I Deserve a Fucking Prize

I'm so proud of this show. We haven't even had a full run-through yet and I just know how good it's going to be. It's such a joy to work on material this strong, this artful, and this ballsy. Yes, friends, you heard me... read me... right.
Assassins is a musical with balls.
Big ones.

And in stark contrast to that, I just read online that Shrek the Musical is about to open on Broadway. Pardon me while I cut myself. Just what we need, yet another brain-dead musical built on gags. Another gag musical. Another pussy musical. One without balls. Like we don't have enough right now. Spamalot, The Producers, Young Frankenstein... will somebody smother Mel Brooks already??? He's giving my art form a bad name! Again!

Am I the only one who's noticed that the American Muscial Theatre, that great adventurous creature, has regressed 100 years backward? Gag musicals is how the art form started, around 1901, with the George M. Cohan musicals. Back then, all musicals were gag musicals.

Those early Cohan musicals were terrific for their times and their audiences, but shouldn't we have progressed just a bit in a whole damn century? It was the century that brought us Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein and Kander & Ebb and William Finn and so many other geniuses making ever more amazing and surprising theatre art. And now we're gonna go backward?

No, say I! No, and I'll say it again!

We will show the world that great art is better than silly shit -- funnier, wilder, more adventurous, more surprising. We'll show them that Stephen Sondheim is a better theatre composer than Andrew Lloyd Webber. We won't put art away in the closet or embalm it so that it never changes. We will thrill you with art. We will assault you with art. We will freak you out and make you laugh with art.
You will make friends with art.

Can you tell I'm stoned?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott