The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre

See, I've Got a Vision

2012-01-24T13:30:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You People Think You Know Me

2012-01-18T15:00:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the last several years, a few other companies have popped up that are following in our footsteps -- The Music Theatre Company, in Highland Park, IL; Minneapolis Musical Theatre in Minnesota; Kensington Arts Theatre in Kensington, Maryland; Factory Edge Theatre Works in Baltimore; Dreamlight Theatre Company in New York; Musically Human Productions in New York; and Slow Burn Theatre Company in Fort Lauderdale.

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

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

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

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

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Life Is a Long Road to Death

2012-01-14T15:07:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

And it ain't for the money...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More soon... The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Your Fear of Other People

2012-01-11T13:30:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. Seriously?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Cry-Baby adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nobody Gets Me

2012-01-08T21:30:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoot me now.

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

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

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Cry-Baby

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is going to be so much fun!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Merrily We Roll Along...

2011-12-31T00:00:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A failure of institutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And coming up in 2012...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Live the Musical! And Happy New Year!
Scott

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

Mapping Out a Sky

2011-12-28T10:00:00.000-06:00

The Rep is producing Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece Sunday in the Park with George in January, and they asked me to write program notes, so Sunday and all its issues have been swimming around inside my head for a while.

It's one of those shows so rich and complex that it inevitably reminds me how often people don't dig deep down into the bone and sinew of the more complicated works of musical theatre, either because they're lazy or they don't know any better. But I have very high hopes for the Rep production -- they've got a great cast! Deborah and I got to talk to two of them, Rob Bohmer (George) and Chris Hietikko (Jules), for our radio show and they really, really get it.

When New Line produced Sunday back in 2003 (with brilliant, lusty, vivid performances from Todd Schaefer as George and April Strelinger as Dot), I realized that, as much as I loved the original production, it was colder and more restrained than I think this show ought to be. I think George and Dot are passionate, complicated, intense people, and I thought Mandy and Bernadette didn't always allow themselves to really go for broke. There was just too much restraint for my taste. (I think Jim Lapine made the same mistake with Passion.) It never felt carnal enough for me. Their big knock-down-drag-out fight ("We Do Not Belong Together") didn't feel visceral enough, painful enough, destructive enough. The stakes just weren't high enough for a fight like this between people this intense over problems this long-simmering. How long has this two-way resentment been building? Months? Years? Bernadette Peters found that place but Mandy Patinkin didn't. When Bernadette and Mandy performed this song, it was a dramatic scene; when Todd and April did it, it was a fucking fight.

And in that same vein, one key moment I found lacking from Mandy was his central character song, "Finishing the Hat." Many Sondheim fans see this song as a declaration about the creation of art, and about the perpetually over-romanticized loneliness of artists. But if you listen carefully to Sondheim's lyrics, it’s doubtful that either of those things is really what he was writing about. We're sucked in by the poetic lyrics, the soaring melody, just as George is sucked in by the seductive world of his obsession, but there is more going on here...

I think the song is more about George self-justifying his behavior toward Dot, by hiding behind the noble pursuit of art. He is outside the rest of us, he's saying. He thinks he's Nietsche's superman. He's telling himself (and us) that it's okay for him to be thoughtless and cruel to Dot (and to others) because he has something more important to do than worry about people's feelings.

He has Art to create. He has to finish the hat.

And in that light, the song takes on a much darker tint, it becomes more psychologically complex, and it also serves a much clearer dramatic purpose in the narrative, as George stumbles through his complicated feelings. This is the proof we needed that George is not equipped or ready to be in a relationship, and so Dot's decision to leave for America may be the best thing for her. Throughout "Finishing the Hat," the title phrase (standing in for the making of art in general) is always part of a larger thought, not standing alone by itself, and through its context we can see that Sondheim is telling us something very specific about George, more so than about the creation of art.

After all, this is Sunday in the Park with George, not Sunday in the Park with Art. Musical theatre is about human emotion.

At the beginning of the song, George says:
Let her look for me -- good.
Let her look for me
To tell me why she left me
As I always knew she would...
George really believes (or wants to believe) that Dot is the one at fault here, not him. The main idea of this song is set up clearly here at the beginning, as it is with most Sondheim songs. This is not a song about art; it's a song about blame. It's a character song, not a philosophical treatise. George is deeply hurt, which means that he cares more for Dot than he admits or the hurt wouldn't be so deep. George goes on to say that no one can possibly understand the motives for his behavior. Maybe, he reasons, that's why people always think it's his fault, when he knows it's always someone else's fault.

George imagines how nice it would be if anyone could understand the act of making art, could understand his compulsion to put his work above all else, could understand “how you have to finish the hat.” In other words, it's not his fault he's inattentive, insulting, thoughtless, rude, hurtful -- it's his art's fault, because it forces him to be those things. (Sounds like something Newt Gingrich might say.) Or maybe it's other people's fault for not being perceptive enough to understand him. Like I said, it's a song about blame. He justifies with his art the fact that he watches the world rather than participating in it, which by implication justifies the fact that he refuses to play by the rules of the real world. After all, he's not a part of that world, so why should he live by its rules?

And yet we'll see at the end of Act I, when he finishes his painting (and that hat), that he's not really a part of the world of his art either; he is outside of it too. There is nowhere he belongs.

George sees the real world, the people in the real world, as somehow inferior -- almost as obstacles. So George refuses to interact with them in any meaningful way. He believes he must keep himself at a distance so he can fully observe. He thinks “it's the only way to see.” The only way to create art, he believes, is to remove himself from the world -- and thereby ignore its rules and conventions. Or maybe that's just a massive rationalization.

Late in the lyric, he says:
When the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.”
In other words, if she can't handle it, that's just tough. She knew George's rules coming in, and if she can't live by them, that's her problem and not George's. Blame. It doesn't even occur to him that he should change his behavior. That's not even an option. He knows that anyone who gets close to him figures out the most basic truth about him: no matter what he's doing, there's always a big part of him that is never really there, not in the world, not in the moment, a part of him who's standing back, watching, not interacting, not empathizing, just observing. And that's his justification for being the way he is. It's not because he's a jerk (he tells us); it's because he's an Artist. He really believes (or is it just rationalization?) that he must submerge his emotions, he must reject polite society, he must ignore the complaints and needs of those who care about him, because if he gives in, if he allows himself to live in the real world instead of in the world of the hat and the painting, he will no longer be an Artist.

Or is he just such an emotional coward and cripple that this is his bullshit excuse for hiding from the world and walling himself off? He thinks his mission as an artist gives him universal absolution. He's wrong.

George is asking us to feel sorry for him, poor misunderstood artist that he is, but his argument is not compelling enough. And perhaps that's Sondheim's greatest achievement with this remarkable, complicated song -- it is beautiful, even a little seductive, but we don't accept George's excuse. If we did, if George himself accepted it, then there would be nothing for him to learn, no reason for him to grow, and no reason for the story to continue. He's the protagonist, so he must learn something by the end of the story. George must realize at some point, or at least suspect, that his argument is bunk...

But could this song really just be about the creation of art, and not all this other stuff?, I hear you ask.

Well, Sondheim doesn't just stop a story in the middle of a musical for meditations on related topics. Songs like “Finishing the Hat,” “Beautiful,” and “Lesson #8” let us see George trying to figure things out, trying to learn, trying to connect. That process of personal evolution is the fundamental action and structure of the show. George's struggle is so profound and so fundamental that it literally takes a hundred years, three generations, and two Georges to resolve it. Notably, the story’s final resolution comes not from the creation of a piece of art, but from human connection -- even across time.

Like I said, this isn't really a show about art.

You can read more of my thoughts on Sunday in the Park in my book Deconstructing Harold Hill. and in the Rep's program notes. The show runs at the Rep January 4-29. If you haven't seen it before, you should really make any effort to see it. It's a genuine masterpiece of the art form, right alongside similar works like Fellini's 8 1/2, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, and Stew's Passing Strange.

Long Live the Musical! And Happy New Year!
Scott

Merry Christmas from the Bad Boy of Musical Theatre!

2011-12-25T08:00:00.000-06:00

I've never done a Christmas blog post before. As far as I know, aside from limited-run special events (A Christmas Carol, White Christmas, The Grinch), there's really been only one Broadway musical about Christmas -- Here's Love, the bland and mediocre but fairly commercial musical based on Miracle on 34th Street, with a so-so score by Meredith Willson of Music Man fame and starring Herman Munster... er... I mean... Fred Gwynne.

Of course there are a fair number of cool musical theatre songs about Christmas -- "Hard Candy Christmas" from Best Little Whorehouse, "We Need a Little Christmas" from Mame, "A New Deal for Christmas" from Annie, "Lovers on Christmas Eve" from I Love My Wife, "Christmas Bells" from Rent, the biting "I Don't Remember Christmas" from Starting Here, Starting Now, "A Greenwillow Christmas" from the wonderful but almost never produced Greenwillow, and a few others.

There's a great CD called A Broadway Christmas that has pretty much all the Christmas songs that have showed up in musicals over the years. Great album!

But my favorite Christmas song from a musical -- by far -- is the manic, super-60s dance number "Turkey Lurkey Time" from Promises, Promises, one of my favorite shows, but one that I haven't tackled yet. With a script by Neil Simon at his darkest (there's an attempted suicide), and a fierce pop score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, this show is everything I could ever want from a musical. And lucky for us, the original cast (including Donna McKechnie and Baayork Lee!) performed "Turkey Lurkey Time" a few times on television, so it's been preserved for us, along with its brilliant, insane Michael Bennett choreography.

There aren't many Broadway musicals about Christmas, but there are several television musicals with some great Christmas songs in them. Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer both have some solid songs. And there's always "Christmas Time is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas and "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," though those two shows aren't really musicals. But my favorite Christmas show of all is The Year Without a Santa Claus, with the neo-vaudevillians Snow Miser and Heat Miser. Why hasn't someone adapted this show -- or any of these shows -- for the stage? Anyway, here is my favorite song from my favorite Christmas special...

I leave you with one more video, some holiday greetings from the New Liners themselves, wishing you a very happy holiday season... Enjoy...

I think Christmas and musical theatre have a lot in common. Both are about storytelling and even more specifically, about the most primal, most fundamental human questions. Both involve a lot of make-believe and a lot of ritual. Both bring enormous joy to a lot of people.

And both are better shared.

Long Live the Musical! And Merry Christmas!
Scott

My Husband Makes Movies

2011-12-18T02:12:00.003-06:00

A week or so ago, I wrote a blog post about ten really cool, lesser known musicals that I wanted to make people aware of. I got some really nice feedback from folks (and only a little backlash), so I thought I'd put together another list, this time ten cool movie musicals you should see (if you haven't already)...

For the sake of this list, I'll assume you've seen really famous movie musicals like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Grease, Hairspray, Chicago, Cabaret, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut... And we're not talking here about the classic movie musicals that almost everyone knows, like The Sound of Music, Singin' in the Rain, or The Music Man. (If you haven't seen all those, watch them at some point.) For the purposes of this blog post, I'm just focusing on movie musicals that are off the beaten path a bit...

Here are ten...

Absolute Beginners (1986) may just be my favorite movie ever. It's an amazing, one-of-a-kind, rock fable that explores "the birth of the teenager" in England in the late 1950s. It centers on the every-teen Colin, a photographer who sells out his art to hold on to his easily distractible, material girl, Suzette, a fledgling fashion designer. It's about the commercialization of rock and roll, it's about race, it's about class, it's about the struggle between an artist and his art, and the struggle between art and commerce. I think what makes it work -- aside from great music, an incredible production design, and incredible camera work -- is that director Julien Temple really found a style in which a movie musical can thrive, only slightly naturalistic, more heightened, more like a serious version of the Bat Boy school of acting -- "the height of expression, the depth of sincerity." And like a lot of rock theatre, these characters are more essence than complex people. This is an adult fable. But it's a fable about complicated things -- the failure of our public institutions to adapt to a changing world, and the growing pains of our continual evolution toward a more fair and more just society. As you can tell, I love this movie. It's totally original, it's gorgeous to look at, the songs are excellent, and it's about a very turbulent, interesting time in our history -- just as interesting in the UK as it was here.

Colma (2006) is yet another movie like nothing else I've ever seen. The backstory to this quirky, smart little film is the town of Colma itself, just south of San Francisco. Because land is so scarce in San Francisco, all their cemeteries are in Colma, so the dead outnumber the living. And all this serves as a big background metaphor for these three emo rock singing high school kids who are trying to figure who they are and where they're headed. And though that description may not sound all that interesting, the writing is so fresh, the emo rock score is so good, and the camera work and editing are so much fun -- some moments feel like a really good indie music video -- that it makes for a compelling, emotionally engaging, adult movie. The 29-year-old H. P. Mendoza wrote the music, co-wrote the screenplay, and plays one of the three leads, all three of whom are perfect. As excited as I am right now about the future of the musical theatre, Colma makes me excited for the future of the movie musical too.

Spike Lee's brilliant and controversial Bamboozled (2000) is one of his very best films. It adapts the story of The Producers to modern day television. Our (anti-) hero is a comfortably assimilated black TV executive (Damon Wayans) named Pierre Delacroix. His boss (Michael Rapaport), a white guy who sees himself as "blacker" than Delacroix, demands new, innovative, cutting edge, more "urban" programming. So Delacroix (like Max Bialystock before him) puts together the most intentionally offensive black show he can imagine -- a new generation minstrel show -- to teach his boss a lesson. And of course, it becomes a monster hit. This film works a lot like Chicago and Cabaret -- by the end of the story, we realize we're complicit in this horror. We've been enjoying this incredibly entertaining minstrel show (starring Savion Glover!), laughing at the jokes, being wowed by the tap dancing, and suddenly we're slapped back to the reality that even in the 21st century, we can still accept a minstrel show as entertainment. In fact, we just did. We accepted blackface. Is it because we know Spike Lee wrote and directed it? Does that give us permission to enjoy it somehow? It's a movie that leaves you with a lot of questions. About yourself.

I consider Bamboozled a musical even though the music is pretty much limited to the TV show sequences. But I think it says a lot about American popular entertainment and a lot about the power of music (and therefore, musical theatre) to manipulate. The music works much the same way it works in any Kander and Ebb musical. It's an amazing piece of film making and dead-on social commentary. And while we're here, I should mention that Spike has also made two other excellent musicals, School Daze and Mo' Better Blues, and he also filmed the brilliant stage musical Passing Strange.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) used to fall under the Guilty Pleasures category. But since directing Rocky Horror, and studying it and writing about it, I gained a lot of respect for Rocky, and by extension for other films like it, Shock Treatment and Phantom of the Paradise. I often recommend Phantom of the Paradise to people, and they ask me what it's about, and I open my mouth and nothing coherent comes out. (I know, I know, so what's new?) It's just really weird. Lately, I've started describing it as a cross between Rocky Horror and Phantom of the Opera (the novel, not the icky pop opera), maybe with a touch of The Abominable Dr. Phibes thrown in. The Paradise score by Paul Williams is sort of fun trashy pop, not the greatest songs you'll ever hear, but all so perfect for this film. And it stars the amazing but odd Jessica Harper, who did quite a few really cool weirdo movies in the early 80s. It's kitschy and campy and glitzy and glammy and so much fun!

I almost also included on this list The Apple, sort of a cross between Rocky Horror and Phantom of the Paradise -- fun movie but just not enough room here for them all... Although by mentioning that, I've actually now included it, haven't I..?

All That Jazz (1979) is Bob Fosse's masterpiece of artistic autobiography, fully equal to Fellini's 8 1/2, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, and Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. For those of us who've read every book ever published about the musical theatre, almost everything that happens in this transparently autobiographical film has an obvious parallel to Fosse's real life, even to the extreme point of Fosse's girlfriend Ann Reinking essentially playing herself. But like the Fellini, Sondheim, and Woody Allen pieces, All That Jazz is about the struggle between art and life, when both demand a hundred percent. And because it's Fosse, it's also wildly entertaining, smart and sexy, dark as pitch, and gorgeous to look at. I think All That Jazz is even better than Fosse's Cabaret.

Mack the Knife (1989) is really The Threepenny Opera, in a new version that purists might not like but I really love. Raul Julia repeats his performance as MacHeath, from the 1976 Lincoln Center production (which is my favorite Threepenny cast album), and his supporting cast includes Richard Harris (as Peachum), Roger Daltry (as the street singer), Julie Waters (as Mrs. Peachum), and Clive Revill (Money Matthew). It seems to me that this is the perfect Brechtian movie musical. When the music starts, the actors just turn to the camera and start singing, something you almost never see on film. And you can just tell how much fun they're all having chewing the scenery and singing and dancing through this uber-dark musical. They've cut some of the score, but it's really rowdy and gritty and funny and nasty, and in the opinion of this Brecht fan, I think Bert would love this movie. In a way, it's very subversive film making -- MGM crossed with Brecht and Weill... Unfortunately, this film has never been released on DVD; but it is available on VHS (and not copy-protected, so you can burn it onto DVD).

Cradle Will Rock (1999) is Tim Robbins' smart, colorful exploration of Marc Blitzstein's amazing 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock, one of my all-time favorite shows, and the one with the coolest history of any Broadway musical -- it's the only musical ever to be shut down by the U.S. federal government for its subversive content. Robbins' film isn't an adaptation of the show (though Orson Welles, its original director, did write a screenplay), but an exploration of its political and historical context, in a way using it to represent a whole lot of different political and social movements happening in the 30s. Robbins has collected together several true stories with similar thematic threads to weave in and around the story of the creation of The Cradle Will Rock. Interestingly, the events in the movie didn't really happen all at the same time; Robbins collapsed them together to make more obvious their connections, and it really works. Like Bamboozled, this isn't a movie with a lot of music, but we see a fair amount of recreated performance footage at the end (though the material is slightly altered from the actual show), and this historic stage musical is at the center of the whole movie. It's one of my favorites. In fact, this film convinced me to produce Cradle with New Line, recreating that historic first night. The energy at the end of the movie is intoxicating, and that's really what it was like for us in performance every night.

I was really torn whether to include on this list Pennies from Heaven (1981) or Dancer in the Dark (2000). Both are such cool films (both total freaking downers too). But I think Pennies from Heaven is the more interesting movie. It's essentially a very stylistic 1930s melodrama about a romantic triangle between a man (Steve Martin), his wife (Jessica Harper), and his mistress (Bernadette Peters), amidst the squalor and struggle of the Depression. But periodically throughout the film, the oppressively realistic sets open up into huge MGM fantasy soundstages and this dark, dreary, depressing story becomes escapist fluff for just a moment, with the actors lip-synching to period recordings. These aren't really their voices, the movie reminds us. They're not really happy, even though they're dancing. She's still single and pregnant. What's fascinating about the movie is that the shadow of that depressing real world hangs over every cheery, flashy musical number, giving it all an ironic edge, almost an indictment of escapism and its failure to grapple with real life. Another thoroughly Brechtian film but also a really well made movie musical.

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) is like Rocky Horror meets Re-Animator meets Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, if you can imagine that. It was first a stage show, now a cult movie musical, written by Darren Simth and Terrance Zdunich, and directed on stage and screen by Darren Lynn Bousman. The story takes place in a dystopian future (aren't they all?) where organ transplants become fashionable and they can be financed! But when you fall behind on your payments, they repossess your organ. This movie is so much fun and has a great cast including Anthony Head, Paul Sorvino, Sarah Brightman, and doing surprisingly well, Paris Hilton. The score (58 songs!) is solid rock and roll, but don't listen too closely to the lyrics -- it'll just ruin it for you. Just go for the ride and you'll have a blast.

Show Boat (1936) is on this list because I think Show Boat is misunderstood. I saw so many boring productions of this show when I was a kid and I hated it. Then in 1986 I saw Show Boat at the Muny in a really smart, exciting production, and I realized it's not the show that sucked; it was the directors! But part of the blame lies with that awful, over-wrought, clumsily rewritten and dumbed-down (ask me how I really feel!) 1951 MGM film version -- I hate it. But since that was released, everybody thinks that's what Show Boat is. Well, it's not. This 1936 film version, adapted for the screen by Oscar Hammerstein himself, with a couple new songs and some of the original cast, is as close as we'll ever get to seeing the original production in 1927. And I really love this version -- it's rowdier, funnier, sexier, much higher energy. It's still very old-fashioned, don't get me wrong, but it's a very cool glimpse back into history to see what people actually saw that first night in 1927. And that's pretty cool. If you love musical theatre and hate -- or haven't seen -- Show Boat, give this one a try. It's finally available on DVD for the first time.

And as I did on my other list, I'll break my own rule again and add one more. It's Todd Haynes' brilliant 45-minute indie film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988). Like a couple of my other choices here, it's not a full-out musical but music moves its story forward. It tells the story of pop legend Karen Carpenter's battle with anorexia and the exploding cultural influence of the Carpenters and their music in the 1970s -- and all told using Barbie dolls. Yes, you read that right, Barbie dolls. And you'd be amazed at how quickly you accept this bizarre narrative device and how easily you get sucked into this very sad story that says so much about our culture. Because there's so much music in it, I'm going to declare it a musical for the purposes of this list. But interestingly, the film is also illegal because Haynes didn't get permission to use the Carpenters' songs (like they would've said yes...). So the film has only existed all these years in bootleg copies. A lot of them. But thanks to technology, you can now watch the entire film online, or you can download it or buy it from Illegal-Art.org.

So there you have it. Ten... shit... eleven really cool movies that are either musicals are pseudo-musicals, some of which you've probably heard of or seen before, hopefully a few you haven't. There's nothing I love more than sharing musicals so consider this my Christmas present to you. If you're lucky, you'll have a little time off, so watch some musicals! Merry Christmas, everybody!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Despite the quote in the blog title, I thought about including Rob Marshall's amazing and unfairly maligned Nine, which I really, really love, but there just wasn't room on the list... It's still worth a watch though...

The State of the Art

2011-12-16T14:00:00.000-06:00

I had a really eye-opening experience a few days ago. I'm a member of a Facebook group called Forgotten Musicals. I had spent only a little time reading the posts in this group, but I mainly visited because there are some wonderful photos and posters of obscure musicals in their photo gallery.

So a few days ago, I posted in this group a link to my last blog post, which was essentially a list of ten really cool but less mainstream musicals that I think people ought to be aware of, shows like Bat Boy, Love Kills, High Fidelity, The Blue Flower, bare, A New Brain, Andrew Lippa's Wild Party, Passing Strange, and a few others. Mostly newer shows, but some older. I thought the Forgotten Musicals group would enjoy talking about these lesser known shows.

But the responses from this group really surprised me...

It turns out the group is less about obscure musicals and more about old obscure musicals. The last time I visited the group, they were talking about Drat! The Cat! (and yes, if you must know, I do own the cast recording on vinyl!) But because I'm around the New Liners so much, I rarely talk to anyone anymore who still loves the older shows more than what's being written now.

And that really made stop and think. I've written several blog posts over the last year or so about the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. (And now here's another!) And yet, I don't dislike those old shows. I just find this moment in our art form's history so exciting and so transformative, and I guess my recent blog posts are my way of working through what I think about the fading away of the kind of musical I grew up on...

I'm pretty okay with it...

There were three categories of responses to my post in the Forgotten Musicals group. Some of them already knew the shows I was writing about and really hated them. I mean, Fucking Hated Them. Some of them just weren't interested because they really only like The Classics, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Jerry Herman, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, et al. Those folks wanted to know why there weren't more "traditional" shows on my list. We all know those, don't we? And they were offended at what they perceived to be a put-down of their classics. They seemed to feel like my blog post was forbidding them to love their favorite shows anymore. Which it wasn't. But a few in the group loved reading about these newer shows; they knew some of them, hadn't heard of others, and they enjoyed the optimism I expressed for the future of our art form.

It was the first time I really understood that there's a rift in the world of musical theatre lovers and practitioners right now, which I suppose is only natural at a time of change like this. (It happened in the late 60s/early 70s too.) My personal opinion, which I've stated here more than once, is that the classics are wonderful, some of them masterpieces, but they don't really speak to our world anymore. Their content, their conventions, their values, and often their musical language trap them in mid-20th century America, when the country was still as rural as it was urban, before rock and roll, before the Sexual Revolution. America is a different place now, and we're a different people. We even look different as a nation. And we're also different as an audience from what we once were -- today, American audiences are better educated, more sophisticated, more culturally literate, more ironic, and we consume a bigger variety of entertainment than ever before in our history. So we expect more from our culture than we used to, even if we don't consciously realize it. We expect complexity and irony and an acknowledgement of the darker side of life. We expect relevance. The old conventions just don't cut it anymore. You just can't put Babes in Arms in front of a contemporary audience without putting them to sleep or annoying them or both.

It was a sobering revelation for me, when I saw the revival of Rent a few weeks ago, to realize that even Rent is now a period piece! I saw the original right after it moved to Broadway in 1996, and now that makes me feel old. And yet I'm not supposed to say that Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943) are irrelevant museum pieces? Oh shit, I just said it again.

I still love listening to cast albums of Mame, Hello, Dolly!, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof. (Now that I think about it, though, I don't really listen much anymore to Rodgers and Hammerstein scores.) I still love those old shows and I still know most of their lyrics by heart, but for me they're the artistic equivalent of an eight-track tape player. It might still work, might still get the job done, but if your iPhone is handy, you'll probably pass by the eight-track, right?

I referred in my last book to people who think musical theatre should have stopped evolving in 1964, right after Fiddler on the Roof opened -- that was experiment enough! When I wrote about these folks, I meant it as a bit of a caricature to make a point. But I think some of the people who were upset by my blog post really would be just as happy if Lerner and Loewe and Jerry Herman were still writing musicals in exactly the same 1950s style.

My initial reaction to that is horror. How could they not want our art form to keep living and growing and evolving? The whole point of human storytelling -- and musical theatre as a subset of that -- is to understand ourselves and the world around us, to make order out of the chaos, to get at some truth about the human experience. Not the human experience sixty years ago, but today.

I think the difference between them and me is that they're looking back while I'm looking forward. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but it does separate us. I'm lucky because I get to keep loving those old shows even though I prefer what's happening in our art form right now. I adore My Fair Lady, but if I have a choice between that and Bat Boy, I'll take Bat Boy.

Bat Boy is about the world we live in now, and I find that a lot more interesting and exciting than sitting through The Sound of Music yet again. As someone who has studied and analyzed both old and new musicals for my books, I can say this with confidence: by a lot of measures, many of them admittedly subjective, I honestly believe that the music, the lyrics, the storytelling, and the stagecraft in the musical theatre today is much stronger, more sophisticated, and more richly emotional than it was during the less daring "Golden Age." Essentially equivalent for their respective periods, Damn Yankees is inferior in nearly every way to Bat Boy. Musical comedy has evolved. And likewise, "Light My Candle" in Rent works so much better than the "Bench Scene" ("If I Loved You") in Carousel. Maybe the Carousel scene worked awesomely in 1945, but "Light My Candle" works awesomely now.

I ultimately deleted my original post from the Forgotten Musicals group and all the comments with it. I guess that wanting to listen to Jerry Herman and Cole Porter all the time is no different substantively from wanting to listen to Beethoven and Bach all the time, right? It's just not my thing. I'd rather listen to Tom Kitt and Bill Finn and Andrew Lippa and Larry O'Keefe.

To each his own...

My iPhone has eighty cast albums loaded onto it at present, everything from Bat Boy and bare to My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!, The Music Man, and Gypsy. I even have High Button Shoes loaded. I enjoy listening to those old shows, but they are from another time. That doesn't make them less good, but it does make them less interesting.

I don't mean to offend those who disagree with me. All of this is only my opinion, but it is informed by thirty years of making and writing musicals and fifteen years of writing about them. I am so thrilled when I see the future of our art form laid out in front of us, and for me, the past just can't compare. A few weeks ago, I saw five incredibly different, incredibly wonderful musicals in New York and it filled me with such optimism. Young people are turning on to musical theatre like they haven't in decades. Young writers are creating incredible new work. Famous pop and rock songwriters are turning to musical theatre projects more and more. We New Liners already have a list of 10-12 really cool new shows that we'd like New Line to produce in the coming seasons.

Our art form is at the peak of its powers. It has never been more alive or more forward moving. And I think that is cause for great joy, for continual celebration, and for a big, resounding Fuck Yeah!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Songs for a New World

2011-12-12T16:33:00.000-06:00

I've spent my life exploring and promoting the musical theatre, and in my adult life, continually defending the musical theatre as a serious, important, vigorous art form. I sometimes call myself, half-jokingly, the Prophet of Musical Theatre (depends on the shit I'm smoking). So in that vein, here are ten shows you might or might not be familiar with, but should be, shows that are exceptionally cool, fascinating works of the musical theatre, shows that challenge and expand the idea of what a musical can be, and all of which deserve more productions and more attention. (In a few days, I'll make a companion list of cool movie musicals...)

Not incidentally, New Line has produced all but one of these shows. The links go to New Line's webpage for each show. And don't argue with me about what shows are on my list. This is just my opinion -- you're welcome to another...

Kyle Jarrow's Love Kills might just be the most intense, ballsiest piece of theatre I've ever encountered. A four-character walpurgisnacht unfolding almost in real time, it follows two (real-life) teenage spree murderers in the over-night custody of a Nebraska sheriff and his wife, in 1958. The score is an explosion of raw emo rage and deeply felt pain, regrets and delusions, and even a sort of redemption. It's apparently too raw and ugly for the New York commercial theatre to dare, but it is one of the coolest shows I've ever worked on in my life. New Line presented the world premiere of Love Kills in 2009 and got rave reviews for it. There have been a few more productions since then, but not as many as this show deserves. If anybody's ballsy enough to take this one on, you can reach Kyle through his website.

High Fidelity is a brilliant, insightful, funny, truthful, and ultimately joyful celebration of rock and roll and the people who live their lives to it, much more faithful to the original novel than the film version is. (It occurred to me when we did the show in 2008 that the main characters are the people Hedwig is talking to in her rock anthem "Midnight Radio.") It was cursed with a terribly misguided Broadway production, by a director and designers who didn't understand their own show and who apparently mistook these very complex characters and relationships and this often funny but fundamentally serious story for The Pajama Game or Mame. But Hi-Fi is so much more than that, a smart, beautifully, artfully crafted piece of storytelling, by composer Tom Kitt (Next to Normal, Bring It On), lyricist Amanda Green (Bring It On), and bookwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Good People, Shrek). This is not old-school musical comedy. This is an adult story about a complicated, adult world. And it uses music in ways other musicals don't, exploring the characters through their musical vocabulary and styles, providing rich, often subliminal information about who these people are, what they value, what they want, what they believe in, but also significantly, what they're missing, what they don't know, where they've gone wrong. The music in this show is not just accompaniment, but an evolving, changing character all its own. In some ways, the music becomes the story's antagonist in Act II. The original production staff (and the perhaps understandably clueless critics) thought the show was a romance, even a romantic comedy; but it's actually a classic hero myth. It isn't a story about Rob and Laura; it's about Rob learning to grow up. It's a companion piece to Company.

New Line presented the first production of the show after its aborted Broadway run, we sold out all but one performance, and we got incredibly enthusiastic rave reviews. The Ladue News called our production the best show of the year. Now other companies across the country are finally producing it and productions rights are finally available through Playscripts, Inc.

Bat Boy, created by the dream team of Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O'Keefe (Legally Blonde, Heathers), is a genuine masterpiece of serious comedy, a laugh-out-loud, outrageous rock and roll satire of American morality, sexuality, politics, and religion; and at the same time, a deeply emotional tragedy about facing the consequences of our choices, about the past never really being past. It's got one of the best scripts I've ever worked on and a score that is unmatched by any other musical comedy, brilliantly crafted and endlessly surprising. New Line has produced this show twice (selling out the entire run both times) and we will produce it again. It elicited from Judith Newmark at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch one of my favorite review quotes ever: “So weird. So smart. So shocking. So entertaining.”

When people ask me what's my favorite musical, the number one spot goes to either Bat Boy or High Fidelity, depending on my mood. No other shows compare to these two...

The Blue Flower is one of the strangest shows I've seen but also one of the most beautiful and most powerful. Jim and Ruth Bauer's rock-country-Kurt Weill score and collage-like script follow a group of artists through the incredibly tumultuous changing of the last century, exploring how the massive, wrenching changes in the world affected their lives, their relationships, and their art. Set a century ago, it also chronicles these times we live in today as powerfully as anything on stage. Its long journey to off Broadway was less than rewarding, with its run there cut short -- again not really a show for New York commercial theatre -- but hopefully it will have a long life in regional theatres and small art theatres around the country. It's a thrilling piece of theatre that adventurous audiences would love to experience. You can hear some of the songs and buy a studio recording of the score on their website.

Might New Line produce it at some point? Yes we might.

bare is yet another show that was not well served in New York. Its brief off Broadway run was the inevitable result of a director and designers who didn't quite know what to do with it. The too-old cast (all looking like they'd just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog) and their terrible soap opera acting didn't do this difficult, tricky show any favors. When taken seriously, it's a powerfully dramatic story about five teenagers in a Catholic boarding school, grappling with their sexuality and the failure of every institution around them. The score is an inventive mix of alt pop and emo rock, though with an harmonic and structural vocabulary far beyond most pop, and yet every song still works as both pop music and theatre music. There is a studio recording available on iTunes, but you'll have to wade through some really bad acting to get at the great music and lyrics. When New Line produced bare here in St. Louis in 2011, not only did people come see it four, five, six times, but we also got audiences from as far away as Seattle, New Jersey, Nebraska, Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. It's a show that requires strong singers who are amazing, truthful actors to keep the story from crossing over into melodrama. But when it's done right, it fucking works! And it speaks to today's youth -- tomorrow's theatre audience -- as powerfully and truthfully as any other piece of theatre I've ever encountered (American Idiot might equal it). One of the reasons we produced bare was to show young audiences that there's a place for them at New Line too.

Bob Carlton's Return to the Forbidden Planet may be the oddest show I've ever worked on, but also one of the most fun, coming close to rivaling Bat Boy. It's based on The Tempest and the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (which is also based on The Tempest), with a score of classic rock and roll songs from the 1950s and 60s. The dialogue is Shakespeare's, a crazy quilt culled from a dozen or more of the Bard's plays with great skill and wit; the story is wacky science fiction (watch out for the Id Monster!); and the songs include "Good Vibrations," "Teenager in Love," "Great Balls of Fire" (for a meteor storm!), "She's Not There," and others that are all hilariously well integrated into the story, so well integrated you almost can't believe it. It's laugh-out-loud funny but also surprisingly emotional and powerful at the end. My favorite review of our production came from Paul Friswold at the Riverfront Times: "This is no parlor trick of a musical; there's a rich vein of Shakespeare's favorite ingredient -- the wondrous depths of the human heart -- that elevates the show from cunning stunt to artful meditation on the destructive nature of power and the redemptive power of love.”

Oh hell yeah!

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party is a brilliant, shattering, pulse-pounding thriller set in the decadent demimonde of late 1920s New York. Based on the notorious book-length poem, it captures the potent cocktail of bewildered innocence and worldly cynicism at the fiery peak of the Jazz Age. A stylistic cross between Chicago and Cabaret -- but much, much darker -- it's the story of a sick, destructive relationship between vaudeville dancer Queenie and vaudeville clown Burrs, both intent on hurting each other as publicly as possible. So they throw a party to end all parties, and as the guests arrive, we meet an assortment of people living on the fringes of society, and we can taste the heady blend of tabloid sizzle, hot jazz, and show biz. After a long night of sex, drugs, and drink, Burrs' jealousy erupts and a romantic double-triangle ends in tragedy. This is a smart, tough show with a score that keeps one foot in period jazz and the other in contemporary rock, with a wailing electric guitar continually reminding us that this is Now as much as it's Then. It's a true masterpiece of contemporary musical theatre, and it's a shame that a third of the amazing, almost nonstop score was not included on the cast album.

A New Brain is William Finn's best show. As much as I love Spelling Bee and Falsettos, this is something really special, utterly unlike any other piece of theatre you'll ever see -- funny, sad, crazy, subtle, and so very, very truthful. Semi-autobiographical and defiantly surrealistic, we spend almost the entire show inside the mind of Gordon Schwinn, the central character who collapses in the first scene from an arterial venous malformation in his brain. For most of the evening, we swim around in his head, in half-conscious memory, hallucination, even coma. We navigate talking frogs, sail boats, kiddie TV, overbearing mothers, and surgeons with tickets to Chicago, and we watch this stand-in for Finn as he contemplates his mortality and worries that he'll die without leaving anything of value behind. Despite its darkness and craziness, it manages to be one of the most life-affirming, most heartfelt musicals written in the last two decades, perhaps a show only someone who has actually faced death could have written. I defy you not to be touched by "I Feel So Much Spring."

Two Gentlemen of Verona is a forgotten gem from a rich, adventurous time in musical theatre, the late 1960s and early 70s. Originally intended just to be a production of Shakespeare's play with some new music by Galt MacDermot (Hair), it soon morphed into a wacky, joyful rock musical that beat out Stephen Sondheim's Follies and Grease for the Best Musical Tony. Set in Renaissance Verona and Milan – or maybe it's New York City in 1971 – MacDermot, playwright John Guare (Six Desgrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves, etc.), and writer-director Mel Shapiro took one of Shakespeare's least produced (and messiest) plays and breathed outrageous, new, cross-dressing life into it. It's a smart, high-energy, romantic comedy that explores issues of race, gender roles, the politics of war, and the sad reality that most men really are pigs. The story follows lifelong friends Proteus and Valentine who leave their rural hometown of Verona to experience life in the big city of Milan -- exactly as Shakespeare had done just before writing the original play...

New Line's production of Two Gents last spring got the kind of reviews an artistic director dreams of... Harry Hamm at KMOX said, “Shakespeare has never been this much fun!” Steve Callahan at KDHX called it “the most purely enjoyable evening of theatre I've had in a long, long time.” Christopher Reilly at The Patch said, "It'll be the most fun you have at the theater this year.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld said, “I honestly can't recall when I've ever witnessed an audience laugh at and enjoy Shakespeare more. . . brilliantly executed and funny as hell.”

That's what I'm talkin' about.

Passing Strange was just too adult, too complex, too nuanced, and too artsy to survive the commercial theatre scene in Manhattan, but luckily, Spike Lee preserved the original production on film, and theatres around the country are now picking up the show and giving it the further life it deserves. From the mind of genius singer-songwriter-performance artist Stew and his collaborator Heidi Rodewald, this is a daring new rock musical that blurs the line between rock concert and musical, that takes its audience on a journey across boundaries of time, place, identity and theatrical convention. This is Stew's only partly fictionalized autobiography, the honest, heartfelt, and hilarious story of a young bohemian who charts a course for The Real through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Loaded with poetic, soulful lyrics and overflowing with passion, the show takes off from middle-class America on a worldwide quest for personal and artistic authenticity. New Line's production a couple months ago was showered with raves.

And there are the ten shows. But there's one more, a show that really stands by itself, it's just that cool...

The opening night of Marc Blitzstein's masterpiece The Cradle Will Rock made theatre history -- the only musical ever shut down by the federal government for its subversive political content. (Check out Tim Robbins' film Cradle Will Rock, for the cool backstory.) But this show is also a masterpiece of agitprop theatre, every bit as potent now as it was when it opened in 1937; and today in 2011, as Republicans across the country try to roll back union rights, this unashamedly pro-union musical is perhaps more potent today than at any other time since its creation. Blitzstein called the show “a labor opera composed in a style that falls somewhere between realism, romance, vaudeville, comic strip, Gilbert & Sullivan, Brecht, and agitprop.” Nice mix, huh? It was the first American musical from a truly working class perspective. It laid the groundwork, in its politics and its episodic construction, for later shows as varied as Cabaret, Hair, Pippin, Chicago, Assassins, and Rent. And like Chicago, it is thoroughly of its time and yet it doesn’t feel dated. There are just as many whores in politics, religion, academia, and the arts today as there were in the 1930s. As televangelists make millions and live in gilded mansions, as politicians receive gifts and campaign contributions from giant corporations, foreign powers, and other special interests, The Cradle Will Rock will always seem as if it could have been written this year. That's a shame for America, but good for the show...

And I know that's already eleven shows on my list of ten, but I can't help myself -- I have to add a shameless plug for Johnny Appleweed, the stoner political satire that I wrote in 2005 in response to Bush's re-election. New Line produced it in the fall of 2006, right before the midterm election, as part of the first St. Louis Political Theatre Festival. The idea came to me through the happy haze of marijuana smoke, when I wondered what would happen if someone just went to see George W. Bush and explained to him what a mess he was making of our country. So I invented the happy itinerant stoner-philosopher Johnny and built a classic Hero Myth story around him, casting Johnny as the Obi Wan Kenobi figure to a closeted conservative and a group of friends that included Jesus Christ himself. (My secret was -- and don't tell anybody -- I only worked on the script when I was stoned out of my mind!) A heady mix of Hair, The Daily Show, the films of Kevin Smith, Waiting for Godot, and The Wizard of Oz, this was a show guaranteed to outrage some folks (we had quite a few walk-outs) while it had the rest rolling on the floor laughing and heading out to the car at intermission to smoke another bowl. The show deconstructed conventional musical comedy -- and narrative itself -- while it tackled politics, religion, sexuality, drugs (obviously), guns, and pop culture, always with a stoner's giggle and a subversive wink. I would love for Johnny Appleweed to have further life, but even if it doesn't, it was one of the must fun shows I've ever done...

And here ends my list of the Top Ten... er... the Top Twelve shows that deserve your attention... I'm sure you can think of some others. In fact, I can already think of some others... But we'll leave that for another day.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. After I published this post, I got some very intense and surprising feedback about it, so I wrote about that, and what I think it says about the evolution of the art form, in a companion post a few days later...

Someone Tell the Story

2011-12-08T11:00:00.000-06:00

We get a lot of musicals submitted to New Line for production. I mean, a lot.

But there’s a fundamental problem with most of the shows we receive – in almost every case, there’s very little action and the only character development comes from the characters flat out telling us what they’re feeling, which is the least effective and least emotionally engaging way to tell a story. An audience wants to discover characters and relationships. If the show's creators do all that work for the audience, that will make them passive rather than actively engaged. We won't produce any of these shows because even though the songwriting is often very good, the stagecraft sucks.

In other words, good songs are necessary, but not sufficient.

I think part of the problem is that musical theatre writers don't always study the basics of dramatic writing, because very few books discuss those basics in terms of musicals. But the truth is that when it comes to structure, character development, subtext, etc., writing a musical is not all that different from writing a play. There are differences, to be sure, but not in the fundamentals.

There are a lot of new musicals now (Ordinary Days, Edges, Glory Days, etc.) that take Songs for a New World as a model – four actors, lots of interior monologues – but as brilliant as it is, New World isn't a regular kind of musical. It’s more of a song cycle, or arguably, an abstract concept musical, since it does have one strong overriding metaphor (which most of its imitators lack). But it’s important to note that in New World, almost every song takes us on a journey – within each song, the characters make decisions, come to crossroads, have personal revelations, face fears, etc. These are active songs, almost one-act playlets. In the case of too many new shows, though, at the end of a song we're exactly where we were at the beginning of that song. And because music takes more stage time than spoken words, that means the show is getting very little storytelling done…

Some of these songs might bring down the house in a concert or cabaret, but they don’t do the heavy lifting that theatre songs have to do to engage and hold an audience for an evening. These songs makes a single point and make it several times. I listen to a lot of these songs and I feel like I'm getting nice pencil sketches, but what I want from a piece of theatre is storytelling. A snapshot is not dramatic. Take me somewhere.

Think about “Being Alive” in Company – during this climactic song, we actually see Robert synthesize all the things that have been rushing through his mind all night, all the lessons about commitment and sacrifice and love, all the fears that are getting in his way, and he makes a decision about committing to someone. But significantly, this isn't just a passive revelation, it’s a decision and a first step. He's in a new place at the end of the song. This new mindset may lead to a relationship or it may end up in disaster because Robert is still essentially an emotional cripple, but he is taking action. Look at most of Shakespeare’s soliloquies – characters work out problems, consider options ("To be or not to be..."), make decisions, concoct plans, etc. They don’t just tell us what they're feeling.

Generally speaking, there are three ways an audience discovers and cares about a character. The most effective, most powerful way is by what the character does, how he acts and interacts with others -- and the reason why is that people are great readers of people. Show us a character in action and we will discern a lot of details about them just by observing. A slightly less effective but still good way is by what others say about him. The least effective way is by what the character tells us directly in soliloquy/solo. That’s because it does the audience’s job for them, and when they're passive they're not engaged. But even beyond that, most real people don’t have profound self-understanding and self-awareness, so the more a character analyzes and describes their own feelings and motives for us, the less real the character seems to us…

One thing I recommend to young (or new) musical theatre writers is to write a one-sentence plot synopsis and also one sentence that says what the show is really about at its core. For instance, Rent shows us a group of friends navigating the complicated terrain of modern life in the AIDS era. What Rent is really about is that we must celebrate life and community anywhere we find it, even in the face of death. Cabaret tells the story of an American writer discovering that “being a camera,” watching life from the outside, is safer but you can’t live a full life on the outside. What Cabaret is really about is that refusing to act in the face of evil is a choice, and it has consequences. No, No, Nanette presents an extended family of people who don’t trust each other so they all end up in a mess of lies and deceit. What No, No, Nanette is really about is that the more you care about money, the more screwed up your life is going to be -- or if you wanna get Biblical about it, that the love of money is the root of all evil. One last example: Company tells the story of single Robert as he observes the ups and downs of married life among his married friends. What Company is really about is that being with someone is difficult and messy and impossible, and being alone is worse – and we get this at the climax of the show, as Robert finally synthesizes all this info he’s collected and makes a decision that “Alone is alone, not alive.” He's moving forward. He's no longer stagnant. But there's no Happily Ever After here because there are no Happily Ever Afters in real life. There's always The Next Day (something Into the Woods explores).

Part of what's wrong with the artistically nihilistic, one-joke, self-reference musicals that have invaded off Broadway lately is that they throw narrative and structure (and character development and everything else) out the window. Because amateurism is funny...? But we go to the theatre to go on an adventure, to find human connection, to be reminded that we all experience the same obstacles and problems, to sit in that darkened room and know that we are not alone. We don't go to the theatre to be assaulted by self-congratulatory trivia spouting (as in [title of show]) or to be assaulted by four-letter words for no particular reason except that the writers think Dirty is Funny (as in Silence! The Musical). That's not theatre; that's just adolescent rebellion, as if they're out to prove to us a musical doesn't need good songs or a good script or ideas or a point of view or talent or craft...

I can get a laugh on YouTube at 4:00 a.m. I need more from my theatre. Tell me a story.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Those Magic Changes

2011-12-02T14:30:00.000-06:00

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals is my sixth book about musical theatre. But it's my first in the Facebook era. The world is changing. My publisher suggested that I create a Facebook page for the book, which I had never even considered before, but it's turned out very cool. Not only have I already picked up 380 "fans" (come join the fun!), but I'm also able to do things I've never done before with any of my other books...

Pretty much every day, I post to the Facebook page additional content related to my book. I've put up YouTube videos of the shows discussed in the book, some with performance footage, some with interviews with the creative staff and cast, as well as videos related to brand new rock musicals. I've put up essays I wrote about other rock musicals that didn't fit into the book. I'm occasionally posting links to my posts on this blog about working on the shows discussed in the book. I posted the original Playboy article that inspired The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which I discuss in the book. I created a photo album of posters of all the shows in the book, another album of production shots from New Line productions of the shows in the book, and another of posters from all the movies referenced in the opening song in The Rocky Horror Show.

The only thing missing so far is conversation -- it's an important one: where are we headed?

But I think that will come. I hope that as people read my book they'll feel comfortable posting about it on the Facebook page, not only if they love the book (which I hope is the case) but also if they disagree with conclusions I draw or opinions I posit. There's no better way to learn about your art form than to disagree about it with smart, interesting people and be forced to back up your opinions. And there's no better place to interact with cool, like-minded people from all over the country than on Facebook.

My real hope with this book -- and also my last book, Strike Up the Band -- is to change the conversation about the American musical theatre, and I hope the book's Facebook page will be one piece of that puzzle. I want theatre artists to understand and accept that the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is as outdated and irrelevant as operetta is; or if they don't agree with that proposition, to decide for themselves what of value the R&H model still holds for us. Can those shows be more than just museum pieces? Can they be changed enough, re-imagined for these times, as director Barlett Sher attempted with the recent South Pacific revival? But when they are, can that re-imagining really make shows from sixty or seventy years ago relevant again merely by imposing on them more contemporary acting and staging techniques?

I'm not advocating throwing all the older shows away. It's still fun to see Gone With the Wind once in a while, so it's likewise still fun to see an old 30s or 40s musical every once in a while -- just not the same four or five old shows year after year. And really, the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is so old itself that there are a lot of (what many would now consider) relatively old musicals that totally reject the R&H conventions. The brilliant current revival of Follies (1971) is a perfect example, but there's also Man of La Mancha, Cabaret, Chicago, Hair, Godspell, Pippin, The Fantasticks, How to Succeed, Promises, Promises, A Chorus Line, Company, and so many others, all older shows that are considered classics, but they're also all post-Rodgers and Hammerstein. That's how long it's been since R&H reigned supreme. America and the world changed forever during the 1960s, in massive ways, so most shows written before that carry very little resonance today; but many shows written during and after that time still speak to us.

But my primary agenda with this book is to demand respect for the rock musical. The genre has been with us since Expresso Bongo in London in 1958 and Hair in New York in 1967. For much of its early history, rock and roll was essentially the point of the rock musical. The whole idea of Jesus Christ Superstar was to tell this very old story through rock and roll, to emphasize the rebellion, the youth, and the politics of the movement around Jesus, to bring it into the present. The point of Grease and Hair was to reject traditional notions of what theatre music sounds like, to reject strings, to reject Rodgers and Hammerstein's ubiquitous foxtrot song form, to reject what older writers had decided was acceptable musical theatre, for a more raw, more culturally authentic sound. Rock musicals aimed to turn Broadway (and the musical theatre in general) into a new Wild West, artistically speaking. And they did. Almost all the rules changed. The rock musical as a genre sputtered briefly in the 1980s, when all of Broadway sputtered, back before shows were routinely created in regional theatres like they are today. But since the mid-1990s, the rock musical has thrived.

When I turned in my manuscript for Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, my publisher asked another author in the field to read it and comment on it. To my great amusement and annoyance, this other author was horrified that I had included a chapter on Grease, and even more horrified that it's the longest chapter in my book. He complained, "Here is a case of not just putting lipstick on a pig, but Mascara, rouge, a Dior gown, and a Gucci bag as well, but no matter how Miller tries to puff it up into something really important and significant, in the end, Grease remains, certainly for me at least, the most trivial of the musicals he has chosen to write about."

That this author (and others like him) thinks Grease is trivial and not worth examination is precisely the reason I included it in my book and one of the reasons for the book as a whole. I think I make a pretty strong, well laid-out case in my book that Grease is far more than he (and the other R&H hangers-on) thinks it is. And it's my longest chapter partly because I knew I was fighting prejudice against the show but also because Grease really is about rock and roll and how it changed America, so a detailed musical analysis here (and also in my High Fidelity chapter) is more relevant than in any other chapter in the book. I quote the song "Those Magic Changes" at length because "Magic Changes" is explicitly about living your life to rock and roll -- in this case, the chord changes of rock and roll coupling with the physical and emotional changes of puberty -- and that's one the central points of the show, not to mention an incredibly authentic cultural commentary.

This guy also wrote in his review, "It is a perfectly fine for the author to introduce his overarching theme that rock is the now and future musical mode of musical theatre music (something I don’t personally agree with, but I can’t fault him for that). But I can and do fault him for his approach to this by offhandedly dismissing as passé and irrelevant the classic non-rock musicals that filled all the decades of the twentieth century. To do so makes the author look simply foolish, a little like a guy who trashes the entire history of conventional theatre from Aeschylus to Albee simply because he digs postmodern performance art."

No, to do so makes me look like I'm living in 2011 and not 1943.

His ignorance is stunning to me. He thinks my argument that the R&H model has become irrelevant is the equivalent of "trash[ing] the entire history of conventional theatre." Really? Rodgers and Hammerstein represent the entire history of theatre?? No, they don't. They represent a period of less than twenty years in the evolution of this art form that is over a century old -- a 20-year period, it's worth mentioning, that ended about fifty years ago.

And to equate Grease, Hair, Rocky Horror, and High Fidelity with "postmodern performance art" shows how little this guy understands both the rock musical and the contemporary, 21st century American musical theatre. And that's a big reason why I wanted to write my book, once and for all to take a serious, thoughtful, analytical look at these fascinating works and present a concrete case for their value as serious theatre. You'd think by now, with the Boomers nearing retirement age, that rock and roll would no longer be so casually disrespected. But it is.

I've noticed lately that almost every show New Line produces now is a rock musical. And even the shows that aren't full-blooded rock musicals use a fair amount of rock and roll, like The Wild Party and I Love My Wife. Why? Because that's where the art form is now in its evolution. I dearly love Hello, Dolly! but what does it have to do with America in 2011? Nothing. In contrast, Lysistrata Jones has everything to do with America in 2011.

There's a longstanding bias against musical theatre among theatre people who don't do musicals. And there's also a bias within the musical theatre community against rock musicals, even today after forty-three years of rock musicals on Broadway. And it all boils down to ignorance, often willful ignorance. That other author who reviewed my book read my chapter about Grease and still couldn't accept that there's anything of value there. It's like people on the far political Right in America today -- no amount of facts or evidence can change their mind because they're not interested in changing their mind.

Luckily, those who fetishize Rodgers and Hammerstein and denigrate rock musicals are almost uniformly older, with less and less influence over the art form as time goes on. Just as I'm on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, I'm also on the cusp between those who grew up with Rodgers and Hammerstein and those who grew up with Hair and Grease and Rocky Horror (as I've discussed in another recent blog post). It's a cool vantage point from which to watch our amazing art form evolve. As we navigate this moment of massive change in American politics and culture, our art form will change and evolve with the country, recording and responding to each moment as it comes.

I've spent my life defending musical theatre, demanding of people that they take it seriously as an art form. Now my crusade shifts somewhat, with Facebook as a powerful ally, to battle against the ostrich-like nostalgia for an antiquated model and instead to stand up for the vigorous, adventurous, and relevant form of the rock musical.

When I see exciting new shows like Lysistrata Jones and The Blue Flower -- two shows that could not be more different from each other -- I know that my new crusade is worth it. Our art form is absolutely thriving and I honestly believe we're in the middle of a true Golden Age for the musical theatre. But we're not going to keep moving forward if people keep trying to hold us back...

Long Live the Rock Musical!
Scott

Crazy for You

2011-11-28T14:52:00.001-06:00

There are a lot of people working in the musical theatre today who don't respect the musical theatre.

I can't count how many productions of musicals I've seen over the years for which the director has clearly not even tried to find truthfulness or insight in the show, much less textual themes, in-depth characters and relationships, social and historical context, and all that other great stuff that makes a great musical a great musical. It's like a peanut M&M that's nothin' but the candy coating. Even the more lightweight shows like Hello, Dolly!, No, No, Nanette, and Anything Goes have interesting subtext and cultural context worth exploring. Too many directors (and designers and actors) think working on a musical is a vacation; they can turn their brains off because they're sure their audience will turn theirs off as well. These theatre artists will never give The Music Man or Cabaret or Rent the same effort or the same thought they would give to Death of a Salesman or August: Osage County.

And that makes me crazy. Audiences deserve better.

Actor Larry Luckinbill once wrote to me (I know I quote this all the time, but bear with me), "Go broke if you must, but always over-estimate the public's intelligence. They will thank you for it." And you know, he's right. Audiences aren't idiots. And, as I often argue, people don't want "escape;" that's just a lazy assumption. They want connection. And real connection can only come from Truth. When will theatre artists learn that?

Sometimes it's hard for me to see productions of musicals because I have high expectations, and quite often, I already know the show and love it and have thought about it, maybe even written about it. So when directors or actors take a show I know is great and treat it like it's nothing more than a mediocre sitcom, it genuinely upsets me. It hurts me. I know that sounds melodramatic, but it's true.

I've seen directors add whole new scenes and sometimes songs from movie versions to musicals -- without permission of course, since they could never get permission to do that -- and also without any regard for what they're doing to the material. I've seen productions in which the director has literally written in new jokes -- yes, new dialogue. I want to ask these presumptuous directors, Do you really think you know better than Stephen Sondheim -- or Lerner and Loewe, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Kander and Ebb -- how to make a piece of musical theatre?

And then there are the productions that are crammed full of comic schtick that has nothing to do with the characters, the story, the dialogue, or the themes, but they shoehorn it in anyway because they think it'll get a laugh. You know what else will get a laugh? That cat trapped in the hamster ball on YouTube. Surely, the bar's not that low, is it? Anything for a laugh? Once in a while, when I disagree with a piece of business an actor wants to add in a show, their response will be, "But it's funny!" And I'll reply, "Yes it is. If we were doing a sketch comedy show, you could keep it. But we're not."

Because you know what's funniest of all...? The Truth. Think about it -- the funniest jokes, shows, movies are built on the two commandments of good comedy. It has to be a surprise, and it has to reveal something truthful. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. That's a joke about the human predilection to complicate the world. The obvious answer doesn't occur to us because we immediately search for a more complicated answer. And then we hear the punchline and we laugh because we notice ourselves caught in that bad habit. It's truthful. And we recognize that on a subconscious level so we laugh.

Now, none of this musical theatre molestation I'm complaining about is malicious. In fact, I think most of these directors never even think about subtextual character detail or the story's socio-political context when they're working on a musical. Which, I believe, is the problem. (For example, Hello, Dolly!, No, No, Nanette, and Anything Goes all have relevant cultural contexts that shape both the characters and the narrative.) And even though these "offenses" I cite make a production inferior in my eyes, there will always be people who still think the show is wonderful for whatever reasons. But I genuinely believe that those people would think it was even more wonderful if it was done more authentically.

Here's a case in point. There's a local production of Godspell going on right now that everybody is raving about. The reviews are great and word-of-mouth is great. Everybody's talking about how charming and entertaining it is. But I just can't go see it. Why? Because they tell me that the director has redistributed all the lines and songs at random. In other words, she's short-circuited all the character development in the script. Yes, Godspell is built to accommodate quite a bit of improv inside the parable stories, so each production is different and always tuned into the pop cultural zeitgeist, but the show was not meant to be rewritten. You have to wonder if this director would have randomly reassigned the lines in You Can't Take It With You or Aracdia... Probably not.

When done respectfully and intelligently, Godspell develops each character in the show very carefully and very subtly, through what they say, which songs they sing, which parables they narrate, which characters they play in the parables, etc. Just as in any well-made play, we get to know these characters by observing them and listening to them. We watch their various relationships with Jesus develop over the first act and into the second act, so that when the second act turns dark and dramatic, there's an enormous emotional payoff because we know these characters so well. When all that is set up right, the show's ending is shattering. But when all the lines and songs are scrambled together -- apparently, all the women sing "Turn Back, O Man" in this production -- then this carefully constructed collection of individuals becomes just a bunch of talented actors having fun. That's not theatre; that's show choir. In reassigning "Turn Back, O Man," the song loses its slyly ironic double-edge (the temptress warning Jesus not to give in to temptation) and the show loses its "loose woman" character (the Mary Magdalene stand-in) who tempts Jesus; and so both that temptation and the later redemption of the "loose woman" get lost.

Why would someone do this to Godspell? Either because they think it doesn't matter or they just didn't bother to notice all of that is in there. And so I can't go see it. Because I love this show, and I'm freakishly transparent, so if I hate this sliced-and-diced Godspell, everyone will know I hated it, and then I'll feel guilty about hating it... and so it goes...

And what bugs the fuck outta me is that I know this director is good; I know she directs non-musicals with sensitivity and intelligence. But I guess musicals are the Rodney Dangerfield of the theatre world. Even though theatre with music has been the norm for most of the history of theatre, and it's only very recently in our history that we've come to the bizarre, topsy-turvy conclusion that theatre with music is somehow less "legitimate" than theatre without music. How did that happen? I've actually had theatre artists in town tell me to my face that musical theatre isn't "real theatre." They're just lucky I'm more Zen-like than I used to be, thanks to my prodigious cannabis consumption...

So why are theatre people taught -- consciously or unconsciously -- to think less of musical theatre than of theatre that lacks music? Certainly musical theatre is harder to do well from a purely practical standpoint, and it requires more skill and training. Musical theatre has been around longer than theatre that lacks music. And while there are certainly some dumb musicals, there are just as many dumb plays. So why is there this inexplicable bias?

Now to be fair, I have not seen this particular Godspell, so it may well be very entertaining and a lot of fun. I imagine audiences will have a great time seeing it. I'm not denigrating the production or the cast, but I am saying they shouldn't have rewritten it, that it's a better, smarter piece of theatre than this director gives it credit for.

Though I didn't intend this, my life and my career in the theatre has become a never-ending campaign to get some respect for my art form. That's why I write my books, why I write essays about all our shows, why I write this blog, why I post so much to New Line's Facebook page, to prove to people that musicals are worthy of respect. And most of the time, once they see that, they're converted for life.

"One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!" -- John 9:25

It's often a very dramatic conversion for actors in their first New Line show when they see how deep we dig down into every musical we produce and how much fuller that makes their performance. It opens their eyes to how rich and complex many musicals really are -- especially shows usually looked down upon, like Grease, Rocky Horror, Hair -- in ways that most people never even considered. My new book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, has chapters on all three of those shows. I promise you'll be amazed at what's there...

"Our eyes are open,
Our eyes are open,
Wide, wide, wide..."
-- "Walking in Space," from Hair

It's usually a pretty cool ride for an actor working with us for the first time, discovering that seriousness of purpose behind even our wackiest shows, finding that fearless but intensely truthful New Line style -- what the creators of Bat Boy call "the depth of sincerity, the height of expression" -- and discovering just what is possible in the musical theatre. I call it "jumping off the cliff," when you just let loose and go for it, and fearlessly let the work carry you wherever it goes. It's artistic hang-gliding. It's that same thrill I got last week in New York, seeing The Blue Flower, Lysistrata Jones, Bonnie & Clyde, Follies, and Rent. All of these productions take the art form seriously, understand its power and its endless possibilities, and all of them have come up with fearless, original, thrilling work.

Imagine if the Rent revival had reassigned all the lines and songs at random...

But having this deeper awareness, this richer vision of musical theatre and all its possibilities makes it harder to watch mediocre productions of musicals, even when they're well-intentioned. Once your eyes are opened, you can't close them again. You go see a mediocre show and all you can see are the missed opportunities, the lack of understanding, the timidity of the commitment.

On the flipside, when I see something really wonderful and surprising, like Next to Normal, American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, or Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, I get twice the joy the guy next to me gets, because on top of the great show everybody else is watching, I also see all the glorious detail work, I tune in to the rich textual and musical themes the writers poured their souls into, the carefully built interior rhymes, the elegant geometry of good staging, the subtle nuances of character, the set-up and payoff of narrative themes...

It's a blessing and a curse. I'm so tuned into all that now, after years of directing shows and writing my books and essays -- and writing a few musicals myself -- that I see much more than most people sitting around me. So a mediocre show becomes even more annoyingly mediocre but a really great show becomes utterly transcendent. And that's a fair trade-off. And meanwhile, I'll do my best to show other people how to see all that wonderful stuff too.

Here endeth the rant.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

One Day More to Revolution...

2011-11-23T11:42:00.001-06:00

It was interesting being in New York this past week. Not just because I saw five really brilliant musicals and hung out with some of my favorite theatre people, but also because I can see so clearly the world of musical theatre fundamentally changing in front of me (mirroring, I think, our sociopolitical world), and that's so exciting to watch! We are at a historical turning point. It's part of what my last book is about. And I see these arguably massive changes happening in two areas -- the transition from the world that venerates Rodgers and Hammerstein to a new world that values originality and authenticity and relevance above all; and parallel to that, the widening gap between the commercial musical theatre world and the more artsy, more ballsy nonprofit musical theatre world.

The commercial theatre apparently doesn't have room in it for the miracle that is The Blue Flower (its run is being cut short by Second Stage), and that's a shame.

After I saw Follies last Friday night, I thought a lot about the Sondheim and Prince revolution of the 1970s and the mixed reception for Follies in 1971 -- it was too dark, too sad, too nihilistic, blah, blah, blah. Yet here is this forty-year-old show feeling as fresh today as any new work on Broadway. I think it's because the musical theatre is in a very dark, sometimes nihilistic period now, reflecting (as it always does) our real world. Think Urinetown, Bat Boy, American Idiot, Jersey Boys, Taboo, The Color Purple, The Scottsboro Boys, Next to Normal, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson...

This new Follies, under Eric Schaeffer's loving and skillful hand, is darker than any Follies I've ever seen before, darker I think than even the original. And the acting is much more raw, more naked, much closer to the bone. Heavier. If you ever want to see a Sondheim show done really right, this is it. I recently wrote a letter to Sondheim, asking him if he'd let New Line take a stab at the original version of Merrily We Roll Along, because I think its relentless darkness (not to mention its structural rebellion) is finally right at home in the contemporary musical theatre. (Sondheim said no, which I totally understand.)

Many folks will bitch and moan about how dark the musical theatre has gotten (they wouldn't like Bonnie & Clyde much) and they'll pine for the days of Damn Yankees and Mame. These are the folks who don't want our art form to keep moving forward, to stay fresh and relevant, to mirror the world around us as the musical theatre always has. They think musical theatre should have stopped evolving a few decades ago. They think the pinnacle of the art form is the Rodgers and Hammerstein model, so our rejection of that model today seems like a tragedy to them. This is the same sort who denounced the rock musical as the ruination of the art form in the 70s.

I bet it drove them crazy when Rent and Next to Normal won Pulitzer Prizes...

But "these are very difficult and dangerous times" we're living through right now. America is having a nervous breakdown of sorts (which I think is what makes Follies, Bonnie & Clyde, and The Blue Flower, not to mention Next to Normal, so potent right now) and is redefining itself in so many fundamental ways. Lysistrata Jones really struck me as a compelling exploration of this new America 2.0, a neo-musical comedy with its very racially integrated cast (mirroring the real-world "browning of America"), its strong hip-hop influences, and its joyous reclaiming of what made the American musical comedy such a cultural juggernaut a century ago -- the brashness, the aggressiveness, the vulgarity, the playfulness, and the sly cultural criticism that goes all the way back to the father of the American musical, George M. Cohan, who was literally inventing the American musical comedy exactly a century ago. Just as the classic musical comedy was once replaced by the modern musical drama, then the concept musical, then the pop opera, then the more cynical postmodern musical, now those forms are giving way to the neo-musical comedy (some of which are also postmodern musicals) and the now fully mature rock musical.

No more are musicals required to imitate the "well-made play" that came over from Europe in the nineteenth century. No more do musicals suffer their uncomfortable relationship with "the Fourth Wall," imposed on them by the disciples of the European Enlightenment; musicals don't do naturalism very well and it's silly to make them try. No more do musicals aspire to the form of grand opera, which was endowed with some faux superiority during the 20th century. No more are musicals in a choke-hold to middle-class, 20th century morality, as encoded in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon -- now characters in musicals can say fuck and shit just like real people do. Now musicals can talk about sex openly, without clumsy metaphor or awkward euphemism.

There's a whole new generation of artists creating new musicals now and they don't suffer from the hang-ups and nostalgia the Boomers inherited from the Depression Generation. I find that I can't watch Lysistrata Jones or The Blue Flower without feeling overwhelming joy and optimism for the future of my art form.

And finally, for the first time in its history, the musical theatre is no longer defined by commercial success. Now there are literally hundreds of musicals being written and produced all over our country every year (try a Google search and prepare to have your mind blown). The monopoly is broken. The requirement that a musical be inoffensive enough to appeal to the least literate tourist is dead. Today the most exciting shows to open on Broadway do not start there. Of the five shows I saw in New York last week, Follies started at the nonprofit Kennedy Center in DC; Lysistrata Jones was first produced by the nonprofit Dallas Theatre Center and then by The Transport Group in the nonprofit Gym at Judson down in Greenwich Village (where some of the coolest experiments of the 1960s and 70s happened); Bonnie & Clyde started at the nonprofit La Jolla Playhouse in California; and both The Blue Flower and Rent were playing off Broadway houses, one of which is nonprofit.

Today, commercial viability isn't always the central concern for people creating new shows. The art form itself has finally become more important than its commercial prospects. That's partly a product of history -- in the first half of the 20th century, Broadway really was the only place to produce a new musical, and for much of the second half of the century, new musicals had only Broadway and off Broadway as options. But since the "new wave" of the 1990s (with New Line Theatre at the forefront, by the way), nonprofit "art" musical theatre has steadily grown in power and influence across our country and now rivals New York's commercial theatre, offering an alternative to Broadway and touring shows for millions of theatre-goers. High Fidelity, bare, and Passing Strange were all rejected by New York's commercial theatre but are now being embraced all over America by the nonprofit theatre world.

Money no longer drives the musical theatre. Now the artists do.

Come join the Revolution!

Don't get me wrong -- Broadway does still hold some magic for me. But we're not living in the 1950s anymore, when Broadway was the only game in the country (in the world?) for a musical theatre artist. If some New York producer called me tomorrow and wanted to produce Johnny Appleweed or wanted me to direct a revival of Bat Boy (that's our 2006 production in the photo), I doubt I'd be able to say no. But until that day comes, I get to keep doing the most exciting work of my life -- working with amazing artists on amazing shows like Passing Strange, Love Kills, High Fidelity, bare, The Wild Party, The Robber Bridegroom, Forbidden Planet, the masterpiece that is Bat Boy, and so many others that the moneyed folks in New York would never let me produce there.

And that's alright, to quote Stew...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Rent

2011-11-21T10:02:00.001-06:00

Last night I saw my last show before coming home today, the off Broadway revival of Rent.

I was a little wary of this one. I saw the original production just a few weeks after it moved to Broadway in 1996, and it was one of the most thrilling theatre experiences of my life. This was before a recording had been released, so I knew very little about the show. And it blew my freaking mind. It was so defiantly unlike anything else in the musical theatre, even though (on closer inspection) it uses many traditional musical theatre devices.

Its rawness and naked honestly was amazing. (I still think had Larson not died, and had he gone on to further polish the show, it might have ended up less than it is now.) Rent quickly became one of my favorite shows ever.

This is the baggage I brought with me to the performance last night.

And you know what?
I loved it.

It's incredibly different from the original -- the only piece of staging that remains is "Seasons of Love," which was the perfect moment to pay tribute to the original. But every other moment and every character interpretation was so different.

And yet, it gave me exactly the same thrill, the same profound emotions, the same joy. It's as if the original production was a 1990s musical capturing the zeitgeist and this revival is a 21st century musical about the 1990s. It really feels like a different show now. This Rent speaks to this moment just like the original Rent spoke to its moment. This creative team found a way to tell this story in today's terms without violating it for a second. And here's the real shocker -- both productions were directed by Michael Greif!

After so many years of the original memory fading a bit, after seeing too many other productions reproduce the original but with lesser results, I think my love for Rent had waned a bit. But this new production fixed that. I can't count the number of times tears welled up in my eyes, only a few times in sadness, but more often in the kind of pure fucking joy that only great theatre can supply.

And on reflection, with time admittedly obscuring the original a bit, it seems this production may have better acting, more subtle, complex characterizations than the original. These characters also seem younger than the originals did, more vulnerable, which makes their stories much more powerful and the stakes higher, and I think that supercharges both the sadness and the joy of this beautiful story. Maureen is funnier and realer, Mark (Michael Wartella at this performance) is more vulnerable and even more the emotional outsider, Roger is more damaged, Joanne is stronger, Mimi is more aggressive. It's as if the original production hired great rock singers who could act, but this one hired great actors who could sing rock and roll. The difference is subtle, but it's real.

Like the set for Bonnie & Clyde, the Rent set looks simple but isn't. It performs some cool stage tricks but never pulls the focus away from the actors. It's a full-stage sculpture of scaffolding, some pieces moving from time to time, with fire escape stairs, a wrap-around balcony, and other cool stuff, clearly discarding the fierce physical minimalism of the original. And they use a lot of projections, video, etc. (which, I gotta say, I could do without). But not only did it look cool, it sounded cool whenever they moved it or used it, giving the whole thing a very urban, downtown, rock club kind of vibe.

I've never directed Rent because I always thought there was essentially just one way to approach it -- the original seemed so fucking perfect. I didn't want to imitate it but i didn't want to lessen its perfection either. But this new approach is perfect too. Maybe this production will finally rescue Rent from a million lesser reproductions of the original. And maybe, just maybe, I might be ready to tackle it soon...

Not next season, but soon...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Here's my background and analysis essay about Rent, from my 2001 book Rebels With Applause.

P.P.S. See also my thoughts on Follies, Lysistrata Jones, Bonnie & Clyde, and The Blue Flower.

The Blue Flower

2011-11-20T16:43:00.001-06:00

I just had one of the greatest artistic experiences of my entire life. A musical called The Blue Flower, by Jim and Ruth Bauer. It's beautiful and weird and thrilling and powerful and incredibly original, as if Kurt Weill and Jacques Brel were still alive and decided to write a new rock musical.

It's about the artist Max Baumann and his circle of friends in Europe at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, as they grapple and struggle with the tumultuous waves in the tides of history. But it's also about art making. And when the show ends, we realize that this musical is a collage like the ones that Max makes, a rush of images, colors, film, movement, and some of the most gorgeous music and most poetic lyrics I've ever heard.

It's almost more performance art than conventional musical, defiantly breaking one rule after another -- not just for the sake of breaking rules, but because it's a story about artists who were testing boundaries, breaking rules, throwing off the conventions of past generations, trying to break through to something new. And though its aggressively Brechtian style seems to hold us at arm's length, it's still one of the most emotional shows I've seen in years.

The profoundly high-energy, versatile cast almost never leaves the stage, but at the center of it all is Broadway veteran Marc Kudisch who gives a fearless, reveletory performance as Baumann, in glorious voice and with the weight of history on his shoulders and his heart.

It's one of those shows that's so stylized, so specific in its physicality, and director Will Pomerantz and choreographer Chase Brock have created some of the most intense, most interesting, most beautiful staging I've ever seen.

It's so rich and so smart and so all-around amazing that as much as I loved it -- and Jesus, did I love it -- I don't know that I'd want to direct it myself. Not only does it use a ton of film and projections (and you know me, I hate tech), but also, I just can't imagine anyone equaling the brilliance of this staging. It seems so perfect, as if the gods of theatre brought together these writers, this production staff, and these actors for this one perfect moment, never to be repeated. It's a show that reminds us how magical great works of the theatre can be in the right hands.

The other shows I've seen this weekend, Bonnie & Clyde and Lysistrata Jones, are great shows, but The Blue Flower is something different. I'll never forget this show as long as I live. More proof, if I needed it, that my chosen art form has never been more vigorous, more alive, more inventive, or more thrilling. This is the Golden Age of the Ameican musical theatre. I've never been more convinced of that than I am right now.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. See also my thoughts on Follies, Lysistrata Jones, Bonnie & Clyde, and Rent.

P.P.S. A few weeks after I originally posted this, I was able to arrange an interview with Jim and Ruth Bauer about The Blue Flower, for a local radio show I co-host, Break a Leg: Theatre in St. Louis and Beyond. You can listen to the interview on the KDHX website.

Bonnie & Clyde

2011-11-20T09:00:00.000-06:00

Let's start with the fact that I've never met a Frank Wildhorn musical I liked. Jekyll & Hyde is a mess of cliches, amateurish lyrics, silly direction, and nice pop music that can't do the job of good theatre music. Sure, there are some decent pop anthems in there, good music to skate to, but they're lousy theatre songs. The Scarlet Pimpernel is marginally better, only because it doesn't take itself too seriously, so its flaws are more forgivable. And let's just skip The Civil War -- one of only two musicals I've ever walked out on in my entire life.

Mom always said, if you can't say something nice...

All that said, I bought a ticket to Wildhorn's Bonnie & Clyde with some understandable trepidation. For $136.50, I want to be fucking impressed.

And holy shit, what do you know, I was!

Bonnie & Clyde has an excellent, dark, emotional book by Ivan Menchell (his first Broadway musical), interesting, dramatic, evocative lyrics by Don Black (who also did Song and Dance), and jazzy, aggressive, high-energy music -- nothing like the sometimes bland, often interchangeable pop tunes Wildhorn has burdened his other shows with. There's not a clunker anywhere in this score.

And the set is one of those "trick sets" Broadway loves that, for once, never becomes the star of the show and never gets in the way of the storytelling, with almost the whole set in rough-hewn wood -- exactly right for the period and the subject matter -- three large sliding panels that are used really effectively, and period projections that continually remind us that this is a real story, that these people were real, that these things -- these murders -- actually happened. The richly suggestive set seems minimalist, but it's actually fairly complex, with hidden trap doors, various ramps and such, all enhanced with some really cool lighting effects and projections that work beautifully with the wooden panels.

And there's gore -- lots of it, not just blood, but late in the show, one character's face half shot off. In fact, the first moments of the show assault us with deafening machine gun fire and a tableau of the doomed couple's assassination in their car. It announces the intensity of the show brilliantly.

This is an adult show about murderers, they're telling us, even if they are very charming murderers...

And then there's the cast -- Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan are just amazing in the leads, not just vocal powerhouses, but also sexy, scary, vulnerable, passionate, damaged, and so in love. Sure, the show romanticizes them to some degree -- I don't know who could tell this story without doing that, at least a little -- but it also doesn't shy away from their savage killing spree. And really, the entire cast is just as pitch perfect and just as fully committed to every moment. And Jeff Calhoun's direction is a study in restraint and the power of the tableau, without a misstep anywhere. It's a real joy to watch actors that good having that much fun.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that St. Louis' own John McDaniel is the conductor, music director, and orchestrator -- and god, are those orchestrations exciting!

And on another interesting note, at intermission I heard some really pretentious theatre people in front of me putting the show down in the most condescending terms. And as I eavesdropped, I realized one of them was the director of The Book of Mormon, and it took all my self-control not to lean forward and suggest to him that this was a more interesting, more adult, better crafted show than Mormon, which sounds like it was written by a creepy twelve-year-old with Tourette's... I'm just sayin'...

I never thought I'd be saying I loved a Frank Wildhorn musical, but god help me, I do. I guess that just goes to prove, the theatre is a never-ending parade of surprises. Maybe that's why I love it so much.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. See also my thoughts on Follies, Lysistrata Jones, The Blue Flower, and Rent.

P.P.S. A few weeks after I originally posted this, I was able to arrange an interview with John McDaniel about Bonnie & Clyde, for a local radio show I co-host, Break a Leg: Theatre in St. Louis and Beyond. You can listen to the interview on the KDHX website.

Lysistrata Jones

2011-11-19T23:02:00.001-06:00

This afternoon I saw a rock/hip-hop musical comedy based on the classical Greek play Lysistrata (the one where the women go on a sex strike until their men give up war). It's called Lysistrata Jones and transplants the story to a college campus -- sort of now and sort of 411 BC -- and swaps war for a basketball losing streak.

You can see how I might be wary of this one...

But it's an absolute blast! With a wacky, fast-paced book by playwright Douglas Carter Beane (author of the brilliant As Bees in Honey Drown and The Little Dog Laughed), a pulse-pounding, hyper-high-energy hip-hop score by Lewis Flinn, and wacky fun-filled direction and thrilling hip-hop choreography both by Dan Knechtges. There are only a few musicals that deliver this much fun. (Bat Boy comes to mind.) Bucking my least favorite trend on and off Broadway, this is not a production that thinks bad acting is funny. These actors are 100% serious within this wacky world and the stakes are sky high, and that's what makes the whole crazy enterprise so utterly hilarious.

They have lots of fun with the double time period, existing both in classical Athens and also in the world of today, with smart phones and Joel Schumacher Batmam movies. But they never make the mistake of self-reference for its own sake. Everything here contributes to the wild fun of the world this awesome cast of 12 creates on stage.

I'd be lying if I said the considerable amount of bare chests and other beefcake didn't add to my enjoyment, but this is a really terrific, neo-musical comedy, using the energy and devices of George M. Cohan but in a relevant, modern way.

Its high spirits and silly seriousness reminds me a lot of awesome shows like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Forbidden Planet, and several other of my favorites. And though it's not long on substance, it is very smart and very literate, and it's the perfect musical comedy for this ironic age of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

It's hard not to have a total blast when everyone onstage is having that much fun. What a joyful, wild, well-crafted piece of musical theatre! Bravo!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. See also my thoughts on Follies, Bonnie & Clyde, The Blue Flower, and Rent.

Follies

2011-11-19T10:37:00.001-06:00

So last night I saw the new, utterly transcendent revival of Follies, which I kept hearing was the best production of this brilliant postmodern musical since the original in 1971.

And I think they may be right.

It was my third Follies, having seen the show on Broadway in 2001 and in London in 2002, and though the other two were very good, this one leaves the others in the dust.

The cast is uniformly amazing, the production design is gorgeous, and the direction is excellent. My only real complaint is that they stuck an intermission into it. Once more, friends -- if a show is written without an intermission, it's structured very differently from a two-act show, so just cramming an intermission into the middle of a one-act show (which people do to Pippin, Man of La Mancha, Assassins, and other shows) doesn't make it a two-act show.

But letting that go for the moment...

Not only were the four leads outstanding, but every one of the secondary leads, most of whom get one song and a smattering of lines, were also wonderful. Among those secondary leads were Broadway veterans like Elaine Page, Teri White, Don Correia, Susan Watson, Florence Lacey, and others.

And then there are those four leads. Ron Raines as Ben was really good, and yet he was the weakest of the four. I'd never seen Jan Maxwell (Phyllis) before but she's a remarkable actor and she made a lot of choices I've never seen from Phyllis before. As an example, as much as I loved Alexis Smith's bitterly cold "Could I Leave You?", Maxwell plays the song as a rage-filled breakdown, almost a mad scene, and it really works!

Danny Burstein (most recently seen in a brilliant performance as Luther Billis in the South Pacific revival) is Buddy, and I've never seen anyone do it better -- such sadness, such heart, such love, such rage, such conflict crippling him and ripping him apart inside. It's a brilliant, thrilling performance, exactly the way Buddy should be approached, so honest, so flawed, so human...

And then there's Bernadette. As much as I love her, I don't always love her acting, but here Bernadette the Broadway Star utterly disappears in the fragile, damaged, profoundly depressed Sally. It's by far the best work I've ever seen her do. Her performance is so raw and honest it's almost painful to watch her. She and Burstein are incredibly believable as this fucked-up couple, married thirty years, who should have never been married to begin with. And it's not just honest, it's really subtle and detailed.

And because the acting was so outstanding, the characters so complex and nuanced, the last third of the show -- the fantasy Follies numbers -- had more resonance than I've ever seen before. And in all four cases, at the end of each song, the sadness, the loneliness creeps back in.

I think this is the darkest production I've seen of the show, but also the most honest. After all, this is about the pain and regret of middle-age. Stressing the considerable amount of pure entertainment over the acting lets both the characters and the audience off the hook. Director Eric Schaeffer wasn't about to let that happen this time.

It's truly one of the most emotional, most powerful productions I've ever seen on stage, and I got choked up any number of times. I'm so glad I finally got to see Follies done absolutely perfectly. Not a flaw to be found.

Oh yeah, did I mention the twenty-eight piece orchestra? How often do you ever get to hear that live?

All in all, a magnificent evening with a true masterpiece of the theatre. It makes me want to produce and direct this show more than ever -- and all we need is an old proscenium house, a full orchestra, a huge cast, and a huge set and costume budget. That's all...

C'mon, who's gonna write me a check to cover all that...?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. See also my thoughts on Lysistrata Jones, Bonnie & Clyde, The Blue Flower, and Rent.

A Helluva Town

2011-11-18T17:17:00.001-06:00

So here I am, back in the big bad apple for my annual Broadway trip. As much I hate travel, I do enjoy seeing new Broadway and off Broadway shows. Quite a few of the shows I've seen here soon after became New Line productions.

Last night, after I settled into my hotel, I met up with my buddy Doug Storm (in the background in the picture) -- native St. Louisan, performer on Broadway, off Broadway, and in national tours, and closest to my heart, an original cast member of Bat Boy. Doug left New York a while back, moved back to St. Louis for a bit, tried his luck in Los Angeles and Las Vegas (where he has also performed) and Chicago, and is now back in New York. It was interesting talking to him about how incredibly difficult it is for an actor to make enough money to live on. I think some people think that's only a problem in St. Louis and it's not.

I've got tickets to see five shows while I'm here, but I started today at Lincoln Center, in the Theatre on Film and Tape Collection of the New York Public Library. I saw three things. First, I thought I was gonna see excerpts from the 1969 musical Promenade, but it turned out to be something else with the same title. Shit.

Then I saw excerpts from Carrie, the infamous Broadway muscial flop. As the librarian put it, "We didn't get a chance to tape it" -- in other words, it closed too fast (16 previews and 5 performances). I've always wondered about Carrie, whether it was really as bad as they said it was. Well, now I think it was. What they had on video was a press reel, portions of 7 or 8 songs. Some of them were really wonderful. Betty Buckley (as the crazed mother) was brilliant and powerful. Linzi Hateley in the role of Carrie was very good. I was surprised to see "Leroy" from the original film version of Fame in some of the clips. But many of the songs were awful. And the choreography was by far the blandest, stupidest, and clumsiest I have ever seen in a musical. And not just on Broadway. From what I what I could tell in these clips, the direction was also terrible. No wonder it was such a flop!

And then I watched something really cool -- the recent off Broadway musical The Burnt Part Boys, which is kind of a cross between Floyd Collins and Stand be Me.

It's about a mining town where a bunch of men were killed in a mining accident ten years earlier. With the news that the mine is about to be re-opened, five kids make a pilgrimage to the "burnt part" of the mountain where it happened. The one kid, the central character, brings along dynamite to close the mine up once and for all, accidentally trapping them all inside, and as their air runs out, the dead miners appear and these kids are able to finally say goodbye to their fathers. And the main character's older brother gets his father's blessing to leave the mining life before he's killed as well. Some of Act I was a little slow, but overall, it's a very entertaining show and the last half hour or so is really powerful. You'll be happy to know a cast recording of the very cool bluegrass score is now on Amazon for pre-order.

Tonight I see the revival of Follies, which they say is the best production of this masterpiece since the original. I can't wait.

I'll check in again soon.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

They say the neon lights are bright...

2011-11-16T19:22:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow I head off on my annual pilgrimage to the Big Bad Apple, to see what's going on in the commercial musical theatre. I really hate to travel, but I love seeing friends and shows in New York, so it balances out. And this time, I'm seeing five shows in three days. Well, six, actually. (More on that later.) And I'll be blogging while I'm up there...

I"m seeing the new Broadway revival of Follies, which I've been told is the best production of the show since the original. I've seen two production of Follies before, one on Broadway in 2001, and one in London in 2002. I thought both were excellent, but I'm extremely psyched to see this one. It's such a remarkable piece of theatre, like no other show ever written. Definitely a show I'd love to tackle someday...

I'm also seeing the new off Broadway revival of Rent. I saw the original production of Rent just a few weeks after it moved to Broadway back in 1996, and none of the actors were out with blown vocal cords yet, so I got to see the entire original cast. It was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had in the theatre, dead center, tenth row. I hadn't heard any of the music, just read a few things, so everything about it was a surprise. And since all the tours and even local productions since then have essentially replicated the original, it'll be interesting to see a new take on the show.

I'm seeing Lysistrata Jones, the new musical that takes the classical Greek play Lysistrata, about women going on a sex strike until their men give up war, and transplants it to a college campus where the girls go on a sex strike until the boys basketball team breaks their endless losing streak. The show was off Broadway and has moved uptown. Sounds like fun.

I'm seeing Bonnie & Clyde, which normally would be totally exciting, but this one has a score by Frank Wildhorn, whose scores I usually hate more than later Lloyd Webber. So I'm a little wary. But I heard a lot of the music on the show's website and it's pretty good (actually, Wildhorn always writes good music, just lousy theatre songs). Also, the lyricist is Don Black, who wrote lyrics for "Tell Me on a Sunday" (half of Song and Dance), which I really like a lot. And it's directed by Jeff Calhoun, who directed that amazing Deaf West production of Big River, which was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

And I'm also seeing The Blue Flower, which sounds wild. Here's what Playbill.com says about the show: "Spanning two continents and half a century, The Blue Flower explores the romantic and tumultuous relationships among four young friends -- three artists and a scientist --as they create a world of art, revolution and passion amidst the turbulence and destruction of the World Wars." It goes on to say, "Set in Germany at the end of World War I and the beginning of the Weimar Republic, The Blue Flower is inspired by the lives of historical figures Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Hannah Höch, and Marie Curie. Influenced by the art movements -- particularly Dada and Surrealism -- and the political tenor of the day, Max, Hannah, Maria, and Franz try to make sense of the world in which they struggle to create, relate, and survive." That sounds a New Line show, doesn't it?

And of course, I always have to take A Trip to the Library (to reference one of my favorite show tunes), to the New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Collection, at Lincoln Center. This time, I'll be watching excerpts (that's all they have) from Promenade, a bizarre, absurdist musical from 1969 that I really want to produce, and the original Broadway production of Carrie. And then I'll also be watching a full tape of The Burnt Part Boys, a recent off Broadway musical that I heard a lot of good things about. Might be a New Line show...

Tomorrow and Monday are entirely travel days, so I'll essentially be in New York for three days and I'll see six shows. Not bad, huh? Go ahead and say it, I'm an addict. I don't care. I'm not ashamed of it.

At age 47, I don't have the same wide-eyed adoration for Broadway that I once had. Broadway is different now. I'm different now. Now that I get to work directly with the writers on some of our shows, I can see how often commercial considerations on Broadway ruin otherwise wonderful shows. Sure, Broadway still sometimes turns out great new musicals, but the truly interesting new shows (the ones I want to work on) almost never start on Broadway, even though sometimes they eventually get there. Still, tarnished as the Great White Way may be for me, it's still Broadway, and since before I could remember, that word has always carried with it more magic than any other word I can think of.

Come on along and listen to
The lullaby of Broadway,
The hi-de-hi and boop-a-doo,
The lullaby of Broadway.
The band begins to go to town
And everyone goes crazy...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Life is Like a Musical Comedy

2011-10-28T12:57:00.000-05:00

I just finished a great biography about George M. Cohan, the father of American musical comedy, called George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway. It's a really fun read, and at the end, the author quotes the last song Cohan wrote, for his last show, The Musical Comedy Man. Cohan died before the show could be produced. But his lyric is so much fun...

Life is what you make it,
It's just the way you take it,
Life can be a tragedy
Or life can be a song.
Scientific teachers,
Philosopher and preachers,
Have forty different themes on the way to get along.
But when all is said and done, why do they worry so?
To me, to look on life is just like looking at a show.

Life is like a musical comedy,
Life is like a travesty show.
Nobody seems to know just what it's about,
Yet ev'rybody's trying to figure it out.
Life, with all its girls and comedians --
Life is like a blackout revue.
Unexpected scenes, all the way through.
Life is make-believe and spectacular.
Life will hand you just a few laughs.
A little dialogue, then somebody sings,
Just like those Gilbert and Sullivan things.
Life is just the same over distant seas,
Life's a serious of inconsistencies.
Lights on, lights out -- before you know;
Life's just a great big musical show.

Hmmmm.... sort of the same sentiment we encountered at the end of Passing Strange --

The universe is a toy
In the mind of a boy,
And life is a movie, too,
Starring you.
Your whole family’s the cast and crew.
That’s a little secret between God and you.

Remember what Stew told us in Passing Strange -- "Some people feel like art is more real than life. And that really gives you something to think about..."

Yes it does.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Meta-Musicals

2011-10-23T14:33:00.002-05:00

Thinking some Deep Thoughts about musicals, with due thanks to God's Goofy Green Goodness for setting the psychic stage for me...

I'm thinking about "meta-musicals." According to Wikipedia, meta-theatre is theatre that "comments on itself, drawing attention to the literal circumstances of its own production, such as the presence of the audience or the fact that the actors are actors, and/or the making explicit the literary artifice behind the production." A meta-musical is one that goes beyond (the Greek meaning of meta) the normal confines and rules of the stage to comment more broadly on the experience of theatre itself. It's theatre about theatre. We do that a lot at New Line.

When New Line produced The Cradle Will Rock, we recreated the show's historic opening night in 1937 when it was performed from the audience because the union wouldn't allow the actors to appear onstage. We could have just produced Cradle as a regular show, but in creating that historical moment around that first performance, by making the audience itself part of the performance, our production went beyond the normal performance experience to create a larger "meta" event. The audience's presence and their watching of the show became part of the show -- they literally played the part of the original 1937 audience -- and our actors were playing actors in 1937 who were playing roles in The Cradle Will Rock.

The most obvious recent example of a meta-musical is [title of show] which really didn't work for me. Jeremy McCarter did a great job of explaining the show's misfires and shortcomings in his New York magazine review. The other recent show which is an on-again-off-again meta-musical is the excessively lauded The Book of Mormon, which is funny, but not as funny as it thinks it is, or as smart as we know its creators are. One blogger's review gets exactly right why Mormon doesn't totally work...

But not all meta-musicals are just about the cheap, easy laughs that come from repeated self-reference. Some meta-musicals are rich, complex, smart, thrilling pieces of theatre written by artists at the height of their powers, like Bat Boy and Urinetown. And that's what I've been thinking about...

Exhibit A. Passing Strange the musical is itself the thing the Youth in Passing Strange is seeking. The unusual force and power of the show comes from the fact the performance of the show itself, the sharing of it, is what the show is about. In the story, the Youth -- the younger self of the writer Stew -- is seeking The Real, in other words, authenticity, his own personal Great Truth, his place in the universe, his path. And what he discovers is that his Real is the expression of himself through art. And the art he (Stew/Youth) makes is Passing Strange. So through the entire story, we're going on this journey to find the experience we're in the midst of experiencing. Because art is expression, art needs an audience. So not only are we watching Passing Strange, we're necessary to its existence. We are of it.

The same is true of Chicago. It's a story about how the press and the public turn crime into entertainment and criminals into celebrities. The most brilliant moment in this brilliant show is at the end when Velma and Roxie thank us -- the audience -- and tell us, "We could not have done it without you." And we realize suddenly that we've gone along with it all night. We are complicit. We sat and watched murderers and we laughed with them, applauded them, got to like them, even root for them to get acquitted. They can't turn crime into entertainment without a public to sell it to, and we suddenly realize we're the public they just sold it to. The show becomes about us as much as the actors onstage. (To a lesser extent, the same thing happens at the end of Pippin.)

But let me digress for a moment. This analysis doesn't apply to the long-running Broadway revival of Chicago. Unfortunately, the producers of the revival stripped it of two of its most essential ingredients, its time period and its central metaphor. Setting the show in the 1920s is important because it lets the audience feel distance between them and these murderers. They can laugh at them because they're safely locked away in the past (and yes, Velma and Roxie are based on two real women murderers) -- until the end of the show when they spring the trap on us. When we get to those thank-yous in the last few moments of the show, Velma and Roxie aren't thanking an audience in the 1920s. They're thanking us, now. We're the problem.

When the producers discarded the show's 1920s period, they lost that amazing trap and a potent expression of the show's central point.

Likewise, Chicago was written so that every scene and every song are in the style of a common or famous vaudeville act -- the sister act, the ventriloquist act, the opera singer, the tableau vivant, the flash act, the exotic dance, the comedy sketch, the torch singer, the specialty dance acts, the comedian, the kid act... So literally, in front of our eyes, every moment in the story of these crimes is transformed into popular entertainment. We aren't watching a story about turning crime into entertainment; we are actually watching it happen. The show itself is what the show criticizes. (The same thing is at work in Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers.) This all pays off so strongly at the end when that trap is sprung. When the revival discarded the vaudeville metaphor, the show lost even more of its original power.

There's a good rule of storytelling -- the more specific the details, the more universal the appeal. It's the reason why Fiddler on the Roof was such a massive hit in Japan. The Japanese saw their culture portrayed so vividly in this Jewish-American musical. But the revival producers took away the specifics from Chicago and made it less universal and less powerful.

Like Passing Strange and Chicago, Cabaret also becomes the thing it's about. We watch this story and slowly understand its point over the course of the evening, that there is a cost to doing nothing in the face of evil. Being passive is as much a choice as taking action, the show argues. And we watch as Fraulein Schneider does nothing in the face of evil and perhaps we judge her for a moment, but then after her searing anthem "What Would You Do?" we wonder if maybe we'd do the same. It's a powerful message. But at the end of the show, when the freaky Emcee returns to end the story, we are brought back to the creepy cabaret, and we realize we've just spent an evening watching evil and doing nothing. Some of us may go further and think about all the evil we see on the evening news every night, and the trivial evils we see committed in the world every day. And we do nothing. And as we realize that, we become part of Cabaret. That's why the Emcee talks directly to us at the beginning and end of the show. The story may be set in Berlin in the 30s but this show, this performance of Cabaret, is here and now and tonight. We are part of what's going on and part of what's to be judged. After all, you can't sit and watch and do nothing, unless you're sitting and watching to begin with...

So I guess my point is that all meta-musicals are not created equal. When the meta-theatricality is the point, when the writers are lazy or bereft of any real ideas beyond mere self-reference, the joke wears thin pretty fast. When meta-theatricality is a tool to better illuminate an idea or central theme, that's smart, rich, interesting theatre. Even in 2011, people still tell me they don't like musicals (what most of them mean, of course, is that they don't like Rodgers and Hammerstein), and that musicals are dumb and trivial. Sure, [title of show] is, but Passing Strange, Chicago, Cabaret, Bat Boy, and Urinetown aren't.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott