When I Was a Boy

It was totally an accident, but once again I find myself working on a piece about the clash between the 1950s and the 1960s. If you haven't heard me ramble on about this before, here's a little taste --

I believe American politics for the last forty years has been entirely about a battle between the 1950s (conservatism) and the 1960s (liberalism). Although this last election might be the end of it -- McCain (the 50s) lost so decisively to Obama (the 60s) -- and since Obama is our first President who wasn't involved in any way in Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement, and since the folks who remember the 50s are becoming fewer and fewer, this battle may soon be over. But what a fucking battle it's been!

And of course, musical theatre has dissected and commented upon this battle like other art forms have. It was obviously at the center of Hair.

But The Rocky Horror Show is about this battle too, with Brad as the straight-laced 1950s, Janet as the sexually adventurous 1960s, and Frank N. Furter as the Sexual Revolution itself, for both better and worse. But in Rocky everybody loses.

Grease is also about this, with Danny as the 60s, and Sandy/Sandra Dee as the 50s. And at the end of the show, Sandy crosses over to the 60s with a defiant (and literal) "Fuck it!"

Last night I caught Animal House on cable, a movie I truly believe is a masterpiece of social satire. And Animal House, set in 1962, is about this epic battle too -- the whole movie is a battle between the forces of chaos (the 60s) versus the forces of order (the 50s), and the 60s win, literally tearing down the 50s at the end.

Charlie Starkweather was right at the heart of all this in 1958 -- he represented everything adults feared about the coming 1960s: rock and roll, teen sex, teen movies, fast cars, "juvenile delinquents," in fact, all of teen culture. To some extent, though less explicitly, Love Kills is also sort of about this big cultural battle, with Charlie and Caril representing the chaos and anarchy of the coming 1960s, and Merle and Gertrude as defenders of what's right and decent and worthy of Eisenhower's (smothering but superficially ordered) 1950s.

I don't know if that 50s vs. 60s thing is as key to 20th century America as I think it is, or if it's just because I came out of the 60s and want to understand those churning cultural forces that birthed me. I realize now, looking back on my childhood in the 60s and 70s, that even within my own family there was that battle between these two visions of America.

Charlie and Caril were the real-life demons that terrified adults in 50s movies like The Wild Ones and Rebel Without a Cause. But why is that terror still with us? Why are the conservatives so terrified of nonprofit healthcare? Why are they so terrified of hip-hop culture? Why do they still fetishize the "Other," first the Communists, then the Blacks, then the hippies, then the rappers, then the Mexicans, now "the terrorists" (which to them often means all Arab men)...?

We have another piece of the puzzle here, but the picture still isn't decipherable. Maybe it never will be. Maybe it's just too complicated... But it sure is interesting!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nothing is Real

With every show, I try to find a show-specific collective nickname for the cast and staff. For Urinetown, it was the Urinators. For Spelling Bee, it was the Spellers; for Return to the Forbidden Planet, the Crew; for Hair, the Osage (our tribe name); for Johnny Appleweed, the Stoners; and for High Fidelity, the Hi-Fi-ers (true, some are less elegant than others). Well, this time, for Love Kills, I think I'm settling on the Love-Killers. What do you think?

We've staged half the show now, and I feel great. I feel like everybody's on the same page, like we all instinctively understand the style and energy of the show, and also like everybody is really happy to be working on this.

I'm also realizing as I work that this is becoming my favorite kind of musical theatre -- non-naturalistic, fully acknowledging the audience and the fact that this is a stage performance. This open artificiality allows me to do some really spare, lean, less realistic -- but I think often more expressive -- staging. It's very Brecht in certain ways. Frank Bradley, our set designer, is giving me an almost-abstract space to work in, and I really feel like I know where we're headed with this show visually.

In a lot of fundamental ways, Love Kills will use the style and vocabulary of our productions of Assassins, Urinetown, Cabaret, Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, March of the Falsettos, and others. My favorite kind of theatre is the kind that never pretends, even for a second, that what's on stage is real -- because we all know it isn't, so why pretend? Why not admit that this is artificial by design, that this is storytelling, and it's wonderful for what it is, and it's one of the most fundamental and primal of human needs?

In other words, it doesn't need to be "real" to be real.

The more we work on the Love Kills script, the more complexity and ambiguity we find. Each of the four relationships has a very tangled connection. There is both innocence and evil in Charlie, maybe in Caril too. There is both sanity and madness in them both. There is both love and coldness between Merle and Gertrude, and they have both gratitude and resentment toward each other. There's both empathy and envy between Gertrude and Caril, and also both fear and, most interestingly for Gertrude, identification.

And then there's Merle and Charlie. Merle never tells anybody what he thinks or feels (aside from his one "interior monologue" song, "Hard Man"), and nobody can ever tell when Charlie's telling the truth or not. So their relationship is the darkest and scariest and most unpredictable of all. I love dark and scary and unpredictable!

Monday night, we'll run through what we've staged so far, and then we'll start staging the rest. It's not long before we move into the theatre! Ack!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We Did It All for Love

Week One of rehearsals is done and we are all so psyched!

My God, this score is incredible. We've noticed how much the show's creator Kyle Jarrow has used music to characterize, like all the best musicals do. The show has four characters - Charlie and Caril (the murderers), and the Sheriff and his wife. Charlie and Caril's music is mostly what I would call alternative rock, some of it very much like the best glam rock. But the Sheriff and his wife get 50s music, both doo-wop and other period forms -- the Sheriff gets a waltz for one of his more interior songs. Kyle has drawn this clear line between the generations by what kind of sound he gives them. This is terrific writing!

We've also realized how well wrought these lyrics are. In some cases, they sound very much like real rock/pop lyrics, with lots of repetition and often what seems like shallow emotions. But if you really listen closely, there are hundreds of tiny, subtle moments that elevate the lyrics and slyly give us information about these kids' thoughts, fears, desires, loneliness, and lots more. And so often, when there is repetition, there is also subtle variation that changes the emotion or context just enough that it moves us forward dramatically.

Check out this lyric in which Charlie berates the audience:

You stare at the newspaper pictures
They shock like a kick in the crotch
But I know you like what you're seeing
I know you love to watch

It's like watching a movie
And we're the stars of the movie
And it's a comedy movie
And it's terribly funny
And it's terribly funny how...

Now the roads all run with blood
From the people we killed
And the countryside could flood
With all that we spilled
Cause we did it all for love
And we'd be doing it still...
That's the funny thing.

That's some powerful shit. It's completely in Charlie's voice, but it reveals things about him that he doesn't even know he's revealing. The movie references remind us how he fetishized James Dean and saw Rebel Without a Cause several times. But it also shows us the self-delusion, that he murdered "for love." And what I like most about this song is that Charlie is indicting the audience for being complicit in his crime by lapping up all the salacious details...

This show was presented for six performances at the New York Musical Theatre Festival and I read some of the reviews from those performances -- they're not entirely positive, but I think these reviewers really missed a lot of what's in this material. That may be partly because most musical theatre in New York these days isn't terribly subtle or complex, so maybe some of the New York reviewers just aren't used to looking into a musical that deeply. We often have the same problem with St. Louis reviewers...

Like some of my other favorite theatre writers (Bill Finn, Larry O'Keefe, Adam Guettel, Tom Kitt, Jason Robert Brown), Kyle knows how to use a rock/pop vocabulary in the theatre without violating it. The songs in Love Kills are honest-to-god real rock and roll, but they're also excellent theatre songs. They have the repetition and surface simplicity of real rock and pop, but they also have the continually unfolding complexity and communication of important information that theatre songs need to do good storytelling.

For years, real rock didn't work on Broadway, with only a few exceptions. Rock is by definition repetitive, with the lyric usually taking a backseat to the beat, but theatre songs have to communicate a ton of info about character, context, plot, themes, etc. During the mid-1990s, suddenly a bunch of songwriters showed up who could both juggle and fuse the inherent characteristics of both forms, creating rock musicals that sounded far more like rock and roll than like Broadway -- with shows like Hedwig, Rent, Bat Boy, Songs for a New World, Myths and Hymns, The Capeman, and more recently, High Fidelity and Spring Awakening.

In the past, the Golden Age of Musical Theatre has been defined as Oklahoma! (1943) to Fiddler on the Roof (1964). I've never agreed with that. I'd say 1925-1950 was an important time when the art form found its voice. But for my money, the real Golden Age was 1960-1975, including shows like The Fantasticks, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, Jacques Brel, JC Superstar, Hair, Company, Follies, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Rocky Horror...

But think of the amazing work being done right now -- Spring Awakening, Next to Normal, Spelling Bee, Avenue Q, In the Heights, Passing Strange, Grey Gardens, Jersey Boys, The Light in the Piazza... I believe we're in a new Golden Age of American musical theatre right now.

It's such an exciting time to be working in this art form!!

Long live the Musical!
Scott

Love Kills

We've started work on Love Kills, the new rock musical by Kyle Jarrow, about Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, two teenage spree killers in 1958 Nebraska who murdered eleven people before being caught. It's an incredible piece of theatre, powerful, disturbing, riveting, wildly original, and with just four actors.

The show was done for six performances at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2007, but we're the first ones to do a fully produced run. It's always so much fun to do a new piece, especially when we're in contact with the author (who I think will be flying in to see it) and Kyle is really open to our ideas, our questions, etc. He's really terrific. (And he's currently working on a new project with Duncan Sheik, the composer of Spring Awakening.)

We have a great cast -- Philip Leveling (who played the Bosun in Return to the Forbidden Planet) as Charlie; Taylor Pietz (who did Best Little Whorehouse with us in 2003) as Caril Ann; Zak Farmer (who's been in every New Line show since summer 2007, except for Spelling Bee) as Sheriff Merle Karnopp; and Alison Helmer (our Yvonne in Sunday in the Park and Emma Goldman in Assassins) as Gertrude Karnopp.

What first grabbed me about this show was the score -- an exciting, rowdy, visceral rock score (Kyle calls it emo), sometimes 50s doo-wop, sometimes really hard rock, sometimes emo/glam rock ballads -- but make no mistake, this is not Broadway rock, this is real rock and roll.

But what really sold me is Kyle's incredibly smart, raw, complex, subtle script -- less about the murders than about these damaged, emotionally disconnected people. Like Assassins, you come away realizing (to your horror) that these murderers aren't all that different from you and me; and like Assassins, the show doesn't really judge Charlie and Caril, which is so deliciously unsettling...

One of the weird things about the show for me is that there's no piano in the band -- it's just guitar, bass, and drums. Which means there's no piano score! So in rehearsal, I have to play from a guitar score and do my best to imitate on the piano what the guitar will be doing later. It's not the first time -- I had to do the same with Hedwig -- but it's really different for me. Still, I'm getting the hang of it...

I realized a while back that what New Line does best -- and what our audiences love most -- are those shows that are sui generis, that are their own genre, their own style, their own sound. We've done so many shows that are unlike anything else you've ever seen -- Bat Boy, Urinetown, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Rocky Horror, Hedwig, Spelling Bee, Assassins, The Cradle Will Rock, A New Brain, Hair, High Fidelity, Jacques Brel, Songs for a New World, March of the Falsettos, The Nervous Set, Sunday in the Park, Floyd Collins... and now, Love Kills. I could list more -- the vast majority of the shows we've produced fit into this category...

And I think that's the primary reason we just finished the most financially and critically successful season we've had in 18 years -- despite the tough times!

As with most of our shows, I just can't wait to share this awesome show with our audiences. I know people are going to be blown away by the power and honesty and emotion of it. And I bet we'll have lots of repeat customers again, just like we did for all three shows this past season.

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Finale

I usually check back in with the blogworld right after we close a show. Not sure why it's taken me almost a week this time...

So yes, Spelling Bee did close, after an absolutely triumphant fucking run! THANK YOU, ST. LOUIS! Rave reviews, big houses, lots of repeat customers, the perfect cast in brilliant material, with a great band, terrific choreography, and (if I do say so myself) strong direction. It was hard to close it, and say goodbye to this weird world and wonderful characters.

This whole season has been such an incredible success, more than I would have ever expected. Hair blew people's minds (though I knew it would) and so very many people just fell in love with it, quite a few of them seeing the show multiple times. Then Forbidden Planet, possibly the oddest show I've ever done, also found an adoring audience, rave reviews, and repeat customers. And now Spelling Bee, embraced so fully by audiences -- every single night the audience was soooo engaged. It wasn't just about the jokes; it was about really thoughtful, artful, insightful material being performed by brilliant character actors working together with the precision of a Swiss watch. It reminded me a lot of our Bat Boy, one of those New Line shows that has become legendary.

So now this week I'm off, and then next week, we start work on Love Kills. And I have to tell you, the more I work on this material, the more I play the score, the more I find unbelievable artistry and depth and subtlety in it. This is going to be such a blast to work on, and a real change of pace from last season.

Last season was the Season of Laughs. This season looks like it's gonna be the Season of Death and Despair. Well, you know what they say, variety is the spice of life. Variety and cinnamon. And besides, we've haven't done drama this relentlessly intense since Kiss of the Spider Woman in 2005. It'll be great to flex those muscles again. I can't wait to get to work!

Spelling Bee will forever have a special place in my heart. It's not often you get to work on art that special. But the new season holds some pretty awesome work ahead...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott