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.

BROADWAY NOIR DEUX!

It won't surprise many people when I say that I often drive my collaborators crazy in various ways. For instance, when someone brings an idea to me, especially if it's not something I've thought about before, I need to take it in, then let it percolate. It swims around in the back of my head and at some point, I realize that it's either a great idea or a terrible idea. Sometimes the percolating takes minutes, sometimes weeks or even longer.

Por ejemplo...

It was two years ago, during the run of my seriously fucked-up Christmas musical, Jesus and Johnny Appleweed's Holy Rollin' Family Christmas, and I was spending a lot of time sitting in the lobby with Chris Moore, New Line's associate artistic director. And one night, Chris said, "We should do a show that's all black people singing the songs they never get to sing in shows."

Chris and I talk a lot about issues around race and representation in musical theatre. New Line has been assembling diverse casts for its entire history -- it's incredibly rare that a New Line show has an all-white cast. But as a middle-aged white dude on the cusp between the Boomers and Generation X, it's important to me that New Line never becomes middle-aged and that our cast and staff always look like our community.

That night, Chris' comment didn't get an immediate response from me, but it surely did start percolating...

After the show, Chris was standing in the aisle talking to some of our friends. I walked up to him and said, "You know, we've been doing these concerts at the Sheldon every few years. We should do your idea at the Sheldon!" We explained the idea to the others, and everybody thought it sounded great.

We toyed around with various titles, many of which were very funny but totally inappropriate. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was Chris who suggested we call it Broadway Noir. It was the perfect title. For me, using a French word evoked Josephine Baker, the black American singer and dancer who in the 1920s could only become a star in Paris. It also just sounded cool.

I decided that night that we would produce Broadway Noir at the Sheldon Concert Hall in January 2025. And totally out of character for me (still a recovering control freak), I told Chris that I would probably suggest things, songs, etc., but this was his concert. He curated the song list, and he directed the show. 

And people loved it. Despite an awful snow storm, the two performances drew nice big crowds. We saw a lot of our regular audience there, but also a lot of new people. And the reaction from everybody was so positive, that we decided to do a sequel and make this second one a part of our regular season, not just a special event.

Of course -- also at Chris' suggestion -- we called the sequel Broadway Noir Deux! (To be fair, I added the exclamation point. To me, it's both fierce and funny.) And once again, Chris has assembled the cast, directed the show, and curated the song list with the concert's music director Jermaine Manor.

The fun for me is threefold. First, I don't have to do any work on this! Second, I get to see actors who've done shows with us take on something really different. For instance, this time, DeAnté Bryant, who played Will in New Line's American Idiot, is taking on the  classic 1945 song, "If I Loved You," Rodgers and Hammerstein's soaring ballad of barely hidden emotion from Carousel. It couldn't be further from American Idiot. That's what's so cool about these concerts of ours.

Corrinna Redford played Mimi in Rent with New Line last season. I loved working with her. I loved watching her navigate the enormous range of intense emotions that Mimi suffers through. I also loved that sometimes she would come up to me and ask to change my blocking or direction, and she'd explain her reasoning behind the change -- and almost every time, her change made the moment or the scene better. She has killer instincts. In Broadway Noir Deux!, she jumps into something completely different, Jeanine Tesori's playful "Morning Person" from Shrek.

The incorrigible Kimmie Kidd played the outrageous, glamorous, hilarious French movie producer Liliane LeFleur in New Line's production of Nine. One of my favorite moments in the show was when Kimmie got to invoke LeFleur's Folies Bergeres performances. She was funny, naughty, sexy, and it was great fun working with her. In a stroke of genius, Chris has given Kimmie "Climb Every Mountain," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. It's oceans away from the playful carnality of Liliane LeFleur, and it will be such a treat to see it.

During our run of Rent, Chris and I had several conversations about how terrific Aaron Tucker was in the role of Benny. It was the first Rent I've seen in which Benny isn't a dick. He's just an adult. And let's be honest, Roger and Mark really are just slackers, right? This was the first time I liked Benny, and I understood more deeply his position, caught between his child-like friends and his desire to lead an adult life. After the scene with the homophobic pastor at the church, Benny and Tom exited with their arms around each other. I loved that. I am thrilled that in our concert, Aaron is going to sing "Johanna" from Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Aaron's got a beautiful voice!

