Symphony

I've always loved Shakespeare.

My first experience with the Bard was in high school. My theatre arts class (remind me to tell you about that sometime, it was amazing!) went to The Rep a couple times a year, and holy shit, did we all look forward to that. For us, The Muny was very nice (especially for me, the muscial freak), but The Rep was the real deal. Serious Theatre. The spring of my junior year, the Theatre Arts class went to see The Rep's Richard III.

And Oh My God. It thrilled me fucking shitless. It was rowdy and violent and nasty and powerful and sly and clever and really funny... I immediately saw the connecton between Richard and J.R. Ewing. This was Shakespeare? In junior high, we had read Romeo and Juliet out loud in class and it seemed to me the dullest, most anicent, most irrelevant thing I could imagine. But this Richard III was different. It shattered all my preconceptions. I learned that Shakespeare rocks.

So, freshman year at Harvard, I took a full year of Shakespeare with one of the Greats among Shakespeare scholars, Marjorie Garber. She taught me how to love Shakespeare's comedy, his vulgarity, his libido, his wordplay, and the complex psychology that he accessed in every play, even the lesser ones. No one had done that before, explored the psychology of characters. Before Will, there was no such thing as subtext. He really changed everything.

I fell in love with him right then and there. From that day to this, I try to see Shakespeare, either live or on video, whenever I can. And lucky for me, The Rep continues to kick ass on Will's behalf -- I've rarely seen Shakespeare as good as The Rep's. My most recent discoveries on DVD have been the amazing Hamlet with Kevin Kline and Patrick Stewart's Macbeth. I also recently discovered a very cool DVD series called Playing Shakespeare. And my favorite of all, a very cool four-part documentary called In Search of Shakespeare, about the details of the Bard's life and career.

I had always wanted to work on a Shakespeare play, but that's not an oppotunity that comes along every day. Then somehow that I can't exactly remember, Return to the Forbidden Planet came into my awareness in 2008. I had read about it before, and it really seemed like a dumb show. But I got the cast album anyway (it was a live recording, which made it even more fun), and fell in love with it. A crazy-quilt of Shakespearean dialogue, mixed and matched and patched together with some fake Shakespeare -- "fakespeare," we called it -- combined with classic rock and roll songs. Oh yeah, and set aboard a spaceship. Does it sound insane to you? Good. It should. But it's also one of the most fun shows we've done. Not only did it sell great, but we had a ton of repeat customers. It was just that fun. And oddly, at the end, also very emotional.

And that opened the door for Two Gents. I had been aware of it since it shared a composer with Hair, but I thought the Shakespeare would be beyond us. Wrong.

As it happens, we're kicking some comic Elizabethan ass! We've finished blocking Act I and had some serious fun running through it last week. Now on to Act II. We have lots of time left to explore, but this excellent, fearless cast is in really good shape. Everybody's on the same road. There's going to be a lot to put together, with band, costumes, tech, puppets (yes, that's right, I said puppets), microphones, all that stuff. But once all the pieces fall into place, we're going to have such a blast with it, and I think our audiences will too...

Just watch, Dowdy's gonna steal the damn show again...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

A Million Wonderful People in the World

The musical shrank in the 1960s for two reasons. First, as most people already know, big shows became cost prohibitive. The more production costs rose, the less they were able to balance the budget. So in some shows, like Company, West Side Story, A Chorus Line, and Grease, the leads became the chorus.

But there was another reason. Big musicals were so big because they almost always had a gigantic chorus. And that chorus represented the community within which the story unfolded. But America changed in the years after World War II. More and more Americans moved from rural areas to urban areas, and with that move came a diminished sense of old-fashioned community and a revived focus on the “rugged individual” of our Frontier past. As it always does, musical theatre as an art form mirrored that shift in our culture.

Back during the heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the central issue of most musicals was whether the hero would assimilate into the community or be removed from it, in some cases by death. In Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, Guys and Dolls, Hello, Dolly!, Annie Get Your Gun, and The Music Man, the hero assimilates and becomes part of the community/chorus at the end. But in Carousel, The King and I, Pal Joey, West Side Story, Hair, and Cabaret, the hero cannot assimilate and must leave or be removed. In a few shows, with more than one hero, we get both outcomes, as in South Pacific and Show Boat. In a few cases, the community actually adjusts to accommodate the hero, as in The Threepenny Opera and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

But in the later era of concept musicals and rock musicals, the stories focus on the hero, his struggle, his growth, his success or not, in shows like Company, Pippin, Dude, Jesus Christ Superstar, Follies, Chicago, Barnum, Sweeney Todd, Nine, Sunday in the Park with George, and so many others.

Still, now and then in the 60s and 70s, shows reappeared which returned to that idea of community, but now with more of a hippie sensibility. It started with Hair, and that spawned Godspell, Grease, The Me Nobody Knows, A Chorus Line, and to some extent also Working. And of course Hair’s closest cousin in its aesthetics, its humor, and its pure joy, Two Gentlemen of Verona. But once the hippie era faded at the end of the 1970s, the focus returned to the individual, even in “ensemble shows” like Dreamgirls. Luckily, several of the shows listed above still work, though now as insightful period pieces.

It’s easy to say in hindsight but maybe Two Gents was the perfect Shakespeare play for the composer of Hair. After all, this play was Shakespeare’s Rent, youthful, rowdy, messy, rude, and unquestionably flawed. But it’s those flaws that give Hair, Two Gents, and Rent -- and our June show, bare --their rawness and authenticity. They don’t feel manufactured or focus-grouped. They possess that same authenticity and unedited joy that the best, most lasting rock and roll has.

I've told the cast that our approach to Two Gents is as if our hippie tribe from Hair is putting on a Shakespeare play. Their way. That's exactly the feel we're going for. As with any piece of great art, if you don't understand the context, you don't understand the art.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

A Very Interesting Question

I admit it. Sometimes I choose a show for us to produce essentially knowing nothing about it. I don't do that very often, but every once in a while I do. I did that with Songs for a New World, Floyd Collins, The Nervous Set, and most of all, Hair. In all those cases, something in my gut told me there was gold there and so I followed my gut. My gut is never wrong about such things. Seriously. Never.

Other times -- most times -- I choose shows that I already know backwards and forwards, and really understand in-depth. That was true of Bat Boy, Urinetown, JC Superstar, High Fidelity, Evita, and lots of others.

But there's a third category, that only has a few shows in it. With these shows, when we start work I have a general sense of why they're wonderful, but I don't really get them yet deep down. That part happens as we work. That was true of The Robber Bridegroom, Return to the Forbidden Planet, and Love Kills. And now Two Gents.

I've always understood the visual and physical style of Two Gents (very much like Hair) and I've had the general sense all along that this is a story about friendship and romance, and considering its original Elizabethan period, about how friendship is somehow nobler than romance. But with the added resonance of 1971, the hippie movement, the women's movement, and of course the beginning of the "Browning" of America as a big wave of Latino immigration came to New York, this becomes a more complicated story.

I think this isn't really about friendship or romance, though that may have been what it was about back in 1590. At its heart I think it's about growing up. Almost identical themes to High Fidelity and one of my favorite films, Diner. All three stories are about young men trapped between childhood and adulthood, wanting the permission to be selfish that comes with childhood as well as the freedom that comes with adulthood. These are thoughtless, selfish heroes, and like Luke Skywalker (or any other hero myth), they all have to go through obstacles and learn about themselves before they can be successfully integrated into civilized society.

I remember when we produced High Fidelity (returning in June 2012!), we were all struck by how exactly it described Generation X, but here's Shakespeare back in 1590 getting it just as exactly right. Kinda cool. Kinda freaky too. He was good.

As with many of Shakespeare's plays, the journey here is both internal and external. The physical journey in the story stands in for their interior journey from the innocent, safe world of childhood, in the form of small town Verona, to the more complicated, more dangerous, more consequential world of adulthood, in the form of the big city Milan. Proteus must learn that he's too old to play games with people's lives, that getting what he wants can't be his only concern anymore. They're growing up and they have to live grown up lives now. That means accepting responsibility, apologizing for wrongs committed, and because it's a Shakespeare comedy, getting married!

But there's another layer to the story, suggested by the multi-ethnic approach of the original and its politics and social commentary. This is also a story about America growing up when it comes to sex and gender, having finally reached national puberty at long last with the Sexual Revolution, but still scared of these new feelings. And still fiercely and obliviously sexist. We see this moment in time today through the eyes of a post-millennial America, and that changes the show from a snapshot of "Now" to a period piece about a pivotal moment in American culture -- exactly like Hair. Still, those of us working on the show have to put ourselves back in that 1971 zeitgeist.

It's funny, now that I think about it... Two Gents is about young men trapped between childhood and adulthood. And so is High Fidelity, which we've already produced and will produce again next season. That's also essentially what bare is about, our next show. It's also what Passing Strange is about, our fall show. What does that say about our times? What does it say about the issues swimming around my head these days?

Somehow there's often a very cool nexus between New Line shows and the headlines. I remember when we put a scaled-down, re-imagined Camelot into an early season, and after we had announced the season, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. So by the time we opened, everyone was following this sexual scandal that was threatening to bring down an administration. It was like Lerner and Loewe had written a not very subtle allegory about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2007, just a few months before we opened Urinetown, the Democrats took back Congress, and there we were, doing this show about how good-intended liberals will destroy everything. A year later we produced Assassins, right around the time that Barack Obama emerged as a viable candidate and people started worrying about his safety. It gave the show a whole new and very creepy resonance. It all felt less impossible.

And now, for the past several months we've been hearing about a rise in gay teen suicide, just as we're getting ready to work on bare, a very contemporary piece that deals in part with teen suicide.

And today, as we work on Two Gents, our country seems to be struggling to grow up itself. I hear our political pundits sputter and rage over imagined demons, outraged at the suggestion that we should all be more decent to each other, and I can't help but think it's exactly that childish thoughtlessness and selfishness, and a lack of empathy or respect, that drive Proteus.

...and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and Michael Savage and Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt...

There's so much in this show to explore! There's nothing more fun to digging down into a really great piece of writing. And both the Shakespeare and the newer elements are so beautiful, so ballsy, and so exactly right. Just like Hair was, this is a show like no other. I'm already having fun and we've barely begun.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Two Gentlemen of Verona

I discovered Two Gentlemen of Verona when we did Hair the first time. Since the two shows share composer Galt MacDermot, one naturally led to the other -- along with less successful post-Hair projects, like Dude, Via Galactica, The Human Comedy, Jim Rado's Rainbow, and others. I had had the double-LP Two Gents cast album a long time but I don't think I had listened to it since college. When I rediscovered it in 2000, I fell in love with this score as quickly as I had fallen in love with Hair. But because the dialogue is Shakespeare, I never really seriously considered producing it. I thought Shakespeare would scare both our actors and maybe some of our audience.

And then we did Return to the Forbidden Planet in 2009 and we found out Shakespearean dialogue isn't really all that hard after all, and our audiences had no trouble understanding the dialogue, following the story, getting the jokes. I had underestimated all of us.

And really, I had been thinking for quite a while that I'd be good at directing Shakespeare. I've studied all the plays (with the world renowned expert Marjorie Garber), seen many of them, and love most of them. And from seeing the very best ones, I learned a lot, most notably that Shakespeare isn't highbrow or elitist or old-fashioned. His best plays are rowdy, playful, funny, sexy, dirty, powerful, dangerous, suspenseful, emotional, provocative -- all the things we want a good movie or show to be today. I think too much Shakespeare today is produced in pretentious quotation marks. There's an aura of importance and reverence and antiquity hanging over everything. Lesser actors try to deliver lines they clearly don't understand, or worse yet, try to impress us with their grasp of iambic pentameter. But they don't get our pulse pounding, they don't thrill us, they don't getting us cheering, crying, or bellowing with laughter. It's just kinda there. (A notable exception is The Rep, which kicks ass when it comes to Shakespeare.) I hate that, and I think I know how to avoid it.

So it only made sense that we should do Two Gents.

Though historians think this was a weak play -- it was his first, after all -- this musical version has fixed some of the more obvious problems and edited it down a bit as well. But we still get that amazing Shakespeare humor (Launce's scolding of his dog for its apathy is brilliant), gorgeous language about love and beauty and friendship, and of course plenty of mistaken identity, drag, politics, crazy coincidences, sex (for part of the show, Sylvia has four men trying to bed her), all the things we've come to expect from Will.

You can see Shakespeare trying out plot devices and exploring character psychology in Two Gents, in a way that would reach maturity later on with his best plays. He wasn't at the height of his powers yet, but he was already Will Shakespeare, and that's enough. What's cool for many of us is that Forbidden Planet was based on The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play and arguably one of his masterpieces. And now we get to work on his first piece. It gives us a cool glimpse into the arc of his theatre career.

The personal joy for me with this show is its kinship to Hair. The two share a composer, but they also share the same energy, mood, playfulness.

So rehearsals continue apace. We finished learning the Two Gents score last night, and goddamn, do we have fun with this music! We all have different favorite songs. Tomorrow, we have a night at the table, just to work our way through the script, make sure everyone understands everything, make sure everybody feels comfortable with the language. And then on Monday, we will read and sing through the entire show, getting a sense of the finished product for the first time.

What a great ride this is going to be!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

They Like Us, They Really Like Us!

It's that time of year when several of the local theatre reviewers look back on the calendar year and assess the best of the year. As always, New Line has gotten several great mentions...

Judy Newmark in her annual "Judy Awards" for the Post-Dispatch honored us twice -- she named me the Best Director of a Musical for Evita; and also named Joel Hackbarth, Troy Turnipseed, and Zak Farmner the Best Specialty Act of the year for their hilarious Greek Chorus in I Love My Wife. Very cool.

Mark Bretz in The Ladue News published his 2010 Year in Review list, and TWO of the shows he cited were New Line shows, both The Wild Party and Evita. About the first show, Bretz wrote, "New Line Theatre artistic director Scott Miller presented a provocative and compelling version of a show titled The Wild Party that had indifferent success off-Broadway in the 1999-2000 season, based on a narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March about an abusive clown and a showgirl dancer caught in their own fatal attraction in the waning moments of vaudeville, with masterful performances by Jeffrey Pruett and Deborah Sharn."

He wrote about Evita, "With posters of modern political figures framing his production, New Line artistic director Scott Miller reminded everyone what an invigorating and provocative work this musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice still can be. Drawing uncomfortable parallels between charismatic politicians and easily swayed followers, New Line’s rendition featured a sizzling performance by John Sparger as the revolutionary Che, a deliberately toned-down Todd Schaefer as Argentinian dictator Juan Peron and Taylor Pietz displaying a beautiful voice and haunting presence as Peron’s mistress-turned-wife Eva Peron. With the crisp accompaniment of the New Line band conducted by Chris Peterson, Miller’s Evita was visceral, raucous and always entertaining."

On the BroadwayWorld site, Chris Gibson also honored two New Line shows in his Top Ten of 2010 list. He wrote about The Wild Party, "If there's any group capable of generating similar sparks it's New Line Theatre, and their dark and decadent production of Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party blew me away. Scott Miller's impeccable direction, as well as his sharp work on the ivories pounding out this genre-hopping blend of space age bachelor pad music and cool jazz, brought this black comedy to life in fine fashion. Jeffrey Pruett's performance as the scary clown named Burrs was especially memorable."

Gibson wrote about Evita, "While some might view a presentation of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita as a safe choice, New Line Theatre's incendiary production was anything but, infusing this modern classic with a rock and roll edge that served the material particularly well. Taylor Pietz (Eva Peron), Todd Schaefer (Juan Peron) and John Sparger (Che) do stunning work under Scott Miller's direction, neatly bringing these characters to life with a genuine sense of enthusiasm and energy that I've found lacking in other productions. This stripped-down, rocking rendition of Evita was truly inspired."

We never get mentioned in The Riverfront Times at this time of year because six years ago we banned the RFT's senior critic from our shows (if you wanna know why, I'll tell you, but not here). Sometimes their other reviewer Paul Friswold comes to our show and reviews us, but he doesn't get to see everything. Still, in the RFT's year-end wrap-up, Friswold wrote, "As for anticipation, I eagerly await New Line Theatre's season announcement every year. Scott Miller is another artistic director who seeks the new while paying attention to the canon, although his canon may be not be for everyone. Kyle Jarrow's Love Kills is one of the most heart-wrenching love stories I've enjoyed; it just happens to be about two spree killers. Ah, romance! I'm already excited for Cry-Baby and the return of High Fidelity."

It's so cool to be able to do the kind of alternative work we do and have it embraced so fully by both local audiences and local theatre critics. I love working in St. Louis.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Happy New Year!

Holy shit! It's 2011...!It seems like only yesterday (well, maybe more like last month) that we started rehearsals for the amazing, thrilling, brilliant, shattering, challenging ride that was The Wild Party. What an experience! Just a couple days ago Jeff Pruett (who played Burrs) and I were talking about how much we miss that show. Truly one of the most difficult pieces I've ever worked on, in terms of music, character, staging, pacing, all of it. But we really pulled it off. And what a brilliant, inventive, hard-working cast we found for that show! And, lest we forget, Robin Berger's astonishing choreography -- sexy, scary, and wildly entertaining!

I have to give big-ass special props to the insanely hard-working Margeau Steinau (such a complicated, nuanced, emotional performance!), Jeff (in the performance of his life, I think), Deborah Sharn (also the best performance I've ever seen from her) and newcomer Keith Parker (with a voice from God and a really sensitive performance of an often thankless role).

The Wild Party is one of those shows I feel an obligation to produce. Who else in St. Louis will ever do it? I'm very happy I was able to get a chapter about the show into my next book, so maybe more companies will produce it. I think Wild Party will be on my top five list for a very long time...

What are the others on that list, you ask? It does vary a bit, depending on my mood and what I'm working on, but my top five list will always include Hair, Bat Boy, High Fidelity, and The Wild Party. Maybe also Assassins...? My top ten list is easier -- the others would include Return to the Forbidden Planet, The Cradle Will Rock, A New Brain... maybe Hedwig...? But I digress.

2010 also brought us Evita, a show I hadn't always been interested in producing even though I've always loved it. But the discovery of the much harder rocking 1976 concept album and a few "enhanced" conversations with Sparger, and Evita found its way into our season. I was stunned at how well it was received. People just fell in love with it. And again, we had this amazing cast, every one of them just perfect. Taylor, Todd, and Sparger all three kicked ass!

A lot of people told me it was a real revelation for them seeing the show stripped down to its essence, its emotions reinvigorated by a return to the score's rock roots. (Mandy Patinkin's Che was such a pussy compared to Sparger's Che!) Instead of the usual story about a hyper-bitch and her manipulations, ours was more a passionate love story, not just between Juan and Eva, but even more between Eva and her descamisados... Like we did for The Wild Party, we dug down into some incredibly intense, dark emotions, and made a really honest, compelling piece of theatre. After we did Jesus Christ Superstar in 2006, I was so proud of how well our "re-imagining" worked that I wished more people would try it our way. I felt the same way after Evita. In both cases the shows actually work better the way we did them... at least in my perhaps not-so-humble opinion...

Evita was also one of the biggest sellers we've ever had at this theatre. I guess it proves that our motivations are worthwhile -- to challenge our audiences rather than comfort them. People seem to really love that kind of theatre!

And in the fall, we took a total left turn, as we love to do, by producing the fairly lightweight but hilarious social satire, I Love My Wife, about wife-swapping in the 70s. After a full season of despair, doom, and gloom, it was so nice to return to comedy! And what a cast full of comic geniuses -- Todd, Jeff, Emily, and Sarah were all brilliant in the leads, but Troy, Joel, and Zak got just as much acclaim -- and laughs -- in their role as quirky Greek Chorus.

This is a score I've been in love with going back to my college days, but for some reason it never occurred to me to produce it. I hadn't even read the script before last year. Again, it's a show no one else in town will produce -- partly because it's just too sexual for high schools, community theatres, the Rep, the Muny, Stages...

But we New Liners LOVE sex!

We also hired a new music director in 2010, Justin Smolik, who joined us for the first time for I Love My Wife and he did a wonderful job! He's an incredible musician and he loves musicals almost as much as I do. He'll be part of our staff for the foreseeable future. Welcome, Justin!

We worked really hard during 2010, and it's going to be no easier in 2011, but I am soooo looking forward to Two Gents, bare, and then next season, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, and High Fidelity. I look at this line-up of these five shows between now and summer 2012, and I'm positively giddy about all five of them! So much cool work ahead!!

We start rehearsals for Two Gents on Monday...! Woo-hoooo!

As most New Line followers know, we got another extension at our current space, so we can stay there till summer 2012. But we really need to find a new permanent space. There are several possibilities, but it seems every possibility requires us finding at least $100,000. Anybody got a rich uncle...?

It's been such a wonderful year artistically. We did so much cool work, I finished my new book, and we set a ridiculously cool 2011-2012 season. And somehow, even during these tough times, New Line is thriving! Ticket sales have been great, our supporters continue to invest in our work, and our funders are doing their best to hold our grants steady...

As our 20th anniversary season continues, we promise to keep surprising you, delighting you, and challenging you. I really think the work ahead may be some of the most exciting we've ever done... Stay tuned...

And if you've got $100,000 laying around, give us a call... We'll name the theatre after you.

Happy New Year!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott