Return to the Forbidden Planet

Today's my birthday. But that's not the reason I'm happy. The real reason is that after eight agonizing weeks of not being in rehearsal or performance, I'm finally going back into rehearsal Monday, this time for Shakespeare's forgotten rock and roll masterpiece, the deliciously bizarre Return to the Forbidden Planet.

This is a show I had heard about for years, but it always sounded like a silly, shallow catalog musical to me. It first opened in London in the late 1980s and was a surprise hit, winning the Olivier Award (their version of the Tonys) for Best Musical, beating out Miss Saigon. It's (really loosely) based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and on the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (which itself was also based on The Tempest). But what the show's creator Bob Carlton did with the material was pure wacky genius -- he based his musical on both sources, using character names from both, using some dialogue from the original Shakespeare, and around that built a show with fake Shakespearean dialogue (we call it Fakespeare), a 1950s sci-fi acting style, and a classic rock and roll score.

For no particular reason I can remember, I got hold of the London cast album last year and listened to it for the first time. Luckily, it's a live album, so not only can you hear the hilarious dialogue leading into many of the songs, but you can also hear the audience's laughs and cheers. I realized that there was much more there there than I had originally thought. Uncharacteristically, I had judged this weird show without even hearing or reading it. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I realized this might be a show we'd want to do. So I got hold of the script. And I just couldn't stop laughing. It's that funny. I sat alone in my living room reading it and repeatedly laughing out loud. But I also discovered that the show is really, really smart, retaining the serious themes of the two earlier versions, but also trading in the sly self-referential humor that musical theatre embraced so fully in the 1990s and still today. Return to the Forbidden Planet fits in quite nicely next to other quirky shows that came after it, like Hedwig, Urinetown, and High Fidelity, but also reaching back to the mostly subliminal social commentary of The Rocky Horror Show, Grease, and the original Star Trek.

(Hey, maybe we need a rock and roll Star Trek musical next...!)

Just like its precursors, Return to the Forbidden Planet is still about a central theme -- the idea of expanding human consciousness with technology (or Jedi-like magic in the original), unknowingly releasing the dangerous power of the human id, and thereby butting up against that timeless and universal truth, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There is serious stuff at the core of this show, but it's easy to ignore that part if you're so inclined. As the editors of Mother Jones magazine once wrote in an anniversary issue, "Better to give us thanks for knowing the importance of being un-earnest, of taking undignified chances, for having the courage to risk all, risk being wrong, risk looking foolish. If there is in fact any secret at all to our amazing longevity, that's surely near the heart of it: knowing how to act the fool like the future depends on it."

We've done that before and Lord knows we can do it again. It's sort of becoming our specialty.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Creative Genius

With this entry I embark upon treacherous and uncharted seas -- I'm about to talk about my art without the benefit of cannabis. I don't do that very often, because I believe God's Goofy Green Goodness opens up my puny human mind in ways that are uniquely worthy of the discussion of art. But this time is sorta different.

My buddy and fellow writer Sparger sent me this link to a video, a talk by author Elizabeth Glibert on the nature of art and creativity and genius -- and the unfair pressure we artists impose upon ourselves. It's about twenty minutes long, but it is soooo worth your time, I promise...


As often happens with such things, Sparger couldn't have had better timing. As I sit uncomfortably in the middle of a two-month break between shows, Ive been thinking a lot about stuff like this. I realized a while back, after reading director Anne Bogart's brilliant (and reassuring) book A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art in Theatre, that what I do is not about A Career or A Body of Work. It's not about Accomplishment or Achievement. It's just about doing good work. Just showing up and doing my job. The stakes are no longer so high for me.

I no longer believe that every piece of work I do has to be better than the one before it. I no longer have to "top" myself with each show or each book. It just has to be a serious, honest effort to say something of value in an interesting way. That's all. If it's a flop, then I'll learn some lessons from it. And if it's an incredible success, I probably won't really know why anyway...

Gilbert talks about how the ancient Greeks and Romans did not believe that genius (which really just meant creativity) resides inside a person but rather was an external divine force. I love that.

I like to think of myself as an antenna, always scanning the skies, listening to the world, being ready to receive, being ready to write down whatever fascinating things come charging into my neural circuits. I don't think of myself as the source of those things, but instead merely as the recognizer of them. And yes, that's where the pot comes in. A heaping bowl boosts the strength of my antenna, allowing it to pick up weaker signals I might otherwise miss, signals I might otherwise dismiss as just white noise. There's a lot of wonderful stuff in there! The pot rescues me from that overly judgemental internal editor that leaps to assess the value of every thought before it's fully explored.

I agree with Gilbert. It's time to free ourselves from Great Expectations and allow ourselves to be what we are at our artistic best -- a conduit, a servant. Because just being that is enough and it's more wonderful than most people will ever understand.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Obama's Economic Recovery Bill and US

It's so interesting to watch the debate over President Obama's economic recovery bill. It's kinda like a Terry Gilliam movie. It's as if the Americans voters had not in fact rejected Republican economic policies both in 2006 and 2008. It's as if the election a few months ago never even happened. The Republicans are incredibly pissed off because this bill isn't exactly the same thing they've been doing for the last eight years.

Which, as we can all too clearly see, did not work, as half a million people lose their jobs each month...

One interesting aspect of the surrealistic debate going on, on Fox News, on conservative talk radio (yes, I do listen to Hannity for laughs, but I can only listen for about 10 minutes at a stretch), and on the internet, is that the definition of "pork" has completely changed. "Pork," in legislative jargon, used to mean earmarks, those pet projects that were stuck into bills without debate or vote, usually in the conference committee. Of course, the truth is that though McCain bet his entire campaign on his pledge to eliminate pork, it's really only a tiny, tiny percentage of the Federal budget, less than 1%. So McCain's quixotic quest to clean up earmarks may have had philosophic appeal, but it would have changed virtually nothing in the real world.

But "pork" isn't just earmarks anymore. These days, "pork" is anything the Rabid Right doesn't like. So even though there are zero earmarks in the recovery bill, Hannity and the other fringe lunatics are as enraged as ever over all the "pork." (Have you also noticed they're trying really hard to replace the word "Democratic" with "Democrat," as in "the Democrat Congress"... maybe someone needs to remind them about the difference between adjectives and nouns. They are not interchangeable.) One of the Republicans' biggest outrages is funding in the bill for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). "That's not stimulative!" they all shout. (Clearly, they've never seen a New Line show...)

This is mostly because they hate the NEA in principle. They are as afraid of art as they are of science and France. What they refuse to consider (among a thousand or so other things) is that the NEA gives much of its money to the state arts agencies, in our case the Missouri Arts Council. And then that money goes in large part to PAYING WORKING ARTISTS.



The screaming fringers want to keep stock brokers employed but not artists. Why? Because artists reveal the truth, and that terrifies the Right. The truth is that our country is significantly worse off than it was eight years ago. The truth is that Bush Jr. did not keep us safe -- we were attacked by Al Qaeda on his watch, well into his first term. He destroyed our economy. He almost destroyed our government. (Why do we ever elect hard-core Republicans who keep telling us that government doesn't work? If they don't think it can work, why would we hire them to run it...???)

Every civilization that survives requires art and artists. As I've said before, we are the tribe shamans. We tell our stories. We record our civilization. How many of us have ever read English history books? But lots of us have seen English history through the lens of good ol' Will Shakespeare. The artists always get the last word.

And there's nothing the Crazies fear more than that. Well, except homosexuals...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott