Passing Strange

We finished our first week of rehearsals for Passing Strange tonight. I knew this was going to be really tricky, challenging, unorthodox music, but I think the actors may be a bit overwhelmed by it. We've got a really strong cast, so I know they'll conquer it, but it's gonna scare them in the meanwhile. I've been working on the score for a few weeks, so I already knew the mountain we're climbing.

Charles Glenn, who plays our narrator, is one of the most talented musicians I've ever worked with. He's done only one show with us before -- he was a blistering, terrifying Herod in our JC Superstar -- but he's also been sitting on our board for a few years. He's a professional singer, but I don't think he's ever tackled anything like this before. And I see him going through the same thing many New Line leads before him have gone through -- they struggle initially with this complex music and they feel embarrassed or worse when they can't nail everything the first time through. It happened with The Wild Party, Sunday in the Park with George, A New Brain, and other shows. I reminded Charles tonight after rehearsal that we have lots of time. Not only do we have lots of calendar time, but we also have a rehearsal just to review and clean up the music, and then after the blocking is done, we'll have a "Fix-It Night" before we start running the full show, when we can work on anything that's still a problem. And then we get ten full run-throughs before we put it in front of an audience.

I learned long ago that if we're going to do these crazy, difficult shows, we need a nice, leisurely rehearsal period. We love the luxury of all that time. The other luxury I get is Nikki Glenn, Charles' wife and an actor-singer-musician who's worked with us on several shows as an actor. She's my assistant director for Passing Strange and because she's a musician (you should hear her play jazz violin -- amazing!), she's there to help me figure out some of the more bizarre rhythms and such. Thank god she's here!

The other thing that's tough about the score is that many of the songs aren't just songs -- they're more like complicated, extended musical scenes. (Oscar Hammerstein would be so proud!) And because the show is so rooted in rock and roll, a fair amount of the music just won't really sound right until we have the band. I'm going to ask the musicians if they can join us earlier than usual. I think it would be really helpful. We have the most kick-ass band in St. Louis theatre -- Justin on piano (and conducting), Clancy on drums, Mike on lead guitar, Aaron on rhythm guitar, and Dave on bass. There's nothing like live music and there's really nothing like live rock and roll.

(The debate over live vs. recorded music in the theatre has resurfaced lately, and I just can't imagine doing musicals without a live band. They bring so much to it that can't really be quantified. I said to someone today that doing a musical with recorded music is like showing a theatre audience a videotape of a play. Maybe that's not a perfect analogy, but it's close...)

One of the things that's tough for me is the physical score itself. Every other show I've ever worked on had a piano-vocal score, but not Passing Strange. There's a piano book for the band, but with no vocals, so I can't use that for rehearsals. And then there's a full conductor score, with all the vocals and all six instrument parts all on the same page (11" x 14" paper, landscape-wise), so I have to read both keyboard parts plus the bass line as I play, all while keeping an eye on the vocals so I can help the actors. And I have to turn the large cumbersome page every 10-12 measures. Ack! I'm learning to deal with it, but it's not easy.

But even at this early stage, we're finding so much gold in this wonderful show, so many subtle things in the music and lyrics, some really funny, some really emotional. This is going to be one of those shows for which I write my analysis chapter and then keep adding to it throughout the run as I discover new things.

And probably more than any other show I've worked on (with the possible exception of Hair), the Passing Strange score is chock full of "earworms," those little musical phrases and pieces of melody that get stuck in your brain. We're only about halfway through learning the score, but we've encountered quite a few of them -- "a colored paradise where the palm trees sway," "Only love is real," "It's alright," "why you wanna leave," "slips through your fingers just like angel dust," and so many more. Like any serious composer, Stew and Heidi (the creators, in the photo above) have built a fully integrated score, using musical themes and leitmotifs, using carefully placed reprises, using vocal melodies later as accompaniment, etc. It's not just great rock and roll, it's also a great theatre score.

Once again, I feel so ridiculously lucky to get to work on this beautiful show with this talented cast, these brilliant musicians, and our gifted designers. Yes, I'm the ringleader and benevolent dictator, but none of my ideas are worth shit without the smart, fearless artists who bring my ideas to life and fuse their own wonderful ideas to mine. This is going to be hard work but it's also going to be crazy fun!

I continue to love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Finishing the Fucking Hat

When I was in seventh grade, we had to write a paper describing a process. It could be about anything, building a birdhouse, washing a car, making dinner. I was a smartass at the time (but only at the time!) so I wrote a paper about writing a paper describing a process. I was pretty proud of myself and my teacher thought it was funny enough to accept my stunt. It probably wasn't as funny or clever as I thought at the time (I'm sure thousands of other kids have done the same), but I was only twelve.

Unfortunately, that's become one of the new models for writing musicals, and I hate it.

When I go to the theatre, I want to laugh because a show has gotten at some unexpected truth or because a character has revealed an unexpected side, not because the writers keep repeating the word cunt in a song or because of random self-reference. We laugh at the crazy people in Bat Boy because they are so desperately, freakishly human. We see real-world behavior in them, and we recognize our own darker selves in their absurdity. People laugh at the new musical Silence! (from whence comes the cunt song) because someone's saying dirty words in a musical.

Big fuckin' deal. Maybe that was "edgy" in the 1960s, but now that four-letter words are relatively commonplace in contemporary musical theatre, a potty mouth is hardly worth the price of a Broadway or off Broadway ticket.

The people laughing at Silence! should've seen Johnny Appleweed. Fifty-two occasions of the word fuck and its various forms. (Suck on that, Silence!) But in Appleweed I was consciously trying to make the word fuck mundane, to use it so much that the audience would stop noticing, to take away its power and its scariness. And it actually worked. It wasn't just about shock or cheap laughs; it was about exploring our hang-ups surrounding language.

And then there's self-reference. I love Urinetown and I like very much The Producers, but those shows were both far more than just self-reference. Urinetown satirizes the simplistic, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein, black-and-white morality of old-fashioned musicals to demonstrate how inadequate it is in a complex real world. It mocks the way too many old-fashioned musicals ignore the complexities of the real world (because it's a lot easier to write that way), and it also mocks political theatre like The Threepenny Opera, with a strong political point of view that, in this case, gets totally subverted in the last few minutes of the show. The Producers is a story about subverting the creative process for selfish gains, and it's told by subverting the devices of the genre which is both the form and content of the story. Bialystock and Bloom violated the theatre and so did their story. In both cases, the self-reference grew out of the story rather than out of an inability to write good comedy.

Content dictates form, as Sondheim says.

I've dabbled in self-reference myself as a writer. During my freshman year in college, I wrote a musical called Musical, in which the central character (and narrator) confesses midway through Act II that he's writing this show as we're watching it and he doesn't know how it ends because it hasn't happened yet. It brought up all kinds of questions about reality, authorship, etc., though the ideas behind it were only half-formed.

Then in 1992, I finished writing a show called Attempting the Absurd about a guy named Jason who has figured out that he doesn't actually exist and is only a character in a musical. (He knows this partly because he has only a sketchy memory of his past and he never goes to the bathroom.) The action of the show follows Jason's mother and the girl who's dumped him, trying to have him declared insane for believing he only exists inside a musical. At the end, he's arrested and taken to court where he produces the script for Attempting the Absurd, proving that he's right, that none of them actually exist, and his case is dismissed. The show was an exploration of perception, sanity, and belief, none of which were what they seemed to be in this world. The characters who knew they were sane were ultimately proved wrong -- they all only existed in this musical. Just because they believed something didn't make it true, and for those looking for it, that was a subtle message about religion.

My point is that self-reference can be funny, it can be interesting, and it can be a great device for exploring other ideas. But that's just it -- it's a device, a tool. Unfortunately, self-reference has become an end unto itself. There are so many shows now that are nothing but evenings of self-reference, for no discernible reason other than it makes the writers laugh. But animals on YouTube make us laugh. Is that the best these writers can aim for? That's not a very high bar and hardly the foundation for a piece of theatre. Seeing someone slip on a banana peel can be funny, but that doesn't make it good storytelling and it doesn't make it a two-hour musical. At least, not a good one.

But self-reference is all the rage right now. So we get musicals like [title of show] which would have made a great 10-minute piece of sketch comedy but was unfortunately a full-length musical. And then there was Gutenberg the Musical which was far worse, and the godawful, cynically shallow Broadway musicals Spamalot and Young Frankenstein. There was The Musical of Musicals, which was smarter but still unsatisfying and a bit too masturbatory for my taste. Even the uneven Book of Moromon has several pointless moments of self-reference, alongside a running gag about scrotum maggots.

And now we have Silence!, complete with an ironic exclamation point that might have been funny twenty years ago. (Yes, it's true that some musicals used to try to inject energy into their shows merely by adding an exclamation point to the title, but that doesn't happen anymore, it never happened much, and now it's nothing but an old joke.) Like the equally dimwitted Evil Dead the Musical, Silence! gets the majority of its laughs from self-reference, from its self-consciously low-budget production, and from more pointless vulgarity than even The Book of Mormom. Which is saying a lot.

It could have been so much more. Imagine the guys who wrote Bat Boy tackling The Silence of the Lambs.

Bat Boy referenced itself and its own limited budget from time to time, but it did so in the service of questioning whether big sets and lavish costumes are necessary to good storytelling. Bat Boy's cast changed costumes onstage to switch characters, and it exposed every "trick" of its stagecraft, admitting its own artifice but also fully engaging us emotionally in the story, so that by the end of the evening, we're stunned at how much we care about these characters and how deeply we're moved by the show's ending. Bat Boy and Urinetown didn't use self-reference because it was the trendy (and easy) way to write a show; they did it as a statement of belief in the power of the actor, and in protest against the mega-musicals of the 1990s, to return to Grotwoski's "poor theatre," where the power comes from the actors, rather than from stuff.

What are these new writers protesting? Intelligence? Structure? Character development?

It all comes down to telling the truth. Humans tell stories to understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Shows like Silence! and [title of show] bother me because they don't respect the incredible power of storytelling and the incredible responsibility we storytellers have to our fellow humans. I think they also bother me because I know how outrageously funny -- and truthful -- shows like Urinetown, Bat Boy, Spelling Bee, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson can be, all of which are waaaaay funnier than their shallower cousins. (And can I just say, for the record, that if you're only nine people's favorite thing, you've failed in communicating with your audience, which is the fundamental point of theatre.)

I know sometimes I will be in the minority on this but I will keep up the fight for smart, truthful musical theatre. There's so much of it being written now -- American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Next to Normal, Love Kills, bare, Spring Awakening, Taboo, In the Heights, Passing Strange -- and there's no excuse for giving us crap instead.

Just my opinion, of course.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

But That Was Once Upon a Time...

I've shocked a lot of people lately, the last couple years or so, by arguing that the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is outdated, no longer relevant, that its style and content is old-fashioned, that its mid-century rural morality has very little to offer us in a world of terrorism and drug wars. People who love classic musical theatre deeply can't believe I'm saying all this. But to be fair, I'm not saying the old shows suck. I'm not saying we should never see them again. But I am saying they are no longer relevant to our culture the way they once were; and also, that the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is not the pinnacle of the art form, just one period and one style.

There are a lot of reason the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is best left to history. Its insistence on perfect rhyming and scansion seems silly in the age of rock and roll. Old-school theatre music, including the music of Stephen Sondheim, is about order and control. Rock and roll is about freedom and anarchy. If every rhyme in Rent was perfect, it wouldn't quite feel right. If every line scanned perfectly, it would seem considerably less authentic. That's just not what Rent sounds like. Same with American Idiot.

But the central problem with the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is that it's based on a deeply flawed fundamental premise, the idea that a musical can ever be naturalistic. George M. Cohan, at the turn of the last century, knew it couldn't. Kander and Ebb knew it couldn't. And the newest generation of musical theatre writers certainly know it.

Now before we go any further, let's distinguish between the word realistic, which means dealing with the world as it actually is, dark side and all; and the word naturalistic, which means imitating nature. Realistic is about content; naturalistic is about style. Robert Altman movies are naturalistic; Company and Next to Normal are realistic.

Rodgers and Hammerstein figured out, even before they started working together, that musicals can be realistic. Hammerstein's Show Boat dealt with alcoholism, inter-racial marriage, gambling addiction, domestic abuse, and more. Rodgers' Pal Joey was about a two-bit night club singer who uses women until they figure out he's using them. But both R&H seemed to think that musical theatre could be naturalistic too.

They were wrong.

All their shows (except Allegro) employed the Fourth Wall, and this created a dilemma when it came to solos, musical soliloquies. If a character is going to just stand there and tell us what he or she is feeling, how do you justify that in a naturalistic world with a Fourth Wall? You can call it an "interior monologue" but it still feels unnatural.

Singing in a musical is almost never naturalistic with the exception of a few shows in which singing is part of the story, like Hedwig, Cabaret, Hair, and a few others. But breaking into song when you're fighting or falling in love is entirely unnatural. Instead of struggling against that, musicals should accept it and make peace with it. George M. Cohan broke the Fourth Wall all the time. He never made any pretense at reality in his shows. Bob Fosse and Tommy Tune were the same. I think musical theatre is at its purest and most honest when it admits its obvious artifice. Thank god we have returned to that in recent years, with shows like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Next to Normal, Spring Awakening, Passing Strange and so many others.

It's fascinating that musical theatre today is essentially rejecting the entire Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution in this new millennium and returning to its roots in classical musical comedy. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is not all that different in its style and its relationship to its audience from Cohan's Little Johnny Jones in 1904 or Cole Porter's Anything Goes in 1934. We're embracing our roots and having a blast doing it. Even serious musicals like American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Next to Normal, and Passing Strange have all rejected the R&H model. We're a much more cynical culture today than we were in the 1940s, and we require a fundamental honesty that R&H shows always lacked, as they tried to convince us that what was happening onstage was real when we all knew it wasn't.

Today, we prefer the honesty of shows that admit their artifice. Today, musical theatre artists follow in the footsteps of Bob Fosse, Hal Prince, Kander and Ebb, and Bertolt Brecht. Not Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I'm just sayin'.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Portrait of a Boy

Sometimes young actors ask me what path they should take to build a career in the musical theatre. But I'm not the best guy to ask because I never cared about the money; I just wanted to spend my life making musicals, wherever and however I could. And also because I never consciously charted a course for myself. I just followed my bliss, as the legendary Joseph Campbell always advised. (I highly recommend the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell PBS series The Power of Myth -- Campbell's ideas have proven really valuable in my theatre work.)

You could argue that I had a huge advantage early on that most people don't have -- an unnatural and profound obsession with musicals. Literally, from further back than I can remember, I have been crazily, passionately in love with musicals. There has never been anything I'd rather do than listen to, watch, read, write, write about, or make musicals. And I can only assume that freakish obsession is why my life has -- often accidentally -- become an amazing lifelong course of study in my chosen art form.

Here's an overview of how I got to be me right here right now...

First, my parents started me on piano lessons when I was four. And even from that early age, they knew they could only keep me interested if one of the pieces the teacher gave me to work on each week was a show tune. I can remember (around age 5 or 6?) pounding out "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof for weeks on end. Drove my mother batshit. They tried to get me to take up trumpet as well in fourth grade, and I stayed with it for three years, but I hated it because I couldn't sing along and it didn't sound anything at all like the cast albums. At least the piano could approximate the sound (most of the notes at least) of the full orchestra. And I could sing along!

When I was a kid, I hated practicing piano. But I'm so glad now that they started me that early. I learned to read music as I learned to read words. Which is why today I'm a pretty outstanding sight-reader. Which is, in turn, why I have no discipline and can never really get myself to practice, because I can get away with sight-reading (except for The Wild Party -- that one I practiced). Which is also why I can direct from the piano for most of the rehearsal process. I really can watch and play the show at the same time.

When I was fourteen, I switched to a new piano teacher, St. Louis jazz pianist Carolbeth True, who taught me how to use the skills I'd learned all those years. Suddenly, I was practicing two or three hours a day, just because I loved it. Best piano teacher I ever had.

Then in high school and college I got my dream job -- ushering at The Muny, the world's largest outdoor theatre. From 1980 through 1987, I wore that godawful polyester red coat in the sweltering St. Louis summer heat so that I could watch musicals every night. It was like the perfect college survey course, planned out just for me. I saw shows I would have never otherwise seen, like Carnival, High Button Shoes, Li'l Abner, George M, Hans Christian Andersen, Shenandoah, They're Playing Our Song, Where's Charley?, The Apple Tree, Funny Girl, Oliver!, and others. And the usher captains were always so cool about stationing me down close to the stage so I could see everything.

In high school, I got to perform in an outstanding survey of the art form, including a classic Cole Porter musical comedy (Anything Goes, 1934), two Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, their first (Oklahoma!, 1943) and their last (The Sound of Music, 1959), a Lerner and Loewe classic (Camelot, 1960), a rock musical (Grease, 1972), and a brand new show, the first one I ever wrote, called Adam's Apple. Later on, with CenterStage, I would also get to perform in Godspell (1970) and to play the role I had always wanted, Cornelius Hackl, in Hello, Dolly! (1964), across from my best friend Chris Penick as Barnaby.

I went to college at Harvard and discovered only after I arrived that there was no theatre department. So I was a music major instead and it was the best accident so far. I learned music theory and history and they have both been very valuable in the years since. And my sophomore and junior year theory professor was the amazing Peter Lieberson, a composer himself, but also son of Goddard Lieberson, onetime producer of the cast albums of Camelot, My Fair Lady, Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, West Side Story, and other classics. Peter's mother was Vera Zorina, onetime ballerina and Broadway musical star. Peter really encouraged me as a composer and he taught me an important lesson -- that an artist needs to learn the rules and history of his art form, even though he might periodically reject them, or only call upon them in a pinch.

And another teacher at Harvard, Ann Dhu McLucas (then Shapiro), also took me under her wing and together we created an independent study program for me over several years, analyzing in real depth the scores of quite a few Broadway musicals, laying the groundwork for the books and essays I write today.
Because there was no theatre department at Harvard, the theatre scene was an artistic Wild West. You got whatever space you could and mounted a show however you could. Because of this anarchy, there were 30-40 productions opening each semester, everything from Antigone to Dames at Sea. It was heaven. I produced my shows in common rooms, dining halls, a former library, but never in an actual theatre. Some friends and I started the Harvard Off-Key Musical Theatre Company, though we only produced a few shows. I learned there how to do the kind of low-budget, (almost) guerrilla theatre that would later mark the early years of New Line.

While I was in college, my high school drama teacher Judy Rethwisch and I stared a community theatre group back in St. Louis called CenterStage, active only during the summers until I graduated and we could produce full seasons. Again, though it wasn't intentional at the time, I see now that the shows we were producing were a personal little master class just for me. We did Hello, Dolly!, No, No, Nanette, Carousel, How to Succeed, and other classics, along with some more contemporary shows, like Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors, and Best Little Whorehouse. I had seen these classics at the Muny, but now I could actually work on them and figure out what makes them tick.

And once we were doing full seasons, I started creating these "Tribute" concerts, whole evenings of songs by one writer or team. Sometimes, there'd be historical narration between songs, sometimes just song after song, sometimes with a little staging, often none at all. I created Tributes to Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lerner and Loewe, Stephen Sondheim, and later on, a "Tribute to the Rock Musicals" and a "Tribute to the Dark Side." In almost every case, one of my priorities was to recreate exactly as possible each song's original performance, context, staging, etc. I realize now I was working my way through the masters of the art form, learning from them by working on them. Just as music theory students imitate Bach to learn composition rules, I was imitating the masters of my art form for the same reason. Just as I had to take three years of music theory as a foundation, these concerts did the same for me in terms of musical theatre. I continued this series into the early years of New Line.

While I was running CenterStage, I got a job at Dance St. Louis, first as a telemarketer, then as the assistant to the operations manager, and finally as the development director. It was there that an amazing man named Adam Pinsker, DSL's executive director, taught me the finer points of arts administration. He had worked in the field for decades and once again I had my own independent study. And on top of everything else, he let me stay after hours to work on CenterStage stuff.

In 1991 I was ready for adventure. So I left CenterStage and started New Line Theatre, right at the beginning of the new wave of nonprofit "art" musical theatre that swept the country in the early 1990s. By the time I left Dance St. Louis in 1994, New Line was off and running. Within a few years I also began writing articles about musical theatre and in 1996 my first book was published.

It's funny now, looking back, to see how freakishly direct the path has been. And it was almost never because I planned it that way. I believe, like Joseph Campbell, that it's not about charting a course or planning a timetable; it's about following your bliss. If you do what you love most and you do it your very best, good things will result. That being said, I'm aware how lucky I've been all my life to get all the opportunities I've gotten. I was repeatedly in the right place at the right time because I was always following my bliss, never straying from the path for a second.

I remember, right after college, Maritz offered me a job writing industrial musicals, i.e., short musicals for trade shows and conventions about how much GM loves its employees or about how cool the new line of Ford trucks is gonna be. I read some of their previous shows to learn the house style and they horrified me. I couldn't do that. I couldn't write musicals to increase sales or introduce the new line-up. Musical theatre is sacred to me. It's not about selling trucks. So I passed on the job. Best decision I ever made. Worst for my finances.

And so now here I am, waist deep in the most amazing art form humans have ever developed, thinking and talking and writing about musical theatre most of my waking hours. And I get to work with a shitload of incredibly talented, like-minded artists who want to make the same intensely cool, aggressive kind of theatre I do. And we get to work on and share with our audiences brilliant, emotional, original work like Love Kills, Passing Strange, The Wild Party, and bare. And as we work, I get to talk to not only the true geniuses of the art form (Bill Finn, Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, John Kander, Ahrens and Flaherty, etc.), but also its newest voices (Larry O'Keefe, Kyle Jarrow, Andrew Lippa, Tom Kitt, Amanda Green, Adam Gwon,  Neil Bartram and Brian Hill, and others).

It's kinda like someone with a sweet tooth living in a candy store.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott