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