Laughing at Our Neighbors

The last two rehearsals have been very cool and we've really moved the ball forward. Monday night we ran Act II and last night we ran Act I. Next week we move into the theatre and start running the whole show together. I can't wait for that!

After Monday night's rehearsal, the cast had a million questions for me, which I was very happy about! That meant they were comfortable enough with lines, lyrics, harmonies, staging, choreography, etc., that their focus was now shifting to the Bigger Things, style, tone, character, motivation, objectives, relationships, etc.

They had lots of questions about who they were at different moments in the show. What's fascinating about The Wild Party is that the whole cast has named characters to play, and sometimes they are playing these characters being at this party, and sometimes they are playing these characters, but as narrators or Greek chorus, standing outside the action, narrating or commenting on it. And sometimes those two functions turn on a dime -- they'll be narrating, third-person, to the audience, and on the next beat, they're back living inside the story. It's very bold, confident writing, but a fairly complex, conceptual idea for an actor to play. Urinetown sorta worked this way, but not to the extent that Wild Party does.

I think part of what makes the show so unique is its source material, Joseph Moncure March's amazing original poem. At first, Andrew Lippa planned just to set the poem to music, but he soon realized that there's very little dialogue in the poem, and so it would make a very inactive show. Instead, Lippa used some language straight from the poem, but allowed himself to stretch outside the boundaries of his source material. The brilliance of his writing is how well he straddles the twin ideas of narration and direct action; and the back-and-forth between the two is part of what gives the show the considerable energy that propels the story forward.

We also talked Monday about the Big Picture. This story is essentially a two-person story. At the very beginning, Queenie tells us directly that she thinks the way to re-spark her relationship with Burrs is to throw a party and publicly humiliate him. (Nice couple, huh?) It's very much a Jazz Age Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- humiliation as sport.

I talked with the cast about how Burrs' humiliation is only public -- and therefore, substantially more painful and destructive -- if they are there. They have to participate in that humiliation. They are accomplices to the tragedy at the end. They have to collectively drive Burrs towards his drunken nervous breakdown in Act II, and his song "Let Me Drown."

I found myself using the word creepy a lot the last two nights...

And that conversation revealed something new to me. I had been seeing a parallel between The Wild Party and the many scandals of the last ten years in America (Enron, AIG, wars and tax cuts that weren't paid for, dishonest political debate, really disturbing reality TV, screaming pundit cable TV, etc.) -- lots of selfishness, immorality, irresponsibility, disregard for others, lies, betrayals...

But I see another, perhaps more interesting parallel -- the death of civility. There's such a nastiness in our national discourse now, arguably going all the way back to 1994 and the Gingrich Revolution. Before that, politicians compromised and cooperated. In the 1980s, President Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill would go to battle over some issue, work until they found a compromise, then have a drink together when it was all over. Not anymore. Can you imagine Congressional Republicans kicking back with President Obama after the healthcare bill passed?

The Wild Party seems to be either metaphor or microcosm for those moments in American history when anger and fear supersede reason and decency. It happened during the Depression and during the 1960s. In recent days, protesters in DC have actually spit on members of Congress, calling them "nigger" and "faggot." Is that all that far from Burrs calling Queenie a "lazy slut"? It's not a surprise that Lippa wrote this show during the latter years of the Clinton presidency.

This isn't as dark a show as Love Kills, because at least in The Wild Party, there is some self-awareness, some clarity, maybe even redemption of sorts, at the end. As the show ends, Queenie asks the party-goers -- and the audience -- "How did we come to this?" But the real question is will we ask ourselves that? And if we do, what will we do with the answer?

If there is a message here (I keep telling the cast that this is a fable at its heart), maybe it's that those darker impulses and emotions are inside all of us, and we're not always conscious of when they take us over. It takes real effort and vigilance to keep those dark forces at bay, to keep them from destroying the people around us and ourselves (a message this show shares with Bat Boy). It's not always easy to be civil, but when we give up trying, we get America in 2010...

We're all so sure.
We're all so wise.
No limits,
No bound'ries,
No compromise.
Laughing at our neighbors,
Smiling through a hiss,
How did we come to this?

We're all amused,
We're all inspired,
So cunning,
So clever,
And so admired.
Easy to be angry,
Easy to dismiss,
How did we come to this?

Tell me I've been
living in a daydream,
Tell me I've been talking in my sleep.
If I've been awake,
Pardon my mistake,
But time is running low,
And talk is growing cheap.

We play our games,
We place our bets,
No witness,
No weakness,
And no regrets.
Filling up with frenzy,
Killing with a kiss,
How did we all come to this...?

Yeah, no shit.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

And the Music Would Swell

When I start blocking most shows, I have fully worked-out intellectual under-pinnings for all my choices. Sometimes, my fundamental approach to a show inherently contains those over-arching ideas -- our updated Jesus Christ Superstar was like that -- once I knew how I was coming at that show, most of the blocking choices were pretty obvious.

The Wild Party is different. This time (as it was with Bat Boy, Love Kills, Return to the Forbidden Planet) I have a kind of instinctual understanding of what I'm doing, but I haven't been able to work it out intellectually yet...

When I was blocking Love Kills last fall, I started realizing that many of the scenes were very still, in some cases with both characters sitting the whole time and barely moving, or in the case of solos, with an actor just standing there singing to us. When I first noticed how still the show was, when I noticed how many big pauses we were using, I was a little concerned -- surely that's not how a rock musical works, is it? Well yes, it turns out, that's exactly how Love Kills works. The reactions from our audience, the critics, and the author told me my instincts were right. But I didn't fully understand why those were the right choices; they were counter-intuitive, but they just felt right.

The same is true of The Wild Party. I'm not sure I could justify all my choices, but they feel right. My gut seems to know how this show moves and looks, even if my brain hasn't caught up yet...

Tuesday night, after we blocked the middle of Act II (which involves only the four central characters), I realized that we're playing almost all the dialogue scenes pretty far down front, often with the actors standing in a line (or something close to it). But later, as I let it all swim around in my fevered brain on the drive home, I also realized that I'm giving the show the look of vaudeville and early musical comedy -- very downstage and very full-front. In both vaudeville and early musical comedy, a number of songs would always be sung in front of the closed main curtain, while they changed the set behind the curtain. I see now that, to an extent, I've staged a lot of this show as if I were a musical comedy director in 1928 (the year the Wild Party poem was published and the year we're setting our action), staging Whoopee!

Now, The Wild Party won't really work exactly like Whoopee because an audience in 2010 requires much more from their musicals than an audience in 1928 did (just a year after Show Boat opened, well before the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution). The Wild Party operates, more than anything else, on the rules of Bertolt Brecht, but early musical comedy also operated (again, to some extent) on the rules of Brecht -- they just didn't know that's what they were doing.

I've always been a big fan of shows that acknowledge their own artificiality -- their theatre-ness -- shows that directly address the audience, that narrate, that step outside of scenes to comment, that admit every second that this is not real, that these are actors on a stage, that this is only storytelling. Almost every show New Line Theatre has ever produced fits that description -- The Rocky Horror Show, Bat Boy, Urinetown, High Fidelity, A New Brain, Return to the Forbidden Planet, The Robber Bridegroom, Reefer Madness, Floyd Collins, Assassins, and lots of others. In a way, The Wild Party simply has to be Brechtian, because Brecht's ideas are so close to the style of that period.

Brecht and Kurt Weill's landmark musical The Threepenny Opera would debut in Berlin in 1928 (what a coincidence!) and on Broadway in 1933. But it was originally a flop here, and it wouldn't be until the wildly popular 1954 off Broadway production that the show became famous in America and Brecht's ideas and practices would be consciously imitated on Broadway. Without the huge influence of that 1954 production, it's possible that we would have never gotten Company, Assassins, Urinetown, or Love Kills.

Or, for that matter, The Wild Party.

All this is a little nerve-wracking because I don't "know" that I'm staging this show well, but I "feel" that I am. And as I've mentioned here before, this show is complex enough, that it will take a little time for the actors to find their way and to let the show find its footing. But while that's happening, I can't see exactly what my ideas will all look like. So I have to have faith that if I correctly figured out all our other shows for the past nineteen years, then I'm probably on the right track here too. But it does require me to have some faith -- in our cast, in myself, in the magic of theatre.

But that also means that the actors can't yet see what the end product will look like, so they have to have faith as well. I'm not sure most of the actors really understand how this show is going to look and move (although a few have already found the style), so they're just trusting me for now. The same thing happened with Urinetown -- if I remember right, it really wasn't until we got onstage that the actors "got" what we were going after. But god bless 'em, until that time, they trusted me and went on the ride I had set out for us. I can tell the same thing will happen this time.

We are so lucky to have a cast this good, this adventurous, and this trusting. This is a bigger adventure than most of our shows, but we've got the right team for the job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Welcome to Our Tower of Babel

I once saw an interview with Hal Prince, in my estimation one of the two or three greatest directors in the history of musical theatre, the director of Cabaret, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and many more. He said that a director has two jobs. The first is to define the journey and the destination, the rules of the road, etc., then set the actors off down that road and help them stay on it. Then the second job is to edit their performances.

I always loved that idea of being an editor. Directing a stage show really can be a lot like film, only we do all the takes live, over time, in rehearsal. And to extend the metaphor, I also make choices about which "shots" to use, close-ups, long shots, reaction shots, over-the-shoulder, pans, zooms -- all of them have theatrical equivalents (thanks in large part to the genius of Michael Bennett).

But working on The Wild Party last night -- our first run-through of Act I -- I discovered another metaphor that is equally apt. Making theatre is kind of like comic book art. I compose the frame, where things are, how they move, but I only give it an outline sketch. The actors ink in those lines and fill in the colors (with the help, to extend this metaphor as well, of the designers).

The actors could do the show without me, but it would be less focused, less unified, and less effective storytelling. There would be lots of colors and shading, but no composition and no point of view. On the other hand, I obviously could not do the show without them. When someone buys a comic book, they expect more than pencil sketches. As I've said before, a director's great ideas and cool insights have no value whatsoever unless there are smart, talented, fearless actors using those ideas to create exciting, honest performances -- sharpening those lines, adding shadow, and finding the exact right colors.

And that brings me to last night's rehearsal. I've sketched out the frame for them (for Act I). Everybody knows where they go, what the stage picture looks like, how it moves. Now they have to ink in their performances by getting their memorization down (though it was pretty damn good last night) and polishing their performance. And then when they've done that, they'll fill in the colors, the shades, the shadows, as they find the reality and complexity of their character's experience. The cast has already been creating some wonderful, interconnected, collective backstory that's going to make the character work later a lot more fun and the end product a lot richer.

And we still have five weeks left of rehearsal! I can't imagine making a show as fast as most people do it. It barely leaves any time to explore the artistic depth of the work. I think New Line Theatre's longer gestation period allows for the things that are what people love about our shows -- there's always a fascinating, sometimes quirky complexity to them (Assassins, Love Kills, High Fidelity); a real emotional honesty, even in the wackiest of contexts (Bat Boy, Forbidden Planet); and a fierce commitment to the reality of whatever world we're conjuring for our audience (Urinetown, Hair, Rocky Horror). All that comes from spending quality time with the characters and their world. We're not just putting up a show; we're sharing with people a wonderful, exciting piece of art.

This is one of those shows that is so specific in its style and so unlike most other musicals that I'm not going to see a "first draft" of my work for a while yet. The actors have enormous jobs to do this time, and I need to let them have the time to do them well. But from what we saw last night, I'm really excited. This is a cast of first-rate theatre artists and they're going to deliver an amazing, thrilling piece of theatre. Just watch and see...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We're All Inspired

Last night, we had a read-thru-sing-thru of the whole show, though to be honest, there wasn't a lot of read-thru, mostly just sing-thru... There's maybe a dozen pages of dialogue in the whole show. I realized, listening to the whole show, that this is as close to a jazz opera as anything I've worked on before. What amazing, powerful material! I'm more baffled than ever by why this show didn't run longer off Broadway. It's so amazing, so well-written, so full of emotional depth. Maybe it was just too dark. I think too often the audience for musicals in New York doesn't really want to be challenged as much as they want to be comforted.

We don't comfort much at New Line Theatre, so The Wild Party is perfect for us.

I'm so proud of this cast. This really is the toughest score we've worked on since Sweeney Todd. A few other shows have come close -- Passion, Sunday in the Park -- but they weren't quite this challenging. And though we've been moving fairly fast in learning the score, the cast really got it last night. Sure, there were rough patches here and there, but nothing major, nothing for me to worry about. And poor Margeau (Queenie) -- she has so much material to learn, but she did a really great job too.

There was a lot of excitement last night. Some of it came from the leads, who were all very nervous. Even though I do my best to remind everyone that this isn't a performance, just a sing-thru, still the leads feel some pressure -- it's the first time the cast has heard some of this material (especially since the whole score is not on the CD), and the leads want to be Great. But there's also excitement because everyone knows last night's rehearsal ends the first part of the process, and on Thursday we start staging the show. We're really on this train now and we won't get off of it until we close. It's been hard work up till now, but from here on out, it's going to be very hard work, as they work on memorizing this massive score, learning the blocking, learning the choreography, and now working in earnest on character.

I've also been giving the actors handouts about what was going on in America (particularly New York), both in 1928 and also in the decade leading up to 1928. I found that many things that were happening in the culture are consciously referenced in the show. Some of the characters themselves reference real-life people. The D'Armano Brothers reference the Gershwin Brothers, but also the many gay musical comedy songwriters of the period, like Cole Porter and Larry Hart. Madelaine True mirrors the many famous, open lesbians of the period. Eddie represents the central place boxing had in pop culture at the time, with two world-famous boxing matches in 1926 and 1927 between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. And of course, Burrs and Queenie's vaudeville was America's favorite mainstream entertainment, which reached its peak in 1928.

This is one of those shows I feel very privileged to work on. And I think everybody else involved feels the same way. As hard as the road ahead of us may be, I have no doubt we will all rise to the challenge. These folks are working really hard. (The more I write about this show, the more I notice how often I'm using forms of the word challenge.)

Stay tuned...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Glorious

I'm just now beginning to register the enormity of what we've taken on. This is one big mother fucking ambitious project. And this is not my first time at the (really gay) rodeo -- New Line Theatre has conquered Sweeney Todd, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Bat Boy, Passion, Sunday in the Park with George, Jacques Brel... many incredibly challenging pieces of musical theatre. But this one challenges them all.

First off, it's a cast of sixteen -- we've only done three shows bigger than that in nineteen years. There's an ocean of complex vocal arrangements, although we've pretty much conquered the score. Robin is creating some of the most ambitious, most complex choreography she's ever done for us, and yet the cast is picking it up. I've been working on the blocking for months now but I'm still finding cool new moments, still being inspired by the music we've been learning and the choreography Robin is giving us. And we haven't even gotten to the characters and the acting yet. We start blocking later this week.

To add to the complexity, this is a show that requires two opposing styles -- on the one hand, a kind of postmodern-Broadway (think Urinetown) mixed with classic Vaudeville (somewhat like Chicago); and on the other, moments of very subtle, honest, naked emotion (think Love Kills). There are very intimate, gentle scenes and moments of terrible violence. It's both Fosse (Chicago) and Brecht (Sweeney Todd), with a little Shakespearean heft thrown in.

And it works because that's what this story is. I just finished reading the original poem a couple days ago. (I love reading source material while I'm working on a show.) The poem has that same dangerous split personality, and that duality mirrors both Queenie herself and her relationship with Burrs. And that what makes The Wild Party the perfect New Line show; it explores the double-edged swords of love and passion and sex. Queenie and Burrs love each deeply, recklessly, but they're poison to each other. Queenie herself comes to that understanding in the song "Maybe I Like It This Way."

Like many New Line shows, The Wild Party is Shakespearean in its themes and its dramatic arc. We watch Burrs (as a stand-in for 1920s over-consumption and over-appetite?) just disintegrate before our eyes and we watch his Tragic Flaw (jealousy) chew away at him, just as we watch the same thing happen to Othello or Lear. Burrs even gets his own Mad Scene with "Let Me Drown." But, in the tradition of Fosse's Chicago and Hal Prince's Cabaret, this dark, Brechtian tragedy is presented as deconstructed, fucked-up musical comedy. Vaudevillian comedy numbers alternate with full-out Broadway production numbers, but there's this dank, creepy shadow lurking behind all of it. Thanks to the homemade gin and coke and weed, this is a room full of nothing but primal drives -- lust, jealousy, revenge, hurt, ego -- there is no higher thinking going on here. Lear goes literally mad; here drink, drugs, and desire do the trick.

As I think I've mentioned here before, Alison, who's directing the show with me and sits on our Board, has been urging me to do this show for a long time. But because at least a third of the score isn't on the cast recording, I didn't fully understand the size of this undertaking, and the incredible artistry of the writing. I knew what was on the CD was really good, but that's just part of this amazing canvas.

So now I know and I'm more psyched than ever. And more scared. But I realize that all our best shows scare the living shit out of me until after opening night (sometimes even after that). I think my fear equals the task in front of us. Luckily, I also think this merry band of ours is equal to the task.

We're in the process of creating something really remarkable. I can already see it taking shape...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

They Were Dancing and Living Free

Jesus, I wish you could have seen this first dance number that Robin (she's only pretending to be stoned in the picture) choreographed Sunday for the show. The song is "A Wild, Wild Party," and it's the "Hot Lunch Jam" (bonus points for catching the 80s reference) of The Wild Party. Robin has given us a genuine showstopper -- it's really funny, dirty, rowdy, it feels totally spontaneous, and it's just a tad bit psycho... Exactly right for this show.

And I'm now even more convinced than ever that we've been blessed with the hardest working cast in St. Louis theatre. This number today is one of the most athletic numbers I've seen in a long time, and they never let down for a second. And, in the show, it comes just a few pages after another showstopper, "The Juggernaut." I think there are four full company dance numbers in the show, and they're all fast.

Makes me glad I'm only the director.

It's fun to watch Robin weave authentic 1920s moves into her own choreographic vocabulary, the Charleston (obviously), the Shimmy, the Goofus... She truly is the best choreographer I've ever worked with. She and I have an identical sense of black humor, so when we need outrageous, subversive, and/or blasphemous numbers (Jesus and the dancing nuns in Reefer Madness come to mind), Robin is utterly fearless and ballsy. My kind of woman. She really understands the New Line style and aesthetic. She always surprises me, going places I never expected, but her numbers are always pitch-perfect in the context of the show.

But there's more than that. She understands that story and character come first. Style, tone, mood, themes, humor -- all that is important -- but Robin knows nothing can get in the way of story and character. I think what I love most about her is her frequent willingness to ignore polish and slickness in favor of authenticity. In Grease, her choreography was as rough and raw as early rock and roll. It was all about pulsating sexual energy, not cute faux-1950s moves. On the other hand, if a show is a period piece, like Grease or The Wild Party, she wants to know even more than she already does about how people moved back then. There are too many choreographers (some of them on Broadway) who put the "stage picture" and their Big Moments over the story. Robin knows dance isn't a diversion in a musical; it's a language.

The other nice thing is that Robin and I have worked together since 2005. We know exactly how the other one works and we never have a problem between us. I think it's because we both have so much respect for the other's work. She has choreographed New Line Theatre's Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Reefer Madness, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, Urinetown, High Fidelity, Return to the Forbidden Planet, and Spelling Bee. And she will be choreographing Evita this summer. (And I hope all three shows next season.)

I've had two giant "happy accidents" in my life. First, I arrived at college only to find out there was no theare department at Harvard! So I became a music major instead, and that training has served me incredibly well over the years, in both my writing and my directing. The second happened when I couldn't find a job after college and ended up telemarketing for Dance St. Louis. I soon moved upstairs and worked in the office in various jobs for seven years, where I learned the business of arts administration, but I also learned a lot about dance. Like my first "happy accident," I learned so much at Dance St. Louis that has made me a better director and, I hope, a better collaborator with Robin.

I'm very good at "musical staging," staging a song to its music but without using actual dance moves. And I'm extremely good at fucked-up, wacky musical staging -- the opening to Bat Boy was one of my favorite numbers I've ever staged. But when a number requires real dance, Robin is the only one I trust.

And Sunday's rehearsal reminded me again why that is. Prepare to have your mind blown, New Line audience...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott