Transvest! Impersonate!

There are few things more fun for me than discovering a musical that I didn't know, or at least didn't know well. I've had the Promenade cast album since college, but it's missing more than half the score! Why hasn't anyone made a complete studio recording of this brilliant score?

It has been a real joy getting to splash around inside Promenade and figure out how it works. It really is a creature of off off Broadway and a genuine oddball masterpiece, so different from anything I've ever worked on before. And that's a huge part of what's so cool about it -- it's an outlaw musical!

After its 1965 debut, Promenade was revised and expanded in 1969 for the off Broadway audience, but the show still retained its off off Broadway philosophy and still centered on the interplay of social status and role-playing. Despite its more conventional two-act structure now, it still wasn’t interested in plot progress or three-dimensional characters who advance toward a goal, nor in psychology, morality, empathy, motivation, or backstory. It still was lightyears from a Broadway musical.

Its story of two prison inmates escaping to observe the world outside is a wild, psychedelic variation on Alice in Wonderland and Candide, as the prisoners encounter increasingly grotesque people and circumstances – but in the real world, not in Wonderland. As Dian Lynn Moroff writes, “The characters of Promenade all display a defiant nonchalance and happy-go-lucky attitude that draws attention to what it would ignore: all is not well in the city.”

Stephen Bottoms writes in Playing Underground, “Promenade, by striking contrast with Fornés’ first play Tango Palace, breaks away from this closed system by envisaging a world in which the characters’ identities and relationships – far from being fixed into predetermined patterns – are constantly being reimagined through performative role-play. The prisoners, for example, are portrayed less as criminals than as childlike innocents, abroad in a strange world like latter-day Candides. Lacking clear identities of their own (they have only numbers, not names), 105 and 106 observe the behavior of those around them in order to decide what roles they should adopt for themselves.”

In a foreword to a collection of plays Robert Pasoli wrote, “Miss Fornés’ minimal art says certainly not all, but something and something with implications for more. This is why her theatrical moments are delightful. Delight in her plays is simply the sensation of surprise that what seemed like nothing does, in fact, amount to something, sometimes to a great deal. Take 'The Finger Song' in Promenade, the musical that Miss Fornés wrote with Al Carmines:

Whenever my fingers went like this,
I said: Hell, my fingers went like this.
I said: Hell, my fingers always go like that.
Until one day somebody said to me:
How original it is that your fingers go like that.

Since then, every time
Since then, every time my fingers go like this,
I say: Look.
I say: Look at my fingers go like that.
How original it is that my fingers go like this.
One of these days I’ll sell them.

Pasoli explains, “The delight and surprise of which I speak is not in the joke of the last line. It is in the psychology of the first three lines of the second stanza, a revelation erupting from something very tame. That is an example of delight in Miss Fornés’s work. The last line is something else, which Miss Fornés does wickedly well. It is the revelation of an attitude, a specialty of her characters: an off-hand, flip attitude that is based on an outrageous and entirely natural ignorance of ‘the facts.’ One of the things that Miss Fornés knows about people is that reality is what’s in their heads, not what’s outside. Fantasy and imagination, the mental embrace of what is impossible according to the laws of physics, is as real as what is every day counted, codified, or used to hold up tall buildings.”

The Servant takes on the role of truth-teller in the show as well as mentor to the childlike prisoners. She sings to them at one point about the Aristocrats, “Riches made them dumb. Yes, riches made them dumb.” The Prisoners ask, “It’s not worth it, then?” She answers, “It’s worth it.”

As Bottoms writes, “Performing the role of the idle rich might render one mentally vacuous, but who would not choose wealth over poverty? Such perverse (a)logic recurs throughout the play almost as a formal principle, alongside the equally persistent concern with the transformability inherent in role-play.” He goes on, “Promenade epitomizes the off-off-Broadway movement’s widespread rejection of the psychological determinism that dominated American theater at the time, thanks particularly to Method-school acting and naturalistic dramaturgy.”

Director Lawrence Kornfeld, says, “The biggest thing that actors have to get over is what they’re taught about motivation. ‘The character can’t do this, they’ll say: It’s not in their psychology.’ Nonsense! People can do anything, and people do almost anything.”

In another interview, Kornfeld said, “What happened in these off off Broadway productions was what happened to the people who did them; the words and music were not what happened: what happened was that the people who acted and sang and danced were the action, the music, and the dancing Many of them didn’t know this or don’t believe this, but it’s true and they are mistaken: they were only doing what they were doing at that moment on that stage, even though they repeated the same thing night after night and were not improvising.”

Theatre artists like to believe they "transport" their audience to another time and place when they perform a show, but that's not true. There is no such thing as "suspension of disbelief" -- no one actually believes what's on stage is "real." Except it is. But it's not the reality of the story that thrills and engages an audience, Kornfeld was arguing; it's the reality of the performance. In fact, a theatre performance transports an audience to a magical, communal Here, Now, and This.

About Promenade, Fornés says, “My script was not delightful, it was just a possible setup for something delightful.” The actual act of live performance is everything. Promenade is less about the outside world than it is about us – audience, actors, musicians, etc. – at this moment in this place as we watch this performance.

And that can never be repeated. It's literally a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And that's the point.

Critic Michael Smith, wrote about the show in the Village Voice in 1965, “The dominant emotion is romantic melancholia but the tone is vapid frivolity, and the delicate tension this creates gives the event its distinction. Only occasionally we come upon the bitter rejection implied by cynicism; more often we confront ironic acceptance.”

Many of the critics applauded Al Carmines’ eclectic score, borrowing from Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, W.C. Handy, Sigmund Romberg, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, and other composers, playing with gospel, pop, ragtime, honky-tonk, and much more. Though some called his music derivative, Carmines recognized the effect of popular music forms on an audience, and the established connections and conventions that act as a musical shorthand, cluing the audience into the content as well as the sound of these songs.

Critic Daphne Kraft in the Newark Evening News called the score a hybrid of “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide.” Today, lots of critics deride Andrew Lloyd Webber’s scores for the same reason; but he knows what Carmines knew.

Stephen Bottoms writes, “Drawing on Carmines’ usual range of eclectic influences, from torch songs to operatic arias, the music is mostly brisk, exuberant, and thoroughly enjoyable. Yet there is also a darker, more abrasive edge lurking beneath the high spirits – perhaps suggestive of some sleazy Berlin cabaret. The cast recording features elements of dissonance, minor keys, and the use of deep, rasping male vocals set jarringly against soaring, high-pitched females. The music perfectly complements Fornés’s deceptively simple lyrics, which in songs such as 'The Moment Has Passed,' mix blithe joviality with a bleak subtext of emotional isolation and violence.”

Kornfeld says about Carmines’ music, “Every show had what we called a compulsory tango. Sometimes the tango was funny, sometimes it was scary: it was just a formalism. But what a lot of people forget is that formalisms like that can contain many subjects and ideas, and that’s what we tried to do: say serious things in a comic way, and not irony for irony’s sake. comic things in a serious way. Al’s music had a deep sense of irony, but it was not irony for irony’s sake.”

Marilyn Stasio wrote in Cue, “Carmines is a genius at assimilating every musical style from grand opera to gut blues and transforming them into an ecstatically slap-happy style that is clearly his own.” She went on to explain that the show was “structured on a mood, a kind of manic exuberance so exaltingly good-natured that is would take a ridged soul indeed to resist it.”

In the book American Drama: The Female Canon, Catherine A. Shuler writes, “If Fornés remains on the periphery of the mainstream, it is because large, popular audiences come to the theater to have their most cherished beliefs reinforced, not challenged. They do not want to examine the implications of gender hierarchy or the dynamics of patriarchy too closely. Fornes’s refusal to compromise, her refusal to write to please men, her rejection of romantic sentimentality ensures that she will remain on the fringe.”

It’s interesting in this musical with a script written by a woman, that the rich women characters are far more constrained by social customs than the men – or the poor! – and their priority in life seems to be looking attractive to men. These women are defined in terms of the men. Only the Servant and Miss Cake, who have fewer social constraints, can really speak the truth.

Moroff writes, “A vaudevillian element characterizes most of these early Fornés plays, and a playfulness characterizes all of them. Each is irreverent, sometimes inconsistent, occasionally preachy, frequently silly. They each also have moments of exceptional theatrical sophistication, a keen awareness of their own contexts, limits, and reach. Each is at least in part about the theater itself, particularly about the way characters are characterized by those on the stage with them, by the stages and sets themselves, and by the audiences for which they perform. . . using the paradigms of certain symbiotic roles in relationships, theatrical and otherwise, to show how roles are defined and controlled in antithesis to others’ roles. Promenade suggests the possibility of transcending certain roles within a theatrical context; an audience, for example, someone to play to, can alter the nature of the play.”

Moroff goes on, “In Promenade, any character provides something against which another character can find definition. The rich are not the poor, the Servant is not the people she serves, the Mayor not the people he rules, and the Jailer not the Prisoners he pursues. The play’s mantra recited by the Servant suggests that the game of role-playing is inherently transformative, but the reverse appears to be true within this drama. Accompanied by the Prisoners, named 105 and 106, the Servant sings:

Be one and all,
Be each and all.
Transvest,
Impersonate,
‘Cause costumes
Change the course of life.

Yet, although nearly every character in the play trades one costume for another, none of their dramatic fates is altered in turn. The rich women undress and redress; the Prisoners exchange their jail clothes for the Soldier’s jackets; Miss Cake, by wrapping a stole around her shoulders, rises in rank to become the Mayor’s mistress – but the rich are rich at the drama’s end, and the Servant wanders off, lonely and poor.”

In the middle of Act One of Promenade, the Servant does some important truth-telling:

We’ve come to one conclusion
That’s readily discerned:
A lot of satisfaction
Does away with discontent.

Doesn’t it?
A lot of satisfaction
Produces happiness,
And the source of satisfaction
Is wealth.
Isn’t it?
All that man possesses
Displaces discontent.

Village Voice critic Jerry Tallmer compared the original 1965 production of Promenade to “a Jeanette MacDonald movie co-scripted by Bertolt Brecht and Jean Genet, directed by Groucho Marx.”

In another Village Voice review of the ‘65 production, Michael Smith wrote:

The plot is inconsequential and exists to provide opportunities for set pieces of entertainment; at the same time the entire play is a set piece of entertainment, achieving unity through coherence of texture rather than form. The style is similar to old-time movie musicals, say, The Big Broadcast of 1938, and the production is an excellent example of high, as distinguished from homosexual, camp.

Irony enters in the written words. Within this preposterous setting, the talk shines with sophistication and intelligence and is more often than not concerned with actual feelings. The ideas that are used for comic effect are by no means trivial, and the glassy glibness of their expression is devastating. The dominant emotion is romantic melancholia but the tone is vapid frivolity, and the delicate tension this creates gives the event its distinction. Only occasionally do we come upon the bitter rejection implied by cynicism; more often we confront ironic acceptance, which penetrates the target’s defenses by denying the need for them.

All this is gravy. The core experience of The Promenade is its exquisite and delicious humor. Great stretches of it are marvelously funny, and most of the time it is funny on the broadest and the subtlest levels at the same time. Miss Fornés’s words are unfailingly witty; no less admirable is the manner in which musical numbers are conceived. One is continually involved in puns and multiple references.

Fornés says, “It’s like a lot of movies from the 1930s, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Everybody is lightweight, you know, you run, you cry, there’s a meeting and then something happens and you go somewhere else.” But we find during the show that the characters’ lightweight-ness is also a fatal flaw which keeps them from engaging with the world meaningfully.

In a review in The New York Times of a 1983 New York revival, Stephen Holden linked the production to the Theatre of the Absurd: “This work, which suggests a mixture of Candide and Samuel Beckett viewed through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, is a little too avant-garde and absurdist to appeal to mainstream tastes. But in its odd way it’s an exquisite piece of musical theater.”

In a Village Voice review of a 2010 revival, Michael Feingold wrote:

First performed Off-Off Broadway by Judson Poets Theatre in 1965, then expanded for its Off-Broadway run in 1969, Promenade marks the apex of Fornés’s earliest playwriting style. A cartoon-baroque extravaganza with a dark, sardonic undercurrent, it evokes but never mimics Absurdist writers like Ionesco and Arrabal. Two convicts, motivated by the desire to know evil, break out of jail. Instead of evil, they discover the privileged obliviousness of giddy rich people, the perpetual bitterness and docility of the working poor, and the soothing effect of even misplaced motherlove. Meekly, they go back to jail. ‘And for those who have no cake,’ runs a final chorus that may or may not mean what it says, ‘there’s plenty of bread.’ Sure.

Carmines floats the barbed ironies of Fornes’s lyrics on a fizzy outpouring of mock-operetta vocal acrobatics, drawing playfully on a staggering range of musical vocabularies, from bel canto to honky-tonk. Orchestrated with equally imaginative wit by Eddie Sauter, Promenade’s score is a gigantic joy to hear, and a daunting challenge for even the best-equipped theater singers to tackle.

In a 2019 review of the City Center concert version of the show, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in The New York Times:

Promenade, the bizarre and sneakily thrilling 1960s musical with a book and lyrics by the then-fledgling playwright María Irene Fornés, is by no means a conventional piece of theater. . . Emerging Wednesday night from New York City Center was like waking refreshed from a glittering, nearly sung-through fever dream – something about two comical, dewy-eyed prisoners on the lam, searching Manhattan for ‘the appearance of sin’ and hanging out with a bunch of swells. . . it’s an episodic satire of haves and have-nots that achieves an ingenious sleight of hand. Occupying us with comedy, vocal splendor and more than a little bafflement, it builds stealthily – through more than 30 musical numbers – toward a surprisingly moving finish. With a vast, stylistically voracious score by Al Carmines, an ordained minister and a composer with magpie instincts who ran the influential avant-garde Judson Poets’ Theater, Promenade is as comfortable with old-school show tunes as it is with operetta and even opera.

Reviewing the 1969 off Broadway production, critic Leo Mishkin in the Morning Telegraph called the show “a dazzling and bewildering extravaganza . . there is nothing quite like it to be seen anywhere else in the theater today.”

Veteran critic Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times:

Promenade will be one of the more controversial musicals this year – it will also presumably be one of the most successful. It is a joy from start to finish. . . There will be those who will question the slightness of the story line, but there will be more, many, many, more, who will glory in the show’s dexterity, wit, and compassion. Miss Fornés’s lyrics, like her book, seem to have a sweetly irreverent relevance. There is a Dada zaniness here that creeps up on you where you least expect it, and a topsy-turvy Brechtian morality that is most attractive. At times, the book and lyrics are perhaps coy – but always with a certain knowingness that prevents the coyness from becoming cloying. And a very cool madness is everywhere – extravagant, wild, and diverting. . . The style of the show is the perfect reflection of the show, wickedly amusing, joyously blithe, and yet with a serious if lightly touched layer of protest and social comment beneath.

The off Broadway 399-seat Promenade Theatre opened in 1969 with the expanded, two-act Promenade, and the theatre stayed in operation until 2006. Among its other famous productions were the original Godspell, William Finn’s In Trousers, and the 1984 revival of Pacific Overtures.

No matter how much or how little an audience “understands” Promenade, everyone agrees it’s really funny. But what is "funny"? We humans find something funny when it both surprises us and tells the truth. Promenade does both, quite ferociously. There are surprises everywhere and a whole lot of truth about us, our society, our world, our times.

America was in the midst of horrendous turmoil in 1965 when the one-act The Promenade opened, and in 1969 when the two-act Promenade debuted, and again today. So what can the world of 1969, even if through a funhouse mirror, teach us about the world of Now? In this case, a hell of a lot.

And besides, theatre isn't really a mirror of reality; it's a magnifying glass.

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.

But Me, I See Everything

In my last post, I wrote about the off off Broadway scene where Promenade was born. Now meet its birth mother.

Cuban-American, queer director and playwright María Irene Fornés first discovered her deep love of theatre seeing a production of Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1954. She says it changed her life. A little more than ten years later, in 1965, she won an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting for two works in the same season, her musical Promenade and her play The Successful Life of 3. She won seven more Obies in the years since.

In Theatre and Literature of the Absurd, Michael Y. Bennett compares Fornés’ work with Beckett’s, writing, “Instead of two flat lines that comprise Act I and Act II of Waiting for Godot, her scenes, one after another, tend to have a rising action, but neither climax nor resolve; much like Godot, the audience is left hanging, but with Fornés, more on the edge of their seats.”

In a 1965 interview with Richard Shepard in The New York Times, Fornés said, “The play comes very deeply from my own consciousness. I didn’t sit down and figure out who were to be the characters. The explanation is an afterthought; there are images I believe in completely. . . Playwriting has less to do with language than novel writing does. It’s language in a very special way. Language is like the motor that starts a machine. How the machine performs, what dynamics it creates, that’s what counts.”

In a 1966 New York Post article, “Rebellion in the Arts,” critic Jerry Tallmer reported, “There were those who thought Promenade – an opera-farce of practically everything – was the best and funniest work in its season, off-off-Broadway or wherever.”

In 1969 Robert Pasolli wrote in the Village Voice, “Fornes’s minimal art says certainly not all, but something and something with implications for more. This is why her theatrical moments are delightful. Delight in her plays is simply the sensation of surprise that what seemed like nothing does, in fact, amount to something, sometimes to a great deal.”

In 1994, in a special section of the Performing Arts Journal devoted to the avant-garde, Fornes described her creative process to Bonnie Marranca, “I believe that there’s a creative system inside of us. It’s a system that’s almost physical. I can compare it with the digestive system or the respiratory system. . . The writing is not asking me for permission but it is taking force and just going.”

María Irene Fornés was called by some the Mother of the Avant Garde in 1960s New York. She wrote thirty-nine plays, and twenty of them have been published. Famed playwright Lanford Wilson said about Fornés, “She’s one of the very, very best – it’s a shame she’s always been performed in such obscurity. Her work has no precedents, it isn’t derived from anything. She’s the most original of us all.”

In his essay “Irene Fornés: The Elements of Style,” Village Voice critic Ross Wetzsteon writes, “From the first, her writing has involved a process of distillation, stripping away the behavioral and psychological conventions that pass for realism, and seeking instead a kind of hyperrealism (whether it appears in the guise of exuberant fantasy or severe documentation). And from the first, her plays have been formally shaped by an intuitive search not merely for a new theatrical vocabulary but for a new theatrical grammar.”

Her goal as a writer was to “catch” and surprise herself with what happens on the page, letting her subconscious and the simple logic of each moment take over. She never had a plan or a message or an agenda when she sat down to write. It was as natural and organic as she could make it.

To write Promenade, she made three piles of cards; one pile listing character types, one pile listing places; and one pile with a first line of dialogue. To begin writing the show she picked up two cards, “Aristocrats” from the character pile and “Prison” from the place file. How could she navigate that? Since Aristocrats can’t be in jail (or can they?), she began with two prisoners escaping from jail and encountering the Aristocrats.

Wetzsteon writes, “Fornés' trademark as a director is a gestural and informational formality, an emphasis on declamatory line reading in particular, that rejects the cumulative effect of naturalistic detail in favor of the spontaneous impact of revelatory image, that rejects emoting, behavioral verisimilitude, and demonstration of meaning in favor of crystallization, painterly blocking and layers of irony. The contrast, in many of Fornés’ plays, between the surface and the subtext helps account for their disorienting paradoxes: the simpler her work, the more mysterious its meanings, the more virulent the action, the more tender its feelings.”

“The Cigarette Song” in Promenade is just a random record of a tiny sliver of a life. In an interview, Fornés explained, “This really happened to me. One day I was walking down Fifth Avenue with a cigarette in one hand, a toothpick in the other, just thinking how wonderful it was to be able to sing when you wanted to, eat bread when you’re hungry. I grew up so poor in Cuba there weren’t even any breadlines – there wasn’t any bread. To be able to do all those wonderful things – that’s what that song means.”

Fornes never pulls her punches. She just shows us, no matter how ugly, no matter how trivial, no matter how maddeningly ambivalent. At the end of Promenade the prisoners’ mother (or is she?) sings a lullaby, but it’s not comforting, just disturbingly truthful.

I saw a man lying in the street
Asleep and drunk.
He had not washed his face.
He held his coat closed with a safety pin.
And I thought, and I thought,
Thank God, I’m better than he is.
Yes, thank God, I’m better than he.

And then the mother leaves her sons and sings to us, with brutal honesty:

I have to live with my own truth,
I have to live with it.
You live with your own truth.
I cannot live with it.
I have to live with my own truth.
Whether you like it or not.
Whether you like it or not.

At first blush, we accept this as a strong statement of individuality, but it’s a claim that we each have our own truth, so contradictory to others’ truths, that they can’t coexist. Good and evil don’t exist in the world of Promenade, because they would require consensus of definition, and there is no such thing.

So how did María Irene Fornés, decades ago, describe so accurately our current culture today in this new millennium, when what’s true is forever up for debate, and alternative facts are competing successfully with actual facts?

I know everything.
Half of it I really know,
The rest I make up,
The rest I make up.
Some things I’m sure of.
Of other things I’m too sure.
And of others I’m not sure at all.

Here at the end of the show, she turns her gaze on us in the audience, and she names our crime.

People believe everything they hear,
Not what they see,
Not what they see.
People believe everything they hear.
But me, I see everything.
Yes, I see everything.

Including her own obvious faults and failures as a member of society.

Wetzsteon ends his essay, “Fornés’ work is like a cross between Brecht and Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Eric von Stroheim and Gertrude Stein standing in the wings.”

In Fornés: Theatre in the Present, Dian Lynn Moroff writes, “The progress-less stories of Beckett’s theater also echo in Fornés’s theater. Her plays are rarely plot driven; more often, structure is the consequence of characters represented by their participation in small and frequently absurd scenes whose juxtapositions equal dramatic events. Fornes’s characters talk, pose, and posture incessantly, and Fornes’s theater lends significance to those ‘small’ acts with scrupulous theatrical framing; characters and audience alike are continually subjected to the carefully crafted and manipulated extraliterary spectacle of the body, light, music, color, and space. . . Her increasing emphasis on the gravity of role-playing, the character as determined by his or her context, and the slipperiness of language resurrect Jean Genet’s The Maids and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And lugubrious atmospheres conjure the dramas of the Irish lyrical playwrights William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory.”

Later in her book, Moroff writes, “Intimacy, pleasure, truthfulness, and an innocence willing to be taken by surprise – these are all crucial attributes of Fornés’s theatre.”

Stephen Bottoms writes in Playing Underground, “New plays like Irene Fornés’ Promenade, were defined not only by aesthetic innovation but by their immediate accessibility as entertainment.”

One of Fornés’ central concerns was the present-ness of theatre, that live actors are presenting this show to you right now in this moment, and the show they’ll present tomorrow will be a different one. Why is this? Fornés tells us in her lyrics “Once a moment passes, it never comes again.”

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.

I Know What Madness Is

Michael Smith, theatre critic at the Village Voice, wrote in 1963 about the new theatre alternative, “Off Off Broadway is decidedly clubby. To some extent, it has a coterie audience; to some extent it is snobbish and self-glorifying; to some extent it is a playground. Sometimes it is despicable. But all these weaknesses are inseparable from its strength, which is it human scale.”

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?”

Judson’s resident director Lawrence Kornfeld (who directed Promenade) said of those times, “We needed to get out. To get out from inside. To get out from Eisenhower time. To get out from those constraints. To create a very, very American form.”

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.

Lots of new physical spaces emerged in the early 1960s to host all the new kinds of theatre, most of those spaces very nontraditional. Off off Broadway (originally "off-off-Broadway") was led by four theatres, all of them in New York's East Village (where Rent is set), Caffe Cino, La MaMa ETC, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poets’ Theatre.

(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.

Within its first five years, Judson produced fifty-nine plays by forty-three authors, including the one-act musical Promenade in 1965. At the same time, Carmines created Judson Dance Theatre and reignited the Judson Art Gallery. Carmines was openly gay and had two degrees in theology. He wrote scores for several off off Broadway musicals throughout the Sixties that played the Judson Poets’ Theatre and in some cases went on to commercial runs. Carmines openly admitted that Judson was a child of the legendary ensemble, The Living Theatre, not only in philosophy but in actors, directors, and designers as well.

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.”

Michael Smith wrote in The Village Voice, “Off off Broadway isn’t a place or an idea or a movement or a method or even a group of people. It has no program, no rules, no image to maintain. It is as varied as its participants and they are constantly changing. At its best, it implies a particular point of view, that the procedures of the professional theatre are inadequate; that integrity and freedom to explore, experiment and grow count more than respectable or impressive surroundings.”

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.

This is the world that brought Promenade to life, and we're doing our best to honor that artistic worldview, and bring back this wondrous, audacious piece of theatre history, as faithful to its creators intentions as possible. It's a different kind of theatre from what any of us are used to, but that's what makes it such a terrific adventure! As we New Liners have been heard to say, "If it's not scary, what's the point?" Or maybe to put it more accurately, if it doesn't challenge us, what's the point? If we don't learn something, what's the point?

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.

Ho, Ho, Ho, I'm Carefree

We've finished blocking Promenade, we ran each act separately and tonight, we ran the whole show for the first time. And it's all starting to make a kind of sense as we assemble all the crazy pieces. And it's really entertaining!

One funny thing I've noticed -- so many of the characters act like children. The two prisoners, 105 and 106, have the innocence and curiosity and openness of children, while the aristocrats display the greed and selfishness and ego of children, as well as the tendency toward shameless showing off and very short attention spans. You might say the prisoners are child-like while the aristocrats are childish. And we leave the audience to decide what they think that means about America.

Likewise, several of the songs sound like children's songs, simple and direct on the surface but loaded with layers of meaning underneath.

"Unrequited Love" is funny in its obvious contradictions, but it's really about emotional walls and the inability to make human connection.

Passionate lips are sweet, but oh,
How much sweeter
Are lips that refuse.
Don't love me, sweetheart,
Or I might stop loving you.

That's pretty neurotic, but we also recognize it as truthful. There are people in the real world like this. Sondheim tackled the same emotions in "Buddies Blues" in Follies. In The Robber Bridegroom, the idea goes to an even darker place in the Act I finale, "Love Stolen."

The lyric to "Unrequited Love" shows us these aristocrats as shallow, trivial people, but these characters don't realize they're also revealing their darker depths.

Much of the song "Isn't That Clear?", sung by the aristocrats to the servant, sounds almost like nonsense...

Your unprosperous status
Produces a dubious,
Fallacious, and tedious
Outlook on life.

You do not know what we're about
We do not know what you’re about
Or care to know.

It’s sad your career
Depends on our whim.
On with your work, my dear,
Or you'll get thin.

But it's not nonsense. It's class warfare. It's the starkest statement in the show about class status in America -- and it comes very early in the show, to establish this theme that runs beneath everything. This song is a declaration of separateness and it's a flexing of social power, to belittle the Other and to remind the Other of their place.

You see,
Even if you're here,
And we're also here,
You are not near,
Isn't that clear?

These lines almost sound like a Dr. Seuss book, but the aristocrats are telling the servant that physical proximity is not the same as social proximity. It's a nasty way of putting her in her place and a it's bouncy, catchy song that's what composer Al Carmines does best, throw us off balance. And he'll do that through the whole show.

In another seemingly silly song in Act I, "Four Naked Ladies," the women aristocrats are jealous of the attention the men are showing Miss Cake, so the women start taking their clothes off. But we soon understand that this song is about social competition and conformity more than anything else.

"The Cigarette Song" is another deceptively complex song, in which the servant and the prisoners muse about the mundane, everyday freedom of being upper class. In the song "Bliss" the trio muses further about being rich.

Eating is a blessing,
Money is a joy.
Drinking is a pleasure
And riches a delight.
We've come to one conclusion
That's readily discerned:
A lot of satisfaction
Does away with discontent.
Doesn't it?

A lot of satisfaction
Produces happiness,
And the source of satisfaction
Is wealth. Isn't it?
All that man possesses
Displaces discontent.

It goes by so fast, we don't completely register the horror of the understatement. "Eating is a blessing"...? "Drinking is a pleasure"...? No, those things are necessary to life. But to these Others, they are luxuries. It's a direct, blunt response to the cliche that Money Can't Buy Happiness. On the contrary, says Promenade, "A lot of satisfaction does away with discontent. . . and the source of satisfaction is wealth."

Nothing subtle about that.

The song "The Clothes Make the Man" is another insightful commentary on social status, but coming at it from a different angle. Here, it's sort of the same idea as My Fair Lady, but in this case, it's the appearance that bestows status, not speech.

You see, a costume
Can change your life.
Be one and all.
Be each and all.
Transvest!
Impersonate!
'Cause costumes
Change the course of life.

There's so much going on in this lyric. It starts with the idea that our outward appearance is all important -- it can literally "change the course of your life." The song lists a series of professions, every one of them defined by their "costume" -- gigolo, businessman, cop, clown, priest, and the Jailer.

But this song also tells us to take that knowledge and use it, to use the power of appearance to get what we need. (I love the command, "Transvest!") The song tells us that our outward appearance is only a costume, a deception, a role we play. Once again, this seriously catchy song catches us off guard with its serious undertones. And it also reminds us of the everyday deceptions we all practice, the costumes we wear, the roles we play.

Later in Act II, the prisoners sing "I'm Carefree," a deeply ironic song about the ugliness of the world.

When I was born, I opened my eyes,
And when I looked around, I closed them.
And when I saw how people get kicked in the head,
And kicked in the belly,
And kicked in the groin,
I closed them.
My eyes are closed but I’m carefree.
Ho, ho, ho,
Ho, ho, ho,
I’m carefree.

In other words, you can be happy only if you ignore the world around you, because it's just too ugly. 105 and 106 are the only decent characters in the show, the only ones with any dignity or self-awareness. Though they are child-like, they are also anthropologists exploring a lost tribe -- the American upper middle class -- who commit (social) atrocities with a smile. And Carmines has written sad, dissonant, minor music to accompany the prisoners' obviously false claim to oblivious happiness in a world like this.

And Carmines has written beautiful music for "Spring Beauties," during which the aristocrats blithely turn two wounded soldiers into a maypole, and they dance around their "maypole" holding onto the soldiers' bandages, merrily wrapping the poor men up tighter and tighter. The song's lyric is all about celebrating the spring as a time for coupling, even as our soldiers are being wounded and killed half a world away. The aristocrats "don't see" our troops in Act II, the same way they "don't see" poor people in Act I. And then the aristocrats leave to go to a party at the Mayor's mansion, leaving the wounded men on the ground.

This subtle but powerful statement about Americans' attitudes toward our soldiers in Vietnam sneaks up on us, gradually emerging out of the silliness and the pretty music of this number.

The most disturbing number is surely the show's gorgeous finale, "All is Well in the City," because we've just spent the whole evening witnessing how much is not well in the city.

All is well in the city;
People do what they want.
They can go to the park.
They can sleep all they want.
And for those who have no cake,
There's plenty of bread.

But what "people" are they talking about? Who can do whatever they want, go to the park, or sleep all day? Rich people and the unemployed.

The last two lines of the finale are the most subversive of the entire show. Reversing the famous Marie Antoinette quote is funny but it implies two uncomfortable ideas -- that poor people should be grateful for whatever scraps they're given; and also that nobody is going hungry, because there's "plenty" of food.

In 1969 when the show debuted, New York City was at the beginning of a decades-long problem of homelessness that lasted throughout the Seventies and Eighties. There wasn't plenty of bread.

Even more unsettling (and depressingly truthful) is that 105 and 106 -- the Others, the Poor -- have bought into those two lines. They believe in the ideas that oppress them. These prisoners (as our stand-ins) have been on a wild anthropological odyssey; they've seen some of the worst of human behavior and impulses, and the only conclusion they draw is that everything is as it should be. They're back in jail. All is well.

Yikes!

I'm not exaggerating when I say you've never seen anything like Promenade. How I wish Fornés and Carmines would have written more musicals together! This show is both laugh-out-loud funny and seriously deep, and in a weird way, really beautiful. Don't miss your once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this thrilling piece of theatre history live!

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.

Who Can Reason With a Clown? Who Can Dance With a Priest?

Working on Promenade is a little different for me as director, but it's really different -- and sometimes baffling -- for the actors.

From the 1970s on, mainstream theatre, even commercial theatre, began to adopt certain ideas and devices from the Theatre of the Absurd, and soon those absurdist devices had become mainstream devices, so pure absurdism mostly faded away.

Because that happened, I've directed lots of shows that used elements of absurdism, like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Assassins, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Rocky Horror, Cry-Baby, Bukowsical, Reefer Madness, Anyone Can Whistle, and of course, Threepenny Opera. So I'm pretty comfortable with those tools.

We do so many shows that have their own unique set of rules, that are unlike all other musicals, so that's not scary. To be honest, that's a huge part of the fun, figuring out how each new oddball show operates, and helping the actors understand each new universe.

But Promenade is pretty close to pure absurdism, and that's not something actors are asked to do very often. Or ever. And unlike my job, Theatre of the Absurd explicitly rejects most of the actor's toolkit.

There's no backstory, no interior life, no psychology, no subtext. There's just now in this moment saying these words. It's about extreme liveness, presentness, about only this live experience in this moment. Or as Jonathan Larson put it, "There is no future, there is no past."

The explanation for all this is that all that complexity in creating a role is "false." No real person is ever thinking about her backstory, her interior life, her psychology, her subtext, so in order to be truthful, in order to represent reality, an actor playing a person shouldn't think about those things either. (For the record, this is terrible advice unless you're dealing with absurdism.)

We've blocked half the show. One of the actors playing the Aristocrats, was puzzled because they were all getting enraged over having their jewels stolen, and yet the next minute they're all dancing offstage singing a waltz, "Can You Bear This Bliss?"

I think the true absurdist answer would be: No, it doesn't make sense, because people don't make sense, because the world doesn't make sense.

My answer is probably halfway between absurdism and how we usually approach characters. I think the Aristocrats are outraged not over the loss, but over the effrontery! They're likely outraged about effrontery a lot; and outrage can be fun while it lasts, but not worth losing sleep over. They'll just buy more jewelry. There's probably a lot in the safe at home too.

And though maybe that approach is not pure Theatre of the Absurd, it certainly does present an absurd world, in which people are so rich, they can lose all their jewelry, and it doesn't really bother them. Who's that rich? Sound familiar?

The six Aristocrats are constantly chasing and flirting with each other but never really hooking up, because they're all terrible at flirting and they seem to possess zero empathy for anyone. Again, it's all silly in the moment, but it presents an absurd world, in which most human relationships are hopeless and fucked up. Sound familiar?

Yet again, here we are, working on this much older show -- it first debuted in 1965, it was expanded and revised, and it opened off Broadway in 1969 -- and yet it feels so much like this show is satirizing us in 2026. I think doing this show will be cathartic for all of us, including the audience, to be able to laugh at so much stuff that bedevils us.

We all cracked up in blocking rehearsal the other night when the Jailer declares confidently, "We have the best crime!" To our ears, that was a Trump reference, but María Irene Fornés wrote that fifty-seven years ago.

Maybe part of the reason the show still feels so timely is that our current zeitgeist isn't that much removed from the late Sixties and early Seventies, another very dark, angry time for our country. Though I think today is worse. Even though Fornés and Carmines were writing specifically about the society and problems of 1969, they were also writing about 2026.

They just didn't know it.

Fornés died in 2018, so I don't know if she realized how well her only musical has stood the test of time. She didn't live to see the well-received 2019 concert of the show as part of the Encores! Off-Center Series at New York City Center.

Great art always speaks to us. We find different things at different times, depending on what we need. Maybe Promenade will always feel timely. Because we humans will always treat each other like shit.

And speaking of that, I have noticed in the Promenade score the clear influence of Kurt Weill's amazing score for Threepenny Opera, which had just enjoyed a long run off Broadway from 1954 to 1961. It was off Broadway's first megahit. Another production of Threepenny in a different translation ran briefly on Broadway in 1966. So Irene and Al Carmines must have absorbed some of that dark awesomeness when they wrote Promenade in 1965 and 1969. It sure sounds like it.

I never thought I'd get to work on Promenade. I didn't really even know for sure exactly what it was. It's been a blast to work on. It's such a crazy adventure. And beyond the fun, the best part is I get to share this work I love so much with fifteen wonderful, fearless actors, and in a few weeks, with our audiences -- who likely have no clue what exquisite madness -- the madness of reality -- they're about to witness!

Promenade is an important slice of theatre and sociopolitical history but it's also a brilliant, whip-smart, wildly entertaining show that's so worth bringing back to life!  And boy, is it a New Line show! I can't wait for you to experience the mad wonders of this beautiful show.

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.

Half Of It I Really Know

I've been wanting to do the musical Promenade since I first found the cast album in college. I knew it was weird -- let's be honest, I loved that it was weird -- but I did not know I'd have to learn about a whole bunch of new things in order to direct this show decently.

But that's okay. I love research. People ask me sometimes why New Line doesn't hire a dramaturg -- it's because that's my second favorite part of the process. (My "first favorite part" is polishing the show at the very end of the process. Nothing's more fun that that.) I figure, if I have to do the hard part (like blocking!), why give up the fun part?

Now that we're in the midst of blocking Promenade, I'm so glad I did all that research. Although, to tell the truth, I feel a little like one of the show's lyrics:

I know everything.
Half of it I really know.
The rest I make up.
The rest I make up.

For months, I've been studying Theatre of the Absurd; the off off Broadway movement; Judson Poets Theatre; the gay minister and composer Al Carmines; and the Cuban-American lesbian playwright María Irene Fornés.

If the Missouri Arts Council hadn't already blacklisted New Line for our content, this would do it.

Frankly, I had a blast learning about all this stuff. Some of it completely blew my mind. But it has made it much easier for me to lead our foolhardy but intrepid expedition into this wild and wacky musical comedy that is truly like no other.

If I do my job right as director, all my research will help this wonderful show operate the way its creators intended. Carmines and Fornés were rabidly, gleefully unconventional and experimental with their creations, but both of them saw their primary goal to be entertaining the audience. This isn't one of those oddball "masterpieces" that you have to study up on, in order to enjoy it. You don't need to know any of what I've learned to have a good time watching this show -- but I do need to.

Besides, I know there are lots of theatre nerds like me out there (well, not exactly like me, let's hope), especially those who read my blog. So if you're interested, I'm going to share what I've learned in my next few blog posts...

I'll start where my research started. What is Theatre of the Absurd?

Theatre of the Absurd isn’t merely silliness in the service of a serious point (which is what I always thought); in fact, the silliness is more the result of absurdism than its point.

In 1961, Martin Esslin wrote the book The Theatre of the Absurd, which is still widely recognized as the definitive text on absurdism. Absurdist theatre first emerged in the mid-1950s. The increasingly complex, consumerist, postwar world of the Fifties and Sixties – and America’s oppressive conformity culture, known as “the Establishment” – demanded a new kind of response to events of the real world, a new kind of storytelling, a new kind of art-making. Off Broadway once had been where the interesting theatre experiments happened, but by the Sixties, Off Broadway had become much more commercialized, more like a mini-Broadway.

Esslin wrote about the impact of the horrors of World War II on the theatre, “A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile.”

Playwright Eugѐne Ionesco wrote about Franz Kafka’s work and absurdism, “Cut off from his religion, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all actions become senseless, absurd, and useless.”

The absurdist playwrights were not trying to understand or explain the horrors of the war; they were simply trying to write in a rapidly changing world in which those unspeakable horrors had been committed.

So many of the devices and conventions of absurdist theatre have become commonplace in mainstream theatre today. The big names in this movement included playwrights Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugène Ionesco, Václav Havel, and Jean Genet, among others; and plays like Waiting for Godot, Rhinoceros, Zoo Story, and The Homecoming.

But to be clear, absurdism wasn’t an intentional movement – most of the playwrights we now think of as absurdists never used the label themselves. But they all challenged the traditions of mainstream theatre in generally similar ways, so it’s useful to think about what they were all doing, why they were doing it, and what the result was of them doing it.

In his book Theatre and Literature of the Absurd, Michael Y. Bennett writes about Beckett’s plays, and by extension about Absurdism, “The amount of words or the amount of silence does not quantify how much is being said. It is, rather, as if Beckett realized that realistic language could not express the inexpressible, so Beckett needed to destroy language, making it inexpressible, to adequately express the inexpressible.”

Or as Beckett himself explained it in his “Three Dialogues” essay, “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”

It’s why absurdists used music a lot, because music is an abstract language that does not try to express concrete ideas, but can convey what is otherwise inexpressible.

Theatre of the Absurd has two basic premises. First, the world is inherently absurd, without meaning or purpose. As Bill Finn’s Spelling Bee reminds us, Life is random and unfair, Life is pandemonium.

The second premise is that language is useless in expressing actual human thoughts and feelings, because words can never fully communicate exactly what another person thinks or feels. We are all trapped inside our own brains and experiences, and forever shut off from the brains and experiences of others. We can only process other people's words in terms of our own experiences.

So we can’t trust language.

Language can be used to deceive. So in an absurdist play, what happens is always more truthful than what is said.

Esslin wrote, “Exposed to the incessant, and inexorably loquacious, onslaught of the mass media, the press, and advertising, the man in the street becomes more and more skeptical toward the language he is exposed to.” He wrote that in 1961, decades before Fox News, the internet and social media emerged, and it’s only gotten worse today. “Language has run riot in an age of mass communication.”

These two basic assumptions mean that no absurdist play ever ends happily. Life can’t have a Happily Ever After because life is inherently without meaning or purpose. These ideas also guarantee that an absurdist play never has a message, since words are unreliable. Absurdist plays only present the insanity of the world, without comment or argument, and let the audience decide what to think about that.

Esslin tells us that one aspect of absurdism is that “it castigates, satirically, the absurdity of lives lived unaware and unconscious of ultimate reality.” A search for ultimate reality sounds a lot like religion minus all the magic stuff, particularly back then in the late Sixties, when traditional religion was fading, ill-equipped for the times. After all, these ideas represents a return to the original purpose of theatre, to grapple with the Gods.

Theatre of the Absurd is not particularly interested in the conventional notions of character, motivation, exposition, backstory, plot, or dramatic arc, the pillars of traditional storytelling. It follows the rules of neither comedy nor tragedy, because it’s almost always both, like real life. Absurdist theatre is expressionistic, conveying emotion and psychology, not relaying information or a message.

And that’s why it’s so appropriate for these befuddling times we live in (then and now), when we’ve lost faith (again) in all our institutions, and in our fellow humans, and in facts, and in language itself. The only honest theatre, the only honest storytelling must acknowledge all that. In this world stripped of certainties and rituals, the most ancient ritual of dramatic storytelling has to fill that void.

And we all know what that is. Live Theatre.

Ionesco said, “The aim of the avant-garde should be to rediscover – not invent – in their purest state the permanent forms and forgotten ideals of the theatre. We must cut through the cliches and break free from a hidebound ‘traditionalism;’ we must rediscover the one true and living tradition. . . To give the theatre its truest measure, which lies in going to excess, the words themselves must be stretched to their utmost limits, the language must be made almost to explode, or to destroy itself in its inability to contain its meaning.”

I love that so much.

In writing about America in 1961 – though he might be writing about now – Esslin says, “There is a kind of horror about, and I think that this horror and absurdity go together. . . If life in our time is basically absurd, then any dramatic representation of it that comes up with neat solutions and produces the illusion that it all ‘makes sense’ after all, is bound to contain an element of oversimplification, to suppress essential factors – and reality expurgated and oversimplified becomes make-believe.”

Instead of literal truth, instead of imitating life, imitating reality, the absurdists believed in presenting the essence of reality, its meta­physical truth, not its appearance. As Esslin reminds us, the stage is a magnifying glass, not a mirror.

And sometimes tiny, harmless creatures can look like terrifying monsters under a magnifying glass. Now that I think about it, that's about as apt a metaphor as I've heard to describe Promenade. Although to be honest, Promenade is more like a magnifying glass combined with a funhouse mirror.

It's a hell of a ride. You will love 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.

PROMENADE!

I'm a bit giddy.

Despite all the problems and troubles and obstacles of everyday life right now, I'm getting to fulfill a lifelong dream. I'm getting to work on a show that is a genuine legend of musical theatre, known by most musical theatre people only through its tragically incomplete cast album, because nobody ever produces it.

Flashback. When I arrived at college in 1982, I found out within a few days that the Harvard bookstore was called The Coop (short for The Harvard Cooperative Society), and it was a massive, multi-floor, two-building department store -- including the largest record department in New England!

When they told me that, I almost wet myself. My inner drama nerd swooned.

It was thanks to the Coop that I discovered March of the Falsettos, Little Shop of Horrors, The Baker's Wife, They're Playing Our Song, The Robber Bridegroom, Fiorello!, Celebration, The Threepenny Opera, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, Anyone Can Whistle and all the other Sondheim shows -- and Promenade.

Every time I bought a new cast recording, I listened to it obsessively for weeks. And then I discovered Boston had a bunch of excellent used record stores, and none of them knew how valuable their cast albums were. I was helpless to resist. When I graduated, I realized I had acquired an average of one hundred cast recordings per year while I was at college. When I graduated high school, I had one hundred cast albums; four years later I had five hundred. All on LP.

Promenade thrilled me when I first put it on the stereo. It was so playful and silly and really funny, and yet the lyrics had a weirdly dark, cynical edge to them. Who were these characters? I fell in love with the score, even though the recording is only about two-thirds of the show, even though I knew nothing about the show itself.

(One funny aside, in order to fit more songs on the LP, they sped all the songs up just a little, which made all the voices a little higher. I never even noticed until I listened to the CD and heard how it's supposed to sound.)

Years later, I found the Promenade script reprinted in a collection called Great Rock Musicals. (No offense to the collection's editor -- Promenade is many things, but it's not a rock musical.)

So I read the script. Twice. And I still had no fucking idea what was going on. But it was awfully funny! Plus, I reminded myself, I felt the same way about Hair the first time I read that script.

It wasn't until years later when I was writing theatre books, that I did further research into Promenade; and as a result, into the Cuban-American book and lyric writer María Irene Fornés, who was a major figure in Sixties theatre; into Theatre of the Absurd; into composer Al Carmines and the off off Broadway theatre he created, Judson Poets Theatre; and into the off off Broadway scene where Promenade was born.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to work on this show.

Year after year, as we talked about programming New Line's next season, Promenade was forever my personal Questing Beast. I knew we could never produce it because it was just too risky "commercially," but I really wanted to work on it. More than that, it was so outrageously, relentlessly special that I wanted to share it with people.

Then, about a year ago, as we planned this season, I called Chris Moore, our associate artistic director and told him it was time for Promenade. This show was initially about 1965 America when it debuted at the Judson Poets Theatre, and then it was expanded and became about a pretty different 1969 America when it opened off Broadway. But as it often is with great works of art, suddenly it felt, last year and still now, like Promenade is about America today.

Chris made the totally legit point that New Line is awfully wobbly financially right now, and that maybe we should be producing shows that we know will "sell" really well, instead of a lesser known 1969 experimental musical comedy with a strange title. He was absolutely right, of course. But if New Line can't do what it was meant to do, why bother? Every show in this season, Bat Boy, Broadway Noir Deux, Promenade, and We Will Rock You all speak to this moment -- regardless of when they were created. That's what New Line does.

A few months ago, our audiences were stunned at how much the twenty-five-year-old show Bat Boy seems like it's about America in 2025. A few months earlier, they were stunned by how the fifty-year-old Rocky Horror felt like it was written yesterday. You'll be even more stunned by Promenade for all the same reasons. But that's what New Line was created to do.

No, that's what theatre was created to do.

And surely the best way to look at the darkest aspects of our current zeitgeist is through humor. A spoonful of sugar, as they say. We have to face the darkness in order to understand it. But in the hands of Fornés and Carmines, that task is a little easier and a little less scary. And a lot funnier.

But trust me, though you'll laugh throughout the show, you'll be thinking about it afterward for a loooooong time. It's sneaky that way.

For most people, this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this brilliant, crazy, rule-changing, absurdist masterpiece of musical theatre. I know we say this a lot, but more than ever, there is nothing else remotely like this show. It scares the shit out of me as director! But we can't wait to share it with you!

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.