Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!

I curse a lot in rehearsal.

Seriously. A lot.

Never in anger. But there are times when I'm really cookin' and we're getting a lot done and everybody's creative juices are flowing, and every other word out of my mouth is some form of fuck. I do love that word. (Check out the outstanding documentary Fuck.)

And over the past couple days, I've been wondering why I do that. Don't get me wrong, I curse like a sailor in my everyday life as well. I have always rejected the idea that certain words should be off-limits because they're "bad." Words aren't bad; only intentions are. On the other hand, I know I can't curse on our radio show and I know I can't curse in business meetings. So why does it feel okay to me in rehearsal?

I think it has something to do with the New Line attitude and approach. Maybe my potty mouth is a signal to the actors and designers not to take ourselves too seriously and not to take our work too lightly. This experience will be intense, I'm telling them, and also fun and vulgar and extreme. I don't do any of this consciously, but I did learn long ago how much my mood influences a rehearsal. If I'm suffering from low energy, the rehearsal will suck. If I had a bad day -- and if the actors can tell -- we won't do our best work. But if I come in high energy and laughing and smiling, we'll do great work and lots of it.

So now I'm wondering if subconsciously I've applied that lesson about mood to my language too.

It puts me in mind of that amazing HBO series Deadwood. I remember watching an interview on DVD with the series creator David Milch, and he was talking about the language in the show, where every other word is fuck or cocksucker. He said the reason he wrote that way was that he wanted to convey the feeling of lawlessness, the idea that there were no rules here, no protection, that this was The Wild. And since most TV viewers never experience that kind of world in real life anymore, he found a way to get that sensibility across through the use of extreme, wild language.

And maybe that's what's behind my language in rehearsal -- that feeling of wildness, of no control, of complete freedom. That's exactly the kind of work we do, fearless, crazy, wild, outrageous; and maybe my subconscious knows that controlling or "watching" my language would curtail that freedom and would send that message to the actors. It's the same reason (in my opinion) that HBO and Showtime series are so far superior to anything on network television, because on HBO and Showtime there is total artistic freedom, while there are tons of restrictions and rules on broadcast TV. Even if characters wouldn't necessarily curse, the curtailing of the creative spirit has a consequence.

And the last thing we ever do at New Line is curtail the creative spirit. I count on our actors to be my full collaborators in bringing a show to life. They don't work for me; they work with me. And if you've ever seen our shows, like Bat Boy, Forbidden Planet, Urinetown, Two Gents, The Wild Party, or numerous others, you know the one thing we excel at is fearlessness.

And so I curse. All the fucking time.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Why Should I Be Frightened?

We started blocking last night. And I find myself in a position that I'm in more and more, lately. We do so many unconventional musicals, shows that are utterly sui generis, and quite a few do not automatically suggest the right approach to staging them. In some cases (Bat Boy, Urinetown, Lippa's Wild Party), the original productions were so good and I learned from them how the shows operate. In some cases, the original productions were awful (High Fidelity, Reefer Madness, Cry-Baby) but I figured them out anyway.

And then there are the shows that are so unique and so outside the normal rules of musical theatre, that I can't really know for sure if I'm on the right road until all the pieces are put together -- which doesn't happen until the week we open! That can be scary. With Love Kills and Return to the Forbidden Planet (in the photo), I literally had no way of knowing if my ideas were going to work. Luckily, they did.

And so here I am again, flying relatively blind. I don't think the off Broadway production of bare was the right approach to the material. The director and designers tried to shoehorn the show into an existing style using existing devices. But bare really is something new. Sure, it's a little like Rent, but in my opinion, it's different enough that the lessons and devices of Rent don't really apply here. After all, as much as I love Rent, it still relied on a lot of the conventions of both old-school musical comedy and Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. I don't think bare does.

There is a new kind of raw rock theatre at the vanguard of the art form now -- shows like bare, American Idiot, Love Kills, Next to Normal, and others -- that prioritizes emotional arcs over narrative. Yes, story still matters in these shows, but it's not as important as the characters' individual emotional arcs. Musical theatre has always done emotion better than non-musical plays, simply because music is an abstract language and so it conveys emotion better than concrete words can. But rock music goes even further than traditional Broadway music in exploring extreme emotion. Imagine the story of Next to Normal set to a Rodgers and Hammerstein score or a Jerry Herman score.

It would suck.

Likewise, conventional staging often doesn't work with this new kind of show. These shows operate partly as rock concert and partly as narrative. (To some extent, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita do the same, both of which we've worked on.) And because this is a show that really isn't like any other in most regards, I need a physical language that isn't like other shows. I think I've found it. I think I'm on the right road. But I won't know for sure until it's too late to turn back and take the other fork. This early in the game, I just can't tell if my ideas are right or not.

But I've learned over the years that my instincts are pretty great. We always find the right answers, even though sometimes it takes some trial and error. And though I periodically find myself in unmapped artistic territory like this, I've learned to trust myself and my inner artistic compass. I may not understand consciously why this approach is right, but it feels right to me, and after thirty years of directing musicals, my gut is almost never wrong. I'll figure out why I'm right later...

That's not to say I won't take some missteps along the way. When we did Evita last season, I staged "The Money Kept Rolling In" three times. When we did The Wild Party, I staged "Come With Me" three times. But the good news is that my instincts tell me when I'm stumbling, and they know when I've stopped stumbling and arrived at the right answer. Or at least a right answer.

With some shows, I know exactly what the end product is going to look like, even if the cast doesn't. I'm lucky that actors trust me and always follow me down whatever odd path I've chosen. With other shows -- like this one -- I have no idea what the end product will look like. But I'm pretty damn sure we're on the right road. So as long as I keep us on that road, I'm pretty sure we'll end up with a powerful, interesting, kick-ass show.

Whenever I ever get scared, whenever I doubt the road we're on, I just picture Luke Skywalker flying in low over the Death Star and I hear Ben Kenobi saying "Use the force, Luke!" In other words, trust yourself. Trust the journey. I'm a big fan of alternative director Anne Bogart and her excellent books, and the greatest gift she ever gave me was to admit in her books that she sometimes has no idea what she's doing. But she has a method for dealing with that moment when she has no clue what to tell the actors -- she gets up off her chair and walks to the center of the rehearsal room, and by the time she arrives she has to say something. It can be bad direction to be fixed later, but she has to offer up something.

It reminds me of a lesson a college writing teacher once taught me about writing shows. If I can't figure out how to write Act I, Scene 1, he advised me to just go ahead and write a shitty version of that first scene so I can go on to the second scene. There's always time later for rewrites. And sometimes what felt shitty as it hit the page looks a lot better the next day when my fear has subsided. But either way, I've gotten myself on the road.

No matter what the problem or obstacle, we can always fix it later. As artists, we have to be comfortable turning away from the conscious brain and turning to The Force. That's often where our salvation lies.

Onward and upward.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

One Truth, One Life, One Voice

When I first found out about bare, I googled it and found some reviews of productions in L.A., NYC, and elsewhere, and many of the reviews were pretty condescending. Now, having finished music rehearsals last night, I'm puzzled by those reviews but I guess I'm not surprised...

I find that reviewers often criticize a show not based on the show itself but instead based on their own ignorance, preconceptions, or childhood traumas. You think I'm kidding, but one St. Louis reviewer found lots to hate in our Spelling Bee, and her comments really made me think some awful childhood experience was causing her to shit all over that amazing, insightful, beautifully crafted show. We've gotten other reviews that complain about a score being simplistic and bland when in reality the score is incredibly sophisticated but beyond the musical comprehension or taste of the reviewer.

In the case of bare, I have been continually blown away by the sophistication, craft, and complexity of this score. The harmonic language is so unique, living entirely in the musical vocabulary of pop music and alternative rock, and crafted with a confidence and fearlessness that is very exciting. Composer Damon Intrabartolo (in the picture) was already a successful film orchestrator and conductor, having worked on X-Men 2, Superman Returns, Fantastic Four, Dreamgirls, and other films. He knows how to write long-form, how to support a scene, how to build tension. And he really knows the conventions of pop music, and he uses them with a freedom and a quirkiness that is really refreshing.

Unlike conventional theatre scores, in Intrabartolo's bare score, phrases aren't always in multiples of four bars; many songs do not end on the tonic chord (the way almost all Western music does); he loves using ambiguous, "emo rock" open-fifth chords; and he often fucks around with the rules of harmonic progressions, surprising our ears but never so much that our ears rebel. To the untrained ear, the score sounds like great pop music. To a trained ear, Intrabartolo's music is just as unique as the music of Bill Finn (Falsettos, Spelling Bee, A New Brain). The open fifths are muscially and emotionally ambiguous, missing the note that defines major or minor, so that they convey neither happiness or sadness. His practice of rarely ending songs on the tonic chord, which is what we're all used to, makes those songs sound like they haven't finished, which adds dramatic tension to the narrative and generally keeps the audience from applauding, which also builds tension. You can tell this guy has written for film -- he really knows how to dramtize through music and write long-form musical scenes.

And structurally, Intrabartolo uses the vocabulary of opera -- arias, recitative, leitmotifs and themes, gorgeous choral work, lots of complex counterpoint, and more -- but all within the harmonic and melodic world of American pop and rock. It's a neat trick he's pulled off, giving these young characters the right musical voices while giving their drama a powerful underlying musical structure. It will be interesting to see if reviewers recognize any of this.

But none of this is why bare is so special or why it resonates so powerfully with so many young people across the country. The reason for its power and its popularity is its honesty. Since the 1960s, the true test of rock and roll (and pop, as a subgenre) is authenticity. And bare has that in spades. It is truthful about being young in America at this moment in history like very few other musicals are -- with the possible exception of the extraordinary American Idiot. Even at age 46, I see myself in almost all these characters and their powerful emotions.

When I wrote about Oklahoma! for my book Rebels with Applause, I argued that though we may think it's a trivial issue whether Curly or Jud takes Laurie to the box social, to her it's hugely consequential. The stakes are very high for her and anyone doing Oklahoma! has to respect that. The same is true of bare -- though the stakes here are already much higher than they are in Oklahoma! (at least Laurie wasn't pregnant and Curly wasn't gay!). But however we as adults may view them, we can't forget how serious this story is for these kids.

All of this to say: Don't underestimate bare or its creators, Jon Hartmere and Damon Intrabartolo. I think we're going to hear many more wonderful things from these guys...

I have a deep respect for this show that I'll admit I didn't have when we chose it for our season. I knew it was a cool show, well crafted, and that we'd get a good audience for it; but now I know (this happens to me every so often) that there's much more there than I initially could see.

We're all having such a blast working on this remarkable show. I can't wait to get it up on its feet and watch this outstanding cast dig down into these complicated kids and their complicated lives. I expect a few tears in rehearsal, and more than a few in our audiences... but what could be better than experiencing true, profound emotion in the theatre?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I've Never Felt So "bare"

I get so tired of people attacking contemporary musicals for not being Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. I attack this silliness in my next book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, which will be out this fall. A side argument to this crap is the idea that musical theatre voices are no longer "good" because they don't sound like John Raitt or Ethel Merman. Check out this silly New York Times blog post.

I call bullshit on both positions.

Rodgers and Hammerstein and their mid-century, rural American morality no longer have any relevance to our lives today. Now as we live amongst terrorism, gang violence, the internet, iPhones, and compulsive liars in Congress, how on earth are we supposed to relate to "This Was a Real Nice Clambake" or "The Lonely Goatherd"?

Blogger, please!

Today's real world is much more fully explored in shows like American Idiot, Next to Normal, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Rent, Hedwig, The Scottsboro Boys, Spring Awakening, and bare. These shows tackle the problems and issues most relevant to American life in 2011. Whether or not Laurie goes to the box social with Curly isn't nearly as compelling or emotional today as whether or not the boys in American Idiot will find the answers they need to their very complicated questions, or whether Tracy Turnblad can "make every day Negro Day"...

Likewise, the kind of voices Rodgers and Hammerstein preferred would ruin shows like American Idiot, Next to Normal, BBAJ, or bare. The days of those big, classical, old-fashioned Broadway voices are gone because musicals are more mature and more complex now. Granted, there's no excuse for casting an actor who can't handle the role, but musicals are inherently artificial, and big, Howard Keel type voices are even more artificial. Today's audiences want a character to sing like that person would sing, to bring a little more reality to the enterprise. After all, musical is an adjuective; the noun here is THEATRE. And theatre is about storytelling; it's not a concert.

It was very cool seeing Next to Normal for the second time last night, having seen the original cast a couple years ago in New York. This is today's theatre. It's muscular, it's ironic, it's complicated, it swims in gray area, and it refuses to offer us shallow, easy answers. No, life for Diana in Next to Normal would not be okay if someone would only sing to her, "You'll Never Walk Alone." Merely picking up a guitar does not heal this family.

Thinking about all this is so interesting while I'm working on bare. I don't understand the folks who still want to produce Brigadoon or Oklahoma! Taking nothing away from their quality and their original reception, why live in the past when the present is so interesting and so exciting? And why lock yourself away with cast albums of Carousel and South Pacific when so many amazing new scores are being written? I do love me some Anything Goes, but if I had a choice between seeing that and seeing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, I'd choose the latter.

Sometimes I grumble about how today's young musical theatre artists don't know the art form's history, and I do think that's a legitimate gripe (which is why I wrote my last book, Strike Up the Band: A New History of Musical Theatre). But on the other hand, there's no reason today's artists should bow down before the rusty shrine of Rodgers and Hammerstein when they could better focus their attention on the work of Tom Kitt, Larry O'Keefe, Bill Finn, Andrew Lippa, Jason Robert Brown, Kyle Jarrow, and others.

I'm so proud that New Line is producing bare, and that we've produced shows like Love Kills, High Fidelity, and in the fall, Passing Strange. I don't know how someone can love this art form but not want it to move forward. Sounds to me like a dysfunctional relationship.

The future is so much more interesting than the past.

Long Live the Musical!

Scott

bare

So we closed Two Gents, I got a week to be brain dead, then a half week to get ready for the next show. Rehearsals start tonight for bare. I think this is one of those rare shows when the actors are even more excited about starting than I am.

We have a younger cast than usual this time, since twelve of the fifteen characters in bare are high school students. We didn't end up casting any actual high schools kids (although we were open to that possibility), but almost the whole cast is twenty-somethings.

It's going to make me feel very old, I can tell right now...

But this is truly an extraordinary cast! We got one of the biggest turnouts we've ever had for auditions, and we had to turn away some really strong, terrific performers because there just wasn't room in the cast for all the talent we saw. Usually, we do shows that people don't know as well, so we get fewer folks at auditions and we can usually find places for all the really great actors we see. But not this time. It was hard saying no to some of these talented folks -- I just hope they'll come back and audition again next season.

Surprisingly, so many in the cast ended up in the one role they really, really wanted. That doesn't always happen, but all the pieces just fell into place this time. I think that's a really good sign. I was a little worried about having such a young cast -- we always have college kids in our shows, but the age range of our casts is usually pretty wide and usually includes a fair number of people my age. Still, I feel so good about the talent we've assembled, and like usual, half the cast are folks I've worked with before, so that will help. Plus, I think everyone has a real emotional connection to this show and will work their hearts out to bring it to life.

Luckily for me, this isn't a super hard show. The music is relatively easy and though I haven't worked out all the blocking yet, I do have a sense of what it will look like and how it will move, so I'm not worried about that part. I've decided that, even though the original production of bare really tried to look like Rent, I'm not sure that's really the right physical and visual model for this story. The show is very Rent-like in many ways, but that doesn't mean it has to be staged the same way.

I think bare operates in two distinct ways -- both as conventional musical and as rock concert. There are so many solos/soliloquies in the show, and I think those should look and feel different from the songs that move the plot forward. The original production had lots of sets coming on and off, and I just don't think that's necessary. This is a show about raw, naked emotion, and I think the actors should be the centerpiece of the show, not sets or lighting effects.

Like Love Kills, this is a show that should be entirely about the acting, with as few distractions as possible.

It will be such fun to dive into this music tonight! The adventure begins!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott