Sounds like my kind of theatre.
Off Off Broadway is where Promenade was born in 1965. Sixty years later, it seems as timely as ever, like it was written about 2026. So the New Liners are bringing it back to uproarious life.
The birthplace of Promenade, the Judson Poets’ Theatre, was one of the four cornerstones of off off Broadway, and the only one to produce musicals as well as plays and other performance pieces. In his (excellent!) book Playing Underground, scholar Stephen Bottoms refers to the Judson’s “unabashedly joyous sense of vaudevillian showmanship.”
Judson was just as radical and experimental as the other companies, but Judson shows were also entertaining. Good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle (on a budget!) in the service of very serious, very complicated ideas. Bottoms calls this moment in theatre history “radically promiscuous in its creativity,” and he tells us these artists found inspiration in poetry, soap operas, Greek tragedy, Hollywood movies, burlesque, even opera.
Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie said about this moment, “It was like, OK, this is ground zero, and you’ve rejected the usual forms, which for us were Broadway and psychological realism. And then you think, now what’s possible?”
We usually don’t think about Theatre of the Absurd and musical theatre together, even though absurd originally meant out of harmony musically. The word has since come to mean out of harmony with reason or logic or purpose. Still, these two forms of theatre don’t seem to go together, since musicals are about emotional connection and absurdist plays are about ironic detachment.
But ultimately, musical theatre and absurdist theatre are both aiming for the same thing, honesty and truth. In The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin writes, “For all its freedom of invention and spontaneity, the Theatre of the Absurd is concerned with communicating an experience of being, and in doing so, it is trying to be uncompromisingly honest and fearless in exposing the reality of the human condition.”
By the Sixties, off Broadway had abandoned its identity as the place for weird and wonderful experiments (like Threepenny Opera and The Fantasticks); it had become just a smaller but still commercial version of Broadway.
So, off off Broadway stepped in.
(Village Voice critic Michael Smith argued for adding The Open Theatre to the list as well.)
One of those spaces was in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church, a landmark in Greenwich Village. The Judson’s Gallery had presented the very first “Happening” in New York in 1958, and in the audience that night was a theology student named Al Carmines.
Soon after, the senior pastor hired minister Al Carmines to create a theatre in the church’s basement, dubbed Judson Poets’ Theatre, which debuted in 1961. The church’s congregation as a whole voted to hire Carmines, as part-time minister and part-time artistic director. They also voted never to censor any material presented in their space. Carmines told interviewers that they considered art-making to be as much a form of worship as Sunday services, and that the cornerstones of Christianity are salvation and creation.
In her book Fornes: Theatre in the Present, Dian Lynn Moroff writes about Carmines and his co-artistic director Lawrence Kornfeld:
They came to define the theater’s aesthetic, which from production to production mixed camp sensibility, abstract movement, social commentary, zany and grotesque humor, bright melodies, grinning irony, pop culture symbols, surrealistic flights of fancy, open sexuality, and, above all else, an unapologetic joy in life. The plays did not promote church orthodoxy, but for Carmines and the Judson leadership, art and performance were an extension of ministry, so it was natural that an ecumenical and somewhat programmatic celebration of life became a Judson hallmark. Two key traits of the Judson Poets’ Theater -- a free and experimental approach to performance events and a madcap often ironic delight -- became important aspects of [María Irene] Fornés' work in her first decade as a playwright. Nowhere is that affinity more apparent than in Promenade, her most Judsonesque play.
In their book Restaging the Sixties, James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal write about the theatre scene in Greenwich Village, “Making theatre was as much an experiment in radical democracy as it was an exploration of the possibilities of theatre as such.” One actor enjoyed calling the off off Broadway scene “the criminal psychedelic homosexual avant-garde.”
There was no Fourth Wall at the Judson. It was just too close-up and intimate. That old idea of “the suspension of disbelief” was utterly impossible here, in practical terms as well artistic.
I never thought I would see a production (or video!) of Promenade. In fact, I never thought I'd hear the entire score, since a lot was left off the cast recording. But not only do I get to see it and hear it now, I get to study it, and I get to share it! My fanboy heart runneth over!
Come join us! And then, forever more, when musical theatre nerds mention Promenade, you can say, "I've seen it!"
The adventure continues...
Long Live the Musical
Scott
P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, 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.
