And the Booze Was Free

I've been doing some research on 1928, the year the poem The Wild Party was written, and the year we're setting New Line Theatre's production of The Wild Party, to help our actors and designers. Here's some of what I found out...

In 1928, the average cost of a house is $2,500, a car costs $300, gas is 21 cents a gallon, and a loaf of bread costs 5 cents.

At least 1,565 people die in 1928 from drinking bad bootleg liquor, hundreds are blinded, and many are murdered in the bootlegger wars. Federal agents arrest more than 75,000 people a year for violating Prohibition.

1928 marks the first appearance of CBS, Peter Pan peanut butter, Rice Krispies, adhesive tape, shredded wheat, Philco radios, Mickey Mouse, penicillin, the Oscars, and Double Bubble bubblegum, and the book Lady Chatterly’s Lover is banned in the US and UK.

Calvin Coolidge is President, but later this year, Herbert Hoover will beat Al Smith in the Presidential election. Hoover campaigns on “rugged individualism” (hmmm... that sounds familiar...) and will take us right into the Depression (by doing many of the things Republicans are advocating today)…

Walt Disney opens Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon with sound. Charlie Chaplin says publicly, “Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics.”

In 1928, vaudeville (where several of these characters work) is at the height of its popularity, and an estimated 2 million people daily attend performances given at the approximately 1000 vaudeville theatres in the U.S. The Palace Theater in New York City is the leading theatre on the vaudeville circuit, and to appear there is the aspiration of every vaudeville performer. The star performers, or "headliners," included the singers Nora Bayes and Eva Tanguay, the comedians Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields, and the comedy duo of Weber and Fields. Not only American but also foreign performers appear in American vaudeville houses, including the Scottish singer-comedian Sir Harry Lauder, the French singer Yvette Guilbert and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt.

Popular Songs include “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “Button Up Your Overcoat,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Short’nin’ Bread,” “Stout-Hearted Men”

Popular musicians include Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Rudy Vallee.

On Broadway, audiences were seeing Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and still running, the popular Abie’s Irish Rose (which St. Louis' own Act Inc. will be producing this summer). Forty-three new musicals open on Broadway in 1928, including Oh Kay!, Rosalie, The Three Musketeers, Greenwich Village Follies, Present Arms, Blackbirds of 1928, George White’s Scandals, Earl Carroll’s Vanities, The New Moon, Hold Everything, Animal Crackers, Treasure Girl, Whoopee, and others. Still running from the previous season are Rio Rita, Hit the Deck!, Good News, A Connecticut Yankee, Artists and Models, Funny Face, and Show Boat.

What a wild time to live in America (particularly in a big city)! It's just a year before the Great Depression. Vaudeville is at its peak. Television has been invented but most people won't see it for decades yet. As one of the books I'm reading put it, this was a time when our country was finally throwing off the social and sexual conventions of the Victorian Age and America was becoming truly Modern for the first time.

Twenty-three skidoo!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Zen and the Art of The Wild Party

I used to spend much of the rehearsal process worrying about the end -- will this thing or that thing work itself out, will the singers be heard over the band, will the staging work, will people be offended by this or that, will the audience "get it," what if it's not polished enough, what if my ideas aren't as good as I think they are...

Worrying that much is a lot of work.

I realized today that I'm just not that guy anymore. Maybe it's about being 45 (well, 46 as of this weekend...). Maybe it's about how many shows I've directed. Maybe it's those books on Zen philosophy I've been reading the last couple years. But for the last several shows, I don't think about the end product much at all anymore. I don't worry about the show itself. (I still worry about having a space, selling tickets, etc., but not about the artistic end.)

Probably some of that is because there really isn't a risk of sucking anymore. I don't think New Line Theatre has ever done a bad show -- we've done some that weren't as good as others, but a lot of our shows are home runs, and the ones that aren't are still doubles or triples... But when we work on material this brilliant, show after show, with artists this talented and skilled and committed, it's not possible to end up with a sucky show. It's just not.

So I find now that I just enjoy the adventure. I no longer wonder what the reviewers or my mother will think. I just let the material and my fellow artists take us where we go. As Buckaroo Banzai says, "Wherever you go, there you are!" (If you've never seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, you're missing out...) In other words, we're always in the act of going somewhere. Always. Destinations are never the end. (As anyone who's seen Into the Woods can tell you...)

I'm now okay not knowing exactly what our destination is. I know we'll get there, one way or another. How could I look at this amazing cast of 16 wildly talented people, our designers, and everybody else involved, and not feel GREAT...? I look at this script and listen to this score and there's no doubt in my mind that most people who see this will be amazed by it, totally entertained by it, and deeply moved by it. No, we're not a union company and we don't have a big budget and millionaires on our board, but dammit, we get to work with incredible people on many of the most beautiful, most artful, most adventurous works this art form has ever produced. Fuck Broadway. Seriously. I'm so completely in musical theatre heaven here...

I used to have to "sell" the actors on every show, convince them that it will be cool, that they will be proud of it, that people will like it. I almost never have to do that anymore. That may have something to do with my own new found calm and Zen-icity. But I think it's more about our agenda. We're not here to make money, to have a "hit," to be loved by everyone -- we're here to make good art and tell the best story we can tell. Whatever the end product, I know it will be the best story we can tell. And that's plenty. If some folks don't like it, that's okay too. We know our work is not for everyone. But our nineteen years of sell-outs prove our work is for LOTS of people...

Which makes it very easy to be very Zen about the whole thing. And it allows me to like rehearsal more than I used to. There's no pressure anymore, other than doing my best. And if I'm working on a musical, "my best" is my favorite thing in the world to do...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

That's How to Throw a Party

We had our first rehearsal last night, and goddamn this is a great cast! Fun people with awesome voices. They've got a big, powerful, gusty sound. This show isn't going to be easy, but it's going to be so much damn fun!

I've learned over the years that it's really important what I schedule for the first night of rehearsal. I always start off with a song they can learn relatively quickly and then have lots of fun singing it. Last night we started with "A Wild, Wild Party." Then I also usually give them one of the hardest pieces in the show, so they know what they're in for. It sets the tone -- this will be very cool, but we're all gonna work our asses off. Last night, that number was the opening -- really, really weird and creepy, but extremely cool... The cast did great on both of them. But my hands and arms were sore by the end of the night from playing the piano. Who knew I should've gone into training before starting rehearsal...?

I love working on a show this rich and layered and honest. It makes me love this art form even more. It's so wonderful to live inside this beautiful, intricate intertwining of words and music and mood. I really believe making art is how we touch God. And the theatre is my church.

Sometimes people will say to me, "Don't forget -- it's show business." And I say, "No, it's not." I work in theatre, not in show business. And I'm not embarrassed to call it art and to call myself a theatre artist. Lots of theatre people are scared of using those words, but I think we all ought to embrace the art of musical theatre, show it respect, give it only our best, and do our best to move it forward. Today in our ironic, postmodern world, the intensely emotional art form of musical theatre is thriving, growing, expanding its possibilities, exploring whole new universes of storytelling (just look at Hedwig, Passing Strange, Noise/Funk, Spring Awakening). People need it even more now.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons this recent overabundance of musicals that mock musicals really bothers me. For one thing, I was exploring similar territory back in the early 1990s, so it doesn't seem like anything new to me. I came up with an idea for a show during my senior year in college in 1986. My roommate David and I discussed my idea at great length throughout all of senior year -- 'cause it was a complex motherfucker. The premise was this: Jason has figured out that he doesn't exist and is only a character in a musical comedy. Because the people around him do not share this self-awareness, they think he's crazy. Simple enough. But once you start peeling back the layers of this onion, you keep finding complications. We eventually decided that Jason is always aware that he's singing and he can talk with the audience. But the other characters, like all traditional musical comedy characters, cannot see the audience and are not aware that they're singing (or of harmony or choreography). Which makes duets tricky. To them, Jason is literally talking to the fourth wall when he addresses the audience. But does he live this two-hour story over and over every night? If he's aware of the nature of his existence, how much more is he aware of? What exactly is "reality" for him?

The show eventually became Attempting the Absurd, the second show New Line Theatre ever produced, in 1992. Eventually the driver of the plot became Jason's journey to find a place where he can fit in, and he finds it with a friendly community theatre company. But his mother has him arrested on trumped up charges, and at the climax, standing in court, Jason produces the script for Attempting the Absurd, proving to the judge that he's really not crazy and that they all are in a musical comedy. (Cool trivia: Joel Hackbarth, who's in Wild Party, played the judge in Attempting the Absurd.) It really is one of my favorite shows I've written. Maybe someday we'll do it again.

And I think the difference, between what Attempting the Absurd and Urinetown do and what title of show and The Musical of Musicals do, has to do with content versus device. Absurd and Urinetown don't mock themselves or musicals in general; they deconstruct them, they take them apart and play with them, subvert them. And the purpose is not to laugh at musicals but to explore them, for the audience to become aware of all their moving parts in a very Brechtian way, and in the process, to recognize in a new way this uniquely American form of pop culture. The agenda with these shows is awareness.

But with title of show and The Musical of Musicals, the only agenda is to refer to themselves and to other musicals. That's the extent of it. Sure, these shows can make an audience laugh, but that's not hard -- after all, babies and dogs can make people laugh. With these one-joke musicals, the whole show is based on the "joke" that the show REFERS to itself, and that's supposed to be somehow subversive or outrageous. From my (totally biased) perspective, that doesn't make for an evening of theatre. Self-reference goes all the way back to Shakespeare (probably further, but it's been a long time since theatre history class), but an evening of self-reference is not storytelling. It's just showing off.

A big part of my problem with these shows is that, however affectionately, they dismiss musical theatre as something ridiculous. I have discovered such incredible richness and beauty in the musical theatre over the years. This art form continually amazes me with its versatility, its power, its guts, its outrageousness, its gigantic heart. And what I love more than anything else in life is turning other people on to that artistic miracle that a really great musical can be. It's not ridiculous and it's not something to be embarrassed about (which is the most disturbing undercurrent in title of show). Working on a piece like The Wild Party is so thrilling. It's powerful and truthful and subversive and its got jumbo coconut balls. And it makes me really proud of my art form.

I've become a fan lately of a Canadian TV show (on DVD) called Slings and Arrows, set in a regional theatre -- totally hilarious and freakishly true-to-life. And I heard a quote on an episode the other night that struck me as so exactly right...

I don't think theatre is about technology. It's about what happens right now, in front of an audience. And you can't download it and you can't tape it. Its very essence is ephemeral. It needs to stay the size of a human body, just as loud as a human voice. And its only function, its sole reason for being, is to tell you a story you absolutely need to hear.

The Wild Party certainly qualifies. In America in 2010, we all need to ask, "How did we come to this?" And Love Kills, Hair, Spelling Bee, High Fidelity, Assassins, and so many other shows we've done also qualify. Good art makes order out of the chaos of the world. We need that as human beings because there's a lot of chaos out there. We need to confront the dark side, the demons, the devils, and take a look at them square in the eye. We're Luke Skywalker on Dagobah.

I think we're due for a party...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Wild Party

When New Line Theatre closed Love Kills in October, I thought this week would never get here! But it did. Thank god. If it hadn't, we might have had to deal with a giant rip in the space-time continuum or something, and that's never fun...

So we finally start rehearsals this Thursday for Andrew Lippa's brilliant, rowdy, jazz musical, The Wild Party. (Lippa is also composer and lyricist for the new Addams Family musical.) Alison, the assistant director for The Wild Party and one of New Line's board members, has been bugging me for a really long time to do this show, but I've been scared of it... There's a ton of music -- the piano score is heavier than my cat! (And I've got a big-ass cat!) And it's really tough music! And it's got a big cast (by our standards) -- we'll have 16 in our cast. And there are five big dance numbers!

Ack!

But I've been playing the score now for several months and it is so AMAZINGLY fun! Once I figured out how to stretch my poor li'l fingers around those mammoth, crunchy, jazz chords, I found out how crazy fun this score is to play! (Strangely enough, my shoulders have been sore lately, and I've finally realized it's the incredibly athletic piano playing I've been doing on Wild Party -- yes, it's that demanding...)

I think the same will be true for the actors -- it will be hard to learn the score and they'll have to work their asses off, but once they do, I think they'll all have the time of their lives singing it.

For me, part of what makes the show so interesting right now is its (probably accidental) relevance to our country right now. The mad pursuit of individual success and wealth, at the expense of the community, has so plagued us for the last ten years -- it's at the core of our economic meltdown. We had a "wild party" in this country (or at least some of us did) and now we're paying the price. When everyone is interested only in their own welfare, you can be sure that the success of the few will come at the expense of the many. It's only at the end of The Wild Party that Queenie understands this. "How did we come to this?" she asks.

Yeah, no shit, how did we?

This is a show (fuck that, it's a whole season) that explores the darkest side of humanity. The great device of Wild Party is that one selfless man (Black) enters a room full of entirely selfish people, and by the end, at least one of them has opened her eyes -- just as we're all doing now.

People ask me why we do so many dark shows. The answer is easy: the dark side is a lot more interesting than the happy side. But it goes deeper than that. We don't learn much from seeing happy people. But we learn a lot from exploring the darkness. People go to the theatre to connect, to make sense of the insanity of our world, to try to understand themselves and each other. Musicals like [title of show] and Legally Blonde can be lots of fun, but what do we take away from them...? It's like a dinner of doughnuts -- sounds awesome till you get the bellyache...

There's a reason New Line is in our 19th season. People want to experience what we create. You're gonna be exhausted at the end of The Wild Party, but you'll have had a fucking blast on the New Line roller coaster! And if we do our job right, you'll leave with some insight into what drives us -- all of us -- to our darker moments. And it will be comforting to be reminded that we all have those darker moments. It's a tough ride for all of us.

As Ben Kingsley once said about actors, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you." And that's what theatre is about. Not just to divert you, but to remind you that you are not alone. Even at your darkest hour.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The "bare" Truth

We're still working on programming New Line Theatre's next season. It really is a long, difficult process, trying to fashion a season that hangs together in some way, that includes both something adventurous and something that we're fairly confident will sell well (without, of course, ever violating our mission statement). As is often the case, this time, two of the three shows came pretty easily...

It's been months now that we've had both I Love My Wife, the jazz musical, and Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Shakespearean rock musical, solidly on the list, and I don't think that will change. It's the third slot that's been tough. We've looked at quite a few shows -- The Story of My Life, Ordinary Days, etc. -- all great shows we may do someday, but not exactly the right fit for next season, which will be our 20th!

But I think maybe we're coming down the programming home stretch now. We're considering very seriously an exciting, fairly new show called bare: a pop opera. If you're a musical theatre geek and you're under thirty, you already know this show. If you're over thirty, you might not. I didn't.

I'm over 30.

It is what its label-title says: a genuine pop opera, using the structure and devices of opera, but the musical vocabulary of contemporary pop music -- not rock, mind you, pop. I've been wanting to produce Boy George's brilliant Taboo (the rights situation is really complicated), partly because its score is also really pure pop. I love the idea of using pop music for a musical, largely because most people think pop music is simplistic and commercial and not Seriously Artistic. But after working on High Fidelity and really digging deep into the world of pop music, I came out of that show with a new found respect for pop.

bare (and yes, the title is usually lower-case) is about five students grappling with sex, love, and religion in a Catholic high school, with a gay relationship at the center of the story. Everyone may not think it's a masterwork of musical theatre, but it is really good storytelling and really good music. And it taps into the current zeitgeist like few shows ever do. It reminds me a lot of Rent in the way it works, even to a certain extent in its sound. But though Rent's sound was more 1980s pop/rock, the score to bare is more contemporary. Yes, sometimes it's a bit overly sincere, a bit too earnest, but I think that's just this story. That's who these characters are. A slicker, more sophisticated brand of storytelling would be wrong for this story. There is a rawness here (like Rent) that is part of what makes the show work so well and makes it feel so damn authentic.

I've Googled the show to find reviews, etc. and what I find is that the show's reviews are often kind of grudgingly complimentary, criticizing individual elements of the show but admitting that the audience loves it and that it is genuinely involving emotionally.

Still, here are a few questions not yet worked out in my fevered brain... First, I wanted to put bare in our March 2011 slot, but everyone seems to agree that if we need 13 college kids and high school seniors (we don't cast anyone under 17), that's gonna be harder during the school year. But if we put bare in our June 2011 slot, then we'll be auditioning it in March, just a couple weeks before starting rehearsals; so if we don't find the right cast, I won't have much time at all to go recruiting, as we often have to do.

Also, despite its cult status, can we indeed find the cast we need, with strong acting chops, great pop voices, and the right physical "types"? One of the two leads is a basketball player, so he has to look like he could be that. One of the secondary leads is an overweight girl, who has to be a great actor and a great comedian and willing to sing a song about herself called "Plain Jane Fat-Ass." And then, of course there's the other question: can we get an audience...? If so, I think bare could be really great for New Line -- we do get a decent audience of that age group for most shows, but really targeting that demographic would be very healthy for New Line, longterm.

I think our recent work in building New Line's Facebook community will help with this, but will it be enough to get the word out as widely as we'll need to? What other things can we do? I've thought about maybe having a contest to make an internet promo video for the show. In fact, I'm thinking of ways to incorporate video into New Line's online experience in general -- it seems to be the one tool we're not really using effectively. I've become a HUGE fan lately of David Siteman Garland, a local guy who's a genius at using social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to build your business -- his daily videos at The Rise to The Top have been incredibly helpful to me. I really want the New Line experience to extend beyond the walls of the physical theatre. I want to keep our fans and supporters involved with us, even between shows. And David's tips are a GODSEND.

And all this connects back to bare. I don't want New Line to become a middle-aged company just because I'm middle-aged now. I want to make sure we keep young performers and young audiences excited about our work and involved in what we're doing. I do have some doubts and concerns about bare but my gut tells me this is exactly the right show at the right time, and it may well accomplish exactly what we've been trying to accomplish lately. And my gut is never wrong. Seriously, like never.

So it's not a done deal yet, but I think we're gonna do bare, most probably auditioning in March, going into rehearsal in early April, and running the month of June. If anyone has any brilliant ideas about getting young people to the audition (there are, by the way, two adult roles as well) and also getting them into the seats, let us know!

And if you haven't already, come be a Fan on Facebook and Twitter!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott