Don't Mean to Be Rude

One of the coolest thing about my job and the kind of work we do is that I frequently get to talk to the writers of the shows we produce -- Jason Robert Brown, Bill Finn, Andrew Lippa, Adam Guettel, Steve Sondheim, Tom Kitt, Amanda Green, Kyle Jarrow, and others. It's so helpful to hear them talk about what elements are really important to them, what their original intentions were, what they thought of their shows' original productions, etc. But now I've had what may be my coolest writer conversation yet...

I had the intense honor yesterday of talking on the phone with John Waters!

First of all, he's every bit as charming and funny as he seems in interviews. And really smart and incredibly literate. He talked about the story, the period (and films of the period), the style, the tone, the cultural context (apparently he did a shitload of research when he wrote the film), and he also gave me a lot of great Drapes vs. Squares background detail. And lest I forget, our guitar player Mike Bauer told me to ask Waters who would win in a fight -- Kathleen Turner or Ricki Lake. You'll have to ask me next time you see me what his answer was...

As much as I've already researched this show, I learned so much from listening to Waters talk about the story, the time period, the social context, etc. Here are some things I learned more about...

After World War II, America saw incredible prosperity but the price for that prosperity was conformity. More than perhaps any other time in American history, conformity was the dominant moral concern. And Cry-Baby (like almost all of Waters' films) is about that culture war between the conformists and the nonconformists. As terrified as American adults were by rock and roll later in the decade (in what I call the Grease era), they were even more terrified in 1954 when Cry-Baby is set, because no one (well, no white people) had ever heard music like this. Not only was it loud and rude and implicitly (sometimes explicitly) sexual, but it was "race music," a polite 50s way of saying black music.

Waters told me that he thinks Mrs. Vernon-Williams would be completely happy to consent to Cry-Baby and Allison's marriage if only Cry-Baby would dress like Baldwin, in other words, that the Drape designation was almost entirely about clothing. The Squares had money and so they could wear the "right" clothes. The Drapes (so named for the drape of the collar on their zoot suits, in the era before this one) didn't have money, the "right" clothing stores weren't in their part of town, and so they wore used clothes, cheap clothes, durable, work clothes. The Drapes were working class; the Squares were upper or upper-middle class. Waters said that in real life, the Drapes were all rednecks, hillbillies, and racists, though he softened them a bit (at least their racism) for the film. And in the musical, one of Cry-Baby's gang is black.

Waters said good models for Cry-Baby and the Drapes are Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Elvis, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Sal Mineo...

He said a good Drape girl model is Debra Paget (who was in Love Me Tender with Elvis). He said the role of Allison is an unusual one for him because it's the only heroine he ever wrote who was totally normal (when he said that, I scrolled through all his movies in my head and realized he was right!). He said the secret to Allison is that she's a good girl possessed by a bad girl.

We talked about our approach to the show and he confirmed for me that we're on the right track stylistically, thematically, comedically. He also confirmed for me that the Drapes are not at all bad people (after all, they're the heroes of the story), and that they perform the false image the Square world has of them, exaggerating it, as both protection and as a mocking of their Square oppressors. The Drapes were entertained, even vindicated in a weird way, by the considerable power of fear they held over the Squares -- much as it was with the Greasers in the late 50s and the hippies in the 60s. But Waters also made the point that the Squares aren't all losers and nerds -- they're just Square. He said the Squares would grow up to be hippies in the 60s (and, no doubt, investment bankers in the 80s); but the Drapes would always be Drapes (much like the Greasers in Grease), I guess because they're inexorably trapped in their socio-economic status.

He said he thinks the main reason Cry-Baby failed on Broadway -- not long after Hairspray had been such a massive hit -- is that Cry-Baby is truer to his movie. It's rude, gross, aggressive, disrespectful, and very sexual. The Drapes are conscious cultural terrorists (a term I think Waters coined, maybe for his hilarious Cecil B. Demented). Waters was very clear that the Drapes are not criminals (some petty shoplifting notwithstanding), they're not destructive, they're not mean. They're not actually "bad," but their response to the weight of their social oppression is to culturally terrorize the mainstream Square culture that oppresses them. They fight back with the only weapon they have -- their Otherness. In the musical, they not only assault the Squares with rock and roll, but also with crudity and cultural disrespect, using words like ass and singing about kissing with tongue...! Not your usual Broadway musical fare. But tailor-made for New Line. As Waters put it, it was the dirtiest family-friendly musical on Broadway. You can see the commercial problem. Hairspray really is Fun for the Whole Family. Cry-Baby is not. Cry-Baby itself is a bit of a cultural terrorist within the musical comedy form.

When we were done talking, he told me to call him or email him if I had any other questions. I had such a blast talking to him -- partly because I got such good information and insight into Cry-Baby but also because he's really one of my all-time top cultural heroes. I love his movies. I love his wacky, subversive, dark-as-pitch sense of humor. I love that he opened artistic doors for so many of us with his ballsy, brilliant films. I'm reading his memoir Shock Value and the way he talks about his circle of friends who made movies with him -- the Dreamland family -- is so much like the way we talk about the New Liners. I guess in a way, the New Liners are minor cultural terrorists...  At least for musical theatre geeks...

So much to think about! Thanks, John!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We're Lucky to Be Us

Still working on funding applications for next season... Part of that process is asking people in our community to write "letters of support" about how cool New Line is, to include with our applications.

This year, the three support letters we'll be including in our applications are so heartfelt and so complimentary, that I have to share them with you. One letter is from Kyle Jarrow, writer-composer of the brilliant rock musical Love Kills, which New Line produced in 2009. The second is from Jake Fruend, college student and former New Line intern. And the third letter is from Larry Quiggins, the head of the theatre department at Lindenwood University. I think you'll see why I wanted to post these...


To Whom It May Concern:

I love New Line Theatre. Not just because they did a great production of one of my plays — not just because Scott Miller is one of the most thoughtful, passionate and engaged artistic directors I’ve ever interacted with — but because New Line Theatre is saving the Musical. The musical is one of the most iconic American popular art forms. And yet, it’s struggling to stay relevant. As I see it, this is the result of a number of factors: ticket prices rising, the average age of theatergoers rising, as well as the commercial pressures that bring more and more unnecessary film adaptations to Broadway. For the next generation of audience, for whom theater is competing with film and television and video game systems, it’s not surprising that musicals often don’t feel like a very good investment of time and money.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A great piece of musical theater can have incredible power. Music has the ability to drill straight into our emotional cores, to elevate drama in a profound way. New Line Theatre understands this. From my discussions with Scott, it’s clear that his company approaches musicals as drama — committed to digging deep to excavate the best in the works his company chooses to produce. In every production, they work to prove why the musical form is important. They demonstrate why this form deserves to live on, and why it deserves to evolve with the times.

I don’t know of any other theater that does the kind of programming that New Line does. They take chances on new, cutting-edge works. They revisit quality shows that flopped on Broadway but deserve another look. And they do game-changing reinterpretations of classics. It’s a varied, exciting mission, and I’m honored to have been included in it. I very much hope to be again. New Line deserves your fullest support. What they’re doing is truly important.

All the best,
Kyle Jarrow
New York, NY


To Whom It May Concern,

There are days — many, in fact — when I wake up in my full-size bed, blocks away from Wrigley Field on the southern bit of Chicago’s north side, and think, “Do I really want to call myself an artist today?”

The answer, more often than not, is an unyielding and resounding, “No.”

It is easy to run away from the challenges presented to the theatre artist. The pressure to connect with every viewer on a philosophical and sometimes political level can be intimidating. However, there are a few individual performers, directors, designers, and companies that can embrace the challenge, embrace the work, and create something sincerely unique and inspiring. St. Louis’s own New Line Theatre is one of those companies. And I firmly believe that my artistic education truly began with my introduction to New Line and the work of its artistic director Scott Miller.

I really came into contact with New Line’s core ideas when I was given the opportunity to work as assistant director for their 2010 production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita. Through the application of Brechtian dramaturgical principles — stop me if I’m talking too fast — which have for too long eluded the musical theatre form, Scott is able to transform these classic, sometimes stale pieces into charmingly funny, provocative, volatile, socially and politically relevant works of living, breathing art.

At a New Line show, we are not presented with a casually frivolous stroll through the musical days of yesteryear. Instead, we are invited to take part in a musical reflection of where we, as a society both political and theatrical, are collectively headed.

New Line also supports St. Louis’s aspiring young artists by offering a musical theatre scholarship each year to a graduating high school senior. I was the first student ever to receive this gift in 2009, and I suspect that New Line’s generosity is partially to blame for my journey to this city that I now lovingly call my home.

Mr. Miller talks a lot (in his books, on his blog, and in his exhaustive program notes) about a “new golden age of musical theatre” happening right here, right now. I believe that this golden age can never really be experienced in a Broadway theater. Instead, it can be found in cities like Chicago and St. Louis, Seattle and Minneapolis, in basements and storefronts, on the streets, in classrooms, and bathtubs all across this country. Musical theatre is returning to the people. New Line has been leading this charge for nearly 21 years now, and they’ve been changing the lives and opening the eyes of young artists for just as long.

So it is with a grateful heart, a sometimes artistically reluctant mind, and absolutely no shame that I ask you to give generously to this unquestionably authentic force for good. Because this morning, thanks to New Line Theatre, I am proud to call myself an artist, an advocate, and an ambassador to Chicago for the brilliant theatre of St. Louis.

Cheers,
Jake Fruend
college student


To Whom It May Concern,

I have been a supporter and patron of New Line Theatre for the last 16 years. I have found that New Line is the most diverse and entertaining theatre company that St. Louis has to offer. Season after season, New Line produces cutting-edge productions that fascinate, shock, move, and put their audiences in awe. These are productions that make the audience think and leave them wanting to come back and experience more.

Some of the past New Line shows that should be highlighted are The Nervous Set, Reefer Madness, Kiss of The Spider Woman, Return to Forbidden Planet,  The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee, Bat Boy, Hair, and Man of La Mancha. The talent that performs in New Line productions is always the best that St. Louis has to offer. New Line Theatre is affectionately nicknamed "The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre" for its cutting edge productions but I think of the company as "The Cool Kids of Musical Theatre." 

St. Louis is blessed to have such a wonderful and professional theatre company housed in its city and those who support the arts should line up and help New Line to continue to bring their excellent brand of theatre to St. Louis.

Larry D. Quiggins
Associate Dean of Fine and Performing Arts
Director of Theatre
Lindenwood University


It's so wonderful for me to read letters like these and know that everything we aim to accomplish we are actually accomplishing: bringing St. Louis works of theatre and a performance style that no other company attempts, educating the next generation of musical theatre artists, supporting the musical theatre writers who are taking great risks and writing breathtakingly original musicals, and letting New York and the whole country know that St. Louis is the place where new, vibrant, exciting work in the musical theatre is being done by committed, talented artists at the top of their game, unfettered by the soul-crushing market forces of commercial theatre. (Can you tell I feel strongly about this?)

Like those we serve, New Line is unique. And that's why we're given production rights to cool shows like Love Kills, She's Hideous, High Fidelity, Cry-Baby, and others. Writers trust New Line. They know we're on their side and we have no desire to "leave our mark" on their work. We're just here to tell these amazing, funny, emotional stories as clearly, as truthfully, and as faithfully to the writers' intentions as possible.

I'm so proud of all the work we've done in the last twenty years, and of all the work to come...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

See, I've Got a Vision

There's a fine, fine line, as Kate Monster would tell us.

We walk a potentially treacherous tightrope with a lot of our shows, quite a few of which have wacky, outrageous surfaces and serious, intense, sometimes even depressing subtext. But the Cry-Baby tightrope may be the hardest to balance on. After all, it's a concept musical in which the style of old-school musical comedy wars with the style of the modern rock musical, and this stylistic battle serves as a big, blazing metaphor for the central conflict of the story.

But that's not all there is to it... The story is also originally a John Waters movie, which I'd like to think of as its own film subgenre, which has an outlaw, even antagonistic sensibility, even though Waters' Cry-Baby was more mainstream than his earlier films. How does that translate into such a joyful, old-fashioned form like musical comedy? Well it's an altered form of musical comedy, more postmodern I think than even the Sondheim shows, more a neo musical comedy like Bat Boy and Urinetown.

Waters' movies generally want to tell you to fuck off (though they're really only kidding) and musical comedy wants to wrap you in its warm and happy arms. It sounds like a mash-up that couldn't work. But it really does. And I think it's that very tension that makes the show interesting and complex and political enough to hold an audience who wants a little meat in their theatre. Metaphorically speaking.

Because our production of Cry-Baby will be much smaller than the original, we're constantly having to make decisions about how to handle various elements of the show with a cast of little more than half the size of the original. Add to that the fact that the original Broadway production got the show pretty drastically wrong, so most of their choices are of no use to us at all. And with each decision and each choice comes a question of style and tone. What are the rules in this hybrid universe? What can we do and what can't we do?

Because of this Battle of the Styles, half our characters live by one set of rules, and the other half live by another set. The Squares live in a rosy 1950s musical comedy, in which "Squeaky Clean" is one of those Clever Charm Songs. The Drapes live in a gritty, off Broadway rock musical world, in which sexuality and The Beat (which, as we all know, You Can't Stop) rule the day, and the driving "You Can't Beat the System" at the end of Act I serves as a powerful indictment of our unequal society and an American justice system which rigs the game in favor of the rich and the mainstream.

If you've ever seen footage of the original productions of Grease and Hair -- or the more recent shows, Love Kills and American Idiot -- you'll know what I'm talking about. These rock shows are raw, ragged, intense, aggressive, violent, spontaneous, sexual. These shows (when they're done right) are the punk rock of musical theatre.

Add to all of this conceptual complexity the fact that half our cast plays both Squares and Drapes at various times during the show. So many of our actors have to live in both worlds at one time or another.

It's been fun watching Robin choreograph wildly different numbers in the two styles. She staged this hilariously goofy, posy confection for "Squeaky Clean," and on the flipside, last night she finished "A Little Upset," this heavy, masculine, angry number with a short football game in the middle of a prison breakout. On my end, I get to have fun because in rehearsal because I get to play all these awesome old-school songs and also these pounding rock songs. Our scenic designer Scott Schoonover has had to find a way to accommodate both worlds at once but also separately. Our costumer Amy Kelly has to give the Squares slightly more styled, less naturalistic clothes than the Drapes will wear. Like I said, it's a tightrope. A very high-concept tightrope.

And let's be clear -- it's not important that the audience understands all this stuff consciously. Like much in our art form, all this will work subliminally.

Now that I think (and write) about it, I realize that Cry-Baby fully embodies the revolution that I've been talking about for the last year or more, the fact that we're at the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era and that the rock musical is now becoming the primary form of the American musical theatre. Just as Show Boat in 1927 marked the end of the first era of musical comedy and the beginning of the serious musical drama by combining the two forms in one show, just as Follies in 1971 marked the end of the mid-century musical comedy and the ascendance of the Prince-Sondheim concept musicals, so too Cry-Baby marks an epochal change in the art form today. Its New York production was too big a clueless mess for the critics to see the intelligence and complexity at the heart of this clever, rich, political piece of theatre, but all that is there. This is one of those shows like Rocky Horror and Grease that have so much more going on under the surface than some critics are able to see.

When you think about how much people dismiss Grease now, partly because of the fun but tamed-down movie version and partly because of the awful, empty-headed revivals that keep coming back over and over like something out of a George Romero movie, it's important to remember that some people really understood how smart and authentic Grease was when it first opened. Critic Michael Feingold wrote about the show for the first publication of the script the same year it opened on Broadway, and what he wrote is just as descriptive of the Drapes in Cry-Baby as it was of the Greasers. After all, Cry-Baby takes place only four years earlier than Grease, so Rizzo could easily be Wanda's older sister... Feingold wrote:

The people of Grease are a special class of aliens, self-appointed cynics in a work-oriented, upwardly mobile world. We know from the prologue that history has played its dirty trick on them before they even appear. They are not at the reunion; they will not be found among the prosperous Mrs. Honeywells and the go-getting vice presidents of Straight-Shooters, Unlimited. Nor, on the other hand, did they actively drop out; that was left to their younger siblings and cousins. (Memory of a line too explicit, and cut from the script early on: "Course I like life. Whaddaya think I am, a beatnik?") They were the group who thought they had, or chose to have, nowhere to go. They stayed in the monotonous work routine of the lower middle class, acquiring, if they were lucky, enough status to move to one of the more nondescript suburbs, and losing their strongest virtue – the group solidarity that had made them, in high school, a force to be reckoned with. It is appropriate that the finale of Grease celebrates that solidarity, with the saving of its heroine, and the reclamation of its hero from the clutches of respectability – a good lusty razz at the sanctimonious endings of those Sal Mineo j.d. [juvenile delinquent] movies (Somebody Up There Likes Me, remember?) wherein the tough punk is saved for society at the end. Everybody knew you didn’t go to those films to see that part...

I hadn't realized until now that the kids of Cry-Baby's Baltimore and Grease's Chicago are essentially of the same generation. Rock & roll had matured more by the late 50s of Grease, starting to find its authentic voice, but it was just being born in 1954 when Cry-Baby is set. And in both shows, the 1950s easily stand in for our own tumultuous times of cultural and political upheaval. There is so much under the surface of both shows, there for those who want to see it, subtle enough for those who choose to ignore it. Feingold also wrote in that introduction:

Grease does not discourse about our presence in Saigon. Nor does it contain in-depth study of such other 50s developments as the growth of mega-corporations and conglomerates, the suburban building boom that broke the backs of our cities, the separation of labor’s political power from the workers by union leaders and organization men. Although set in and around an urban high school, it does not even discuss one of the decade’s dominant news stories, the massive expansion of the university system, and the directing of a whole generation of war babies toward the pursuit of college degrees. Grease is an escape, a musical designed to entertain, not to concern itself with serious political and social matters. But because it is truthful, because it spares neither the details nor the larger shapes of the narrow experience on which it focuses so tightly, Grease implies the topics I have raised, and many others. So I think it is a work of art, a firm image that projects, by means of what it does contain, everything it has chosen to leave out. And between the throbs of its ebullience, charm, and comedy, it conveys a feeling, about where we have been and how we got to where we are…

The same is true of Cry-Baby. It's pure, rowdy fun. Goddamn is it fun! But it's also a sardonic and clear-eyed look at our fucked-up culture, still not progressed far enough beyond the petty bigotries of the 1950s. And it's also a look at our art form. The old forms can only act as jumping off places now; they can no longer stand on their own. But we're in luck, because amazing, exciting, daring new musicals are being written every day. And we New Liners are lucky enough that we get to work on a lot of them.

It is such an honor that the Cry-Baby writers have trusted us with their creation, and also that we get to work on a show this interesting, this fun, this fearless. I am so often humbled before the amazing, beautiful theatre pieces we continually have the privilege of working on. And there are more to come – Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Next to Normal, and other really cool shows...

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You People Think You Know Me

I've been working on funding applications lately, something I really hate a lot. I usually procrastinate till the last minute but I decided I'd try to do them early this year, several weeks before the deadlines, before I get too busy with Cry-Baby rehearsals.

Each year we get written feedback on our applications from the "peer panel" that reviews them. Some of these comments are helpful and some are just weird, but the ones that really bother me are from people who want to cram New Line into some mold they have in their mind and slap some preexisting label on us.

I've learned over the years that it's hard for some people to accept anything that doesn't fit into their existing categories. And of course, New Line doesn't fit into most people's existing categories. I'm constantly getting emails and Facebook messages from young musical theatre lovers who are absolutely astounded -- and thrilled -- that a company like New Line exists. Too many people think musicals are all Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hello, Dolly!, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera. But we're doing musicals like The Wild Party which includes plenty of singing and dancing, but also a rape and an orgy, and Love Kills, about teenage spree murderers. And though we take our musicals very seriously, sometimes they can also be as outrageous as Bat Boy or Reefer Madness. One of the our peer panelists was so desperate to label our company that she referred to us in one of her comments as "avant garde."

Seriously? Nothing we've ever produced even comes close to avant garde. Okay, maybe Jacques Brel...

One panelist wondered why we don't get more kids at our shows, presumably because musicals are Fun for the Whole Family...? (Clearly this person has never bothered to see our shows.) Last year, one of the panelists found it "troubling" that we didn't survey our audience to pick shows. Huh??? If we surveyed our audiences to pick our shows, St. Louis would have never seen Love Kills, Woman with Pocketbook, Return to the Forbidden Planet, High Fidelity, and so many other shows -- or for that matter, Cry-Baby. The idea of an audience survey is built on the false assumption that people are already aware of everything they could possibly like, and we know that's not true. People like what's good; not just what they know. And our job is to find exciting work for them. As Edmund Burke once said, "Your representative owes you not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion." (I only know that quote because it's in 1776.) But too many theatre artists either don't know that's their job or they don't really trust their own judgment...

And I think all this is the reason Cry-Baby was so manhandled in New York. It doesn't fit into any existing categories, other than maybe my newly minted label, "neo musical comedy." The production team (director, choreographer, designers) tried to make it old-school musical comedy, but this is a show that works on two levels from beginning to end, and they were only recognizing the surface layer. They did not understand this show. They tried to make it trendy, self-conscious meta-theatre, where the actors are "commenting" on their characters and their performances, but that's not what this show is either. They tried to make it into one of those shallow-ass revivals (and artistic rapes) of Grease, with castrated, cartoon Greasers and tons of frantic dancing that aims to make you forget how bland everything else is. You can see from my description what a clueless mess it was. The director spent the whole musical just begging the audience for laughs, and that's the last fucking thing John Waters would ever do! John Waters slaps you in the face and then blows cigarette smoke at you. Dammit.

I've been thinking about all this after seeing Sunday in the Park with George at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. These lines always catch me...

Stop worrying if your vision
Is new.
Let others make that decision --
They usually do.
Just keep moving on.

"They usually do." Ain't that the fuckin' truth. All my life people have wanted me to fit some idea they were already comfortable with. And I never could. When I was four, I knew I was going to work in the musical theatre. I started my own theatre company at age 27 and then quit my "real" job six years later. And now for the last twenty years people have tried to make New Line fit into some idea that's easy to understand and file away. But what fun would that be?

I love giving our audiences wildly different experiences, from Love Kills and bare to Bat Boy and Two Gents. You never know what you'll get when you come to a New Line show -- except you know you'll get an adventure. As you will with Cry-Baby...

In the last several years, a few other companies have popped up that are following in our footsteps -- The Music Theatre Company, in Highland Park, IL; Minneapolis Musical Theatre in Minnesota; Kensington Arts Theatre in Kensington, Maryland; Factory Edge Theatre Works in Baltimore; Dreamlight Theatre Company in New York; Musically Human Productions in New York; and Slow Burn Theatre Company in Fort Lauderdale.

Maybe together we can all form our own category...

I think New Line's greatest strength is in taking each show on its own terms. I'm not sure the New York commercial theatre is capable of doing that anymore. They ruined High Fidelity and Cry-Baby both. And New York couldn't sustain runs of either the wonderful Lysistrata Jones or the amazing The Blue Flower.

I never forget that, though I do create a lot in my work, my first job is to follow the road the writers have laid out for us. The show is what they say it is; not what I say it is. It seems New York directors and designers (and producers, I assume) are less willing to do that. And I think that's one of the biggest differences between commercial musical theatre and what we do.

Watch as the New Liners make Cry-Baby work, even though the Broadway team couldn't...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Life Is a Long Road to Death

We used to start our first day of rehearsal with a read-through. A lot of directors do that. But doing that with a musical means I have to play and sing all the songs that first night, since the actors won't necessarily know them yet. And if I do that, the actors don't get as good a sense of the show as they might otherwise. So a few years ago, we changed our process. Now we do all our music rehearsals first and learn the score. When that's done, then we have a read-through-sing-through, and the cast gets a much clearer sense of the show.

We did that for Cry-Baby Thursday night.

But I've found that first read-through is still really nerve-wracking for some actors, even if it's not on the first night. They sit there, juggling script and score, trying to jump back and forth between books as the songs come and go, and some actors start feeling really overwhelmed. Then they screw up a piece of harmony or miss a phrase or whatever, and then they start beating themselves up for fucking up in front of the whole cast, and then their focus is off... And that critical self-editor starts yammering at them inside their head... And so they spend the evening thinking they suck.

And then afterwards, at least one or two of them come up to me to reassure me that they know their music. But I already know that. I know exactly what they're going through. I've been doing musicals since 1976, and writing them and directing them since 1981. There are so many parts of the process of making a piece of musical theatre which can fuck with the actors' heads -- not the least of which is the barbaric practice of auditions.  How awful that an actor has to come into a room and sell himself to us. He is the product we may be rejecting later by carelessly tossing his audition sheet into the No pile. It can be soul-crushing.

So New Line created a new rule a few years ago that any actor who's worked with us during the past eighteen months does not have to audition for us anymore. You have no idea how happy our actors were about that. That doesn't solve the problem, but it does make it better. And it also makes it easier to keep our (modified) repertory company intact. Even though we try to balance each cast with about half new people and half people we've worked with before, the New Line regulars often come back show after show after show. And there are a handful of them that will happily do pretty much every single New Line show. Especially now that they can skip auditions...

And it ain't for the money...

But the whole process is an ego-buster. I try not to use the word No too often as we work, because I want to be as encouraging as I can be, but I often find myself saying it anyway. I try to keep rehearsals relatively light and fun, to keep the soul-crushing to a minimum, but sometimes the work is really hard and the fun has to wait. And if an actor is really struggling with something, I try really hard to come up with a solution to his problem before I talk to him about it. That doesn't always work out, but I try.

I've also taught myself over time not to judge an actor's performance too harshly in rehearsal. Maybe it looks like this actor is heading in a totally wrong direction, but maybe he's trying to create something complicated and he needs some time to work it out, before I charge in and tell him it won't work. After all, I allow myself first drafts when I'm writing; shouldn't I give actors that same luxury? On the other hand, sometimes I really do know right away we're on a wrong road and it's better to fix that early.

As you can see, it's a tough job I have.

And I do all this stuff to try to make it easier on my actors because I really love actors. I love watching them work, watching them create, watching them make magic. And the really good ones can really surprise and delight me with their unexpected but often brilliant, truthful choices.

The good news is that we always have the most amazing theatre artists working with us, and this show is no exception. From my perspective, I thought our read-through-sing-through went pretty awesomely. We laughed all night long (this is a really smart, funny show!), most of the songs sounded very good, and a few sounded amazing already. As much as I often feel like a blind man groping his way through casting our shows, the end result is always wonderful. So it was such fun to hear these characters for the first time, to hear how perfectly each actor fits his role. I honestly don't know how it works out show after show, but it does.

I can also see at this early stage that not everybody understands this Bat Boy style we're going after yet. It's a difficult style to master -- really exaggerated and outrageous, and at the same time completely, utterly honest and truthful. Unless they've seen a lot of New Line shows, or caught Bat Boy or Urinetown in New York, they've likely never seen a show done in this style. It's a hell of a tightrope for an actor to walk. But we've become pretty expert at it, if I do say so myself...

I don't usually give the actors too much direction for the read-through; I wanna see what they've been thinking about and what cool things they may bring to the table. But the one note I gave to the Teardrops, Cry-Baby's Drape back-up girls, is that whenever they're talking to Squares,  every word is an assault. Each sentence is a dirty, cracked baseball bat with some dried blood on it and they're slamming it down on the Squares' squishy little heads. It's like a six-year-old who's mad at her parents for making her go to bed early, so she's gonna say the meanest things she can think of, with the meanest face and meanest delivery she can muster. With the Drapes, it's almost always a preemptive strike, more a general reaction rather than a specific one. But they're not bad people; they're just performing their "badness" as a kind of body armor to protect against the simplistic moral judgment that's always radiating out of the Squares like a crayon sun. Most importantly, the Drapes aren't cartoon characters; these are real people, behaving in a childish, cartoonish way. Their "bad kid" status becomes a performance -- a mask -- for the world.

How often have I seen that, living here in South City? Constantly.

After the read-through, I told the whole cast (as I always do when we work on comedies) that if they get an idea for a bit of stage business or a reaction or something, and they think, "This is funny! I bet it'll get a laugh," then they must immediately discard the idea. If, on the other hand, they get an idea and think "This will really define my character," or "This will set up that revelation at the end," then they're on the right road. Never for a laugh. Only for storytelling. If the storytelling is good, the laughs will take care of themselves.

We've got two choreography rehearsals over the next two days (there's a lot of dance in this show!), and then we start blocking. I don't like blocking because it's the hardest work I have to do in the process (depending on the show, I guess). But I do love getting a show up on its feet...

After all, it's not theatre on the page. It's only theatre when actors, directors, musicians, and designers bring it to life in front of an audience.

It's going to be such fun putting this show together. The actors are starting to realize that they're the second people ever to do Cry-Baby the Musical, that there's only the original Broadway cast and the New Line cast. I've had this experience several times (check out our High Fidelity promo video on that topic), but it's awfully cool the first time that hits you...

More soon... The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Your Fear of Other People

The first words Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker sings in Cry-Baby are:

Well, It’s a perfect day to scare a square
For no apparent reason:
By singing, dancing, standing there,
Maybe just by sneezin'.
Your fear of other people
never ceases to amaze.
You call that class?

The show's central joke -- which doubles as potent social commentary on our world in 2012 -- is that the bad kids are really the Good Guys, and the good kids are really the Bad Guys. As far as these Squares in 1954 Baltimore are concerned, rock and roll is "race music" and it's Bad, so anyone who sings or listens to rock and roll is, ipso facto, Bad. No other details are necessary. As we all know, in the real world those who claim to be morally superior frequently aren't. Today conservatives accuse liberals of "moral relativism," but this is the worst kind.

The Drapes can scare the Squares merely by showing up, but that gives them a certain kind of Power. 

It puts me in mind of the infamous quote from Newt Gingrich to the Occupy Wall Street movement: "Go get a job. Right after you take a bath." His condescension, his wild generalizations, and his false assumptions would be breathtaking if we didn't already know what a crazy dumbass he is. But it's a view held by many people, both in 1954 and today, that The Others (blacks, Jews, gays, Muslims, Drapes, mixed race Presidents...) are both alien to "our way of life" and therefore also morally inferior. I can't help but think the pro-segregation protesters in this photo look an awful lot like the Tea Party. Gingrich has said about Obama, "This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president." He couldn't possibly have won fair and square because he is Other.

Wow. Seriously?

This show of ours seems to be about this exact moment we're living through today, even though it was written several years ago, before the national onset of Obama Derangement Syndrome. But the outsider Cry-Baby can now easily stand in for Obama, rejected by "upstanding" Protestants, not for what he says or does, but for who he is.

One of the creators of Bat Boy had read that societies tend to scapegoat three types of people -- the unusual, the vulnerable, and the gifted. So the Bat Boy team made Edgar the Bat Boy all three of those things. But in a way, Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker is all three, too. He's different because he was born poor, he lives in the wrong part of town, and his parents were executed as criminals. He's vulnerable because society sees him both as an orphan, with no place in the Squares' carefully balanced social structure, and as the "bad seed" of his "criminal" parents. He has no place in the world and no place in the social structure; he has no protection. And last, he's also gifted in that he's a talented musician and singer. Like the Bat Boy, Cry-Baby is an outcast not for anything he's done, but for who he is.

And to some extent, all three things are true about Obama too. He's certainly different and gifted. And he was arguably vulnerable as a biracial kid in the 1960s.

Or for that matter, as a black man in America in 2012.

Cry-Baby gets at a fundamental truth of the postwar era. Many of the so-called "juvenile delinquents" of the early 1950s were born during the Depression, then lost their fathers to World War II during their most formative childhood years, and then got really damaged fathers back after the war, many of those fathers now suffering under the weight of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. Cry-Baby having lost both his parents stands in for that whole transition generation, the ones lost between The Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, falling into that crack between the generation of deprivation and the generation of abundance.

This is the peak of American Cold War hysteria and racial hysteria, of nationalized, legitimized paranoia, of air raid drills and of seeing other Americans as “enemies” for no good reason other than the need for a boogeyman. Sound like any cable news network you know? Notice in this picture that these are kids protesting having to go to school with black kids. Fuck! And significantly, these are all things we're still doing – just replace Commies with Muslims and replace black folks with... um, well, black folks -- and it's like looking in a mirror. Well, a funhouse mirror.

What makes Cry-Baby so relevant to today's audiences is that it shows us a world of two mutually exclusive realities, exactly like our America in 2012, where we can't agree even on fundamental questions of fact and morality, where it feels like we don't all even live in the same world anymore. Cry-Baby lives in the 1950s that many of today's conservatives want to return to, a paradise for white, upper- and middle-class males, but purgatory and worse for everyone else.

One of the reasons we can laugh at all this darkness in Cry-Baby is that the writers have created an exaggerated reverse morality in this world, one exactly opposite to what most people in the audience believe in, a world in which the audience is automatically on the side of the oppressed. That didn't happen much in musicals before the 1960s, with only a few exceptions, like The Cradle Will Rock. Most old-school musicals did their best to reinforce their audiences' worldview, not challenge it.

But the rock musical changed that, with shows like Hair, Grease, Dreamgirls, Rent, Hedwig, Spring Awakening, Hairspray, bare, Love Kills, Passing Strange, American Idiot, and lots of others. Rock and roll was never meant to be for the mainstream culture; it was a rebel music form. Adults already had their own slick, bland, aggressively inoffensive music in 1954, from Doris Day, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher, et al. Rock and roll was for teenagers. It was for outcasts. Jazz was made for the brain; it was about detachment. But rock and roll came straight from the heart and the groin. It was about primal feelings and desires. Rock and roll was animal, outlaw. It was sweaty. It didn't float like jazz. It exploded. It pounded. Rock and roll was actually banned in major cities across America. It terrified white adult America. Listening to rock became the ultimate rebellion, especially for white kids. Their parents saw it as the biggest danger to all that’s decent. Early rock and roll was the punk rock of its time.

And Elvis was the Sid Vicious of his day. Imagine if Sid Vicious wanted to take your daughter to Turkey Point. No wonder adults were so afraid...

To some extent, Cry-Baby works like Huckleberry Finn, in that what the characters find “wrong” or “anti-social” we the audience find innocent and innocuous, even praiseworthy. Rock and roll doesn't scare us today. The cultural backdrop of the show is about how much our perspective, values, norms have changed, and how not fabulous the 1950s really were for many people…

And also how much we haven't changed...

And by extension, Cry-Baby also says something about old-school musicals. What we ask from a musical comedy today has really changed since 1954. Cry-Baby argues subliminally that "Golden Age" musical theatre (1943-1964) may be a jumping off place for new works of art, but in their original form most of those musicals no longer speak to us. The shows and the form itself have to be retrofitted in order to work in the 21st century. But when the retrofitters really know what they're doing, the new work can be really interesting and really exciting.

Our Cry-Baby adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nobody Gets Me

It's an interesting position I'm in with Cry-Baby.

With most shows we produce, we can assume that the original production is at least close to what the writers intended, or even their ideal, so I know I can learn things from those original choices even if I don't use them. But I've found over the years that I can't always make that assumption. I've discovered that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber were not happy with the original Broadway productions of Jesus Christ Superstar or Evita; in both cases, the shows became much bigger than they intended and the rock and roll got lost along the way. (New Line took them both in completely different directions and got rave reviews.) I also know Sondheim wasn't all that happy with the concept for the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, which he wanted to be a small, scary, chamber musical. (Which is what New Line did with it.)

In some cases, the original production of a show just flat out sucks, and sadly, it can effectively mask really wonderful material, making it appear mediocre and amateurish. It can kill a great show. That happened to High Fidelity, bare, and Cry-Baby.

All of that to say that we have a model for what our show isn't supposed to be, but only hints at what it should be. It's essentially like working on a show that's never been produced, except that they got a chance to polish the material. As I said in my last post, I think the fundamental misstep for the original director and designers were misunderstanding what kind of show this is. It's neither old-school musical comedy or the new trendy, self-referential meta-musical (which I hate).

It's a neo musical comedy -- lots of laughs and lots to say. I like to think of it as "poetry, politics, and popcorn;" in other words, great storytelling, genuine substance, and lots of fun. It's the New Line formula in a nutshell. If you sprinkle a few fucks over the top...

What that means is that even an outrageous comedy like Cry-Baby is to be taken seriously. The more truthful and the more committed our performances are, the funnier it will be. And the more authentic it is, the more emotional it will be. We know how this works; we do it all the time. In the climactic scene of Bat Boy, we had audiences laughing, then crying, and then laughing again. We did it again at the end of Return to the Forbidden Planet. We do it a lot. We're diabolical that way.

I think the key to Cry-Baby is the Drapes, the "bad" kids. They know everybody looks down on them, so they perpetually strike preemptively by being intentionally, childishly nasty to everyone, by performing their bad kid status as a layer of protection. Kinda like the fat kid who makes his own fat jokes before anyone else can, or the gay kid who knows he can't hide his gayness so he brandishes it like a weapon. And the childishness of their insults is like an extra, added fuck you to the intended victim, as if they're not worth more. But the Drapes' nastiness is not who they really are -- they're not bad people -- it is their armor. As they say in politics, they're attacking from a defensive position. So the actors have to be careful not to play these extreme characters as cartoons. They're not cartoons. These are real people acting in extreme ways. For a reason.

And the key to the Squares is fear. I saw a quote getting passed around Facebook not too long ago from a rabbi, telling us to listen to everything that's said and done in the world, always with one question at the back of our minds: does this bring fear or hope into the world?

It's a great question in politics (and I think it's what separates the parties), but I'm realizing that it applies to everyday life as well. The Drapes offer Allison a kind of hope -- the lure of sexual and emotional freedom and the relentless self-expression of rock and roll. But Baldwin and the Squares offer her only fear. If you don't count global thermonuclear war, the Squares are most afraid of difference. They're afraid of The Other, a basic, primal, human instinct that probably served us well back in the cave man days, but not so much today...

Late in 2010, researchers in London announced a pretty stunning discovery about brain structure. According to this study, the brains of conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala than liberals. This is the most primal part of the brain at its very center, and it controls reflexive impulses, like anxiety and fear. Conservatives also tend to have a smaller anterior cingulate in the front of the brain, which controls higher functions like optimism, curiosity, and the reconciling of conflicting information -- in other words, nuance. Another study that year found that liberals tend more to have a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4 which causes them to seek out novelty, and to be curious about the people and world around them, and this tends to make them more accepting of difference. The researchers found that if someone with this receptor gene also has an active social life in adolescence and meets lots of different people, those two factors together will likely make that person a liberal.

Now, if you know the story of Cry-Baby, if you've seen the movie, re-read that last paragraph with the Squares and the Drapes in mind. The Squares know the Drapes are Bad. No nuance there, no hope for redemption, case closed. You can't beat the system. Poor Baldwin and his puny amygdala.

When I watched the presidential debates this weekend, I couldn't help but think about all this. I listen to Romney, Santorum, and the others go on and on about who we should afraid of, and how dark our future looks, and all I can think about (other than Back to the Future II) is how their brains must be structured differently from mine. Lucky for me, I don't fear much. I suppose if I did have an enlarged fear center, either New Line wouldn't exist at all, or we'd be producing Joseph and Nunsense.

Shoot me now.

But I also thought to myself, Baldwin will grow up to be Mitt Romney! It's an interesting way to look at the Cry-Baby story -- who's afraid and who's not? And what does that mean about how they perceive the world and people around them? Maybe Allison is the only truly fearless character, at least at the beginning of the story.

Lots to think about... Rehearsal continues apace...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Cry-Baby

We had our first Cry-Baby rehearsal last night and all of us are soooo stoked! After our meet-and-greet, we set to work on the music. We got through three of the biggest numbers, "Misery," "You Can't Beat the System," and "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again." It's moderately challenging stuff (though compared to Wild Party, nothing seems that hard anymore), but the cast picked up the music quickly and they already sound really good. These vocal arrangements are so cool!

Once again, against greater odds than more generous theatre gods would allow, we have assembled a thoroughly kick-ass cast for this show. Everyone is so engaged, so committed, and they all seem so perfect for their roles...

So now I have to take all the ideas that have been swimming around in my head and turn them into concrete choices in the music and onstage. I've been thinking about this show for more than a year, so I have a lot of ideas...

Probably the most important overarching idea for me is to put aside the original production's misguided musical comedy approach. This show is not old-school musical comedy; and the fact that it isn't is one of its central devices. Cry-Baby starts off as a full-throttle 1950s musical comedy -- the populist art form of its period -- but the opening number is not even allowed to end before the Drapes (the "bad" kids) invade not just the picnic, but the show itself. They assault this 1950s musical comedy world with rock and roll, and transform the musical comedy into a rock musical; and the two forms war with each other for the rest of the show, with Baldwin and his Whiffles (that sounds vaguely dirty, doesn't it?) living and singing musical comedy, but slowly losing their turf to the rock musical of the Drapes. And Allison, having to choose between the Square world and the Drape world, has one foot in each musical world during much of the show. In the last scene, there's even a literal sing-off between Baldwin and Cry-Baby. And by the end of the show, everybody is singing rock and roll -- just as it did in the real world, rock and roll supplants the old-school show tune.

And the Rodgers and Hammerstein hangers-on are still bitching about that...

What's wonderful about the score is that songwriters David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger absolutely nail both styles. The show's opening number, "The Anti-Polio Picnic," sounds like it came right out of the score for Kiss Me, Kate or The Pajama Game. But when DJ and Schlesinger interrupt that song to turn to the rockabilly of "Watch Your Ass," it's just as authentic.

The biggest of many missteps made by the original production team was that they treated the musical comedy elements as cheap, self-aware, Book of Mormon style gags, rather than allow them the faux authenticity that the writers' flawless pastiche gives them; and at the same time, they treated the rock musical elements like bland musical comedy. With both styles effectively crippled, the battle of the styles at the heart of the show doesn't work. Believe me, the brilliance is there in the writing, but a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the box office...

The show's creators (in the picture at right) used another device of old-school musical comedy but with a postmodern twist. In most classic musicals of the so-called Golden Age, the central conflict boils down to whether or not the Hero will assimilate into this established community or be removed from it. In Carousel, Pal Joey, No Strings, and West Side Story, the outsider is removed because he or she can't (or won't) fit into the community. In The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun, Hello, Dolly!, and Brigadoon, the protagonist successfully becomes part of the community. South Pacific managed to do both: Nellie is assimilated into this exotic island community, but Lt. Cable can't overcome his prejudices and he is removed through death. The same is true of The King and I, in which the King is removed but Anna is assimilated. We also get both outcomes in Show Boat and Fiddler on the Roof.

That assimilate-or-die device fell out of favor in the 1960s and 70s because America became a fundamentally different country, now far more suburban than rural, much less dependent on community in a more technological but disconnected world. (Today, we've come full circle and our technology has returned us to the idea of community, as we each construct our own small town on Facebook and Twitter.) With the 1960s counter-culture came a new focus on the inner life of the individual, and we saw that illustrated in shows like Man of La Mancha, Company, Follies, Rocky Horror, A Chorus Line, Nine, Sunday in the Park, and others. (There was still the occasional show that explored community, like Hair, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Grease, but the choice between assimilation or removal in those shows became a much more complicated, more socially meaningful act.) The comic genius of Cry-Baby is that it seems to return to that out-dated assimilate-or-die device, but this time it's dripping with irony and social comment (what else could we expect from Javerbaum, alum of both The Onion and The Daily Show?), and a comic deconstruction of exactly those expectations. In Cry-Baby, we start the show thinking that it's the Squares who are the established community into which the Drapes must assimilate, but that would never happen in a John Waters story. Ultimately we discover the opposite is true -- the Squares have to find a place in this new world of rock and roll.

In yet another example of musical comedy subversion, at the beginning of the show we think it's Allison's grandmother, Mrs. Vernon-Williams, who is the antagonist, the one who will keep the star-crossed lovers Allison and Cry-Baby apart. But we discover during Act I that Mrs. Vernon-Williams is not the real antagonist; Allison's freaky boyfriend Baldwin is. By Act II, the writers have also set up the old-school device of the second comic couple who mirror the central romantic couple, but here that second couple is the mentally ill, self-mutilating Lenora and the selfish, amoral Baldwin. Not exactly Ado Annie and Will Parker, if you know what I mean.

The show repeatedly sets up expectations and then shatters them, and always in very funny ways that also say something interesting about the story's social and political context...

I invented a new label recently that fits Cry-Baby perfectly -- "neo-musical comedy." It's old-school, 20s-30s musical comedy, but with a self-aware irony on top that the older shows didn't have. In these shows, there are always two layers operating at once. Examples include some of my all-time favorite shows: Bat Boy (the masterpiece of this new form), Urinetown, Lysistrata Jones, Spelling Bee, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson; and there are even a few examples further back in history that pretty much fit the mold, like The Cradle Will Rock, Pal Joey, Of Thee I Sing, and How to Succeed. These neo-musical comedies use the style and devices of musical comedy and the socio-political content and the Brechtian devices of the concept musical, developed by Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Bob Fosse, and Kander and Ebb. It makes for a heady mix, more complex than its precursors, more ambiguous, and therefore, more interesting and more fun.

But the Cry-Baby creative team didn't just do all this for laughs. The split personality of the score is the whole point of the show -- it's about the 1950s vs. the 60s, "nice music" vs. rock and roll, conformity vs. freedom, sexual repression vs. sexual openness, all of that. As Sondheim likes to say, content dictates form.

I have this Grand Theory of American Politics I've been thinking about for a long time, that every political and social issue in America boils down to one thing. Since 1968, America has been in a 43-year cultural war between conservatives who want to return to the black-and-white safety (i.e., oppression, conformity, strict morality) of the 1950s, and liberals who want to finish the work of the 1960s (inclusiveness, compassion, sexual and intellectual freedom). Never was that more obvious than in the 2008 election. You just had to look at McCain and Obama to see it. Conservatives don't like sexual variance, dirty words, drugs, challenges to authority -- all the things we finally (sort of) embraced in the 1960s. Cry-Baby is about that ongoing American cultural chaos.

And like all well-made theatre, Cry-Baby may be set firmly in 1954 but it's really about our fucked up world today. Just as the opening does, the show's finale, "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again," encapsulates the entire show with its ironic split personality, as the characters all look ahead to a bright, sunny, optimistic future for America that we know in 2012 will never exist. Like the best theatre, the show implies far more than it ever says, and it asks from the audience active participation in teasing out the contradictions and implications of what we see. What's actually on stage is only half the picture. And that's a big part of the fun here...

Cry-Baby delivers a message parallel to the message of Hair, that we Americans have yet to solve so many big problems that have been with us for so long. With Hair, that message was less present in the original production and only really emerged later with time and perspective, but it's a depressing thing to realize. With Cry-Baby, it still might be a bit depressing, but we're laughing too hard to notice...

This is going to be so much fun!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott