Heart Like a Hand Grenade

New Line has been in transition the last few years. The Great Plague of 2020 didn't really cause this transition, but it sped it up.

I remember when I turned forty (twenty years ago!!), I told my friends that New Line could not get "middle-aged" just because I was. It's one of the reasons we produce shows like bare and Be More Chill.  

But the biggest change since 2019 has been a turnover in the people who work with us. Some of our longtime New Line veterans left town and/or moved on to other life adventures.

Mike Dowdy-Windsor joined us as an actor in 2009, and he became our Associate Artistic Director in 2012, but he and his husband Dominic moved to California in 2022. But as board member (and occasional performer) Alison Helmer reminded me, New Line has been around thirty-two years, and every so often, we get a whole new generation of New Liners -- even while a good number of our longtime veterans stick around. Sometimes, that new generation brings the return of past New Liners, which is always a treat. And that's our secret sauce.

It's always a little sad when veteran New Liners move on, but it's also really exciting when a new generation joins us. So many of our actors this season are new to our company, and that's very exciting. It's so much fun to see what new things and different perspectives they bring to our work. At the same time, we still have some longstanding New Liners joining us again this season.

Clayton Humburg just played Johnny in American Idiot which opened this current season. Nine years ago, he joined us for the first time, in Heathers, and then as Rock and Roll Boyfriend in our last production of American Idiot. This was Clayton's eighth New Line show. Todd Schaefer first joined us in 2002, for Cabaret and then as Brad in Rocky Horror. Later this season, Todd returns to play Frank N. Furter, in his fifteenth New Line production. Chris Strawhun first joined us in 2010, in Evita, and he returns this season for his tenth New Line show, as Eddie and Dr. Scott in Rocky Horror. Ian McCreary first joined us in 2019 as one of the lovely and dangerous Cagelles in La Cage aux Folles, and this season he returned for his eighth New Line show with American Idiot. Victoria Pines first joined us in 2001 in The Cradle Will Rock, and she returns this season as Magenta in Rocky Horror and as Joanne in Rent, her fourth and fifth New Line shows.

Likewise, Chris Moore first joined us as an actor in Head Over Heels in 2020, but now he's our Associate Artistic Director and he was the lead director for American Idiot, the first time he's directed for New Line. (There will be more.)

It's this great mix that makes such great theatre -- the comfort and familiarity of working with our veteran New Liners, mixed with the energy and excitement of working with new people.

Part of that mix is also a very intentional diversity of race, gender, age, body type, and sexuality. We have actively focused on that diversity in our casting for decades, and I'm happy to say that this season will be our most diverse ever. That's due largely to the amazing new people who came to audition for us. And all those new people came to us largely because Chris Moore cares so deeply about that diversity and did some very active recruiting. I've always been proud that our casting has been race-blind, and we often cast actors of color in leading roles that are traditionally "white." But thanks to Chris, we're doing better in these efforts than ever before. (He's the driving force behind our January concert at the Sheldon, called Broadway Noir.) All of that is really important to me as Artistic Director, so I'm very grateful to Chris.

Sometimes the specific advantages of working with new people are a surprise. It wasn't until we were a couple weeks into rehearsal that it occurred to Chris and me that almost no one in our cast had even been born when the 9/11 attacks happened, and we were doing this show entirely born out of that event. What we eventually realized is that this was an advantage -- the characters had also never experienced 9/11 before. The biggest surprise is that they all found historical and emotional equivalents in today's world. It was welcome proof that this story, so specific in so many ways -- is truly universal and timeless. 

Also, many of these actors had never performed a piece of musical theatre this serious, this dark, this confrontational, and it was genuinely thrilling for many of them. I've been doing shows like this for so long that I forget the rush of discovering that there are so many musicals like this. All of this changed the show in lots of ways, obvious and subtle.

Several people came up to me after performances and told me sheepishly that they liked this production better than our production in 2016 that I directed. Every time it made me laugh, and I reassured them it was okay to like this one better. Of course, that got me thinking about how the two productions were different.

My conclusion was this. I think our 2016 production, much like Michael Mayer's original, was colder, more outraged, more rebellious, more political, more Brechtian -- more of a fuck-you to the audience. In contrast, this new production was more emotional and more human, and so the ending felt gentler this time. I had done my best to keep my fingers out of the process, to let Chris make the show his own, so the two productions really were different -- partly because of the different directors, and partly because of the different cast with different, more indirect connections to the story in these different times.

Same material, very different show, every bit as dramatic and powerful. That's cool.

It took me a while in my directing career, but I finally learned at some point that there are no "right" answers when you're directing a show, only stronger choices and weaker choices. And sometimes there are several strong choices which can take you down several different but parallel paths. As I reminded Chris, we never have to try to make it unique or fresh or different. That happens by itself and we shouldn't force it. Sondheim taught us that in Sunday in the Park with George:

Anything you do,

Let it come from you.
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.

It feels a little odd that we're producing a whole season of shows we've done before, shows that originally debuted in 1973, 1994, and 2010, and yet they all feel (sadly) relevant again. But I know that in this dark, ugly, fraught time, these shows will help us navigate. We chose shows for this season about lost humanity, sexuality, and community. And because they are all modern musicals, all three are also about connection, and connection's arch-nemesis, "Othering." All things we need to be reminded of right now.

Even though we've produced these shows before, even though you may have seen them before, I promise you this -- we will give you more to see.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Rocky Horror tickets, click here, and to buy Rent tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Everybody's a Critic. Literally.

What responsibility do theatre reviewers have these days? What role do they play in our culture?

And maybe more to the point, what value does a theatre review have today, when literally anyone can set up a blog and declare themselves a reviewer? Like filmmaking, music, publishing, and other areas, reviewing has been radically democratized in this digital age. Anyone can make a film now, or record a song, or publish a book.

And anyone can be a reviewer. Literally.

That's because there are no criteria to be a reviewer, no gatekeepers, no particular rules or conventions or deadlines anymore -- and no editors! -- so reviews are now just random people's opinions, quite often people with no training, expertise, or credentials. Just opinions. And many reviewers take a week or two (or more) to publish their reviews, giving them even less value. Theatre reviews are fast becoming little more than Amazon customer reviews. And I guess that's not necessarily a problem -- as long as we understand that's what they are.

Throughout the 32-year history of New Line, I have publicly called out reviewers when they weren't doing their jobs. I won't go after them if they simply don't like a show, but I will if they misunderstand the show and then criticize it for their misunderstanding, or if their review is simplistic and superficial. Especially in New Line's early days, too many people still thought all musicals are silly and brainless, and I had to teach reviewers how to watch and think about the work we do. 

Sometimes, local actors and directors are horrified that I dare review the reviewer. But why shouldn't we?

When New Line produced Jerry Springer the Opera, one local reviewer ended his review by telling his readers that they might enjoy the show more if they left fifteen minutes before the end, because nothing happens. Now the truth is, the last fifteen minutes of the show are very intellectually dense and philosophical, referencing Dante and William Blake, and ultimately leaving us with a profound statement that lines up shockingly well with the ethos of Springer's TV show. By the end of this brilliant opera, Jerry Springer himself has united Heaven and Hell.

In other words, there's a lot that happens in the last fifteen minutes of the show, and this reviewer just didn't understand any of it. I called him out on it.

When we produced The Rocky Horror Show the first time, one reviewer dismissed our production entirely because it wasn't enough like the film. But we weren't producing the film. We were producing the very different stage show, which came first. I called him out on it.

When we produced The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, one reviewer dismissed the entire show as "glamorizing" prostitution. But onstage (unlike the film), Whorehouse is a very clear-eyed look at prostitution, and it tells a true story, with a very unhappy, true ending. And besides, the stage show isn't about sex or about prostitution -- it's about the mad hypocrisy of the culture and politics around these women, at the height of the Sexual Revolution. And seriously, how glamorous could they be when they're all wearing early 1970s polyester jumpsuits? I called the reviewer out on it.

So when we got a positive but clownish review from KDHX for our current production of American Idiot, I called the reviewer out on it. On cue, a handful of local actors were predictably shocked, stunned, and deeply saddened yet again that I had reviewed the reviewer. Apparently, they believe reviewers can criticize our work, even irresponsibly, but their work deserves some kind of Trumpian Immunity?

No.

In this Idiot review, the first two paragraphs are the reviewer's pointless musical autobiography, weirdly straining to establish his punk street cred. (Spoiler Alert: reviews are not about the reviewers.)

When he finally gets to the show he's reviewing, he declares that "New Line's timing" in producing the show this year is "well-timed." Our timing is well-timed? (KDHX has since fixed this sentence, so clearly somebody knows there's a problem here.)

Then this guy writes, "Despite its obvious six degrees of plot separation from La Bohème by way of Hair and Rent...” What's he smoking? The plot, characters, and themes of American Idiot have virtually nothing to do with Bohème, Hair or Rent. And also, how do you play the Six Degrees game with plots?

He goes on to write, "The musicians sit behind a chain link fence, but their musical talents, under the direction of bassist John Gerdes, roam freely..." WTF? Can someone please explain to me how musical talents roam freely...? This is a reviewer who loves his own writing too much and who's trying to sound like a better writer than he is. That never works. And also, reviews are not about the reviewers.

There's lots more clumsy self-indulgence in this review, but I'll spare you. What's my point? The artists who work with New Line deserve better. This kind of chatty, un-serious review is disrespectful of us and our work. 

As I expected, I was social-media-scolded for being a bully and for having a "meltdown," for reviewing this guy's review. Let's get real -- disagreeing is not bullying, despite what people on Facebook may think. And being offended is not having a meltdown. I'm baffled by this genuinely weird mindset that reviewers are somehow above review, that it's "unprofessional" to call them out.

Because that would mean that Steve Sondheim, Hal Prince, David Merrick, Joe Papp, and lots of other legendary theatre artists have been unprofessional for publicly calling out critics for irresponsible reviews. (They haven't.) If reviewers want to be part of the public cultural conversation, they have to take the good with the bad, like everyone else who puts work before the public.

You know, like theatre artists.

Reviewers should not get a pass for un-serious, un-thoughtful reviews. In Days of Olde (pre-internet), reviewers were afforded some respect and authority because their job was to think and write about the art form, and even so, they were often held to account by the public through Letters to the Editor. But that's nobody's job anymore, at least not in St. Louis. Nobody gets paid to review theatre locally. Now, reviewing is a sideline. A hobby. Some of our local reviewers are excellent, some are fine, but a few are terrible and a few are little more than synopsis machines. One big problem is that admission to the Critical Community is now just the price of setting up a free blog.

To paraphrase Gus the Theatre Cat, "Reviewing is certainly not what it was." It's probably too much to ask that any of them read any of these...

How to Write About Theatre: A Manual for Critics, Students, and Bloggers

The Critics Say: 57 Theatre Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future

The Art of Writing for the Theatre: An Introduction to Script Analysis, Criticism, and Playwriting

The Critics Canon: Standard of Theatrical Reviewing in America

So what do we do about all this? No idea. As a species, we're still figuring out how to navigate the digital era, how to sift out the bullshit from the truth, who to give our trust to, who to believe, how to judge information, and so much more.

Maybe in this digital information age, when theatre companies can share with their potential audience (virtually cost-free) production photos, rehearsal photos, video clips, glimpses behind-the-scenes, interviews, blog diaries, and so much more -- maybe reviews as we know them and review pull-quotes will soon go the way of the Betamax and the Walkman.

I mean, when many reviews have all the gravitas and depth of a Facebook post, do we really need them? Do they still serve the community in any meaningful way?

Reviewers in St. Louis don't represent theatre audiences today the way they once might have. To be blunt, with only a couple exceptions, all the St. Louis reviewers are pretty old; the majority are male; and with only the rarest exception, they're all white. That does not align with the majority of our audience. Or the audiences we want to reach. Or our city.

So now what? No idea. It's a new world. And there's still a lot to figure out.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Author's Note: I generally distinguish between critics, who write about shows in the context of the art form and the times and the culture; and reviewers, who say if they liked a show or not. Critics are people like George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker, Eric Bentley, George Jean Nathan, Harold Clurman, Langston Hughes, Robert Brustein, Frank Rich, George C. Wolfe, et al.

P.S. To buy American Idiot tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

The Heart's Apocalypse

A big part of the punk mindset is nihilism -- everything sucks, everyone is stupid and corrupt and selfish, everyone lies, the world is a pit, and life is meaningless.

Or as Sweeney Todd might put it:

There's a whole in the world
Like a great black pit,
And it's filled with people
Who are filled with shit,
And the vermin of the world
Inhabit it...

American Idiot expresses that nihilism with the anti-anthem "I Don't Care."

It's easy to see how that mindset became a comfortable trap after the 9/11 attacks -- and after the pandemic. And by that logic, if everything and everyone is fucked up, there's no point in trying to fix any of it, or forge meaningful relationships -- or do anything. All three of our heroes in American Idiot set off to chase their dreams, but none of them has a dream, and despite their efforts, they cannot connect with anyone -- well, not anyone real, anyway. 

They're not running to anything, only away from something. They have no dreams to chase, only a banal nightmare to escape.

This is a coming-of-age story, a hero myth story, and the lesson these young men learn by the end of our story is that you never find what you're looking for by chasing it out in the world -- well, not out in this world, anyway. You always find what you're looking for within. That's the message of so many hero myth stories. But American Idiot goes a little deeper than that.

These three guys, Johnny, Tunny, and Will, desperately seek meaningful human connection, although I'm not sure any of them actually knows that consciously. And the only real connection they've ever known is among the three of them. And so their meandering quests eventually lead them back to each other, back home. Yes, home in a physical sense -- they're back in Jingletown -- but also home in an emotional sense.

At the end of American Idiot, we don't know if these three will be okay. All we know if that they've grown up a little. They're a little better equipped now to navigate life than they were at the beginning. But also, they've learned the most basic of human lessons -- they need each other. They need connection. And in this story, they've all learned different lessons, so now they can learn from each other.

It takes a village. Or at least three punks.

This show is really dark, really harrowing, but people come out of it feeling really good. Part of that is ending the show with "Good Riddance" -- such an amazing song. But also, I realize now, they feel good because they've been reminded of that simple basic human truth -- we need each other.

And especially in these ugly, combative, insane times, that reminder is incredibly comforting. The Great Plague of 2020 was a national trauma not unlike that of the 9/11 attacks. And in both situations, many of us emerged with PTSD. And many of us worked through those emotions and fears through making art. That's what Billie Joe Armstrong did. That's what Michael Mayer did. That's what we're doing right now. We're trying to make sense of our trauma, and at the same time, to reassure us all that none of us is alone in this suffering, in this blind groping toward something better. And we will find our way through it. But we need our art to help guide us.

That's what American Idiot is about -- grappling with the unthinkable, grappling with who we are when the whole world changes around us, grappling with the ability to see a different reality from the people around us. It feels a lot like that sci-fi-horror movie They Live. (If you haven't seen it, do!)

That's the great tragedy, the great curse of Johnny, Tunny, and Will -- and their entire generation, according to American Idiot. They can see the bullshit. They can see the grift, the corruption, the lies, but nobody around them can see it. The rest of the country is screaming, "USA! USA!" in a great, toxic stew of rage and revenge, stirred up by a mindless, mad love of country.

So, as Billie Joe wrote, our hero is "the son of rage and love." The insane cultural and political stew of 2001-2003 has made Johnny into this nihilistic punk. But if you watch the news today, you might sense that we're right in the thick of a very similar great toxic stew again. And it has made many of us into nihilists.

So what does American Idiot teach us? Probably each of us takes away from it different lessons and messages, depending on what we need right now, exactly like all the classic fairy tales. This is a fable for the 21st century, a story about the personal toll it takes on each of us when our institutions are sabotaged, disassembled, and smeared with well-coordinated lies, when the people who are running the country don't care about us...

But who's fault is all this? The grifters who play the epic con, or the millions of marks who accept the lies? Is it Trump's fault? Or is it the fault of Trump voters? Or is it the fault of all of us?

The first step is realizing you have a problem. By the end of our story, our heroes have taken that step, and they are beginning to find healing. But what will happen to them when they get to 2020?

American Idiot is a powerful, wildly entertaining show, and you might just leave the show feeling a tiny bit better about the state of our world, or at least, about yourself.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy American Idiot tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Something Unpredictable

I had programmed an entirely different 2024-2025 season for New Line. In retrospect, I see now that my mistake was in thinking about seasons the way we used to think about seasons, before the Great Plague of 2020. We were going to do The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bad Cinderella, and The Life. That would have been a very strong, very cool season, but it was a season for a normal (alternative) company in normal times. It was not the season we needed right now.

New Line survived the pandemic and we're slowly returning to pre-pandemic audience attendance, fundraising, etc. But despite the promises of Starlight Express, I've been very skeptical these last several years that there is really a light at the end of this tunnel.

It was New Line's Associate Artistic Director Chris Moore who urged me to repeat one of our biggest past hits this season, to put some much needed money in the bank. But what neither Chris nor I realized at the time, was that shows are usually big sellers precisely because they speak to a moment in our culture and history -- even when they're not literally about that moment.

American Idiot was written in 2004 about the events of 2001-2003. But when we produced it in 2016, during the Presidential election, we were all shocked -- me, the actors, the audience -- at how much the show was about that moment in 2016. And now we're producing the show again in 2024, and you'll be amazed at how much this story now is about 2024. Even though Billy Joe Armstrong wrote these songs twenty years ago, even though Michael Mayer fashioned these songs into a stage musical fourteen years ago, the show is about now.

Ultimately we decided that, for the first time in New Line's history, we'd put together an entire season of repeats of our biggest hits. And just as it was with American Idiot, it was the same The Rocky Horror Show and Rent, in this time of conservative freak-out over all things related to sexuality and a stronger-than-ever push from the political right to Other-ize all non-white, non-straight, non-binary Americans. Rocky's satire, so specifically about the freak-out over the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, suddenly takes on pointed new meaning in this world newly afraid of trans people, drag queens, and new kinds of family. Ten years ago, we didn't think we still needed queer-affirming culture, but we need it today, as much as we needed it in the 1970s and 80s. Rent isn't just relevant again; it's necessary again.

Life's hard. Theatre can help us.

It's an oversimplification, but it's not hard to see the Republican/MAGA Party as mostly terrified white folks, and the Democratic coalition as everybody else in America. Just look at the numbers -- Republicans have lost the popular vote in every Presidential election since 2004. And almost all the big agenda items on the Democratic side have broad majority appeal among Americans.

In American Idiot, Johnny, Tunny, and Will are battling against the forces of conformity and complacency and shallow patriotism in 2002. But when we see these characters again, now in 2024 -- without any literal references to 2002 -- we now see them battling all those same forces in 2024. Twenty years after Armstrong wrote these songs, it's still easier to be an "idiot," to accept what you hear, believe what you're told, vote with your tribe, than to stand up and yell Not This Time.

American Idiot doesn't give us a tidy, orderly resolution at the end. Our three heroes have gone out into the world, done battle with the "idiots" (including themselves) and come home a little wiser. But only a little. They're not really happy or content when our story ends, but they know themselves better now. The culture can't turn them into idiots now. They see that life isn't an adventure, like they thought; it's a journey. And a lot of unresolved shit stays unresolved in the course of a human life. But if you know who you are and you can see your path, you'll be okay.

Sort of by accident -- or was it? -- we ended up with a totally different season than I had first planned, a season that is far more relevant to this moment in our shared history and culture than the other shows would have been. Our country, our community, and many of us were badly broken by the pandemic. A lot of those breaks have not yet healed; some of those breaks have been re-injured. Without consciously intending to, Chris and I put together a season about The Others and about healing. That's the season we need.

Theatre -- well, all the arts -- are medicine. Theatre helps us grow, helps us heal, helps us connect, helps us understand. And just as a doctor has to prescribe the right medicine to match the illness, we too have to find the right shows that will help us all, on both sides of the lights, to do that healing. I think we've done that this season.

Still, I do worry sometimes that this period is so complex and so hard to unravel, that it's a lot more difficult to heal ourselves and each other than it used to be. I've always felt like what we do at New Line really matters and contributes to the world and our community. But now I wonder, can theatre still heal us? Can we still come together to tell a story and connect in meaningful ways, just as we've done for thousands of years?

Or is the darkness too strong and too pervasive today?

We shouldn't underestimate the power of the Dark Side. The MAGA movement is built entirely on a foundation of fear. And we can't quote Master Yoda enough these days -- fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. We can't just turn away from that darkness; we have to confront it. And to confront it, we have to understand it. That's why we tell stories.

In these turbulent times, I think the only real answer to our problems is genuine human connection. And that's one thing we all know the theatre does incredibly well, especially in a small blackbox space like the Marcelle. We have to stop fearing each other and start connecting to each other. That's the only sane way forward.

Theatre can help us.

In the last song of American Idiot, Armstrong's lyric describes the human journey as "another turning point, a fork stuck in the road." It's all about choices. Choosing to connect instead of fear. Choosing to find value in The Others instead of fear. Choosing to go forward, not backward. Choosing to embrace all of life, the good shit, the bad shit, the crazy shit, the surprising shit, the glorious shit, the stupid shit, all of it. Choosing to follow your own path and not someone else's.

Choosing to heal. And to heal others.

How do you measure a year in the life? All of us are trying to figure that out all over again, here in this New World that Jason Robert Brown warned us about way back in 1995:

But then the earthquake hits,
Then the bank closes in;
Then you realize you didn't know anything.
Nobody told you the best way to steer
When the wind starts to blow.

And oh, you're suddenly a stranger;
You life is different than you planned.
And you have to stay
Till you somehow find a way
To be sure of what will be;
Then you might be free.

A new world crashes down like thunder;
A new world charging through the air;
A new world just beyond the mountain,
Waiting there, waiting there...

A new world shattering the silence;
There's a new world I'm afraid to see;
A new world louder every moment:
"Come to me, come to me..."

These are still very scary times. But JRB reassures us that we will find our way out of the darkness, one way or another:

And oh, you're suddenly a stranger
In some completely different land;
And you thought you knew,
But you didn't have a clue
That the surface sometimes cracks
To reveal the tracks
To a new world.

Theatre can help us crack it open. 

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy American Idiot tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

It Was Worth All the While

So here's the deal. 

Theatres across America are still struggling with the lingering effects of the Great Plague. Dozens of great theatre companies have shut down. Seasons have been reduced, side series have been cut. Staff has been downsized. We have worked very hard to get New Line through this period, and we're gonna make it! But it hasn't been easy.

I was recently talking to my friend Jennifer Ashley Tepper, who writes very cool books about Broadway history and also runs the New York concert venue 54 Below. Jen's programming is outstanding, but the space had to change to a nonprofit because audiences still haven't returned to pre-pandemic levels, so they need to fundraise now to balance their budget.

So before I go any further, let me ask you for action -- make a donation of whatever size you can, to your favorite theatre company, as often as you can. St. Louis has an extremely vibrant and exciting theatre scene, with new companies popping up all the time, and new work everywhere you turn, and shows ranging from very serious to very silly, from intimate to epic, and spanning the history of the art form. We need to support all our local theatres as much as we can. So pick one, two, or three of your favorites and do what you can.

On top of all those challenges, tens of millions of Americans are still suffering from PTSD brought on by the pandemic and everything surrounding it -- the irrational rage over masks, closings, vaccines, etc.

And it was even worse for us artsy types. Some artists are HSPs -- Highly Sensitive Persons. It's a real thing. Researchers are finding that certain people have supercharged sensitivity, not only to physical senses (which makes them picky eaters), but also to pain and to emotions. An article in Psychology Today says:

Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP, is a term coined by psychologist Elaine Aron. According to Aron’s theory, HSPs are a subset of the population who are high in a personality trait known as sensory-processing sensitivity, or SPS. Those with high levels of SPS display increased emotional sensitivity, stronger reactivity to both external and internal stimuli—pain, hunger, light, and noise—and a complex inner life.

It's probably a safe bet that some people become artists because they are HSPs. Making art helps them understand themselves and provides an expressive outlet for those emotions.

In fact, as we work on American Idiot, it occurs to me that some of these characters are probably HSPs and that makes the upside-down post-9/11 world even harder for them to grapple with. It never occurred to me, before the pandemic, that the "national mood" could so powerfully affect an individual's personal mood. But I'm here to tell you, first-hand, it does. I went on anti-depressives for the first time in my life in 2020, and I still need them.

What's going on today is a big part of the story of American Idiot -- what happens to us when we don't trust any of our institutions anymore? Or our fellow citizens? What happens when we feel betrayed by our own government? What happens when we don't believe what we're told?

It's so interesting to return to this brilliant piece of political theatre in this new time of crisis -- just substitute Project 2025 for the reckless decisions to go to war in 2002 and 2003. The original Green Day album American Idiot came out in 2004, and really, in a lot of ways, 2024 is a lot like 2004, but turned up to eleven.

Billie Joe Armstrong was writing specifically about, and in response to, George W. Bush and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But we know, from the Fiddler on the Roof rule, that the more specific a story is (in terms of time and place, context, etc.), the easier it is to see the story's universality. It doesn't seem like that would be true, but it is.

We've done a lot of shows where the greatest challenge was to communicate to the actors what specific historical moments felt like, the social and cultural context around the action of the story. For many of our stories, period and context are very important. Most of the stories we tell take place in the 20th century, but I was born in 1964, so many of our stories take place well before my time. Sometimes, the historical moment is within my lifetime, so I can talk about it personally.

I sort of remember the late Sixties, but when we produced Hair the first time (we did it in 2000, 2001, and 2008), I had to do a ton of research, reading, and talking to people to fully understand what the world felt like in 1967, so I could convey that to the actors -- getting the feel right was fundamental to the immense power and ferocious emotions of the show. At first, it shocked us that at every performance, the finale, "The Flesh Failures" and "Let the Sun Shine In," would have the audience sobbing. But after a few performances, we understood.

It was the fullness and authenticity of the world we had recreated that engaged our audience so powerfully. The audience knew that it was real, that it all really happened. We learned that, when the material is respected, Hair is almost unbearably emotional. Because 1967 was.

The same has been true with many of our shows that are set at consequential moments in our history. Grease is set in 1959 because that's the pivot point between the cultural conservatism of the 1950s and the cultural anarchy of the 1960s. Grease shows us America crossing over. The Rocky Horror Show is set in 1973 because that was the peak of the Sexual Revolution, and Rocky Horror shows us how Americans grappled with the Sexual Revolution.

Company is set in 1970 because that's when it became both acceptable and affordable for people to live alone, at least in urban areas. And that "advancement," along with advancements in mobility, communications, and technology, made it easier and easier to not interact directly with people -- not to "connect" with people in any meaningful way. (Today's Information Age has taken that to the extreme.) That's the whole point of Sondheim's brilliantly insightful song, "Another Hundred People."

So many of New Line's shows are like that, where the feel of that time and place mean everything -- shows like Heathers, The Wild Party, I Love My Wife, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Atomic, Anything Goes, Hands on a Hardbody, Rent, Chicago...

And of course American Idiot.

Billie Joe Armstrong wrote these songs in direct response to George W. Bush and his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. When we first did this show in 2016, almost everyone in the cast remembered 9/11, and American troops were still being killed in Afghanistan. The fierce patriotism after the attacks had quickly turned into bitter, nasty partisan politics. Armstrong was reacting to the PTSD so Americans were suffering with, in the only way he knew how, through his art, an album of songs.

Today as we work on American Idiot again, only a few people in our cast can remember 9/11. Many in our cast hadn't even been born. So how do we convey that awful darkness and distrust and anger and apathy and rage?

The good/bad news is, it's not that hard. Because today's national mood is just as ugly. And America has PTSD again. It's one of the reasons we wanted to bring this show back right now. Storytelling is how humans make sense of our world and our selves. We need this particular story right now. We need to work through these dark emotions, both as individuals and as a nation. We need to understand what's happening. We need to understand our response to it. We need to know how we can drive away the dark.

American Idiot's very ambiguous (i.e., very realistic) ending doesn't offer us much concrete help -- except it kinda does. Our story leaves a lot of details dangling, no question. Not much gets wrapped up. But here's the thing -- all three of our heroes return to each other, beaten up by the world (like Matt in The Fantasticks) and they've all grown up a little. None of them requires an epic, adventurous life anymore. Early in the show, Johnny stands in New York City and says, "This is my city." He thinks he belongs here, but he doesn't; this place can't heal him. But then, at the end, back home again with his friends, Johnny says it again, "This is my city." He knows now that he was on the wrong road. The three boys finally realize (or start to realize) that the Answers aren't Somewhere Out There. The answers are inside. 

And that it's okay not to be the most badass rebel punk. These guys are finally starting to become who they are. They learn the lesson of Pippin -- sometimes the most extraordinary act is to accept that you are ordinary.

The last song in American Idiot, "Time of Your Life," the show's epilogue, tries to give us some direction in how to respond to these times -- and how to drive away the rage and sadness. There's no happy ending here, no tidy resolutions, no coupling! This is not a love story; it's a coming of age story. There's growth. And that's enough.

I can't wait to share this unique show with our audiences again! To buy tickets, click here.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

AMERICAN IDIOT Redux

One of my side hobbies lately is finding old novels and plays that are the sources for famous musicals, and if these sources are out of print, I put them back in print, with a little help from Amazon. One current project is the 1835 play A Day Well Spent, which went through several adaptations over the years and finally became Hello, Dolly!

For these reprint projects, I add an essay about the piece and its adaptations. Right now, I'm reading a lot about Thornton Wilder, one of our greatest playwrights and novelists. He wrote, among many others, Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, and he's the only person ever to win a Pulitzer for Fiction and also for Drama.

To my surprise, what I'm finding in Wilder's writing about theatre, is so relevant to American Idiot, which we New Liners are working on right now. It's such an expressionistic piece of musical theatre, never really pretending to reality, but working in a heightened, simpler, poetic world, to express truths about reality. I never would have thought about it before, but director Michael Mayer staged American Idiot very much in the style of Our Town. There's virtually no physical reality, but there's a deep vein of powerfully real emotions and truths.

Remember what George tells his mother in Sunday in the Park with George?

Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother.
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.

"Pretty" is only a surface quality, while beautiful goes deeper, involving the mind and emotions, maybe even changing the viewer in some way. “Pretty,” representing the actual state of things, is changeable. “Beautiful,” representing the ideal state of things does not change. The ideal always remains the same because it is never realized and therefore can't fade or age. George changes what is pretty when he draws it, but once he paints it, it no longer changes. It is frozen in time.

It's about what's true and what's truthful. They're not the same. A lie can reveal a larger truth.

This quote is from Thornton Wilder's preface to his published Our Town script.

The theater longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves. All the lies it tells – the lie that that young lady is Caesar’s wife; the lie that people can go through life talking in blank verse; the lie that that man just killed that man – all those lies enhance the one truth that is there – the truth that dictated the story, the myth. The theater asks for as many conventions as possible. A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, an accepted untruth. When the theater pretends to give the real thing in canvas and wood and metal it loses something of the realer thing which is its true business.

In 2016, when we produced American Idiot last time, I started my first blog post about the show, writing, "America is a very angry place right now." Who knew that nothing much would have changed eight years later?

I'm not the lead director for this show. New Line's associate artistic director Chris Moore is directing and I'll be by his side. But not having to worry about staging and other details, it's allowed me to sit back and think about the show, the impulses that created the album in 2004, the impulses that led to the Broadway musical in 2010, the impulses that made us produce the show in 2016, and what it means today in 2024.

That first line of the show is such an assault and now it's packed with even more meaning than ever before -- "Don't wanna be an American Idiot!" The audience will hear that differently than they did the last time we did the show, or when they first heard those words in 2004.

It's more proof of the Fiddler on the Roof Rule -- the more specific the details are, the more universal the story will feel. The rule definitely applies here. American Idiot is very much about George W. Bush and his two wars, but it's also -- every second of it -- about right here and now.

And I'm just as excited to share this amazing show with you as I was last time. If you'd like to check out my blog posts about the show from 2016...

American Idiot

The Song of Rage and Love

We're Not the Ones Meant to Follow

The Rest of Our Lives

Throw Up Your Arms

She Gets So Sick of Crying

This Sensation's Overwhelming

It's Something Unpredictable

For What It's Worth

And In the Darkest Night

Come join us for the return of this brilliant piece of political theatre. American Idiot runs Sept. 12 to Oct. 5 at the Marcelle Theater in the Grand Center Arts District. Sept. 12 is a preview, and there is no performance on Sept. 14.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

DRACULA

I've always loved horror, and Dracula in particular. In 1995, I wrote my own gay vampire musical, In the Blood, and as I wrote, I read every vampire short story and novel I could find. Yeats later, during the Great Pandemic, I decided to write a collection of "weird fiction" short stories, all connected to musicals, eventually called Night of the Living Show Tunes. Again, I spent a long time reading all the great horror stories and several novels, as well as Stephen King's nonfiction books about horror. 

Now as we go into rehearsal for Frank Wildhorn's stage musical Dracula and I start thinking about this iconic story again, I see things in it I haven't seen before. (Several plot spoilers below.)

For instance, everything in the story is upside-down and backwards. Dracula seems like the antagonist, but he's not. The four men seem like heroes, but they're not. No, it's a Hero Myth story and Mina is the hero. The story fools us several times by making us think a different character is hero. The first section of the book (and the show) is all about Jonathan Harker and Dracula; and it sure seems like they are the story's Hero and Evil Wizard (like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or Dorothy and the Wicked Witch). But then the focus of the story shifts to Lucy, and it seems she's actually the Hero. And then author Bram Stoker kills her.

We might be tempted to think that Professor Van Helsing is the story's Wise Wizard figure (like Ben Kenobi or Glinda the Good Witch), but he's not. We have to put aside all of our preconceptions, banish from our minds Bela Lugosi (and his accent!) and Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman.

Bram Stoker understood two things his readers know before the story even begins. First, Dracula is a vampire; and second, vampires are evil. Remember, when Dracula was published, there had already been quite a few widely popular vampire novels, short stories, and newspaper serials, like Varney the Vampire. Also, everybody in Europe knew vampire lore, and many of them believed it. And significantly, Stoker's initial readership at that time in England was very wary of foreigners, very anti-immigrant. (Sound familiar?)

Put aside those preconceptions and what do we have? Dracula is undoubtedly still a vampire, but is he evil? We see him behave with brutality a couple times, throwing one of the weird sisters across the room, breaking the neck of his own John the Baptist, Renfield. But the other men in the story are equally (more?) violent. And otherwise, Dracula's violence is in self-defense. Without those preconceptions, his relationships with Lucy and Mina are far more ambiguous.

From the start, Lucy seems very uncomfortable within the confines of polite Victorian social rules, and she seems much happier once she's a vampire. Does her transformation make her a sex maniac? No, it simply reveals what's already there. We can see that sexuality in Lucy ready to burst out of her, long before she meets Dracula. Dracula frees her. To be sexual. To be bisexual. To be authentically herself. But it also makes her The Other.

What about Lucy the Vampire and the kids? If we don't assume vampires are evil, what do we make of the biting and sucking? Well, unless clumsy, ignorant humans get involved, feeding on someone does not kill them in this story, just weakens them. What arguably kills Lucy is Van Helsing giving her a succession of transfusions from four different people -- and with no knowledge of blood type! Or germs!

So... what am I saying...?

Lucy and Mina are on twin paths following the Hero Myth story. Lucy doesn't get to finish her story; Mina does. One might even argue that Mina survives because she has taken charge of the group, while Lucy is left helpless to the men's murderous shenanigans. Or is Lucy eliminated because she became overtly sexual, while Mina manages to suppress those impulses?

And so...?

So Mina is the protagonist, the Hero of our story. This is her quest. Her call to action is Jonathan's need to be rescued and brought home (which reverses their traditional gender roles early in the story!). And contrary to what we might think, Mina's Wise Wizard is Count Dracula, and her Evil Wizard -- the story's antagonist -- is Professor Van Helsing. He leads the forces of oppression and death, and they literally kill Lucy! And notice that the opposing Wizard figures are both foreigners.

Or maybe Lucy is really Mina's Wise Wizard. She brings Mina into the world of Dracula, but like most Wise Wizard figures, Lucy can't go on the Hero's Adventure with Mina. Like Ben Kenobi, Moses, Glinda, Merlin, Peter Parker's Uncle Ben, and many other Wise Wizard figures, Lucy sets Mina on her path, but then she dies and leaves Mina to her adventure.

For a brief moment, even Renfield becomes Mina's temporary Wise Wizard.

Notice that the three suitors blindly accept all the crazy shit Van Helsing tells them, and they follow his orders without (much) question. But not Lucy. Van Helsing is an authority figure, after all. He's a professor! And he's foreign! These men are conditioned to believe authority figures. But not Lucy. Let's be honest, Lucy is a wild child, born a century too early. And she must be punished for it.

Mina survives because she's better equipped to face this adventure than Lucy is. Before any of this starts, Mina has a job as a teacher's assistant, she has her own typewriter, etc. But Stoker fools us into thinking that Mina is the classic Damsel in Distress because she's more properly "feminine" in her behavior and demeanor, only later revealing her power when it's needed most. Like Luke Skywalker, Mina doesn't know she has this power until she needs to call it forth.

Lucy is a New Woman in terms of sexuality and gender roles. Mina is a New Woman in terms of intelligence, confidence, career, and the authority she claims -- and gender roles!

Here in 2024, when we have hero vampires like Blade, and those sappy, snot-nosed Twilight tweens, we have to wonder what a vampiric Mina Harker would be like. She'd be amazing. She'd be a strong, interesting, challenging longtime (!) companion for Vlad Dracula. Or for Lestat. Or Countess Zaleska.

In fact, our musical hints at all that, more than the novel does. And our version of the story has a slightly different ending, in support of that different focus.

Gothic horror stories had already been around a century or so before Dracula debuted. Stoker's brilliance was in taking this very old literary tradition and yanking it violently into the present, focusing on the use of all the most current technology in the pursuit of the vampire -- telegraph, typewriter, Dictaphone, Kodak camera, etc. -- and presenting it as a true story backed up by a ton of documentary evidence. Stoker had been a journalist for a while, so he was uniquely adept at creating his fake journalistic documents.

We might even say that Dracula was the first mockumentary.

I've asked our actors to let go entirely of all their preconceptions about this story and these characters, of Bela Lugosi (and his Hungarian accent), Vampira, Elvira, Grandpa Munster, Count Chocula, all of them. 

What do Dracula, Lucy, and Mina all have in common? They are all three serial boundary crossers in a very repressed age. And speaking of boundary crossing, aren't Lucy and Mina essentially his vampire daughters? When Dracula returns to Transylvania, he sails on the Czarina Catherine, named for the libidinous Russian ruler (about whom Cole Porter wrote the racy number "Kate the Great" for Anything Goes, but Ethel Merman refused to sing it because it was too dirty).

But in understanding this story and our show, we can't think of Count Dracula as a monster -- we have to think of him as a charming, mysterious, foreign aristocrat, who brings chaos (freedom?) to a previously well-ordered world. Same plot as The Man Who Came to Dinner. Well, almost. We know that Stoker's Count Dracula is based on the famous English actor-manager Henry Irving, the Welsh-American explorer, journalist, soldier, author and politician Henry Morton Stanley, and the British explorer, writer, orientalist scholar, and soldier Richard Burton. That should tell us much of what we need to know.

Likewise, Van Helsing isn't the usual 1950s Wise Scientist -- he's another very strange foreigner, arrogant, baffling, overzealous, obsessive, a bully, with no discernible empathy or social skills, who talks weird and has incredibly strange beliefs by any measure. (Although, now that I type that, I bet all those Wise Scientist characters in the 1950s and 60s are based on Van Helsing. What a wild line of descent, from Van Helsing to 1950s sci-fi to Dr. Scott in Rocky Horror!) Notice that in the novel, none of the foreigners (Dracula, Van Helsing, and Quincey Morris) ever narrate the story, only the English characters.

One of the fun parts of working on the Dracula story is that, to quote my own Zombies of Penzance, Count Dracula is "a surprisingly plastic metaphor." In one of the many Dracula study guides I've been perusing, Lilith Steinmetz tells us at the beginning, "Dracula has been seen as a grail romance, a twisted Oedipal fantasy, a religious fairytale, and a psychosexual drama." This musical stage version we're working on is a tragic romantic thriller. Steinmetz also says about the story, "It juxtaposes the ancient gothic castle with the thoroughly modern." That's what our show is -- a story from more than a century ago, told in the form of a contemporary rock musical. With all that in mind, I talked with our costumer Zach Thompson yesterday and we agreed on an aesthetic that's both 1897 and 2024 at the same time.

And for the first time in my life, a show I'm helming will dabble in elements of Steampunk! Why, what presumptuous podsnappery, I hear the foozlers and mutton-mongers cry! Okay, I will admit, as much as I have always loved steampunk, it's almost never organic to any story we're telling. But it fits Dracula perfectly. Cutting-edge technology is such a big part of Stoker's story. Zach and I are equally psyched about this.

We started music rehearsals this past week. I realize that my favorite thing about this show is that it never mocks Dracula or gothic horror or musicals. There's nothing Ironically Meta here, no parody, no winking at the audience, no self-reference, no references to other musicals. No, this is a serious drama, with the highest possible stakes -- death and eternal damnation. (And transfusions when you don't understand blood type. And Free Love.)

This is gonna be such a cool adventure! Stay tuned!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Dracula tickets, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

It’s Dilemma! It’s de Limit! It’s Deluxe! It’s De-Lovely!

This is the introduction for my newest book, Anything, Anything, Anything Goes: A Deep Dive:

My freshman year in high school, Anything Goes (the 1962 version) was the first “real” musical I was ever in. I played Bishop Dobson (who gets arrested in the first scene) and I was also in the tap dancing chorus. I fell in love with the show and all the songs. I knew it was an “old” show, but it didn’t seem old-fashioned to me. It was sexual and cynical, and kind of wild and anarchic, and blazingly self-aware. I now know it was very much in the vein of George M. Cohan’s first musical comedies in the early 1900s, but even more cynical, and a little edgier.

Fast-forward to 2006, and I was writing a musical theatre history book, Strike Up the Band. As I wrote about Anything Goes, I started to realize things I had never thought of before. Maybe it was because when I first got to know the show, I hadn’t yet developed any analytical skills, so I hadn’t looked beyond the surface. But now writing about the show, I realized there are two central themes running through the story, two delicious pieces of social satire that are just as relevant today as they were in 1934. Americans still turn religion into show business, and we still turn criminals into celebrities. Anything Goes is a smart, insightful, razor-sharp cultural satire about Us. Now.

I also learned from an actor who was playing Moonface and had done lots of research on the show, that Victor Moore originally played Mooney very mousy, unassuming, jittery, with a high, nasal voice, and none of the Brooklyn accent we’re used to from more recent productions. Over the years Moonface has become a parody of gangster movies clichés, but Victor Moore played the role as the opposite of every cliché about gangsters – and that was the very funny joke that we seem to miss today. Mooney is fundamentally, constitutionally ill-suited to being a gangster. That’s why he’s only Number 13. That’s automatically funnier than the usual characterization.

And also notice his name, Moonface Martin. His nickname apparently mean he’s ugly or disfigured in some way. That connects to a belief system, “eugenics,” popular at the time, which posited that physical deformity indicates mental deformity. That belief was on full display in Chester Gould’s comic strip Dick Tracy, which had debuted in 1931. In line with the eugenics movement, every one of the criminals in Dick Tracy’s world was grotesquely deformed, and their names described their inside-and-out aberration – Big Boy (a stand-in for Capone), Pruneface (possibly the model for Moonface?), Flattop, Little Face, Mumbles, The Brow, etc.

Also, over time I have come to understand that Sir Evelyn is definitely not gay, which is the usual default for unimaginative actors and directors. Suggesting he’s gay short-circuits a big part of the intricate plot. It’s much funnier if he’s clearly straight, and terribly charming. After all, we have to believe that hard-boiled Reno genuinely falls for him. Reno and Sir Evelyn are roughly parallel to Harold Hill and Marion Paroo, but with the genders reversed.

Maybe my most important lesson was that the show was never meant to be “a tap show.” Dance on Broadway at the time was a wild variety of popular social dancing. And stylistically, the pacing of the show is everything. The performance style of Thirties musical comedy wasn’t far removed from vaudeville, very full front (there were no mics!), with only the slightest wisp (if any) of a Fourth Wall. Anything Goes is a big, crazy, nonstop, high-energy, perpetual motion machine, something much closer to a Marx Brothers movie than to later, mid-century musical comedy. It leaves the audience and actors breathless. And delighted.

It’s worth noting that any American musical from the 1930s brings some baggage with it. Anything Goes of course has the problematic “Chinese converts.” But its parallel baggage is that 1930s musical comedies were all essentially “white” musicals, in which the characters were written to be white, and the plots erase the presence of people of color in American life – except for those “Magical Negro” characters (Paul in Kiss Me, Kate; Jewel in Best Little Whorehouse; Caroline in Caroline, or Change; Leading Player in Pippin; Joice Heth in Barnum; Lola in Kinky Boots; et al.), the exceptions that prove the rule.

That problem is less pervasive today, but it’s not gone. In the book Race in American Musical Theatre, Josephine Lee writes, “Well into the twenty-first century, theatrical success continues to be defined in ways that maintain white perspectives and artistic dominance.” The first definer of the image of the American chorus girl, Florenz Ziegfeld, made her white and interchangeable. In 1922 Ziegfeld debuted his famous tag line for his Follies, “A National Institution – Glorifying the American Girl.” In other words, the American girl is white and interchangeable. Pretty is white. As a case in point, the 1934 production of Anything Goes included Reno’s sixteen angels, all platinum blondes.

Even when one of these shows had a chorus line of black women, for a taste of “exoticism,” they would be the lightest skinned black women the producers could find. The white girl was still the ideal. Some people still argue today that black people never would have been on a transatlantic ocean liner like that in 1934 – both for reasons of race and social status – so it’s not wrong to cast Anything Goes entirely with white performers, as it was originally.

But that’s a simplistic argument.

Anything Goes is storytelling as much as historical document; and no audience expects a history lesson. Doing the show today, there’s no reason why Reno has to be white; or why Hope and Mrs. Harcourt have to be the same race.

Still, we still have to admit that Anything Goes is not really about the lives of people of color – which is why we all should produce new shows as often as “classics.” But I digress.

Even with those caveats, Anything Goes is wonderful in so many ways, a wild musical comedy about anarchy and chaos, where the dizzying action aboard this ocean liner reveals the insanity of the 1930s. Our country felt out of control (as it often does), and so did the S.S. American. And though we don’t like to admit it, Anything Goes is always about America right now – no matter when it’s produced. America is always a mess, our popular culture always swims in the ridiculous, and we are forever weirdly in love with gangster mythology. Anything Goes is a timeless funhouse mirror we can always hold up to ourselves when we need a good hearty laugh.

And those songs!

Alec Wilde wrote in the excellent book American Popular Song about Cole Porter in the mid-1930s, when Anything Goes opened, “By this point in his career Porter was in full control of his musical craft. He was experimenting, doing daring things, and writing in many styles, though this last seems less obvious because of the immediately recognizable style of his lyrics. His musical training constantly reveals itself in both his melodic as well as his harmonic invention.”

I love this show. Here’s why.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To buy Sweet Potato Queens tickets, click here. 

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here