Victoria Pines first worked with us way back in 2001 on the amazing 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock. She most recently worked with us in Sweet Potato Queens. She's an incredibly versatile, honest performer and her voice can pretty much do anything. In Sweet Potato Queens, she broke our hearts every night with "Cherries in the Snow." But in New Line's Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Victoria played Jewel and she brought the fucking house down every night with the joyous, raunchy "Twenty Four Hours of Lovin'." When Chris told me Victoria was going to sing Kander and Ebb's torchy "Maybe This Time" in the concert, I was thrilled. She will nail it.

I just met Ronmal Mottley a few months ago, as we started rehearsals for Bat Boy. He's new to our company, but he easily proved himself as both the loudmouth Mrs. Taylor and the nurturing Reverend Hightower. I remember calling him to cast him in Bat Boy, and I made sure he knew one of his roles would be in drag. Without a pause he said, "That's cool. I'm up for anything." Keep this guy around. He's also in both our upcoming shows, the weird but wonderful Promenade in March, and We Will Rock You in June. For Broadway Noir Deux!, Ronmal is singing Jason Robert Brown's gorgeous ballad, "Wondering," from The Bridges of Madison County. After the insanity of Bat Boy and the coming insanity of Promenade, it's so cool to give Ronmal a song like this.

Though I haven't worked with De-Rance Blaylock yet, I know she's a really great performer, and I LOVE that Chris has given her Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch," from Company, one of the all-time great musical theatre character songs.

I haven't worked with the others in the cast, but I can't wait to hear them all. Chris and Jermaine did such a wonderful job last year, I know this year will be awesome too.

One of the reasons I love doing concerts of theatre songs at the Sheldon is that normally, people hear these songs in context, and they're thinking about story, sets, jokes, music. Concerts like this allow the songs to shine by themselves, to let us really listen to the lyrics. Most of us humans are primarily visually oriented, and if you give our brains a choice between visuals and some other sense, like hearing, the visuals will win the attention war. So for these concerts, we take everything else away. It's just the performers, the songs, and you.

Besides, the Sheldon is world-renowned for its acoustics. Singing there is a huge joy all its own. And when we can share wonderful theatre songs at the same time, it's doubly awesome.

And let's not forget the original reason for these Noir concerts. Though diversity in musical theatre casting is getting better and better over time, there are still lots of directors and others who can't imagine a black woman playing Sally Bowles, and can't imagine a black man playing Billy Bigelow or Anthony Hope. It's stupid. And these extraordinary local performers are the proof.

Join us this weekend at the Sheldon for Broadway Noir Deux! What could be better than sitting in an historic concert hall, listening to wonderful actors singing wonderful theatre songs? To me, that's pretty much heaven. And a great way to start the new year.

2026 just has to be better than 2025... right?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Broadway Noir Deux!, click here.

P.P.S. To get tickets for the other shows in the season, click here.

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

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

'Twas a Year Full of New Line, 2025

'Twas a year full of New Line, still lurching toward stable;
Our budget's quite tight, but we do what we're able.
They say that we all have to suffer for art,
But the making of art is the easier part;
It's the bowing and scraping and begging for money,
To pay for the art and the artists to run free;
We suffer alright, and that suff'ring ain't done, G...

The Missouri Arts Council, which once we could trust,
Decided to yank all their funding from us!
For thirty-three years, they had funded New Line,
Now they've blacklisted us, to send us a sign:
Our founding philosophy makes them so sad,
'Cause we value diversity; they think that's bad.
See, Missouri's a red state -- and stark raving mad!

We started the year going back to the Sheldon;
Our Broadway Noir concert was 'specially well-done --
Performers of color recaptured the show tune,
In dazzling displays, like a big Broadway typhoon!
So eye-op'ning, mind-blowing, gob-smacking too,
For these much gifted artists, their message came through --
Just let them, and they'll show you what they can do!

What a joy to return to the Frankenstein Place,
And a re-mounting of Rocky Horror, to face
All the horrors of Now, when our world is so mad,
To remind us that differences aren't always bad,
That queer folks and trans folks and other non-normies
Are just like the rest of us, so we perform these
Subversive rock tuners with important stories.

It was more than a decade since we last did Rent,
But these times, they demanded a cry of dissent
Against hatred and bias and misinformation
That slices and dices our nattering nation;
So Roger and Mark and their friends all returned
To remind us again what we each should have learned,
That empathy's how our humanity's earned.

We brought back the Bat Boy for one final time,
'Cause we need the reason inside of his rhyme,
'Cause we need reminding that scapegoating sucks,
'Cause morality, decency both are in flux.
It's now that we need what our musicals do,
Reveal the real world, with a fictional skew,
To show us the truth 'bout ourselves that breaks through.

Yes, New Line has lasted for thirty-four years,
Through poverty, challenges, setbacks, and tears,
But we're all still plugging along, as we do,
To bring all the quirkiest, best shows to you,
With Promenade's wacky, insightful satire,
And We Will Rock You, full of Queen's rockin' fire,
Plus more of the musical art you inspire.

Stay Sane and Safe, and Have a Happy New Year!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. I started these year-poems on a whim way back in 2013. If you're a glutton for punishment, here are my poems from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024. (Yes, I skipped 2021.)

P.P.S. To buy tickets to our 2026 shows, Broadway Noir DEUX!, Promenade and We Will Rock You, click here.

P.P.P.S. If you'd like to contribute to New Line Theatre (you know you would!), just click here.

The 2025 New Line Theatre Gift Guide is Here!

Happy Holidays from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre! We're here again to help you find the perfect gift for that musical theatre fanboy or fangirl on your list who has everything! Tickets, calendars, books, and more!

Broadway Meets STL Rhythm, Passion, Style
For two nights only, Jan. 9-10, the New Liners return to the acoustically magnificent Sheldon Concert Hall in the Grand Center Arts District. BROADWAY NOIR DEUX!, features a cast of all local actors of color, sharing with you a powerhouse celebration of Broadway musicals through the lens of their own lives, staking their claim to this most American art form, and reminding us that the Broadway musical belongs to all of us.
Click here to buy tickets.


Come for the Party!
Stay for the War!
Don't miss your once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this uproarious experimental musical comedy from 1969! Beneath its dizzying comedy and catchy songs, PROMENADE follows the exploits of two escaped prisoners taking an unexpected tour of Capitalism and The Big City, where the poor and homeless mingle with the Idle Rich, exploring some big issues along the way, like wealth inequality, law and order, war, corruption, body image, gender, sexuality, and more.
Click here to buy tickets.


Will You Do the Fandango?
New Line Theatre wraps up its 34th season with the global sensation, the electrifying rock adventure WE WILL ROCK YOU, a fantastical rock fable featuring 24 songs by QUEEN! Set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic dystopia, WE WILL ROCK YOU follows two revolutionaries on their mission to save rock and roll. In an age where algorithms control our every choice, this musical is a rallying cry for our times, a fist-pumping, foot-stomping anthem to individuality.
Click here to buy tickets.


Bring Great Musical Theatre to our City!
Make a Year-End Donation to New Line!
Donate in the name of your favorite fanboy or fangirl. Donate in the memory of a loved one. Donate in honor of the teacher who turned you on to musicals. Donate in the name of your parents who drove you to rehearsals. Donate in Memory of Sondheim. Or just get an extra year-end tax deduction!
Just Click Here!
New Line Theatre is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.


New Line's 2025-26
Photo Calendar
Every year, we produce a wall calendar with high-quality photos from our shows by Jill Ritter Photography. Enjoy gorgeous production photos from some of New Line's coolest shows, Rocky Horror, American Idiot, Something Rotten, Dracula, Lizzie, Anything Goes, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Johnny Appleweed, Sweet Potato Queens, Return to the Forbidden Planet, and Jesus & Johnny Appleweed's Holy Rollin' Christmas!


The Poster Art of
New Line Theatre
Yes that's right, we've published a coffee table book of all our posters over the last thirty-three years, all designed by St. Louis graphic artists Kris Wright, Matt Reedy, and others. It's a fun look back over New Line's amazing, unique history, and the company's first hundred shows. It's perfect for lovers of New Line and anyone who loves poster art, available now in hardcover and softcover editions.


New Line's "First Hundred Shows" Poster
One 36" x 24" poster that includes all the posters from New Line's first one hundred musicals (plus six Sheldon concerts). Get your Poster of Posters today!


New Line Bumper Stickers
Collect 'em all!

Go See a Musical;

Make Musicals, Not War;

got musicals?;

Bat Boy for Prez;

or the New Line logo.


Bat Boy
You loved seeing Bat Boy on our stage -- and we loved sharing it with you! Now you just can't get enough of him, right? No problem! We've got you covered.

Get ALL the Weekly World News articles about the Bat Boy, all in one crazy volume, Going Mutant!

Or how about a volume of the craziest WWN articles ever, Bat Boy Lives!


La Vie Boheme!
the RENT novel
You saw Rent last season, but have you read the novel? People say the musical is based on the opera La Boheme, but it's much closer to Henri Murger's very funny, very truthful 1851 French novel about young artists, Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, now in an all-new, easier-to-read English translation! Every character from Rent has a parallel character in this original version of the story. Especially if you know Rent, you'll love this book!


Rocky Horror
Our audiences went crazy over our production of The Rocky Horror Show! For those of you who already knew the show, and for those who've just discovered it...

Get yourself the new 50th anniversary coffee table book, Rocky Horror: Featuring Unseen Photographs and Exclusive Interviews!
   AND
Also the new Official Rocky Horror Late Night Double Feature: The 50th Anniversary Two-Volume Collector's Edition


The Wonderful Music of BOZZ
The new novel from Artistic Director Scott Miller, a fairy tale for the new millennium! In a dark world without music and without empathy, drama nerds Shellie and JoJo, and their new traveling companions, carry the fate of humankind on their artsy teenage shoulders. Can a musical save the world?
          When L. Frank Baum first published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he wrote in his introduction, "The old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as 'historical' in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer 'wonder tales' in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale." Baum wrote that in 1900. Miller thinks the time has come again.


JESUS & JOHNNY APPLEWEED'S HOLY ROLLIN' FAMILY CHRISTMAS
You loved this wild, vulgar, rowdy, outrageous, and hilarious musical satire in 2023. Now you can get the script and the vocal selections for yourself and for your nastier-minded friends!
          “What if Seth Rogen, Charles Dickens, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cheech and Chong, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Waters decided to have a baby?” – KDHX
          "A pot-laced, Dickensian, Cheech & Chong-esque holiday spoof that is reminiscent of Saturday Night Live in its heyday." – BroadwayWorld
          "A snarky (and oddly charming) holiday event." – TalkinBroadway
          "Resembles the audacious dark comedy material that John Waters and Charles Busch specialize in." – PopLifeSTL


The ABCs of BROADWAY MUSICALS series
These terrific books from New Line artistic director Scott Miller are a series of fun, easy-to-read books, a totally not intimidating way to get a basic understanding of this most American of art forms, including a very brief history of musicals, a survey of important and well-known shows, examples of the wide and wild variety of musicals, a look at the amazing people who create musicals, and a sense of how Broadway musicals reflect and comment on our culture. You’ll never feel lost again in a conversation about musical theatre, and you’ll enjoy seeing musicals more than ever. These books are short enough to read in one sitting or you can flip open to any page and find something interesting. Even hardcore musical lovers may learn something from these little books! Now available -- The ABCs of Broadway Musicals; The ABCs of Acting in Musicals; The ABCs of Directing Musicals; and The ABCs of Writing Musicals.


REPRINTS!
So many interesting books and scripts have fallen into public domain lately, so it's possible to reprint them at long last. Here are just a few gems that are back in print after many decades out of print!

42nd Street, the novel

Go Into Your Dance, the novel

Stage Mother, the novel

Oh! James!, the novel that inspired No, No, Nanette

No No Nanette, the original 1925 script

The Fantasticks, the original play

Liliom, the play that inspired Carousel

A Day Well Spent, the play that inspired The Matchmaker and Hello, Dolly!

Sondheim & Grimm & Perrault, the original fairy tales that inspired Into the Woods

Twenty Years on Broadway, George M. Cohan's memoir


BROADWAY MUSICAL
CHRISTMAS CAROLS
A piano-vocal songbook, full of 25 well-loved Christmas carols refashioned by Scott Miller for the hard-core fan of Broadway musicals, in new vocal arrangements with all-new lyrics related to musical theatre – funny, serious, smartass, cynical, reverent, poignant songs that will make you laugh, that will make you think, that will remind you why you love musicals so much.
          The songs include “O Little Shop of Bethlehem,” “God Rest Ye, Mad Thenardiers,” “Away in a Mame Tour,” “I Heard You Screlt On Christmas Day,” “What Squip Is This,” “Here We Come A-Chorusing,” “O Come, All Ye Rent Heads,” “Jolly Old Steve Sondheim,” “Shrek, the Herald Angel, Sings,” “O Hamilton,” and other future classics.


ANYTHING, ANYTHING, ANYTHING GOES! A Deep Dive
We all get a kick out of Anything Goes. Find out why. One of the most performed musicals in history, Anything Goes has become a classic of the American theatre, and yet most people don't really understand the show and its wild mashup of musical comedy, screwball comedy, and gangster movies. Far from being an old-fashioned, old-school musical comedy, Anything Goes is a razor-sharp satire of America, as much about today as about the Thirties, the way we make celebrities out of criminals and make religion into show biz. It's irreverent, smartass, insightful, fearless, and very funny. Plus, it's got some of Cole Porter's best songs.


HE NEVER DID ANYTHING TWICE
Get ready for a mind-blowing trip through the Broadway musicals of the most fearless and influential artist in the history of the American musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim. Here are sixteen in-depth explorations of all the great Sondheim musicals, West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Anyone Can Whistle, Evening Primrose, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion; plus some brief stops at a few of his other musical and non-musical projects over the years.


GO GREASED LIGHTNING!
The Amazing Authenticity of Grease
So many people underestimate the intelligence and authenticity of Grease. So it’s time to set the record straight. Originally a rowdy, rebellious, piece of alternative theatre, written by two guys who really lived it, Grease was inspired by the rule-busting success of Hair, rejecting the happy trappings of Broadway for a more authentic, more visceral, more radical theatre experience. It’s an authentic snapshot of the end of the 1950s, a moment when the styles and culture of the disengaged and disenfranchised became overpowering symbols of teenage power and independence.


HAMILTON AND THE NEW REVOLUTION:
Broadway Musicals in the 21st Century
How lucky we are to be alive right now! With this new volume, musical theatre scholar, director, historian, and fanboy Scott Miller takes you on a phantasmagorical journey through the second decade of this millennium, every stop along the way a Broadway musical truly like no other, all of them brilliant, original, and unique, all pointing toward an even brighter future for the art form and all the young artists creating amazing new work for us every day in this Golden Age for the musical theatre, including Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, A Strange Loop, Hadestown, The Color Purple, Bonnie & Clyde, Hands on a Hardbody, and The Scottsboro Boys, all shows that break the rules in smart, fearless, and surprising ways.


LET THE SUN SHINE IN:
The Genius of HAIR
In 1967, Hair launched a revolution. It rejected every convention of Broadway, of traditional theatre in general, and of the American musical specifically. It paved the way for the nonlinear concept musicals that dominated American musical theatre forever after. With more regional productions of Hair than ever before, Scott Miller gives us an incisive and fascinating analysis of the show. He looks at its place in theatre and cultural history, and its impact on recent musicals, including Rent. He delves into the mystical power Hair has over performers and viewers alike and its ability to literally change lives today -- including his.


RESCUING CATS:
The Musical That's Better Than You Think
No matter how you approach it, Cats is so much more than a silly dance revue based on some silly poems, so much more than a punchline. Why has Cats been such a huge, longstanding commercial success around the world? Why do people see it over and over? Cats is literally about life and death. Cats is about us. Scott Miller takes another revelatory deep dive into this overly maligned but iconic musical, to see how it was made, what it's about, why it works, why so many people love it and so many people hate it. If you love Cats, you'll find here so much more to love. If you hate Cats, this book might just change your perspective a little.


SEX, DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL, and MUSICALS
More deep dives into ten musicals that engage with sex, drugs, and rock & roll in one way or another, from the artistic earthquake that was Hair to punk pop that is Hedwig and the Angry Inch. These are all shows that New Line has produced over the company's history, including The Wild Party, Grease, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Show, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I Love My Wife, Bat Boy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and High Fidelity.


STRIKE UP THE BAND
The whole history of musicals, pulling back the curtain on the amazing innovation and adventurousness of the art form, its political and social conscience, and its incredibly rapid evolution over the last century. Strike Up the Band focuses not only on what happened on stage but also on how, and why it matters to us today. Its a different kind of history that explores the famous and, especially, the not-so famous musicals to reveal the lineage that paved the way to contemporary musicals.


LITERALLY ANYTHING GOES
Another musical theatre book from Scott Miller that takes deep dives into more than a dozen incredible, quirky musicals spanning the history of our art form, all shows that New Line has produced, including The Threepenny Opera, Anything Goes, The Nervous Set, The Fantasticks, Zorbá, Two Gentlemen Of Verona, The Robber Bridegroom, Evita, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Kiss Of The Spider Woman, A New Brain, Reefer Madness, Bukowsical, and Love Kills. Nobody does deep, insightful, penetrating analysis of musicals like Miller does.


IDIOTS, HEATHERS, and SQUIPS
In this volume, Miller takes you on a short but fantastic journey through the first decade and a half of the new millennium, guided by deep dives into eleven of the musicals that represent the astonishing variety and fearlessness of this new Golden Age, including bare, Urinetown, Sweet Smell of Success, Jerry Springer the Opera, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, Next to Normal, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, American Idiot, Heathers, and Be More Chill, all shows that opened in this new century, presented in chronological order so you can see how our art form is evolving like never before.


NIGHT OF THE LIVING SHOW TUNES: 13 Tales of the Weird
The short story anthology that takes you on a roller coaster ride of thirteen nightmarish tales, all inspired in one way or another by the musical theatre, mashing together the history of musicals with the conventions and mad variety of the horror genre. You’ll meet theatre ghosts, vampires, monsters big and small, child killers, a homicidal maniac or two, a demon-possessed keyboard, and much more. The stories include "Tomorrow, Daddy," "Nothing More," "Night of the Festival," "Scarily We Roll Along," "Time Steps," "Requiem for Musical Comedy," "Happy Birthday, Robert," "I Had a Dream," "The Spellbinder," "A Little Fight Music," "The Farm Hand," "Over Finian’s Rainbow," and "The Flibbertijibbet." You’ll never think about musicals the same way again!


THE ZOMBIES OF PENZANCE
Yes, available now on Amazon, New Line's 2018 monster hit, The Zombies of Penzance, which the RFT called "a delightmare"! No more just a beloved if mildly unsettling memory, now you can bring those dancing and singing Zombies and Major-General Stanley's zombie hunting daughters all back to life -- death? -- with the Zombies of Penzance script, the full piano-vocal score, and the live original cast recording of the show, featuring the St. Louis cast and your favorite New Liners, recorded live in performance at the Marcelle Theater!

"A wonderful whirlwind of apocalyptic delight."
-- Tanya Seale, BroadwayWorld

Nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association's 2018 New Play Award!


THEATRE CATS:
The Old Producer's Book of Dramatical Cats
In T.S. Eliot’s famous collection of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the basis for the megahit Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, Eliot observed and made fun of the habits and behavior of everyday people, through the comic and insightful metaphor of some very human-like cats. In Scott Miller and Zachary Allen Farmer’s new collection, the targets are more specific but just as wickedly true-to-life, as Miller and Farmer explore the behavior of the quirky, eccentric, fascinating types who make musical theatre, this time through the lens of some very artsy cats, the good, the bad, and the finicky. And you can sing these new poems to the Lloyd Webber score...


SHELLIE SHELBY SHARES THE
SPOTLIGHT
The picture book you never knew you needed, in which Dr. Seuss meets 42nd Street, as freshman Shellie Shelby embarks on a wild adventure through the treacherous social jungle of her first high school musical. When Shellie gets cast in the school show, she can’t believe her luck, but her best friend, poor tone-deaf JoJo McQuill, isn’t so lucky. Can she successfully navigate the drama club mean girls, her crazy philosopher-teacher, music rehearsals, killer choreography, and Tech Week, without losing her mind and her best friend in the process? Written by Scott Miller, with original illustrations by longtime New Line Theatre actor Zachary Allen Farmer.

That's it -- your 2025 Gift Guide. We hope it's helpful. And we hope your holidays are good ones, that lots of wonderful art comes into your life, and that you join us in 2026 for some more truly wonderful shows!

Happy Holidays!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Stay tuned -- on New Year's Eve, I'll post my 12th annual year-end poem looking back on The Year in New Line!