the Opera, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, Next to Normal, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, American Idiot, Heathers, and Be More Chill, all shows that opened in this new century, presented in chronological order so you can see how our art form is evolving like never before.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING SHOW TUNES: 13 Tales of the Weird
The short story anthology that takes you on a roller coaster ride of thirteen nightmarish tales, all inspired in one way or another by the musical theatre, mashing together the history of musicals with the conventions and mad variety of the horror genre. You’ll meet theatre ghosts, vampires, monsters big and small, child killers, a homicidal maniac or two, a demon-possessed keyboard, and much more. The stories include "Tomorrow, Daddy," "Nothing More," "Night of the Festival," "Scarily We Roll Along," "Time Steps," "Requiem for Musical Comedy," "Happy Birthday, Robert," "I Had a Dream," "The Spellbinder," "A Little Fight Music," "The Farm Hand," "Over Finian’s Rainbow," and "The Flibbertijibbet." You’ll never think about musicals the same way again!

THE ZOMBIES OF PENZANCE
Yes, available now on Amazon, New Line's 2018 monster hit, The Zombies of Penzance, which the RFT called "a delightmare"! No more just a beloved if mildly unsettling memory, now you can bring those dancing and singing Zombies and Major-General Stanley's zombie hunting daughters all back to life -- death? -- with the Zombies of Penzance script, the full piano-vocal score, and the live original cast recording of the show, featuring the St. Louis cast and your favorite New Liners, recorded live in performance at the Marcelle Theater!

"A wonderful whirlwind of apocalyptic delight."
-- Tanya Seale, BroadwayWorld

Nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association's 2018 New Play Award!

THEATRE CATS:
The Old Producer's Book of Dramatical Cats
In T.S. Eliot’s famous collection of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cat s, the basis for the megahit Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, Eliot observed and made fun of the habits and behavior of everyday people, through the comic and insightful metaphor of some very human-like cats. In Scott Miller and Zachary Allen Farmer’s new collection, the targets are more specific but just as wickedly true-to-life, as Miller and Farmer explore the behavior of the quirky, eccentric, fascinating types who make musical theatre, this time through the lens of some very artsy cats, the good, the bad, and the finicky. And you can sing these new poems to the Lloyd Webber score...

SHELLIE SHELBY SHARES THE
SPOTLIGHT
The picture book you never knew you needed, in which Dr. Seuss meets 42nd Street, as freshman Shellie Shelby embarks on a wild adventure through the treacherous social jungle of her first high school musical. When Shellie gets cast in the school show, she can’t believe her luck, but her best friend, poor tone-deaf JoJo McQuill, isn’t so lucky. Can she successfully navigate the drama club mean girls, her crazy philosopher-teacher, music rehearsals, killer choreography, and Tech Week, without losing her mind and her best friend in the process? Written by Scott Miller, with original illustrations by longtime New Line Theatre actor Zachary Allen Farmer.

That's it -- your 2025 Gift Guide. We hope it's helpful. And we hope your holidays are good ones, that lots of wonderful art comes into your life, and that you join us in 2026 for some more truly wonderful shows!

Happy Holidays!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Stay tuned -- on New Year's Eve, I'll post my 12th annual year-end poem looking back on The Year in New Line!

Christian Charity

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:59:00 +0000

This is the third time I'm directing Bat Boy. A couple nights before we opened, our intern Aiden asked me if I've learned anything new this third time. I couldn't think of anything specific.

And then it hit me. I've always thought of this story as one about bigotry and religious hypocrisy. But it's both bigger and simpler than that.

It's about fear.

It's about that famous saying of Yoda's, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." That's what happens in Bat Boy. That's also what's been happening in the Trump era.

Like the town in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle, Hope Falls, the setting for Bat Boy, is a town in crisis, in other words, it's America 2025 in miniature. The town's primary industry, coal mining, is gone, and the people of Hope Falls have turned to ranching, at which they really do not excel. All their cattle are dying because they don’t know how to raise cattle (“A mountain’s no place to raise cows,” the finale reminds us), but rather than acknowledge their own inadequacies, they look for a scapegoat.

Edgar shows up in town and they get their scapegoat. The ranchers fear financial ruin, which leads to anger, which leads to hate (they all sing, "Kill the Bat Boy!"), and that hate leads to quite a bit of suffering.

In the process, these characters palpably evoke our crippled country right now. One of the many problems with our broken politics today is the idea that I must win and you must lose -- that politica are a war now instead of argument and compromise and solutions. Blame is how I win. Whether it's true or not, it seems the one who blames first wins the battle.

It's a terrible way to run our country or a town of five hundred.

Bat Boy satirizes misinformation and disinformation, religious extremism and hypocrisy, and also religion as a misused socio-political force; but it doesn’t poke fun at Christianity itself or at people of genuine faith. The people of Hope Falls frequently proclaim their “Christian Charity,” but it’s clear from their behavior that they aren’t nearly as Christian as they claim to be. It seems everyone in town loves exclaiming “Sweet wounded Jesus!” when they’re surprised, and yet one would assume that serious Christians wouldn't take the Lord’s name in vain on such a regular basis.

The townspeople initially blame the death of their cows on God. They also talk about doing horrible things to Edgar and later, they threaten Dr. Parker, all the while pretending that their actions reflect their “Christian charity.”

You may disagree but this is 21st century American Christianity.

The song “Comfort and Joy” shows how misguided the people of Hope Falls (and America) are. 2nd Corinthians 1:23-24 says, “Our strength and ability are owing to faith; and our comfort and joy must flow from faith.” But these people are asking God to give them comfort and joy outright. They’ve got it backwards; they don’t understand that joy comes from faith, which they don’t have. They believe their comfort and joy will result from the destruction of an innocent life. They sing:

Comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy!
Kill the bat boy,
Kill the bat boy!

On the other hand Meredith has it right. She sings:

He will show them he’s not
What they’re terrified of.
He will show them a love
They can never destroy.
If we prove that they’re wrong,
They’ll come ‘round before long,
And we’ll all sing a song
Full of comfort and joy.

Out of context, that could be Jesus' disciples talking about how the priests and the pharisees will react to Jesus -- fear, hate, suffering. Edgar the Bat Boy is explicitly a Christ-like figure throughout the story.

It’s significant that Meredith better understands the teachings of the Bible and that she alone in Hope Falls practices actual Christian charity by insisting on caring for Edgar, by teaching him, by making him a part of the family. In the first dialogue scene in the show, Meredith even quotes Romans 6:23 at Shelley: “For the wages of sin is death…”, though she conveniently (comically) leaves out the more positive rest of the sentence.

In this story, the wages of sin are death, and maybe Meredith’s past and present circumstances lead her in that direction unconsciously. In this world of faux Christians, only Edgar sincerely seeks God, first praying to him in “Comfort and Joy,” then hoping for divine healing at the revival meeting, then in his testimony before the congregation. Edgar believes that God can help him.

Of course, he's wrong.

The people of Hope Falls -- and America in 2025 -- practice a poisoned, hypocritical brand of Christianity that has corrupted American culture today, and because this is the only kind of Christianity Edgar experiences, it prevents Edgar from finding God as he had hoped.

It’s also significant that the one explicitly religious figure in the show, the Reverend Hightower, is not a source of satire. He accepts Edgar without reservation. Even though the people of Hope Falls have asked the Reverend to come to town for all the wrong reasons (the cows), he’s still there hoping to do some good. And like Meredith, he accepts Edgar unconditionally. The Reverend Hightower, the one genuine Christian in the story, invites Edgar up on stage to be healed and urges the congregation to accept him, to assimilate him into the community. And though they are initially willing, their misplaced fear and hatred are easily revived by Bat Boy's supervillain, Dr. Parker.

Like many American musicals before it, Bat Boy is a story about an Outsider who meets a Community; the Outsider must learn to assimilate into the Community or be removed, through death or banishment.

In Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, Guys and Dolls, Hello, Dolly!, Annie Get Your Gun, The Music Man, Hedwig, the heroes assimilate and become part of the community (and/or the chorus) by the end. But in Carousel, The King and I, Pal Joey, West Side Story, Hair, Evita, Passion, Sweeney Todd, Urinetown, Pippin, Cabaret, Rocky Horror, Bonnie & Clyde, the heroes cannot assimilate and must leave or be removed. In a few shows, with more than one hero, we get both outcomes, as in South Pacific, Show Boat, and The Wild Party.

In a few (usually satiric) cases, the community actually adjusts to accommodate the hero, as in The Threepenny Opera, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Heathers.

By the end of Bat Boy's first act, we realize that Edgar the Bat Boy isn't the only outsider; in this story, the entire Parker family are the outsiders, and the question is whether Edgar and the Parkers can assimilate -- and maybe also, why would they want to? Hope Falls (i.e., America) is a really fucked up place.

In the era of concept musicals and rock musicals, the musical theatre stories have focused more on the hero, his struggle, his growth, his success or not, in shows like Company, Pippin, Dude, Jesus Christ Superstar, Follies, Chicago, Barnum, Sweeney Todd, Nine, Sunday in the Park with George, Passing Strange, Hamilton, A Strange Loop, and so many others. Bat Boy fits into this category as well.

Most of this stuff is under the surface, most of it the audience doesn't consciously recognize, but it's what makes this story so powerful, so recognizably truthful, and so deeply human.

Even the third time around, it has been such a joy to live inside this material for a few months. It's not just funny and big-hearted, it's also masterfully constructed, and that's part of why it's so powerful.

Bat Boy runs through October 25. Get your tickets!

Long Live the Musial!
Scott

A Filthy Freak Who's Just Like You

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:42:00 +0000

Bat Boy is a weirdly wonderful mashup of extreme silliness and deadly seriousness. Part of the glorious stunt of this musical is how adroitly it jumps back and forth between -- and often straddles -- a silly, obviously aftiticial, musical comedy world and our seriously fucked-up real world. As I wrote in my director's notes for the program, "This is a very funny show but a very serious story."

You might call it Seriously Silly. Or just razor-sharp social satire. One of our reviewers thinks the show is flawed because it needlessly mocks "hillbilly stereotypes." No, Bat Boy mocks all of us, collectively and individually. No one escapes unscathed, and these days, none of us deserves to.

As the opening number says, "Heed the tale of a filthy freak... who's just like you." Later in the song, they sing to us, "He has suffered, and now it's your turn." From the show's first song, Bat Boy makes it clear -- we are the target of the satire.

I invented a label for this kind of show a while back -- a neo musical comedy, a show that uses the devices and conventions of musical comedy, but in the service of more serious underlying socio-political themes. These shows emerged most obviously in the mid- to late 1990s, Bat Boy, Urinetown, A New Brain, Floyd Collins, The Ballad of Little Mikey, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and others. But a few neo musical comedies had popped up over the years before that time, like Anyone Can Whistle, Chicago, Merrily We Roll Along, Little Shop of Horrors, Assassins, and of course, the 1928 OG neo musical comedy, The Threepenny Opera.

After last season of New Line revivals, I had decided we wouldn't repeat any more shows for a while. After all, there are so many wonderful shows out there to produce.

But as we discussed shows for this season, the real world was beginning to come apart at the seams. I reminded myself that New Line always has an obligation to speak to this moment. All artists do. And I couldn't think of a musical that better captures this zeitgeist than Bat Boy, even though we've produced it twice before, in 2003 and 2006.

Stephen Sondheim has said that the purpose of art is to make order out of the chaos of our world. That's a hell of a task right now -- there's a lot of chaos -- Americans' toxic love of Othering is in overdrive. But I believe Bat Boy is up to that challenge. Specifically because it is as silly as it is. A spoonful of sugar...

Scholars say that autocrats take seven steps to fully seize power:

Corrupting elections
Aggrandizing executive power
Politicizing independent institutions
Controlling information
Scapegoating and stoking division
Quashing dissent
Incentivizing violence

One big component of that agenda, part of steps 4, 5, and 6, is silencing the comedians. We just watched it happen in our real world, with the forced retirement of Stephen Colbert and the (brief) cancelation of Jimmy Kimmel's show.

Autocrats, dictators, and their ilk know well that they must fear comedy. Comedy is subversive by definition, and it's also revealing. America has a proud tradition of edgy political humor, with Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Chris Rock, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle, and so many others. The nationwide bipartisan backlash over Kimmel proves that tradition is alive and well.

Closer to home, New Line has been permanently blacklisted by the Missouri Arts Council over our recent shows that included gay characters and drag performances, in The Rocky Horror Show and Rent. That certainly sucks for our company, but even though the government can take away our grant money, they can't stop us from telling stories about the truly fucked-up world around us. And I'm sure we can agree, it is truly fucked up right now.

Just wait till they get a load of Promenade in March!

Make no mistake, it's not a desire for escape or disconnection that makes us love comedy; it's the exact opposite, the need for connection and shared truth. We laugh because we are surprised and because we recognize the truth. Both those things will happen to you as you watch Bat Boy. A lot.

Whether you like it or not.

We can't do a lot about all the ugly shit happening in the world right now, but we can do this one small thing -- we can share stories that help us all understand the raging maelstrom swirling around us. To quote my director's notes again --

This is about us. Right here. Right now.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your Bat Boy tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

He Has Suffered and Now It's Your Turn

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 20:18:00 +0000

It all started with the satirical supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News. This brilliantly funny newspaper boasted outrageous headlines over the years like “Dead Rock Stars Return on Ghost Plane!” and “Faces of Howard Stern, Pamela Anderson and Satan Appear in Volcano Smoke!” and the classic, “Bill Catches Hillary With Space Alien!,” a story that claimed one of the best subheads in the history of newsprint: “I thought she was gay, says stunned ex-Prez.”

The paper once ran a story called, “Surprising Bible Prophecies Your Preacher Doesn't Want You to Read,” about a “turncoat Vatican librarian” who has revealed parts edited out of the Bible, including an unknown corollary to the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife unless you in turn are willing to share thine own wife with him.”

In 2001, The Washington Post published a tribute article to the tabloid, saying, “Funnier than Saturday Night Live, deeper than Leno or Letterman, smarter than Mad, more outrageous than The Onion, Weekly World News just might be America's best purveyor of social satire. The fact that it's disguised as a sleazy tabloid just makes it that much more delicious.”

Back in 1992, the Weekly World News began following every twist and turn in the bizarre life of a poor half-bat/half-boy who was found in a rural West Virginia cave. The paper dispatched a crack team of twenty-four reporters and photographers assigned exclusively to the bat boy story.

The paper described him this way: “Discovered in a cave in Hope Falls, West Virginia, this half-bat has escaped from captivity and is currently at large. He can be identified by large, pointy ears and oversized eyes that make him profoundly sensitive to sound and light. The creature has reportedly attacked at least three people with his razor-sharp fangs and should be considered extremely dangerous.”

The paper chronicled how he initially attacked a 10-year-old girl; how he was captured by the government and then got sick; how he received 17,402,901 get-well cards in the hospital from Weekly World News readers, how sympathetic nurses fed him flies; how he escaped from the hospital by crawling from a sixth-story window; how his abrupt withdrawal from hospital drugs caused him to go crazy and attempt to mate with a scarecrow; how he was chased by a bloodthirsty bounty hunter; how he was run over by an exterminator's truck; how he showed up mysteriously at Al Gore’s campaign headquarters in 2000, wanting to officially endorse Gore; how he tried to sneak into the White House to visit Jenna Bush; and most notably, how he joined the U.S. military in Afghanistan because his special bat vision made it easy for him to find the Taliban in all those caves.

In November 1996, two writers were standing in the lobby of the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles. Keythe Farley, Gang member and director, and Brian Flemming, a screenwriter and film director, were working the concession stand for intermission of the musical Euphoria, when in wandered Laurence O’Keefe, the composer-lyricist and music director of Euphoria, taking a break. Farley and Flemming told O’Keefe they liked his music and lyrics and asked if O’Keefe would be interested in a project of theirs, based on a character from the pages of the Weekly World News named Bat Boy. They showed O’Keefe a cover of the Weekly World News featuring the bat boy’s picture, a baby with huge fangs, bulging eyes and pointy ears. They were determined to tell this poor creature’s story – from the beginning.

O’Keefe was shocked. “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

On Halloween 1997, Bat Boy made its world premiere at the Actors’ Gang Theatre, perhaps the only place where this show would be understood and properly nurtured. The Actors’ Gang is Los Angeles’ premier repertory theatre company, creating original works and reinterpreting classics, through the prism of The Style, a performance method derived from commedia dell’arte, from the work of the Theatre du Soleil in Paris, from vaudeville, from the political agitprop theatre of the 1930s, and from the off off Broadway movement of the 1960s, particularly the work of the Play-House of the Ridiculous. The Style is artificial and presentational, yet insists on deep truthfulness and high emotional stakes. All the authors agree today that The Style was instrumental in both the writing and the execution of Bat Boy the Musical.

O’Keefe says, “The Actors' Gang is a hyperactive and politically committed theater company that teaches if you show an emotion, always make it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. People pay money to see a show portray terror, rage, despair and joy, so we might as well sell it in megadoses. We were consciously trying to dig up the deepest and most volcanic emotions, the most inflammatory questions – what is it like to be a scapegoat? what is it like to be loved by one parent and hated by another? What is it like to have no idea who your parents are? What is it like to have an insatiable hunger for blood?”

Director and co-author Keythe Farley developed what Flemming likes to call the “take-it-so-seriously-it's-funny-but-it-also-hurts” style of Bat Boy. Both Deven May (as Edgar) and Kaitlin Hopkins (as Meredith) were in this first production and, together with Farley, they found the extremely sincere approach that this outrageous musical demands. Farley’s mantra throughout the development process was “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity,” a style of truthful acting that marked all the work at the Actors’ Gang – something the cast took to heart and something which guided them throughout the L.A. and New York productions. Brian Flemming says of his partner, “Keythe's major contribution to Bat Boy has gone largely unmentioned, but it was great and permanent.”

Unlike musicals in which the goal is to be as silly as possible (The Producers, Spamalot, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), with Bat Boy the goal is to be as serious as possible within the context of an utterly silly universe.

Julio Martinez wrote in Variety, “The clever scenario, though outrageous, always contains an aura of intriguing plausibility. And to his credit, Farley creates a supercharged mix of heightened realism, surrealism and fantasy that is always engrossing. The work is magnificently served by the emotion-charged, thoroughly realistic performance of Devon May [as the Bat Boy], who catapults himself body and soul into the seared psyche of this child who possesses the mind of a genius but the uncontrollable, blood-craving appetite of a beast.”

Throughout 1999 and 2000, the show went through staged readings at the Directors’ Company in New York, now with director Scott Schwartz at the helm. The pace of the work was stepped up, aiming toward a 2001 New York opening, with rewrites continuing even after opening. The collaboration among the writers was an unusually close one, free of ego. O’Keefe says, “I would take a character's speech and replace it with sung lyrics, or sometimes even take a line of dialogue and set it verbatim to music. Sometimes it worked in the opposite direction – we'd try a song in one place and realize it stole ideas or energy from a better song later, so the song would disappear and be replaced by new dialogue.”

Bat Boy opened at the Union Square Theatre in New York in March 2001, where it was a hit but suffered the same fate as many other New York shows after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and it closed that December. It’s tempting to guess how long the show would have run if not for the terrorist attacks and whether it would have moved uptown to Broadway like Urinetown did.

But in a post-9/11 world, the hatred and discrimination leveled against the Bat Boy in the show took on a whole new dimension, as anyone in America with a Middle Eastern background was now a potential victim of abuse, harassment, and even imprisonment, based only on their appearance, their ethnicity, their clothing. The metaphor that was Bat Boy now held a power wholly unanticipated by its creators.

The New York Times said of the off Broadway show, “It's remarkable what intelligent wit can accomplish... the show is a jaggedly imaginative mix of skewering humor and energetic glee.” The New York Post said, “Bat Boy soars! An instant classic!” The New York Daily News called it “an outrageously silly and totally charming show. . . wickedly funny! A wacky, hilarious musical!” USA Today called it “immensely satisfying.” Backstage said, “Rarely do we see a piece of theatre that is at once so smart, silly, self-aware, and easy to enjoy as Bat Boy the Musical.”

Two years later, New Line negotiated the rights to the regional debut of the show. Our 2003 production sold out every night, and for months afterward, people were literally begging us to bring the show back. So in 2006, we did.

And now here we are nineteen years later, returning to Hope Falls again. Each time I've encountered the show, in its original 2001 off Broadway production, our productions in 2003 and 2006, and now our production this fall. Each time it seems like Bat Boy has absolutely nailed the zeitgeist, and it's the same today. So much of this ferocious satire feels like it could have been written this year.

I've come to realize that great works of art are always relevant, no matter when you interact with them. That's why people keep doing Shakespeare plays. That's why we sometimes produce older shows like The Threepenny Opera or Anything Goes. Their satire is still as timely and funny and relevant as ever.

And what does that say about us?

As odd as it may sound, Bat Boy really is great art. As funny and silly as it is, it's a very serious piece of well-made theatre about very serious things. And you'll laugh your ass off all evening.

What could be better than that?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To get your 2025-2026 New Line season tickets, click here.

P.P.P.S. To get your Bat Boy tickets, click here.

P.P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

BAT BOY No. 3

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:45:00 +0000

I first saw Bat Boy off Broadway in March 2001 and I fell madly in love. And trust me, "madly" is the right word. May the theatre gods bless the writers who were crazy (or stoned) enough to write a musical based on a story in the satirical tabloid, Weekly World News.

I saw this mad mashup of musical comedy, love story, and horror-thriller again in October 2001, just before it closed, prematurely. Once the tourists stopped coming after the Sept. 11 attacks, a lot of good shows had to close.

I think it could have transferred uptown and enjoyed a healthy Broadway run. It wasn't just insanely funny -- it was one of the smartest, best built, most ridiculous, most fearless, most sophisticated, most enjoyable pieces of theatre I had ever seen. I'm not kidding -- I thought to myself, oh my god, they wrote this for ME! On that same trip to see Bat Boy again, I also got to see Urinetown for the first time, and had about the same reaction.

It was a good trip.

It was the beginning of a new Golden Age of Musical Theatre, starting in the very late 1990s and still continuing today. Our art form has never been so interesting, so inventive, so fast evolving, so full of explosive potential.

As soon as performance rights were released for Bat Boy we snatched them up and produced the show in spring 2003. One of the original off Broadway cast, St. Louisan Doug Storm, came to see us, which was very cool. After we closed, we kept getting asked when we would bring the show back. People who had seen it wanted to see it again. People who missed it, really wanted to see it. So we brought it back in 2006, with seven of the ten actors from 2003 returning. It sold out every performance, just like our first run.

When we closed our second run, I made sure to preserve the bat baby and the cow head. (If you don't know what that means, don't worry, you'll find out when you see the show.) I knew we New Liners would return to Hope Falls someday for a third production. It took us nineteen years, but here we are.

We're here because we need this story, right here, right now.

On its silly surface, Bat Boy seems to be a wacky though big-hearted satire about American prejudice and the hypocrisy of modern religion. But dig a little deeper, venture down into the dark caves and chambers of human emotion, and you’ll find a bigger, more interesting idea that underpins everything else in the show: we all have an animal side, a primitive, primordial beast in us that lashes out when we’re afraid, that drives our hungers for sex, for food, for power, for control – and of course, fear of The Other.

Just as it is with Frankenstein, it's not the monster who's the monster.

The last line of the show implores us, half-kidding, half-serious, “Don’t deny your beast inside.” And that’s really the heart of Bat Boy, the knowledge that we are, all of us, animal to one degree or another, and that we must embrace and integrate that side rather than fear it -- but also that we must not allow it to take control.

The creators of Bat Boy, Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O’Keefe, have given us a hero who literally, physically embodies that dangerous mix. Edgar the Bat Boy represents every one of us, always trying to control our beast inside with only the thinnest layer of civilization as protection.

A layer that seems to get thinner every day.

Each character in the show gives in to his or her inner beast at some point in the story, but because Edgar is so obviously different on the surface, he's the one to be ridiculed, scorned, feared. We see in this beautiful, hilarious fable not only our own inner struggles, but also echoes of racism past and present (even the rationale for slavery), and of anti-gay and anti-trans laws. As technology evolves faster than our ethics, who knows who's next?

We face our inner Neanderthal in the characters that populate Bat Boy, and it’s a hell of a ride. In the age of social media, it's also more important than ever for us to do that.

But Bat Boy is also about the act of storytelling itself. In Act II of the show, a Pan-like figure called “King of the Forest” appears, to sing the slyly subversive song “Children, Children,” a pop anthem about inter-species sex. The opening lines, “Children, welcome home to where we all began,” not only invite the young lovers Edgar and Shelley back to the roots of humanity and procreation, urging them to embrace their more primal, animal natures, but these lines also invite the audience back to the roots of theatre, back to mythic stories told around a fire, back to Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” where it’s all about the storytelling, not the budget, where originality is more important than money or technology, where the audience’s imagination is the final vital ingredient.

All the usual tricks and illusions of theatre are revealed in this show. There is no deception, no suspension of disbelief, just the naked honesty that we're all there in the theatre together to share a story. Nobody needs to be fooled. The audience's imaginations can fill in the world around these characters; in fact, audiences enjoy doing that.

There are productions that engage the audience in the act of storytelling, and there are productions that leave the audience passive and unengaged, with huge sets and projections doing the storytelling work instead of the audience's imaginations. That's less fun.

By rejecting some of the more ridiculous conventions of contemporary commercial theatre (musical or non-), by insisting on a theatre of imagination instead of high-tech machines, by using imaginative techniques from the world of improv and experimental theatre, Bat Boy does comment on other musicals, intentionally or not. By its very existence and its artistic quality, Bat Boy argues that too many musicals (especially in New York commercial theatre) have gone too far, have gotten too high-tech and too expensive, and they've lost the simplicity and joy of human-to-human storytelling.

Bat Boy has a small cast, a small budget, no helicopters or chandeliers, no special effects, and yet it doesn’t suffer for all that – it ends up being more fun, more transporting, more magical, more emotional, more intense, because it goes back to the roots of storytelling and relies on its audience to participate in the magic.

Edgar the Bat Boy tries to teach the people of Hope Falls about tolerance and acceptance, while Bat Boy the musical tries to teach us, the audience, about what really matters in the theatre – relationships, emotions, people.

Especially right now.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To get your 2025-2026 New Line season tickets, click here.

P.P.P.S. To get your Bat Boy tickets, click here.

P.P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to This Season

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 01:07:00 +0000

When we were planning for New Line's 2025-26 season, which is never an easy job to begin with, there was one overriding consideration this year -- no matter what, the shows we chose had to speak to this moment. As I like to say, theatre (really, all storytelling) makes order out of the chaos of life. And if we were ever in need of some chaos-ordering, it's now!

Don't worry; we're on it. Lucky for you, season tickets are on sale for New Line's gut-busting, mind-blowing 34th saeson. Just click here for info!

Last season was the first time we did a whole season of shows that we had produced before, so I vowed we wouldn't repeat any more shows for a while. And then the election happened. Immediately, it was clear to me that the shows we'd produce in 2025-2026 had to speak strongly, fearlessly to this moment in our cultural and political history.

That's our job, after all. And though it wasn't our plan, all the shows turned out to be really funny. And we ended up with one repeat.

To my mind, the finest, smartest, sharpest musical satire I've ever seen is Bat Boy. Its script and score are so skillfully written -- so funny, so shocking, so beautiful, so well-constructed -- that the audience never consciously notices the very serious themes right under the surface. The audience bonds with Edgar the Bat Boy far more than they expect, and so the stakes of this comic musical thriller become sky high.

I am such a fanboy for songwriter Larry O'Keefe. In addition to his remarkable score for Bat Boy, he also wrote music for Heathers and Legally Blonde. New Line previously produced Bat Boy in 2003 and 2006, and we produced Heathers in 2015.

From the perspective of today, this story of "Christians" hunting down this "Other" in order to kill him, doesn't feel entirely fictional anymore. We can't help but think that if this story were set today instead of 1992, most or all of these West Virginia ranchers would be wearing MAGA hats.

Bat Boy runs Oct. 2-25 at the Marcelle Theater in Grand Center. Just click here for more info. And click here to order season tickets.

Last season, we produced a concert at the Sheldon called Broadway Noir, an evening of show tunes sung by a cast of black performers who would normally never get to sing these songs onstage (which is a problem we need to solve, by the way).

As soon as our associate artistic director Chris Moore originally suggested the idea to me, I knew it was something our company should do. And the reception to the concert was so enthusiastic!

So we're doing another evening with basically the same agenda, this time called Broadway Noir Deux!

When we were discussing the first edition last season, I couldn't help but think that it was wonderful to be able to give these amazing performers this chance, but also, how sad that we need to. I mean, why can't Eliza Doolittle be black or Asian or Latina? Everybody in the audience knows that's not actually Eliza there onstage, that it's really an actor playing Eliza. Why can't Henry Higgins be played by an Asian man? Why can't Pickering by played by a middle-eastern man? Or a woman?

It's all pretend, and everybody knows it.

We don't usually get all knotted up over whether an actor is the same height as the character, or has the same eye color. Why do we get so knotted up over whether an actor has the same skin color as the character? And while we're at it, why do we assume that if a character's race isn't mentioned, they must be white?

Because we haven't yet got past this toxic silliness, we needed Broadway Noir last season and we need this season's sequel Broadway Noir Deux! But don't come because it's important -- come because you will have a great time!

Broadway Noir Deux! runs two nights only, Jan. 9-10 at the Sheldon Concert Hall in Grand Center, right behind the Fox Theatre. Click here for more info. And click here to order season tickets.

As many of my friends know, I encountered a truly weird, wild, wonderful musical in college called Promenade, a genuinely experimental 1969 absurdist musical comedy (originally featuring Madeline Kahn!) that I have been dying to do ever since. It's my favorite kind of show -- very smart, very relevant, and very wacky.

It's one of the only absurdist musicals ever written, and it's one of those shows that will drive you mad if you try to make sense out of each moment -- but just lean back and go for the hilarious ride and you will have so much fun!

It's going to be a gargantuan challenge for me and Chris as directors, for Jason as music director, and for all our designers. But what's the point of starting a new project if you're not a little bit terrified?

That's the only way we grow!

This show is almost never produced, so this may your only chance to see this amazing, surprisingly relevant, and legendary oddball musical. There's truly nothing else like. It will leave you in a puddle of giggles. Don't miss it.

Promenade runs March 5-28 at the Marcelle Theater in Grand Center. Just click here for more info. And click here to order season tickets.

We close our season next summer with one more wild comedy, the international hit We Will Rock You, a fantastical fable featuring the songs of the world-famous rock band Queen. It's a very silly story on the surface, but underneath it's about how our art preserves our history and cultural.

At this moment in America's history, when Trump & Co. are screwing around with the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center, this comedy about a dystopian future isn't entirely divorced from our current reality. It will remind us why we need storytelling, and how much we'd miss it if it were gone.

In a weird way, totally accidental, We Will Rock You is kind of a companion piece to my recent novel The Wonderful Music of Bozz, also about a dystopian future and the healing power of music.

We Will Rock You runs June 4-27 at the Marcelle Theater in Grand Center. Just click here for more info. And click here to order season tickets.

Last season, after every performance, people came up to me in the lobby, really shocked at how healing American Idiot and Broadway Noir and Rocky Horror and Rent all were -- and that's the word almost everybody used, healing. That's what stories do for us. They make us feel less alone, less lost, more connected. That's something we all need desperately right now.

So come join us this season. We've got some truly wonderful musical theatre to share with you. There's a pretty good chance that you'll never get another chance to see any of these shows again! So don't make a terrible mistake and miss out!

Just in case you've forgotten since the beginning of this post -- all you have to do is click here for info! You will be so glad you did.

Rehearsals started last week for Bat Boy and I am so thrilled to be back inside this smart, funny, big-hearted show. We've got a killer cast (see what I did there?), and some really talented new staff, and I CANNOT WAIT to share this show with you.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

To get your Bat Boy tickets, click here.

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

There's Only Us

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Fri, 09 May 2025 02:18:00 +0000

Art explores and explains life. That’s the whole point of art. Can art explain Donald Trump and this Moment of MAGA, this angry, dark, cultural and political cloud hovering over us? Or more to the point in this case, can musicals help us understand Trump and MAGA?

Yes. They can. I think.

Full Disclosure: I’m a liberal. I voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and the election results stunned me. I’ve spent my adult life studying human behavior, emotions, motivations. As someone who directs musicals, writes musicals, and writes about musicals, that’s a huge part of my job. For a long while, I have felt like I generally understood people in a fuller way than most of us do. I have the great luxury of running New Line Theatre, and one of the perks is that I choose our shows, so I never have to work on mediocre material. Ever. We produce only the smartest, most interesting, most insightful, most well-made musical theatre. Our next show, Rent, will be our 100th production, and each new show has been a master class for me in human psychology, sociology, culture, politics.

But the Great Plague of 2020 really shattered me. Overnight, theatre disappeared. For a really long time. There’s no disputing the fact that Trump’s apathy and shocking scientific ignorance prolonged the pandemic significantly, adding tens of thousands to the lists of the dead – including many theatres across America.

The election of 2024 broke me again. Suddenly the world didn’t make sense to me. I discovered that I didn’t understand all I thought I did. What do I do with that?

I discovered that a lot of people (half the American electorate?) have little or no capacity for empathy, that elementally necessary human ability to understand and even feel how another person feels. I discovered an appalling new Trumpianic permission structure for being really selfish and really mean – or maybe it’s more accurate to call it an encouragement structure. It’s not just allowed; it’s celebrated. What do I do with that?

I face all this both on a personal scale and on a national scale, as the Trump team methodically tears apart every agency and institution that serves and protects our basic humanity, and that allows us to collectively care for and lift up each other, including “the Least of These.” Trump and his acolytes are metaphorically spray-painting a giant swastika over the Golden Rule. What do I do with that?

But I also face this darkness on a local level, as the director of the Missouri Arts Council, Michael Donovan, continues his year-and-a-half campaign against our company. Just a few weeks ago, he took our grant away, right in the middle of this season, blowing a huge hole in our budget. He just canceled our contract. No reason given. We lost $16,000. We have no idea why he's doing this, and he refuses to explain or answer any questions. Why is he trying so hard to hurt our small, 34-year-old company? And again, what do I do with that?

Well, theatre is life explained, they say. So then musical theatre is emotional life explained. So can we look to our musicals to better understand any of this?

We storytellers, we who make art, are supposed to be the ones who find meaning in it all. The whole reason humans tell stories is to make sense out of life, to make order out of chaos, to connect us all through the shared experience of being human in this time and place. We learn about ourselves and the people and world around us by sharing our stories. They teach us lessons, they show us our history, they explore human conflict and communion, they deliver truths that we need, and they help us understand ourselves as well as each other.

Can they still do all that, even now?

All of this selfishness and apathy I witness is why live theatre is both awesome and necessary. It’s hard to disconnect when you’re in the same room with the storytellers and an audience. The more we connect, the better humans we become. The more we understand others and their experiences, the better we understand ourselves and the more fully we live.

The thing a musical does best is emotional connection, because the abstract language of music conveys emotion much more effectively than words can. It’s hard to sit in an audience and not forge a connection with the characters in Rent or Come From Away or A Strange Loop, or yes, even Cats. We are those characters onstage, in all their flawed humanity, so we connect with them. We are reassured as we sit in the darkened theatre that everybody goes through trials and tribulations, and that we all survive them. Sharing stories exercises our empathy muscles, and it reminds us that we are not alone -- even when it really feels that way.

I’ve always believed that the musicals our company produces matter to people, that they help us make sense of our own lives and the lives around us. So it stands to reason that I should turn to those great storytellers to help me navigate through these times, doesn’t it? After all, why do we share stories? Precisely because we are not alone; because we all share so many human experiences, even though we may not always be aware of it.

Because really, there are no Others. Or, as Rent might put it, "There's only Us."

When an artist shares a story with an audience, they connect, not just to each other, but to all the rest of us too -- “connection in an isolating age,” as Jonathan Larson wrote in Rent. But there’s a four-way connection in a live performance – among the actors onstage, among the characters inside the story, between the actors and audience, and among the audience.

The Rent kids, the Spelling Bee kids, Celie, George Seurat, Edgar the Bat Boy, Cry-Baby Walker, Sweeney Todd, Hedwig Schmidt, Fredrik and Desirée, Veronica and J.D., Queenie and Burrs, even Frank N. Furter and Sondheim’s assassins – all of these characters and many others – seek one central thing.

Connection.

And in the real world, that’s harder than ever right now, in this toxic culture of ours. While social media has connected us in ways we could never have dreamed before, it also has accidentally given us powerful tools to demonize and Other-ize – and to lie without consequence.

We are still in the infancy of the Information Age, and we’re still learning how to navigate its treacherous waters. Too many of us have not yet learned how to distinguish between legitimate information and bogus information online; because the One America News site looks on the surface as legit as the New York Times site, so those who don’t know any better don’t know any better.

Couple that with the fact that many on the political Right are motivated by fear right now, mostly of the inevitable Browning of America; and this heady brew of fear manifests itself as serious anger and outrage, often over things that don’t exist or aren’t true. Many MAGA Republicans fear the Other, so they don’t seek out connection. But we all crave human connection (just look at the ubiquity of social media), so those who fear those connections often create for themselves even more disconnection, which leads to even more anger and outrage, as they come to perceive the world only in terms of Us vs. Them.

And then Trump and the conservative media universe tell these people every day that they are right to feel that way.

Many people think social media is the problem, but it’s not. Connection is connection, whether it’s in person or not. The appeal of connection is not only the proximity of other people’s physical bodies; it’s also about emotional and social connection, and Facebook does delivers that, if you can curate your list of friends nimbly enough. (I do wonder if maybe kids should be kept off social media, but that’s another discussion.)

And let’s be honest, for those of us working in the theatre, connection is the central appeal, the act of coming together for the common purpose of storytelling to share with others, creating the quite legitimate “magic of theatre” that binds us more powerfully than “civilians” will ever understand.

Musicals have always reflected their times, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes accidentally. In the 1930s and 40s musicals were primarily about assimilation, about fitting into a community. Either the hero would assimilate or he’d be removed. In other words, the hero had to be either “Us” or “Them.” Either he belongs there or he is the Other. This theme was so prevalent in large part because many of these shows were written by American Jews who had fled Europe, who worked hard to assimilate into American culture.

In the 1960s and 70s, many musicals turned instead to the Hero Myth, a personal journey set largely outside any community, as Americans looked inward and grappled with the moral complexity of the Sexual Revolution, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and lots more. A Hero Myth story doesn’t need a “community,” so theatre producers didn’t have to hire big choruses.

Starting with the dawn of the new Golden Age of musical theatre in the early 1990s, many musicals turned to stories about connection, in response to the selfishness and disconnection of the 1980s.

Our musicals always reflect our collective lives. In my books of musical theatre essays, I love to explore the political and social context in which a show was written and debuted, because our art always reflects our culture and politics. The greatest musicals hold on to that relevance over time. As examples, we worked on Rocky Horror a few months ago, and we were stunned at how relevant it felt -- still? again? The same thing is happening with Rent as we work on it now, and I expect the same when we do Bat Boy in the fall.

The Information Age will still be tough going for a while, as we learn collectively how to live in this new technological paradigm. It won’t be easy anytime soon, but in the meantime it’s up to us artists to provide that life-giving connection whenever and wherever we can. In fact, this post is an early draft of an introduction to a book I'm working on, in which I'm going to try to answer these questions.

To quote actor Ben Kingsley, “The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that’s what the storyteller is, and I think it’s important to appreciate that.”

Director Gregory Mosher said, “I have great faith in audiences. We only create problems when we treat them as customers instead of collaborators in an artistic process. . . We can let audiences down in all kinds of ways: by being dishonest with them, by betraying our own intentions and, therefore, betraying the audience’s trust. All they ask the artists to do is what the artists want to do. Audiences say, ‘I want to see what you want to show me.’ All they want is human connection, and we betray them if we don’t deliver that.”

That’s our job, after all: Connection in an isolating age. I wonder if Jonathan Larson suspected that Rent would still feel up-to-the-minute thirty years later. He probably did.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Food of Love: The RENT Glossary

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 02:47:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered about all those references in "La Vie Bohème"? Me too! Here's what I found.

"Dies irae" -- a musical phrase that's best known from its use in the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. The first melody set to these words, a Gregorian chant, is one of the most quoted musical phrases in history, appearing in the works of many composers, in many film scores, and used extensively in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd score. The Latin words mean "Day of Wrath."

"Kyrie Eleison" -- Greek for "Lord have mercy," also a part of the Roman Catholic Mass

"Yitgadal v' yitkadash" -- the opening phrase of the Jewish prayer of praise and remembrance recited by mourners after a death. It translates to "May His great name be magnified and sanctified." The prayer is part of Jewish mourning rituals and is recited in all prayer services, as well as at funerals and memorials. The joke here is that none of them are religious, and their quoting of these ancient texts is entirely ironic.

"La Vie Bohème" -- this phrase means "The Bohemian Life," except it's wrong. It should be "La Vie de Bohème." And really, if you're singing it, it would be more like "La Vie'd' Bohème," so it'd be the same number of syllables.

The word Bohemian originally referred to an area in the Czech Republic, and the people there were historically called gypsies, though today they prefer Roma or Romani. In the nineteenth century, the word Bohemian came to mean anyone living an alternative, nonconformist lifestyle, particularly artists, writers, musicians, and other artsies. Henri Murger's 1851 novel, Scenes de la Vie de Bohème, the source for Rent, popularized the label.

From this point in the song to the end, these characters will catalog for us the stuff of living La Vie Bohème, i.e., The Artsy Life, all the varied influences and experiences and artists that led these people to this community, and to a fuller inner life of art, literature, music, dance, foreign films, international cuisine, and some top-drawer artistic role models.

"Playing hooky" -- 19th-century slang for skipping school, with the word "hooky" (maybe) coming from the Dutch word for hide-and-seek. In this context, it's about skipping work, in other words, not being a Good Corporate Clone.

"Making something out of nothing" -- this might seem like a throwaway phrase, but it's not. The phrase itself has several meanings. In one sense, it means simply the act of creation; but the phrase comes from Latin creatio ex nihilo, literally creation from nothing, and it originally refers to the divine act of creating the universe. But the phrase can also mean getting really upset over nothing. That one little phrase, rushing by in the middle of this song, invokes art-making, divinity, and immaturity. That's awfully good writing.

"Going against the grain" -- is an idiom that means going against the norm, the mainstream, the expected. It can also sometimes mean going against your own beliefs or conscience. The phrase comes from woodworking, where sanding or planing against the grain causes a rough surface. To create a smooth surface, you sand with the grain, in the same direction as the wood fibers. The use of the phrase as a metaphor goes back to Shakespeare (of course) and his political thriller Coriolanus.

"Going mad" -- this is specifically a reference to the widely assumed connection between art making and insanity. Aristotle famously said, "No great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness." And thanks in large part to Henri Murger's novel Scenes de la Vie de Boheme (the source for Rent), young artists sometimes romanticize that connection. So let's pause...

A 2015 study in Iceland found that people in creative professions were 25% more likely to carry gene variants that increase the risk of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. A Swedish study, which tried to establish whether creativity is linked to all psychiatric diagnoses (particularly in writers), found “an association between creative professions and first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa, and for siblings of patients with autism.” A recent report shows that 73% of musicians have suffered from mental illness, and a report from the Office of National Statistics in England for 2011 to 2015 indicated that those working in arts-related jobs were at high risk of suicide (in some cases up to four times more at risk). Other papers have suggested a link between bipolar disorder and creativity, assessed mood disorders in British writers and artists, and psychoanalysed women artists compulsions to create.

"Loving tension" -- an idea that acknowledges the inevitable tensions within any human relationship, and that disagreements and problems can be dealt with from a place of love rather than anger. It's about embracing the complexity of human experience, including the discomforts and challenges, and still being able to connect with others, and yourself, with compassion and understanding.

"No pension" -- a reference to workplace pensions, savings plans established by an employer that offers employees regular income payments during retirement, usually until their death. The point of the reference is that because these people don't have "straight" jobs, none of them have access to a pension, and so none of them will have any financial security for their old age.

"More than one dimension" -- a reference to the idea that there could be (are?) other realities beyond what we can perceive (with the word dimension in its common though incorrect usage).

"Hating dear old Mom and Dad" -- considering the context and the characters, this is most likely a way of Mark saying he hates the conventional mainstream world that Mom and Dad represent -- or that they insist he join.

"Riding your bike midday" -- a symbol of the freedom from the oppression of a 9-to-5 office job. It likely also refer to bike messengers, who spend their days biking around Manhattan.

"Three-piece suits" -- popular in the Seventies, the three-piece suit (pants, vest, coat) was out of style by the mid-1980s and the 90s. So in this context, the phrase is remarking on the clueless corporate drones still wearing the same suit every day for decades.

"Fruits" -- a slang insult, along with "fruitcake," for gay people that goes back to the 19th century. But it's one of the insults that the gay community co-opted and took for themselves (like "queer"). In the British outsider slang called Polari, fruit means Queen.

"No Absolutes" -- a reference to the idea that there are no absolute truths in ethics and that what is morally right or wrong varies from person to person or from society to society. It comes from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of Moral Relativism, which holds that no truth is universally valid, but instead, all truths are relative to a specific context or perspective, to different cultures, languages, or individuals. Arguably, acknowledging that there are no absolutes can encourage a more nuanced and flexible approach to thinking, allowing for the possibility of diverse perspectives and interpretations. Nietzsche proposed that morality itself could be a danger. He believed that morals should be constructed actively, making them relative to who we are and what we, as individuals, consider to be true, equal, good and bad, etc. instead of reacting to moral laws made by a certain group of individuals in power.

Absolut -- a well-known vodka brand, and a fun bit of wordplay

Village Voice -- the news and culture publication based in Greenwich Village, New York City, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, The Voice began as a platform for the creative community of New York City. It ceased publication in 2017, although its online archives remained accessible. After an ownership change, The Voice reappeared in print as a quarterly in April 2021.

Miso Soup, Seaweed Salad, Soy Burger, Tofu Dog, Meatless Balls -- the joke here is that no one at the table orders anything "normal" -- until the thirteen orders of fries, of course. The first two items are Japanese dishes, the other three are dishes that should have meat in them but don't. And we're forced to wonder, why are they buying these dishes defined by meat -- a hamburger, a hot dog, and meatballs -- and requesting versions of them without meat. It's also a joke on high maintenance customers, many of whom Jonathan Larson had inevitably faced working for ten years in the Moondance Diner.

"Hand-Crafted Beers made in local breweries" -- a reference to micro-breweries, a phenomenon that started in the 1970s, small breweries that emphasize quality ingredients, unique flavors, and varied brewing techniques. Their smaller production scale allows micro-breweries to experiment with different flavors and styles, offering beer drinkers a wider variety of options. Consumers often appreciate supporting locally-owned micro-breweries, viewing them as stewards of their region's identity and legacy. There's an implied rejection of national corporate brands here.

Yoga -- originally, a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices and disciplines that originated in ancient India, aimed at controlling body and mind to attain salvation, as practiced in the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. Yoga as exercise is part of a modern yoga renaissance, a 20th-century blend of Western gymnastics and haṭha yoga. Yoga as exercise is now a worldwide, multi-billion-dollar business involving classes, teacher certification, clothing, books, videos, equipment, and holidays.

Yogurt -- a food produced by bacterial fermentation of milk, dating back to Ancient Greece, introduced to America in the early 1900s, declared health food in the 1950s (though current research isn't so sure), and in 1966 was enhanced with sweeteners and fruit for the first time.

Rice and Beans and Cheese -- a beloved Mexican dish

Leather -- a sexual subculture centered on activities that involve leather garments, like leather jackets, vests, boots, chaps, harnesses, and other accessories. Some leather enthusiasts are also into BDSM (bondage, domination, and sado-masochism). For some, leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power.

Dildos -- sex toys, usually shaped like an erect penis, sometimes battery-operated!

Curry Vindaloo -- a dish and curry from the state of Goa in India. It's known globally in its British-Indian form as a staple of curry houses and Indian restaurants and is often regarded as a fiery, spicy dish. Vindaloo evolved from the Portuguese dish carne de vinha d'alhos. The traditional vindaloo recipe is pork, but alternative versions are also commonly used, including beef, chicken, lamb, mutton, prawns, vegetables and tofu.

Huevos Rancheros -- a vegetarian breakfast egg dish served in the style of the traditional large mid-morning fare on rural Mexican farms. The basic dish consists of fried eggs served on lightly fried or charred corn or flour tortillas, topped with a spicy salsa made of tomatoes, chili peppers, and onions. Common side dishes include refried beans, Mexican-style rice, and guacamole or slices of avocado, with cilantro as a garnish.

Maya Angelou -- an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees

[Susan] Sontag -- an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels. She wrote extensively about literature, cinema, photography and media, illness, war, human rights, and left-wing politics. Her essays and speeches drew backlash and controversy, and she has been called "one of the most influential critics of her generation." Sontag lived for many years with her partner, director and playwright Maria Irene Fornes.

[Stephen] Sondheim -- composer and lyricist, one of the true geniuses of the American musical theatre, who took the art form forward after the Rodgers and Hammerstein era.

[Allen] Ginsberg -- an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, openness to pederasty, and openness to Eastern religions.

[Bob] Dylan -- an American singer-songwriter, considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his nearly 70-year career, and his work is widely taught in university classes. With an estimated more than 125 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling musicians in history.

[Merce] Cunningham -- an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than fifty years. He frequently collaborated with artists of other disciplines, including musicians, graphic artists, and fashion designers. As a choreographer, teacher, and leader of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, he had a profound influence on modern dance and avant-garde art more generally.

[John] Cage -- an American composer and music theorist, a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments. Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Notice the lyric in "La Vie Boheme" is "...Cunningham and Cage" -- Larson parried them together as a couple!

Lenny Bruce -- an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist, renowned for his wild, free-wheeling, aggressive style of comedy that combined satire, politics, religion, sex, and lots of vulgarity. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial was followed by a posthumous pardon in 2003. Bruce forged new paths in comedy and counterculture, and in 2017, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him third (behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin) on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.

Langston Hughes -- an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri, and one of the earliest innovators of the literary form called jazz poetry. He is most widely known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Uta [Hagen] -- a German-American actress and theatre practitioner, who originated the role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She later became a highly influential acting teacher at New York's Herbert Berghof Studio and authored best-selling acting texts, Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor. Her most substantial contributions to the teaching of acting were a series of "object exercises" she created that built on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and Yevgeny Vakhtangov.

Buddha -- a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE, and founded Buddhism. His name means "Awakened One" or "Enlightened One." According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha taught a Middle Way between sensual indulgence and severe asceticism, leading to freedom from ignorance, craving, rebirth, and suffering. His core teachings are summarized in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, a training of the mind that includes ethical training and kindness toward others.

Pablo Neruda -- Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.

biseuxals, trisexuals -- a exaggeration to illustrate openness and acceptance of any sexuality. The word trisexual is commonly used as a joke to describe someone who's willing to try anything with anybody. But the word also has been adopted seriously by people who believe there are more than two genders.

homo sapiens -- modern humans. There are twin references here. This is sly wordplay. In context, with "...bisexuals, trisexuals, homo-..." Larson sets us up to expect homosexuals, but then he tricks us with homo sapiens instead. And on another, more serious level, though, humans are the raw material of all art. Homo sapiens have certainly shaped these artists and their work.

The extra bonus of Larson's wordplay is that his trick sets up a whole new list of rhymes -- homo sapiens, carcinogens, hallucinogens -- and then a close rhyme, with men. But Larson's not through yet. Following men with Pee-wee Herman reminds us comically of Pee-wee's embarrassing arrest in a porno movie house. And then Larson rhymes Herman with German in the phrase, "German wine," which sets up another new rhyme with turpentine and Gertrude Stein.

Carcinogens -- substances that can cause cancer, found in workplaces, homes, and even in some foods. Examples include tobacco smoke, certain viruses, and radiation.

Hallucinogens -- a class of psychoactive drugs that alter perception, mood, and cognition, often producing vivid and intense sensory experiences. They can cause hallucinations that can involve any of the five senses. The true hippies and Bohemians distinguish between "good" (natural) hallucinogens, like peyote and mushrooms; versus "bad" (man-made) hallucinogens like LSD, DMT, and PCP.

Pee-wee Herman -- a totally nerdy, totally hip character created and portrayed by the American comedian Paul Reubens. His onstage Pee-wee Herman Show was broadcast by HBO in 1981, and a slightly revised version briefly ran on Broadway in 2010. Reubens took the character to the silver screen with Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, which paved the way for Pee-wee's Playhouse, an Emmy Award-winning children's series that ran on CBS from 1986 to 1991. Another film, Big Top Pee-wee, was released in 1988. In 1991, Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure in a Florida porno theatre.

German Wine -- known for its diverse grape varieties and production styles, with white wines like Riesling being particularly renowned internationally. The country also produces red wines, particularly from the Pinot Noir grape, known as Spätburgunder.

Turpentine -- an artist's necessity, to thin out oil paint and to clean brushes -- and sometimes used for suicide.

Gertrude Stein -- lesbian American novelist, poet, playwright

[Michelangelo] Antonioni -- Italian film director and screenwriter, one of the auteurs who launched the Italian New Wave in the Sixties.

[Bernardo] Bertolucci -- Italian film director and screenwriter, another of the auteurs who launched the Italian New Wave in the Sixties.

[Akira] Kurosawa -- Japanese filmmaker who directed 30 feature films in a career spanning seven decades, still regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, with a bold, dynamic style strongly influenced by Western cinema but distinct from it.

"Carmina Burana" -- a famous cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff, based on 24 poems from the medieval collection of poetry, Carmina Burana. The first and last sections of the cantata are called "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" ("Fortune, Empress of the World") and this section is very familiar to American movie audiences.

Entropy -- the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder; or more casually, the process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder; chaos, disorganization, randomness.

Empathy -- the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, or to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling, an absolute necessity for any artist.

Ecstasy -- a state of intense joy, bliss, or spiritual exaltation, often described as a trance-like state or transcendence of ordinary consciousness; and it's the common name for MDMA, a synthetic drug with stimulant, empathogenic, and minor psychedelic effects, known for its ability to induce feelings of euphoria, empathy, and connection. In other words, ecstasy improves your empathy.

Vaclav Havel -- Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and political dissident, who was still alive when Rent was written.

Sex Pistols -- an English punk rock band formed in London in 1975, whose career actually lasted only two and a half years, but they became hugely influential in popular music. The band initiated the punk movement in the United Kingdom and later inspired many punk, post-punk and alternative rock musicians, and their clothing and hairstyles were a significant influence on the early punk image. (Some cultural historians argue that costumer Sue Blaine was the one who invented punk fashion with her costumes for The Rocky Horror Show in 1973.)

8BC -- a nightclub, performance art and music concert space, and art gallery in the East Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1983, the space was closed in late 1985 over city fire codes. During its short lifespan, the space showcased over 650 performances ranging from punk rock and no wave bands to Japanese Butoh theatre. The club's name came from its location on 8th Street, between Ave. B and Ave. C. (In later versions of Rent, this reference was changed to "BBC.")

"The Fame Game" -- a phrase generally used to describe the pursuit and dynamics of fame, often with a negative connotation that it's a competitive and manipulative arena. The phrase emphasizes the idea that fame is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but instead a game played for attention and recognition. And notice that in context of this lyric, they're celebrating refusing to be part of the "fame game." It's something Mark has to learn before our story is over.

Marijuana -- this reference isn't just a shout-out to getting stoned. In this context, it's about the many great artists who have used marijuana over the centuries. The list of stoner artists is really long, but a small sample includes the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, Louis Armstrong, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Marley, Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson, Lady Gaga, Dave Chappelle, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia, Pablo Picasso, Carl Sagan, Sting, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Salvador Dali, David Hockney, Vincent Van Gogh, Melissa Etheridge, Toby Keith, Jay-Z, Oscar Wilde, David Bowie -- and probably William Shakespeare. Scientists recently tested residue in a pipe found in Shakespeare’s home, and it tested positive for cannabis residue. In Shakespeare’s 76th sonnet, he refers to a “noted weed” and “newfound methods and compounds strange.” Scholars speculate he was probably writing about marijuana.

Sodomy -- usually misunderstood to mean homosexaulity, due to a sloppy misreading of the story of Sodom in the Christian Bible; and it eventually came to mean any kind of illegal sex.

S&M -- an abbreviation for sadomasochism, sexual practices that involve either inflicting p[hysical pain (sadism) or receiving physical pain (masochism), and/or humiliation. This can range from mild forms of bondage and role-playing to more extreme activities.

High Holy Days -- a series of Jewish holidays that begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and culminate with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This period is a time of reflection, repentance, and prayer, lasting about ten days.

Vocoder -- a machine that electronically transforms the human voice

"Musetta's Waltz" -- the song "Quando me'n vo'" in act two of Puccini's 1896 opera La Bohème. It is sung by Musetta (Mimi in Rent), in the presence of her bohemian friends, hoping to reclaim the attention of her occasional boyfriend Marcello (Rent's Mark). The meta joke here is that inside the world of Rent, Roger and Mark are aware of a song from the other stage adaptation of their story.

"ACT UP" -- the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, founded in 1987 by playwright-activist Larry Kramer, an international, grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic. The group works to improve the lives of people with AIDS through direct action, medical research, treatment and advocacy, and working to change legislation and public policies.

Masochism -- the enjoyment of suffering pain or humiliation, inflicted by you or others. It can manifest in various forms, including sexual masochism, where sexual arousal is associated with pain or humiliation. Masochistic behaviors can also be seen in everyday life.

"AZT break" -- an antiretroviral drug used to treat HIV/AIDS. It works by interfering with HIV's ability to replicate. While it was the first drug approved by the FDA for HIV treatment in 1987, it's not now recommended as first-line therapy anymore due to potential side effects and the availability of more effective treatments. The "break" illustrates that patients had to take pills up to six times a day on a strict schedule.

"Food of Love" -- is a reference to Shakespeare dark comedy Twelfth Night, in which Duke Orsino says, "If music be the food of love, then play on."

"Living with, not dying from, disease" -- is a reference from the AIDS movement, an effort to stop people from saying someone sas "dying of AIDS," and to say instead that someone is "living with AIDS."

"tear down the wall" -- a metaphor referring to the Berlin wall, but now standing in for political activism on behalf of all the Others who are oppressed.

"The opposite of war isn't peace; it's creation." -- this is a Jon Larson original, and it's brilliant. And it's true. The opposite of destruction isn't the lack of destruction. The opposite of destruction is creation. The opposite of war is art.

We start blocking Rent this week. I cannot wait to see it on its feet, so the actors can start playing. It's been ten years since we last worked on this show, and it's so great to be back.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Everything is Still Rent!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 02:39:00 +0000

We've just begun rehearsals for Rent, and I could not be more delighted. Our cast is terrific.

I saw the show on Broadway in 1997 with the entire original cast; then I researched and wrote about the show for my 2001 book Rebels with Applause: Broadway's Groundbreaking Musicals. I saw the off Broadway revival in 2011; then I directed the show myself in 2014; and while we worked on it, I wrote even more about it here in my blog (see links below).

Saying I love this show is a severe understatement.

Saying that we need Rent right now is also an understatement. Rent is about community, about connection and empathy. Right now, it seems that so much of America has lost those things. Our country has indeed been rent, as in torn apart.

Maybe Angel can save us all.

There are so many songs in Rent I love (almost all of them) and so many lyrics that always strike me as powerfully truthful. As I look at America in 2025, one lyric that smacks me in the face is in "Halloween," when Mark asks, "How did we get here?" Yeah, no shit. We're all asking that right now, aren't we?

The other line that seems doubly potent today is in the Support Group:

There's only us.
There's only this.

It reminds me of President Obama telling audiences that there aren't any superheroes coming to save us -- we've got to be the heroes.

There are certain shows that have completely changed the way I think about theatre, Hair (which we've done three times), Rocky Horror (which we just closed for the second time), Grease (only once for New Line, three times for me personally), and Rent. In each case, I first saw the show (or movie) and thought to myself, Holy shit, musicals can be THIS?

Each time it was like walking out the door from a sepia-toned world into Technicolor. Each time, these shows expanded massively for me the possibilities of this art form I love so much.

I'll always remember being struck, from the opening moments, by how un-Broadway Rent was, the whole show, how raw and un-pretty and free of the usual show biz bullshit. It was so refreshingly, disarmingly honest about both its story and its storytelling. And it didn't sound like Broadway; it sounded like the world around us. That was new.

Jonathan Larson was a visionary. I'll always mourn for the amazing works he would have created for us if he had lived longer. But I'll also be forever grateful that he left us Rent, which has meant so much to so many. It heals us. That's why we're producing it this year. We need healing.

The only thing I know how to do right now, in this ugly world of ours, is put some light out into the darkness. My way of doing that is to bring Angel back to us for four weeks and hope that her deep humanity and her limitless empathy and compassion might stay with us for a while.

I know it might sound a tad crazy, but I sort of feel like Rent will "protect" me in some way while it's with us, like some kind of psychic armor against those slings and arrows of outrageous fascists who seek to disconnect us from each other.

Rent's Act II opener "Seasons of Love" has always seemed like a prayer to me. We have to remember that the lyric doesn't say, "You can measure in love;" it says, "Measure in love." It's a command. That's easier said than done, I know, but that's what Rent demands of us.

When we did the show last time in 2014, I blogged a lot about what we were discovering inside this masterpiece. Yes, it's a masterpiece. These are my Rent posts from 2014:

Rent, a post about my Renty past

No Day But Today, about the challenges of Rent

It's Creation, abou Rent as a Hero Myth

Truth Like a Blazing Fire, about the politics of Rent

Food of Love, Emotion, Mathematics, Isolation, Rhythm, Power, Feeling, Harmony, about the Rent score

La Vie Boheme, about Rent research

It's Between God and Me, about Rent, religion, and "Another Day"

Causing a Commotion, about staging "La Vie Boheme"

A Bittersweet, Evocative Song, about the character of Roger

The 3-D Imax of my Mind, about Mark and me

To Passion, When It's New, about letting go of the original Rent

It's a Comfort to Know, about Rent and community

Moo With Me, about Maureen's performance piece

Touch Taste Deep Dark Kiss, about "Contact"

Everything is Rent, about the reception to New Line's 2014 production

Connecting in an Isolated Age, about my experience with Rent

Stay tuned!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

My Beautiful Creature

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 05:36:00 +0000

I spent my high school years crazy, madly in love with Rocky Horror. I saw the movie at midnight screenings at the Varsity Theatre eighty times during my four years of high school (1978-1982).

For a media class, senior year, my friend Stephanie and I created a multimedia presentation explaining the Rocky Horror phenomenon. We got an A+.

A decade later, I started New Line Theatre, a company designed to produce shows just like Rocky, but the production rights for the show were tied up for years!

Finally in 2002, New Line got to produce the stage show, and it was a blast. We were the first in the region to do it after all those years, so our audiences were thrilled to see Rocky in its original form.

Afterwards, I wrote a chapter about the show for my book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals.

Twenty-three years later, here I am directing Rocky Horror again. It's been a wonderful ride, with a wonderful cast, band, and staff. But Dr., Frank N. Furter has left the building.

Our brilliant graphic artist Matt Reedy even re-designed our poster after he saw the show, to match our actors and costumes. He's been designing our posters for more than twenty years, and he's done really outstanding work for us. You can see all of it in our coffee table book of New Line posters.

As always, I learned new things about the show, even after my (almost) lifelong love affair with it.

My biggest takeaway -- how ballsy it is that this show spends all evening in subversive but very silly satire, with outrageous characters in a bizarre situation, and then, the story ends in total seriousness. Frank's gorgeous power ballad "I'm Going Home" always knocks the audience out because though it may be shallow, it's serious. No joke.

After that, once Riff-Raff kills half the cast, there are no more laughs. The story ends with the exit of the mutinous, homeward bound Riff-Raff and Magenta, but the show doesn't end yet.

Instead, all these characters, alive and dead, leave us with a final sobering thought, not a hopeful one, not a musical comedy ending. They sing the very serious, densely poetic "Super Heroes," reminding us that despite all the fun we've had with this show (and with the Sexual Revolution) that freedom and fun sometimes come at a cost.

Brad steps forward and sings:

I've done a lot;
God knows I've tried.
To find the truth,
I've even lied.
But all I know
Is down inside,
I'm bleeding.

He tried to be open to the experience, but it broke him. Then Janet steps forward and sings:

And super heroes
Come to feast,
To taste the flesh
Not yet deceased;
And all I know
Is still the beast
Is feeding.

Janet describes her sexual awakening, with the dubious understanding that once awakened, it doesn't go back to sleep. And though she ultimately enjoyed her awakening, this new Janet does not belong now in the world where she lives. (Richard O'Brien's sequel-adjacent second film Shock Treatment rebalances Brad and Janet, for an ironically unhappy Happy Ending.)

The Narrator closes Rocky Horror by telling us we are lost, in time and space. Not just Brad and Janet; all of us too. And we know he's right. And that's a hell of a way to end this rowdy, vulgar rock fable.

But I wonder if Rocky Horror without that sober ending would have been as big a success over time. The last two songs force us to re-think what we've just seen in a new context -- the human pain and suffering of these people who've been through this experience (exactly like several Shakespeare plays do to us), which parallel real-life pain and suffering. This whole musical shows us our own world, but in a cultural funhouse mirror; then finally at the end, it takes that distorted mirror away and lets us see ourselves, no more goofy aliens, no more rock and roll. No more ironic distance.

Rock and roll equals sex in this world, so rock must be banished at the end of the story as well.

Without "Super Heroes," this is arguably a rapey, dated musical about sexual assault. With "Super Heroes," it's an insightful, adult commentary on the real-world ramifications of the sexual openness of the 1960s -- or really, on any moment in history when oppression and freedom do battle within our culture, and the Others rise up. Like right now.

My other big takeaway from our run of Rocky is that no matter how frustrating these times seem to me personally, people need stories more than ever, to try and make sense of the chaos of this world. It matters that we keep telling stories, and it matters which stories we tell and how fearlessly. We can't hide. We have to tell the truth. Even if it pisses some people off. That's the job.

This show revealed uneasy truths about us when it debuted onstage in 1973 and on screen in 1975, when New Line first produced it in 2002, and now, in 2025, maybe even more than when it first opened.

As I wrote in my program notes, "Rocky Horror is lots more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We can revel in the anarchy and craziness of this incredibly entertaining rock and roll fable, but our real world is peeking out from between the sheets, and it’s begging us to pay attention."

So many people leaving our Rocky performances told me how much they needed that experience. It was certainly good medicine -- and a call to action? -- for all of us. That's what art does.

Even though I despair for our country, still I know that my job -- my place in the world -- is as storyteller. And in today's world of intentional lies and misinformation, our duty as storytellers is even more vital now, to help explain this world, to connect people to each other, to tell the truth.

Rocky Horror does that. Our next show Rent does that too. And so do the shows we're planning for next season. That's the job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Lost in Time and Lost in Space and Meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 04:43:00 +0000

Most people think of Rocky Horror as silly, sexy nonsense. I thought about it that way in high school when I saw the movie more than eighty times at the Varsity Theatre (now Vintage Vinyl).

But then when I worked on it for the first time in 2002, my mind was blown by how smart and subtle and sophisticated the show really is. It follows the classic Hero Myth structure, and it explores the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and Americans' ridiculous reaction to it. Along the way, it gives us a subliminal history lesson in American Sex, from the often shirtless, short-shorts clad Flash Gordon in the 1930s to the barely disguised "physique magazines" of the 1950s, to the Free Love movement of the 1960s, and the mainstream backlash in the 1970s.

I have argued for years that Rocky Horror should never be removed from its time and place. "Re-imagining" the show in other contexts diminishes the truth behind this story. This is a story about a relatively unique cultural moment, and its detailed specificity is exactly what makes it timeless and universal.

It's a truism of storytelling -- the more specific the story, the more universal its impact. The success of Fiddler on the Roof around the world is proof.

I finally understood years ago that my job as director is never to be fresh and original. My job is to help the actors tell this story as clearly as possible. That's my only job. It's not to dazzle or impress; it's just to tell a story. The only reason to come up with "a new vision" or a new approach is that it will tell that particular story more clearly. But new visions almost never tell the story more clearly. Directors and actors are interpretive artists, not writers.

The last time I directed the show, I was very focused on being faithful to the original stage show in 1973 London. This time in 2025, I wanted to strike a balance between being faithful to the original but not being bound by it. This time, we strayed quite a bit from the stage show and the movie, but tried to be true still to the intentions of Richard O'Brien and the original team.

I think we succeeded in that. The hardcore Rocky fans love our production and that balance we struck, enjoying the references and call-outs to the film and delighted at the many differences.

In 2002, it wasn't as clear as it is now. We need Rocky Horror. In 2025, as the MAGA world stokes hatred of those of us who are Other, this show is a ferocious Fuck-You to Trump and his MAGA followers. This show is a celebration of difference and a morality tale about refusing to evolve even as the world around us evolves. Janet embraces the Sexual Revolution (i.e., Frank) while Brad runs from it. Janet embraces purely physical love (with Rocky), while Brad is still stuck in the emotional entanglements of love ("Once in a While"). The two of them begin our story in the same place, but end up in very different places.

During the run, it's been surprising to me how many people thank me for this show and tell me how much they needed it right now, how much it is genuinely healing for many of us. Our next show Rent will be the same.

Sometimes I wonder if what we do really matters in a world this ugly, this mean, this upside-down, but our audiences are telling me, even with a show as silly on the surface as Rocky Horror, what we do does matter. I have to hold on to that.

It's been such a hard few years for most of us. For those of us who are Other -- essentially everyone who isn't a straight white married man -- we live in fear of what's still to come from Trump and his followers. Every day it gets worse and more destructive. Every day is gets scarier.

But at least we get to come together in a darkened theatre and share what is most human about us all, and we feel that profound human connection that we all need and that seems more important today than ever before.

As Next to Normal reminds us, "We need some light."

I hope we provide that.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

'Twas a Year Full of New Line, 2024

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 06:00:00 +0000

'Twas a year full of New Line, still soldiering on
Down this long, winding road, toward a long promised dawn;
'Cause when times feel this ugly, confusing, distraught,
And people fear things might get worse than they thought;
Then that is when we who tell Stories must rise,
And share those good tales full of glories and size,
Of poetry, popcorn, and beautiful lies.

The truth? It's not easy, especially now,
To keep us afloat and to hold to our vow
Making musicals that entertain and inform;
To remind us how much we're the same, come the storm;
And to help us see all of those things we can't see
When we're rushing through life, and we can't find the key,
When a hushed, darkened theatre's the best place to be.

Now, sometimes a show's just too weird not to do;
And the question's not should we?; but if not us, who?
The Great Ol' White Way is no longer the spot
In which every great musical must be begot.
No, our art form is thriving on stages and screens
Spanning ocean to ocean, and what all that means
Is that we can find gems like the Sweet Potato Queens.

But darkness descended -- the fictional kind --
With our Gothic, romantic pop opera, designed
To renew and re-focus the Dracula tale,
From epic-sized horror to more human-scale,
From heroes-and-villains to lovers and pain,
About love that is sacred and love that's profane,
About op'ning a heart before op'ning a vein.

It was timely in 2004, we all knew,
But American Idiot wasn't yet through.
For it debuted on Broadway in spring 2010,
And it somehow seemed even more relevant then!
Now, crafting our version, near twenty years on,
Has revealed to us insights our zeitgeist has drawn;
Then as now, life's no sprint; it's a damned marathon.

But no matter how gloomy this night might appear,
The good news is New Line will always be here
To guide us, to grapple with gobsmacking times,
Through characters, stories, and music and rhymes;
For art is a map of the world and the soul,
And it helps us to steer when life's out of control,
And it keeps us connected.
And it makes us feel whole.

Stay Sane and Safe, and Have a Happy New Year!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. I started these year-poems on a whim way back in 2013. If you're a glutton for punishment, here are my poems from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023. (Yes, I skipped 2021.)

P.P.S. To buy tickets to our 2025 shows, Broadway Noir, Rocky Horror and Rent, click here.

P.P.P.S. If you'd like to contribute to New Line Theatre (you know you would!), just click here.

Heart Like a Hand Grenade

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 05:03:00 +0000

New Line has been in transition the last few years. The Great Plague of 2020 didn't really cause this transition, but it sped it up.

I remember when I turned forty (twenty years ago!!), I told my friends that New Line could not get "middle-aged" just because I was. It's one of the reasons we produce shows like bare and Be More Chill.

But the biggest change since 2019 has been a turnover in the people who work with us. Some of our longtime New Line veterans left town and/or moved on to other life adventures.

Mike Dowdy-Windsor joined us as an actor in 2009, and he became our Associate Artistic Director in 2012, but he and his husband Dominic moved to California in 2022. But as board member (and occasional performer) Alison Helmer reminded me, New Line has been around thirty-two years, and every so often, we get a whole new generation of New Liners -- even while a good number of our longtime veterans stick around. Sometimes, that new generation brings the return of past New Liners, which is always a treat. And that's our secret sauce.

It's always a little sad when veteran New Liners move on, but it's also really exciting when a new generation joins us. So many of our actors this season are new to our company, and that's very exciting. It's so much fun to see what new things and different perspectives they bring to our work. At the same time, we still have some longstanding New Liners joining us again this season.

Clayton Humburg just played Johnny in American Idiot which opened this current season. Nine years ago, he joined us for the first time, in Heathers, and then as Rock and Roll Boyfriend in our last production of American Idiot. This was Clayton's eighth New Line show. Todd Schaefer first joined us in 2002, for Cabaret and then as Brad in Rocky Horror. Later this season, Todd returns to play Frank N. Furter, in his fifteenth New Line production. Chris Strawhun first joined us in 2010, in Evita, and he returns this season for his tenth New Line show, as Eddie and Dr. Scott in Rocky Horror. Ian McCreary first joined us in 2019 as one of the lovely and dangerous Cagelles in La Cage aux Folles, and this season he returned for his eighth New Line show with American Idiot. Victoria Pines first joined us in 2001 in The Cradle Will Rock, and she returns this season as Magenta in Rocky Horror and as Joanne in Rent, her fourth and fifth New Line shows.

Likewise, Chris Moore first joined us as an actor in Head Over Heels in 2020, but now he's our Associate Artistic Director and he was the lead director for American Idiot, the first time he's directed for New Line. (There will be more.)

It's this great mix that makes such great theatre -- the comfort and familiarity of working with our veteran New Liners, mixed with the energy and excitement of working with new people.

Part of that mix is also a very intentional diversity of race, gender, age, body type, and sexuality. We have actively focused on that diversity in our casting for decades, and I'm happy to say that this season will be our most diverse ever. That's due largely to the amazing new people who came to audition for us. And all those new people came to us largely because Chris Moore cares so deeply about that diversity and did some very active recruiting. I've always been proud that our casting has been race-blind, and we often cast actors of color in leading roles that are traditionally "white." But thanks to Chris, we're doing better in these efforts than ever before. (He's the driving force behind our January concert at the Sheldon, called Broadway Noir.) All of that is really important to me as Artistic Director, so I'm very grateful to Chris.

Sometimes the specific advantages of working with new people are a surprise. It wasn't until we were a couple weeks into rehearsal that it occurred to Chris and me that almost no one in our cast had even been born when the 9/11 attacks happened, and we were doing this show entirely born out of that event. What we eventually realized is that this was an advantage -- the characters had also never experienced 9/11 before. The biggest surprise is that they all found historical and emotional equivalents in today's world. It was welcome proof that this story, so specific in so many ways -- is truly universal and timeless.

Also, many of these actors had never performed a piece of musical theatre this serious, this dark, this confrontational, and it was genuinely thrilling for many of them. I've been doing shows like this for so long that I forget the rush of discovering that there are so many musicals like this. All of this changed the show in lots of ways, obvious and subtle.

Several people came up to me after performances and told me sheepishly that they liked this production better than our production in 2016 that I directed. Every time it made me laugh, and I reassured them it was okay to like this one better. Of course, that got me thinking about how the two productions were different.

My conclusion was this. I think our 2016 production, much like Michael Mayer's original, was colder, more outraged, more rebellious, more political, more Brechtian -- more of a fuck-you to the audience. In contrast, this new production was more emotional and more human, and so the ending felt gentler this time. I had done my best to keep my fingers out of the process, to let Chris make the show his own, so the two productions really were different -- partly because of the different directors, and partly because of the different cast with different, more indirect connections to the story in these different times.

Same material, very different show, every bit as dramatic and powerful. That's cool.

It took me a while in my directing career, but I finally learned at some point that there are no "right" answers when you're directing a show, only stronger choices and weaker choices. And sometimes there are several strong choices which can take you down several different but parallel paths. As I reminded Chris, we never have to try to make it unique or fresh or different. That happens by itself and we shouldn't force it. Sondheim taught us that in Sunday in the Park with George:

Anything you do,
Let it come from you.
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.

It feels a little odd that we're producing a whole season of shows we've done before, shows that originally debuted in 1973, 1994, and 2010, and yet they all feel (sadly) relevant again. But I know that in this dark, ugly, fraught time, these shows will help us navigate. We chose shows for this season about lost humanity, sexuality, and community. And because they are all modern musicals, all three are also about connection, and connection's arch-nemesis, "Othering." All things we need to be reminded of right now.

Even though we've produced these shows before, even though you may have seen them before, I promise you this -- we will give you more to see.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rocky Horror tickets, click here, and to buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Everybody's a Critic. Literally.

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Miller) — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:37:00 +0000

What responsibility do theatre reviewers have these days? What role do they play in our culture?

And maybe more to the point, what value does a theatre review have today, when literally anyone can set up a blog and declare themselves a reviewer? Like filmmaking, music, publishing, and other areas, reviewing has been radically democratized in this digital age. Anyone can make a film now, or record a song, or publish a book.

And anyone can be a reviewer. Literally.

That's because there are no criteria to be a reviewer, no gatekeepers, no particular rules or conventions or deadlines anymore -- and no editors! -- so reviews are now just random people's opinions, quite often people with no training, expertise, or credentials. Just opinions. And many reviewers take a week or two (or more) to publish their reviews, giving them even less value. Theatre reviews are fast becoming little more than Amazon customer reviews. And I guess that's not necessarily a problem -- as long as we understand that's what they are.

Throughout the 32-year history of New Line, I have publicly called out reviewers when they weren't doing their jobs. I won't go after them if they simply don't like a show, but I will if they misunderstand the show and then criticize it for their misunderstanding, or if their review is simplistic and superficial. Especially in New Line's early days, too many people still thought all musicals are silly and brainless, and I had to teach reviewers how to watch and think about the work we do.

Sometimes, local actors and directors are horrified that I dare review the reviewer. But why shouldn't we?

When New Line produced Jerry Springer the Opera, one local reviewer ended his review by telling his readers that they might enjoy the show more if they left fifteen minutes before the end, because nothing happens. Now the truth is, the last fifteen minutes of the show are very intellectually dense and philosophical, referencing Dante and William Blake, and ultimately leaving us with a profound statement that lines up shockingly well with the ethos of Springer's TV show. By the end of this brilliant opera, Jerry Springer himself has united Heaven and Hell.

In other words, there's a lot that happens in the last fifteen minutes of the show, and this reviewer just didn't understand any of it. I called him out on it.

When we produced The Rocky Horror Show the first time, one reviewer dismissed our production entirely because it wasn't enough like the film. But we weren't producing the film. We were producing the very different stage show, which came first. I called him out on it.

When we produced The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, one reviewer dismissed the entire show as "glamorizing" prostitution. But onstage (unlike the film), Whorehouse is a very clear-eyed look at prostitution, and it tells a true story, with a very unhappy, true ending. And besides, the stage show isn't about sex or about prostitution -- it's about the mad hypocrisy of the culture and politics around these women, at the height of the Sexual Revolution. And seriously, how glamorous could they be when they're all wearing early 1970s polyester jumpsuits? I called the reviewer out on it.

So when we got a positive but clownish review from KDHX for our current production of American Idiot, I called the reviewer out on it. On cue, a handful of local actors were predictably shocked, stunned, and deeply saddened yet again that I had reviewed the reviewer. Apparently, they believe reviewers can criticize our work, even irresponsibly, but their work deserves some kind of Trumpian Immunity?

No.

In this Idiot review, the first two paragraphs are the reviewer's pointless musical autobiography, weirdly straining to establish his punk street cred. (Spoiler Alert: reviews are not about the reviewers.)

When he finally gets to the show he's reviewing, he declares that "New Line's timing" in producing the show this year is "well-timed." Our timing is well-timed? (KDHX has since fixed this sentence, so clearly somebody knows there's a problem here.)

Then this guy writes, "Despite its obvious six degrees of plot separation from La Bohème by way of Hair and Rent...” What's he smoking? The plot, characters, and themes of American Idiot have virtually nothing to do with Bohème, Hair or Rent. And also, how do you play the Six Degrees game with plots?

He goes on to write, "The musicians sit behind a chain link fence, but their musical talents, under the direction of bassist John Gerdes, roam freely..." WTF? Can someone please explain to me how musical talents roam freely...? This is a reviewer who loves his own writing too much and who's trying to sound like a better writer than he is. That never works. And also, reviews are not about the reviewers.

There's lots more clumsy self-indulgence in this review, but I'll spare you. What's my point? The artists who work with New Line deserve better. This kind of chatty, un-serious review is disrespectful of us and our work.

As I expected, I was social-media-scolded for being a bully and for having a "meltdown," for reviewing this guy's review. Let's get real -- disagreeing is not bullying, despite what people on Facebook may think. And being offended is not having a meltdown. I'm baffled by this genuinely weird mindset that reviewers are somehow above review, that it's "unprofessional" to call them out.

Because that would mean that Steve Sondheim, Hal Prince, David Merrick, Joe Papp, and lots of other legendary theatre artists have been unprofessional for publicly calling out critics for irresponsible reviews. (They haven't.) If reviewers want to be part of the public cultural conversation, they have to take the good with the bad, like everyone else who puts work before the public.

You know, like theatre artists.

Reviewers should not get a pass for un-serious, un-thoughtful reviews. In Days of Olde (pre-internet), reviewers were afforded some respect and authority because their job was to think and write about the art form, and even so, they were often held to account by the public through Letters to the Editor. But that's nobody's job anymore, at least not in St. Louis. Nobody gets paid to review theatre locally. Now, reviewing is a sideline. A hobby. Some of our local reviewers are excellent, some are fine, but a few are terrible and a few are little more than synopsis machines. One big problem is that admission to the Critical Community is now just the price of setting up a free blog.

To paraphrase Gus the Theatre Cat, "Reviewing is certainly not what it was." It's probably too much to ask that any of them read any of these...

How to Write About Theatre: A Manual for Critics, Students, and Bloggers

The Critics Say: 57 Theatre Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future

The Art of Writing for the Theatre: An Introduction to Script Analysis, Criticism, and Playwriting

The Critics Canon: Standard of Theatrical Reviewing in America

So what do we do about all this? No idea. As a species, we're still figuring out how to navigate the digital era, how to sift out the bullshit from the truth, who to give our trust to, who to believe, how to judge information, and so much more.

Maybe in this digital information age, when theatre companies can share with their potential audience (virtually cost-free) production photos, rehearsal photos, video clips, glimpses behind-the-scenes, interviews, blog diaries, and so much more -- maybe reviews as we know them and review pull-quotes will soon go the way of the Betamax and the Walkman.

I mean, when many reviews have all the gravitas and depth of a Facebook post, do we really need them? Do they still serve the community in any meaningful way?

Reviewers in St. Louis don't represent theatre audiences today the way they once might have. To be blunt, with only a couple exceptions, all the St. Louis reviewers are pretty old; the majority are male; and with only the rarest exception, they're all white. That does not align with the majority of our audience. Or the audiences we want to reach. Or our city.

So now what? No idea. It's a new world. And there's still a lot to figure out.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Author's Note: I generally distinguish between critics, who write about shows in the context of the art form and the times and the culture; and reviewers, who say if they liked a show or not. Critics are people like George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker, Eric Bentley, George Jean Nathan, Harold Clurman, Langston Hughes, Robert Brustein, Frank Rich, George C. Wolfe, et al.

P.S. To buy American Idiot tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here