The Choice was Mine and Mine Completely

We've come to the final step of the creation process -- putting all the pieces together (band, lights, costumes, props, mics), and doing the final polish. From now on, no more singing with the rehearsal piano. The coming week will be intense and a little stressful, but it's the best part of the process. We always take big steps forward during Hell Week, as the show finds its final form.

In some ways, our Evita probably won't feel drastically different to some people who've seen it before. We haven't rewritten anything and despite the questions I keep getting, no, we haven't added nudity to it! We've only used nudity in four or five shows over nineteen years, but still every show, people ask if we're adding nudity... I guess we can chalk that up to America's pathological fear of the human body...

But in other ways, our Evita may feel very different. It's obviously much smaller, physically. I think the score will sound different merely because of the instrumentation. No strings or harp this time, just piano, bass, guitar, drums, a trumpet, and reeds, a nice-sized rock band. Our dramatic approach is very different from the original Broadway production, but most people didn't see that, so they won't make that comparison. I do think our staging is really cool and it emphasizes the ensemble more than most productions. More than anything, I think merely because we're musical theatre artists in 2010 instead of 1979, we have more and different tools at our disposal. Musical theatre is a very different art form than it was when Hal Prince first staged Evita.

Case in point...

A couple nights ago, I put in my DVD of the documentary Broadway: The Golden Age. It's not a film I really love because the whole thing is interviews with old Broadway stars talking about how wonderful theatre used to be, and how awful it is that it's not wonderful anymore. I've encountered several musical theatre books with that mindset as well.

And it drives me fucking nuts. No, the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is not the pinnacle of the art form, just one step along the way, a step we were done with FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Still, this documentary does have a lot of interview footage with some major Broadway names, so I thought it'd be fun to watch it. But right off, I got pissed. All these people are talking about how amazing it was that so many great shows could all be running at once during the so-called "Golden Age," and several of them recite lists of famous shows as proof. But these folks forget about all the awful, wretched pieces of crap that also opened during the "Golden Age," like Wildcat, Drat! The Cat!, Shangri-La, Skyscraper, Bravo Giovanni, Flower Drum Song, Subways Are for Sleeping, and who can forget It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman!...?

One part of this documentary was everyone remembering their first Broadway show. Mine was The Pirates of Penzance in 1981, with Kevin Kline, Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt, George Rose, Estelle Parsons, Tony Azito, and a kick-ass, high energy cast. (The next year, my brother managed to find one of those brass ticket keychains with Pirates of Penzance on it, which I still carry.) I'll never forget that show. Once it started, it never stopped for a second. It was the rowdiest, funniest, sexiest, most outrageous thing I'd ever seen on a stage. And it absolutely thrilled me. I think it was the first time I understood that musicals can be smart-ass and vulgar and rowdy -- three of my favorite attributes! -- and also really smart and artful, at the same time.

I've always credited my (still evolving) directing style to my work on Assassins and Bat Boy, and the outrageousness and freedom both those shows gave me to play with. But I realize now that my directing style really goes back to Pirates. Seeing that show was one of those moments when I thought to myself, Holy shit, musicals can be like THIS? Though Assassins and Bat Boy were clearly important stops along the artistic road I'm on, I think that my taste was first and most fully molded by Pirates all those years ago, and that later drew me to shows like Assassins and Bat Boy.... and Urinetown and Return to the Forbidden Planet and Spelling Bee...

Pirates (and the others) taught me fearlessness (you can even see it in the poster), to take a running jump off the artistic ledge and just see whether we fly or not. Sometimes I make mistakes in those leaps, but it's always in the name of adventure. I see now that I owe a lot to Kevin Kline. I can still see him as the Pirate King, sword-fighting with the conductor. Thanks, dude! I'm especially noticing the effect of all this on The Wild Party and Evita. (The other night at rehearsal, I told the cast I wanted the show more aggressive, and Petersen said dryly, "Imagine that!" Smart ass.)

If you're interested, there is a DVD available now of a live performance of this production of Pirates of Penzance that essentially changed my life. It was filmed at the outdoor Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, before the production moved to Broadway where I saw it (this is not the film version with much of the same cast, which I don't think is as good). It's every bit as crazy and rowdy as I remembered it. If you want to understand my taste, watch that DVD.

We have lots of work ahead this week, but it's the most fun kind of work we do. Evita is a very complex show, but this is such a terrific cast and everyone is working so hard, I know something really cool and interesting will come out of it. I am so lucky to work with artists this talented and dedicated.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Time-Honored Way the Game is Played

I'm reading this terrific book, Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen. It's a survey of the various trends in musical theatre in those two decades, including the European mega-musicals, but also the birth of what the author calls the "nonprofit musical," shows developed at nonprofit theatres with no commercial pressures (March of the Falsettos, Sunday in the Park with George, Assassins, etc.). It's seems like an accident that I'm reading this book right now while I'm working on Evita, but maybe it's not.

Several things in this book have struck me...

I had never thought about it in these terms before, but for the most part, American musicals (at least during this period) came from the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, while European musicals came from the Brechtian tradition. (Think La Cage aux Folles versus Les Miserables.) Of course the exception to this are the musicals of director Hal Prince, who picked up Brecht's baton in America back in 1966 with Cabaret. (To be fair, a few shows had done it earlier, like The Cradle Will Rock, but not many, and virtually none that were successful.) New Line's work comes much more from Brecht than from R&H. Duh.

Another interesting tidbit is about the difference between Stephen Sondheim's musicals with Hal Prince and the Sondheim musicals with director-writer Jim Lapine. The Sondheim-Prince shows, Company, Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along, are about narrative and social commentary. The Sondheim-Lapine shows, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion, are more about mood and personal, emotional issues. Prince was interested in society (just look at his non-Sondheim shows like Evita and Kiss of the Spider Woman) while Lapine is interested in the individual (as in the Lapine-Bill Finn shows, like the Falsettos trilogy and A New Brain). New Line's work plumbs both those worlds.

One of the points the book makes about this second kind of more individualized musical is very interesting -- because commercial musical theatre had always been by necessity a collaboration, those classic shows never really came from one person's experience or emotions. But the more individual voices of the nonprofit musicals, often with music and lyrics by one person, sometimes with the book by that same person (think of Rent), often came from one person's experience, one person's life, one person's emotion. Compare the Sondheim shows Company and Sunday in the Park. Both are about single men grappling with personal issues. But Company is about marriage and commitment in 1970s America, while Sunday is about The Artist. The social versus the personal.

So which is Evita? I think Tim Rice meant it to be personal, but Hal Prince wanted it to be social. I believe New Line's production will be more inclined toward Rice.

The other element of Lapine's work that I see in New Line's work is his process, his fondness for shaping a show slowly over time. He's fine with putting a "first draft" of the staging on its feet and then tinkering with it, much like a writer or painter might do. I've learned over time that I don't have to have all the right answers (as if there really are "right answers") the first time we stage a scene. I just have to get us on the right road. There's always time to adjust or even totally re-stage a scene later on.

Maybe the most interesting thing to me in the book -- and I guess I should have known this -- is that Evita really started the mega-musical trend. We don't think of it that way because it didn't have massive set pieces or special effects, and maybe also because almost the whole production staff was American. Perhaps because of the disagreement between the writers and director over the approach, Evita in its original form had a split personality, partly coming from the Prince-Sondheim model and partly acting as a prototype for the European mega-musicals to come.

One quote in the book really grabbed me. Talking about his mentor, the legendary director-writer George Abbott, Hal Prince says, "He really unabashedly wants people to have a good time, and sometimes I don't give a damn. I want to stimulate them."

Amen, Hal. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Who Am I...?

As we do every year after the Tonys, all the musical theatre geeks are debating the state and the future of the art form. Of course, most of the debates make one common, glaring mistake -- assuming that Broadway and the American musical theatre are essentially the same. They were once, back before the regional theatre explosion, back before Broadway's biggest audience was tourists. Not so much anymore. The only really cool shows opening on Broadway all begin their lives elsewhere...

But unlikle Broadway, the musical theatre as an art form has never been more exciting, more adventurous, more surprising, or more full of life than it is today. The same cannot be said for Broadway (despite the occasional fluke like the awesome American Idiot, which actually began life on the West Coast). Even when New Line produces shows that have played Broadway (many of the shows we've done have not), the way we approach the material would probably never find an audience in New York. There are different expectations there. Here our audiences want to take a wild ride, to be surprised, to be challenged; in New York, audiences want to "get their money's worth." If they have to take out a second mortgage in order to buy tickets for the whole family to see a Broadway musical, then by God there better be a shitload of eye candy on that stage!

I read two New York Times articles today, one that I found silly and another that made me smile. The first article was about how the Tonys this year proved that the American musical "has lost its voice." Same mistake as always. Maybe the "Broadway musical" has lost its voice, but not the musical theatre itself. Some of the coolest musicals I've ever encountered are being written and produced today out in the hundreds of regional theatres across our country. As artistic director of New Line, I can't just watch New York for new work -- I have to keep an eye on the entire national theatre scene to find the real gems.

The other article in the Times was about this wildly enthusiastic new generation of musical theatre lovers, who are exactly the people who are going to keep New Line in business -- the ones we're producing bare for next season -- by writing shows, by auditioning for us, and by buying tickets. We notice that the younger folks are often coming to see our shows more than once, mostly because they just can't see musical theatre as ballsy as ours anywhere else, and it thrills them. How great is that?

I think this is one of the reasons the programming at The Muny and at Stages St. Louis often bothers me. Why on earth is The Muny still producing Show Boat? Sure, it was once very exciting and innovative, but that was EIGHTY-THREE years ago!! I don't even know any people that old! And though I know Stages does good work, why on earth are they producing State Fair? Can Rodgers and Hammerstein really still be relevant to audiences in 2010? I don't think so.

I know what you're thinking: Who am I who dares to keep his head held high while millions weep? Just a guy who works with a company that will be producing the incredibly exciting bare next summer while Stages and The Muny will no doubt be producing more Rodgers and Hammerstein...

Long Live the (NEW) Musical!
Scott

Who Is This Santa Evita?

I never wanted to work on Evita.

Don't get me wrong -- I always loved the show. I saw the original Broadway production with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, and listened to the cast album for hours on end. In fact, I think I always liked Evita a little more than Jesus Christ Superstar because it's a better, more interesting score. But the original production of Evita was massive. Director Hal Prince blew Evita up to ridiculously huge proportions, just as he would do to Sweeney Todd a year later (and now New Line has undone it to both shows). And La LuPone and Mr. Patinkin both gave us the most profoundly unlikeable characters I have ever seen on stage. Interesting, sure, but blocked off from any real emotion or empathy. LuPone delivered almost every line sarcastically. She was angry, bitchy, and scheming. Who wants to spend time with that?

Then not too long ago, I heard the original 1976 concept album with Julie Covington and Colm Wilkinson (who would later create the role of Jean Valjean in Les Miz), and I was quite shocked to hear a very different Evita. This was rock opera, like Superstar. It wasn't the massive, heavily orchestrated spectacle I had seen in New York. And it was romantic. After all, this is really a double love story, not a political story. One romance (which is quite possibly non-sexual) is between Eva and her daddy figure Juan Peron. The other romance is between Eva and "her people," the working class Argentines that she grew up with, who genuinely love her as much as she loves them. But all that emotion was stripped out on Broadway. Which is, I think, a big reason why the idea of working on it never appealed to me. I like working on theatre that is emotional.

This afternoon I was watching a behind-the-scenes documentary about Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Now, I really hate this show. I think it's banal and badly written, with truly some of the worst, most awkward, most cliched lyrics I've ever heard on Broadway. But as I watched the documentary, I found out that Phantom also started out much more rock and roll, and much funnier, more ironic, and that Steve Harley, a British rock/pop singer had been hired first to play the Phantom.

And I can hear now how cool some of these songs might have been -- there's footage in the documentary of Harley singing the title song and it works so much better with a rock voice, instead of Michael Crawford's heavy, labored, pseudo-legit scooping and sliding. Other songs, like "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" and "All I Ask of You," are pretty bland, but with rock voices and less strict adherence to the very straight, syncopation-free melody lines, those songs could have been much more interesting and much more emotional. If you look at the Superstar music on the page, it looks pretty straight and bland, and if you sang exactly what's on the page, it would suck. But it's rock music, so people take liberties with it and give it personality and passion. They add ornaments and shift rhythms. Evita works straight, but it works better as rock. Phantom doesn't work straight at all (in my opinion), but it might have been better had he allowed it to be rock.

And I realize now that in Lloyd Webber's ongoing and fairly desperate quest to be taken seriously as a composer, he has turned his back on rock and roll, the only musical language in which he writes really great music. After Joseph and Superstar, his first instinct was to write Evita in that same language, but some part of him decided instead to make parts of it faux classical -- and not really as good. Then after a brief return to rock/pop with Cats (a score I like very much), he made the exact same mistake with Phantom. Yeah, I know what you're thinking... that's some mistake that made him a multi-millionaire! But his insecurity left us with the bloated, overwrought Phantom that wrings emotion out of its audience with its sets and orchestrations, instead of with character and story. People feel moved at the end of the show, but they don't realize they're being emotionally manipulated by a very skillful director, designers, and orchestrator. Instead of being moved by truth, they are being moved by accessories. (Try reading some of the Phantom lyrics out loud and you'll see how dreadful they are without all the trappings... )

I think this is a potent illustration of the dangers of commercial theatre. When Rice and Lloyd Webber had no idea if anyone would produce their work on stage, they wrote cool, inventive scores like Joseph and the really brilliant JC Superstar. But once Lloyd Webber became too aware of himself as a "Broadway composer," and of the expectations that he and others imposed on his work, his music suffered. Evita was right in the middle of that change, so luckily it still works as real rock opera.

We're going to show people what Evita can be, with honest performances, genuine emotion, and that sense of authenticity that comes from rock and roll. Tim Rice's lyrics don't really fit Hal Prince's cold, nasty vision of the show (the same was true for Sweeney). What I hope we bring our audiences is what Rice really wrote: a show that presents both sides of the myth of Eva Peron and lets the audience choose sides. Was she a saint, as the people believed? Was she a devil, as Che apparently thinks?

Or was she just a woman struggling against the rejections and deprivations of her childhood, finding that she had been given the power to change those things? She is certainly complicated. It's that conflicting legacy -- and our inability to know for sure one way or the other which is more true -- that makes her story so fascinating. But she's not the cold-hearted bitch that Patti LuPone gave us. That's just not what Tim Rice wrote. If we do our job right, we'll show you what Tim Rice wrote.

Stay tuned.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Dice Are Rolling...

I just watched this on YouTube and can't get over how inspiring it is, thinking about how the performing arts fit into the highly personalized, user-controlled, high-tech world we now live in. Where do we belong in this world? Ben Cameron knows. I just wish every single artist working in the theatre today would watch this video -- it would change drastically the old-fashioned ways we make and sell theatre...



Long Live the Musical (and ALL the performing arts!)
Scott

I Like What I See

We had a great blocking rehearsal last night. We've now staged a little more than half of Act I. And I feel a lot more confident that my approach is the right one. This Evita will not look or feel like any other Evita you've seen, but I honestly believe this is the best way I can think of to tell this story clearly and effectively. While the original Broadway production told the audience what to think about Eva, our production will present two totally conflicting views of who (and what) she was, and leave it to the audience to pick sides. Doesn't that sound like more fun?

Like a lot of New Line shows, this is going to be very conceptual and very minimalist, but I love that, precisely because it leaves so much room for the actor.

The more I work in the theatre, the more I understand one big thing about myself as a theatre artist: I love actors. I don't like sets much. I recognize costumes as a necessary hassle. And I really hate props. (Ask the New Liners, I'll cut any prop I possibly can.)

But I love actors. I think the best theatre experiences I've had as an audience member have been those shows when all the other elements get out of the way of the actors and let them do what they're best at -- revealing the truth of being human. Most recently, it was the Rep's Saint Joan. The set was big and it was beautiful, but it was really only backdrop, almost never changing. It was a very artful bare stage. And the cast of fourteen conjured up amazing characters and worlds and emotions, with very little besides their talent and their joy. Going back, I also remember extremely minimalist -- and totally amazing -- productions of Man of La Mancha at the Westport Playhouse and Ambition Facing West at the Rep.

My favorite New Line examples would be Man of La Mancha and Cabaret (both designed by the mutli-talented Todd Schaefer), Bat Boy, and A New Brain, all four done with essentially nothing but a bare stage, though very carefully and artfully wrought. I can guarantee you our audiences weren't wondering why there wasn 't more set for those shows; they were too involved in the characters on those stages. There's a reason Shakespeare wrote the way he did -- his was a theatre of words and ideas, not sets and special effects. By necessity, he had to engage the audience's imagination to collaborate on the illusion. And that's why actors love Shakespeare -- everything's in the words. It's all on them.

New Line's Evita will be almost that minimal, though with a touch of the Group Theatre and a big helping of Brecht. This will be a show about acting, about character, about story. We don't need spectacle to tell this story and we don't need a massive scale. This is a deceptively simple love story between Eva Peron and the working people -- the descamisados -- of Argentina. All we need is really talented storytellers, and we've got a cast of fifteen who are just that.

We've only had two blocking rehearsals but it's already so obvious they're all absolutely willing to try whatever I ask. They're all going to be excellent collaborators on this adventure of ours. I am most fortunate to be blessed with a cast like this on almost every show over the last few years. Maybe it's because I project more confidence than I used to, or maybe I've gotten better at communicating my ideas, or maybe my ideas are just better than they used to be. But whatever the reason, I know how lucky I am to get actors this talented, this fearless, this easy to direct, and this free of ego, on a regular basis, particularly for shows as challenging as Evita.

Maybe it's just about the atmosphere we try to create at New Line that constantly reminds everyone that we work in the theatre, not in "show business." We're not here to make a product; we're making art.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott