It's So Hard to Be Sixteen and Schizo

I think one of the biggest things that will make New Line's Cry-Baby distinct from its Broadway production (in the picture) will be the acting. I don't mean to be snarky about it, but as it is with too many big-budget Broadway musicals, the focus in the original production was not on character development or relationships or story. Just laughs and gags. Our production will be really funny, but it won't be only that. There's so much more to this show.

I'm so proud of how much our actors are bringing their characters to rich, full life, because it proves what a good show this is, what a strong, smart, subversive script and a pitch-perfect, ironically period score.

The material was not the problem in New York.

Someone taught me years ago that the key to playing drunkenness is not to play the effects of the alcohol but instead to play the struggle to overcome the impaired motor skills and verbal skills, to play the attempt not to look drunk, to play the altered reality that someone who's really drunk perceives. In other words, don't play the stumble, play the attempt not to stumble. I didn't realize it until very recently, but what that person was really telling me was just to play the truth, to play the inner reality of the moment, not the appearance of the reality.

Likewise, the key to playing the batshit crazy Lenora in Cry-Baby is not to play the crazy, but instead to play the character from inside her fractured reality. Lenora doesn't think she's crazy, so if the actor plays her crazy, the actor will be in conflict with the character. Everything Lenora says and does makes sense to her, so the actor has to come from that warped perception of normalcy. Lenora's reality is so at odds with ours that she actually thinks "Screw Loose" is a serious love song, complete with a stalker-ish invitation for sex at the end, and the hilarious implication in the last two words that she might just be the town pump. She doesn't think the song is funny, and so neither can the actor when she's onstage. And yet the more serious Lenora is, the funnier it gets. Our Lenora (Terrie, in the picture), has really found this balance, to the point where you actually feel a little sorry for her a couple times, in between her bouts of shouting, fainting, and talking to people who aren't there.

Ryan and Taylor are just as assuredly finding Cry-Baby and Allison from the inside out. Instead of just playing the leather-jacketed "bad kid" (as James Snyder did on Broadway), Ryan is playing Cry-Baby from the inside, his decency, his sensitivity, his emotional wounds, his intelligence. After all, as David R. Shumway writes in The Other Fifties, "Elvis does not come across as cruel in spite of the aggression of his performance, and he certainly does not seem the sophisticated and insinuating adult. Innocence, rather, is the dominant characteristic of the Elvis of the Fifties. . . The official Elvis is marked by modesty, deferential charm, and the soft-spoken assumption of commonsense virtues. . . The lyrics of his major early hits almost invariably present a wounded or vulnerable lover." At the same time, Shumway writes, "His motions suggested intercourse and his performance was read as a public display of sex. Elvis thus put the sex that the name rock 'n' roll described explicitly into his performance. But in presenting himself as an object of sexual incitement or excitation, he violated not just Victorian morality, but more importantly the taboo against male sexual display." Cry-Baby is both innocent and corrupter at the same time. And Ryan has found that delicate balance.

And instead of just playing a cardboard "good girl," Taylor is playing Allison the individual, not conforming to any stereotypes and far less "good" (i.e., conforming) than the "good girl" label implies. Allison is smart, adventurous, open-minded and open-hearted. Instead of playing her in opposition to the Drapes (as they did in the original show), Taylor is playing Allison as the real misfit of the story, trapped in the squeaky clean world of waspy upper-class when she really belongs in the rock and roll world of the Drapes. She discovers that the Drapes aren't the misfits – they're comfortable in their world. And really, the same is true of the Squares. But Allison is a Drape at heart, even if she lives in the Square world when we meet her. Or as John Waters put it to me, "She's a good girl possessed by a bad girl."

In creating Cry-Baby on film (and most of his other films, now that I think about it), John Waters was essentially celebrating and satirizing exploitation films, movies that dealt with "forbidden" subjects that mainstream film studios wouldn't touch, particularly back in the days of the Motion Picture Code – sex, nudity, drugs, gender, gangs, rock and roll. And so Cry-Baby onstage becomes an exploitation musical. (The only other example I can think of in that category would be Reefer Madness, which is really more sketch comedy with songs, than satire or exploitation.)

You'll notice that Cry-Baby has all the standard exploitation character types: The Innocent (Allison), The Corrupter (Cry-Baby), The Parents (Mrs. Vernon-Williams), The Crusader (Baldwin), and the Charlatan (also Baldwin?). But because John Waters is the musical's source material, there's a lot more than shock and exploitation here. Though in classic exploitation films, the characters are built more on moral positions than on human psychology, Waters and his stage adapters retain the exploitation models but bring them into the richness and complexity of modern storytelling.

Allison, after all, is the real protagonist here, not Cry-Baby. She's the one who goes on the journey of discovery, just as in other Hero Myths like The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Johnny Appleweed. She's the one who changes, who learns about herself. Cry-Baby is her "wise wizard," her Obi Wan Kenobi. He shows her the path, but she has to choose to take it. In the book Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, Eric Schaefer writes, "Each character [in an exploitation movie] functions to either receive, promote, stifle, or create the need for education about sex." Allison is in a completely different place at the end of the story from where she starts out. The central conflict of the show is her desire to explore and learn, while Mrs. Vernon-Williams (at first) tries to stop that from happening. It's the universal conflict between the child leaving the nest and the parent trying to hold them back to protect them. But thanks to John Waters' unique view of the world, Mrs. V-W gains self-knowledge herself and ultimately understands that she must let Allison grow up.

It's such fun in rehearsal now to watch Taylor/Allison as she discovers the Drapes and their music, ventures into their world, does her best to learn the Drape ways, falls in love, and then ultimately finds her place with the Drapes – not just because she's in love with Cry-Baby, but because this is where she belongs. As Allon White writes in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, "What is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central."

As an example of why it's important to come at a role from the inside instead of from the outside (you'd think this would be obvious to actors, but it often isn't), in my latest book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, one section of my Grease chapter applies to Cry-Baby as well. After all, Johnny Depp said in an interview that Cry-Baby is "Grease on acid"...

Many people are uncomfortable with Grease's ending because they miss the fact that Sandy doesn’t actually become a slut in the finale; she just learns how to dress like one, finally letting go herself of the tendency of too many Americans to stigmatize sexuality as dirty and shameful. She gives up the desexualizing poodle skirt that hid away her female form and replaces it with clothing that reveals and celebrates – and takes ownership of – her body and its adult curves. This is not a descent into decadence for Sandy; it is a throwing open of the doors of her moral prison. The authors’ intentions are clear in a stage direction in the final scene. After describing Sandy’s new hypersexual look – the tight pants, leather jacket, earrings, wild new hair – the script says, “Yet she actually looks prettier and more alive than she ever has.” 

The end of Grease suggests that a lasting, healthy relationship is only possible when both partners are openly and completely themselves, without regard for other people’s opinions, social conventions, or personal insecurities – and also when neither of them are afraid of their own human sexuality. This was not the message of the conforming adult world; this was a uniquely teen perspective. Both Sandy and Danny have to learn to be themselves, to shake off the masks of “cool” and “respectable.” If there is any question about who the protagonist of the show is, Sandy is primary; she’s the one who has changed, who has learned something significant. The same may be true of Danny, but to a much lesser extent. 

But the ending of Grease isn’t a “moral” and shouldn’t be read that way. It doesn’t declare what we should or shouldn't do; it's an objective and accurate description of America in the 1950s. Sandy is America in its progression from puritanical repression in the 50s to sexual freedom in the Sexual Revolution of the 60s. And yet, as she tells Danny in “All Choked Up,” she isn’t ready to give up her virginity quite yet. Too many people believe that the message of Grease is that to win the man you love, you have to be a slut. But there's not a single line or lyric anywhere in the show to suggest Sandy has changed anything but her looks. Like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady, Sandy learns the secret that anyone can fit in just by talking and looking the right way (and don’t we all do that to some extent?). Her overnight transformation proves that it’s all just play-acting – and that they all know it! She has learned what Rizzo and the girls have known all along. Sandy has become one of them just by changing her clothes! She allows herself the freedom of the coming 1960s, a refusal to fear her own sexuality or to see sex as dirty, the freedom to be able to talk and laugh openly about sex. 

But behind all the rest, there’s a simpler, more subversive message. Sandy isn’t just saved by how she dresses; she’s saved by singing rock and roll. It isn’t until she can achieve the authenticity and sexual frankness of rock and roll by singing “All Choked Up” that she can be healed. Grease doesn’t moralize; it just reports. Sandy’s triumphant line late in the show, “Goodbye to Sandra Dee,” puts away not only Sandy’s false good-girl persona, but also the 1950s as a whole, a world in which the goody-goody Sandra Dee can be a role model, in which facades were cracking. We were moving on…

For both Sandy and Allison, the journey isn't from one group to another, from one culture to another; it's a journey from living a lie to living truthfully, from being oppressed to being free. Authenticity is the holy grail Allison seeks, and she's lucky enough to be living right at the birth of rock and roll, an art form built entirely, specifically, on emotional authenticity. It's why Cry-Baby's nickname (and the show's title) is explicitly defined by emotion – Cry-Baby is literally emotion incarnate – to capture that massive cultural shift from John Wayne to Marlon Barndo, from swing to rock and roll.

Like Sandy in Grease, Allison finds herself when she discovers rock and roll. And all of this is why these characters have to be played truthfully, from the inside-out. You can't be phony and superficial when you're telling a story about the quest for authenticity. The biggest laughs in the show come not from punchlines, but from the moments that reveal either the freakish inauthenticity of the Squares or the uncomfortable, even sometimes ugly authenticity of the Drapes.

As I've said before on this blog, Grease takes place just five years after Cry-Baby, so the cultural zeitgeist is nearly the same and it's such an incredibly interesting – and transformational – moment in American cultural history. No wonder we love the 50s. It was the beginning of so much. Despite all its considerable wackiness, Cry-Baby has some really smart, really insightful things to say about our culture, both then and now, and the more we work on the show, the more impressed I am with it. I can't wait to share it with our audiences. Tickets sales are going really well, so get your tix early!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. For more in this topic, see "Swichblades Laughin' at a Butter Knife."

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

Switchblades Laughin' at a Butter Knife

We're running the whole show at every rehearsal now. This is such a valuable part of the process, the editing, the repetition that leads to muscle memory, the working out of problems. It can get boring sometimes. But not with Cry-Baby. This show is such crazy fun to watch. One by one, all the problems are getting ironed out, the blocking is getting more and more natural looking, and I can see growing in front of me some really amazing performances.

Cry-Baby is a neo musical comedy and the show's wickedly off-kilter style of humor is shining through every actor in the cast -- they really get it. The Teardrops have found their Grrrl Power. Dowdy is crafting one of those classic comic villains you just love to hate. Terrie is utterly fearless in diving into Lenora's deep, deep dementia -- and "Screw Loose" is going to bring the house down. Taylor has found the joy and adventure in Allison, and Ryan has found the honesty and core decency in Cry-Baby. Every comedy I work on proves it to me again -- nothing is funnier than the truth. If you play the characters, the emotions, the relationships truthfully, the comedy rises to even greater heights.

One of my pet peeves and most ferocious crusades centers on the plague of mindless, shallow productions of smart, well-crafted musical theatre. Yeah, I know, lots of theatre people who don't know any better will reply that all musicals are mindless and shallow. Well, you're wrong so shut the fuck up. That hasn't been true in decades and today the art form is moving in amazing new directions. This is no longer the art form of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The worst offenders inject their fourth-grade humor into well-crafted comedies, with the apparent conviction that anything that gets a laugh is Good, and the arrogance to believe that they're actually funnier than the people who wrote the show. As I've argued many times before, animals on YouTube make us laugh -- shouldn't there be a higher bar than that for theatre? Shouldn't a night at the theatre deliver more than America's Funniest Home Videos?

It's one of the reasons Cry-Baby sorta sucked on Broadway.

What routinely drives me crazy is that people choose to produce shows that are already incredibly funny -- Spelling Bee, Bat Boy, Little Shop of Horrors, Into the Woods, Chicago, Urinetown, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and yes, Cry-Baby -- and then they try really, really hard to make them funny. Which invariably makes them considerably less funny. But don't take my word for it. Here's the Author's Note from Howard Ashman, bookwriter and lyricist for Little Shop of Horrors:

Little Shop of Horrors satirizes many things: science fiction, B movies, musical comedy itself, and even the Faust legend. There will, therefore, be a temptation to play it for camp and low-comedy. This is a great and potentially fatal mistake. The script keeps its tongue firmly in cheek, so the actors should not. Instead, they should play with simplicity, honesty, and sweetness – even when events are at their most outlandish. The show’s individual “style” will evolve naturally from the words themselves and an approach to acting and singing them that is almost child-like in its sincerity and intensity. By way of example, Audrey poses like Fay Wray from time to time. But she does this because she’s in genuine fear and happens to see the world as her private B movie – not because she’s “commenting” to the audience on the silliness of her situation. Having directed the original New York production of Little Shop myself, and subsequently having seen it in many versions and even many languages, I can vouch for the fact that when Little Shop is at its most honest, it is also at its funniest and most enjoyable.

I remember first reading that -- after already having seen and loved the show off Broadway -- and it really had an impact on me. I became aware that the funniest comedies are always the most honest and the most straight-faced. It was the same with Urinetown in 2007. We followed the writers' intentions and approached the show on its own terms, as fiercely straight-faced but subversive, political (and artistic) satire.

The key to Urinetown is that every single character takes everything so incredibly seriously, with such insanely high emotional stakes, that it's hilarious. It doesn't need "help" to be funny. We just had to follow the outstanding road map Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann laid out for us. The more seriously we took the characters and the story, the funnier it got. Our audiences were roaring with laughter, partly because we never violated the reality of the story. They could believe in these crazy people and their story, and that made the comic ride a hell of a lot more fun.

The same is true of Bat Boy. And Cry-Baby.

One of the reasons the Laughs-At-Any-Cost approach so often fails is that the shows I'm talking about are really funny, but they're a lot more than funny. Little Shop is the Faust story, after all. Cry-Baby is about class and injustice in America. Bat Boy is about moral hypocrisy in American culture. Urinetown is about the shallowness of American politics. Load them up with funny voices, mugging, schtick, unmotivated gags, and you kill everything cool about the shows.

There's nothing less funny than the effort to be funny. When you try really hard to make a show funny, when you look for schtick to add, when you cram a show full of "bits," you essentially end up with a straight-to-video Pauly Shore movie. And nobody wants that. If the audience can tell you're trying to be funny, they'll find it far less amusing. Comedy is at its best when it sneaks up on you and surprises you. If you see it coming a mile away, it's less funny. Comedy needs two things to work -- it has to tell the truth, and it has to be a surprise, or in the best of both worlds, it tells a surprising truth. When an actor or director is just throwing in silly bullshit to try to get a laugh, the audience sees it coming, so the surprise is lost. And when the director or actor's agenda is getting laughs instead of telling a good story, the truth gets lost too.

One of the biggest problems with the original Broadway production of Cry-Baby was that the cast was working like dogs to get laughs, with lots of enormous mugging to the audience, lots of stopping the show for a punch-line and then leaving lots of room for laughter (which didn't always happen). The substantial truth at the heart of Cry-Baby got lost in the mess of middle school hijinks. Cry-Baby himself was a joke. And because the actors didn't take the characters seriously, and the characters didn't take the story seriously, neither did the audience, so they didn't give a shit if Cry-Baby and Allison got together or not. There was no emotional investment, because sketch comedy doesn't traffic in emotion, just easy laughs. The result was bad storytelling.

I've seen the same thing happen with productions of Bat Boy, Spelling Bee, and Urinetown over the years. Take them seriously, focus on character and story, and the laughs come by the bucketful. Try to make them funny and you cripple them. Sure, audiences may still laugh at actors making asses of themselves, but you've stopped making good theatre; instead you're just making great shows look stupid. When New Line produced these shows, we didn't have to "make" any of them funny; they are already brilliant. We just had to stick to the show the creators had written. The actors and directors who mangle otherwise wonderful shows with clumsy comedy bits either don't understand the shows they're working on, or they have no respect for the shows and their writers -- or their audience.

Over the years, we've produced some of the most outrageous, most unconventional musicals ever written (that's New Line's Bat Boy, in the picture), and we get full houses laughing uproariously at our comedies -- because we take our comedy seriously. The realer the characters are, the more convincing and involving the story is, the more rooted in truth the laughs are, the better and more memorable the experience will be for everyone on and off the stage. Maybe it seems counter-intuitive, the idea of taking comedy seriously, but all the great comedians and comedy writers will tell you the same thing. TV comedies like Third Rock from the Sun and The Beverly Hillbillies are so funny because the characters take everything so seriously, even as they seem to us wacky and bizarre. If you've seen New Line's Bat Boy, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, or Forbidden Planet, you'll know what I'm talking about; if not, come see Cry-Baby.

I think, generally speaking, the people who try that hard to be funny, who go out of their way to come up with comic bits, who don't seem to realize how funny the material itself is, are not actually funny people. Not everyone is. Some people are funny and some just aren't. (One of my favorite indie movies, Funny Bones, is about that.) And yes, people who aren't funny can still get laughs from an audience, in the same way that cat in the hamster ball or the bear on the trampoline on YouTube gets laughs from their audiences.

I just wish more theatre artists knew how much more funny and more satisfying the comedy would be if they'd just get off its fucking back...

I'm just sayin'...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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

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

One More Vivid Verbal Picture

One of my Cry-Baby actors has said to me several times recently, in regard to a piece of business or staging, "Well, you can decide once you're out front watching." Though they won't say it outright, I think it really makes our newer actors anxious -- or at least uncomfortable -- that I'm still playing piano and I'm not out front taking notes. But I've been making theatre this way for thirty years. Yes, I'm that old.

There are a lot of ways in which New Line just doesn't work the way a conventional, union theatre works. I've spent the last thirty years developing and tweaking the process we use. In some ways, we are very conventional, but in many ways, we're not.

Case in point. When we started New Line in 1991, I had to play piano for both rehearsals and performances because we couldn't afford to hire someone else to do it. After a few seasons, we were finally in a position to hire a pianist for performances, although I still played a show now and then if I really loved the score (like A New Brain and Hair). But it was so valuable for me to be free during Hell Week, to sit out front, take notes, and shape the work.

But even then, I was still playing rehearsal piano, as I do now. And though we could now afford (maybe) to hire someone else to play rehearsals, I don't want to. I love our process the way it is, though I assume we'll continue to tweak it over time. What I've discovered is that because I'm on the piano until the last two weeks of rehearsal, the actors enjoy a lot more freedom than they would otherwise. They get six full run-throughs before I start taking detailed notes. During my time on the piano, I'm awfully good at watching a fair amount of the show anyway (after all, I've been doing this since the early 1980s), but I can't see everything, and I certainly can't stop and take notes.

So after we've blocked the whole show and I've given them what I think of as a pencil sketch of the show, then they get time to experiment and play, to try things, to explore line readings and physical work -- and all without me judging that work (much). And without me trying to polish each moment. (After all, I don't think a piece of theatre is made of moments; I think it's made of arcs.) I realize now that our early financial restrictions led me to a wonderful artistic choice. Never in twenty years of New Line shows have I ever moved off the piano and into the audience during Hell Week, and found the actors on the wrong road. It just doesn't happen. The first part of our process is in-depth enough that everyone knows what road we're on and where we're headed.

Still, some actors hate all that freedom. They want to know now whether or not they're making the "right" choices. They don't trust themselves. But the truth is there are a bunch of "right choices" for any given moment or character. And me giving them notes and correcting things while they're still building their performance seems silly to me. Would I judge an painter's work based on sketches or studies? Would I judge a novelist's work based on a first draft?

Long ago, the A&E cable channel had an arts news magazine, and they did a story on the development of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Hal Prince said in this interview that he thinks of himself as an editor. He gets the actors (and designers, etc.) all heading down the same road, then he lets them work for a while, and then he edits their work. I love that image of "editing" the actors' work. The simple truth is that I'm not creating these performances; the actors are. But I'm responsible for making sure we have good, clear storytelling, aesthetic and artistic unity, and a clear point of view.

I think the actor I mentioned at the beginning is just feeling insecure. She wants someone to reassure her she's on the right road or to tell her if she's on the wrong road. But I already know she's on the right road, even if she doesn't. I know she's really smart and really talented. I also know she has excellent instincts, as do the vast majority of actors I work with at New Line.

I think too many actors are used to dictator-directors (I was one in my early years), who dictate every single moment in the show, every gesture, every step. I have no interest in making theatre like that. Theatre is supposed to be collaborative. If I give our actors a lot of freedom to create, they will create wonderful things, because that's the kind of actors we work with. And our actors will create much quirkier, more interesting, more personal, much realer performances -- the kind of performance that we would never get from me telling all the actors exactly what to do throughout the show. I will never be able to create fifteen interesting performances nearly as well as fifteen really great actors can. I love actors. In my ideal world, my shows would be bare stages with nothing to look at but the actors. And I often find that I have way more confidence in my actors than they do in themselves. I think many of them have been trained by mediocre teachers and directors to search for the "right" answers, which really is a fool's errand.

And it makes for boring theatre.

I remember, a number of years ago when the late, lamented Hydeware Theatre Co. produced Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. It's a two-character one-act, and they performed it twice for each audience, with a different set and the actors swapping roles the second time. And it was a revelation for me! Both "versions" were equally amazing, equally compelling, equally text-based, but I found myself switching allegiances the second time around, having totally different reactions to the same moment. Blew my fucking mind. 

It taught me that there are no right answers. Ever. So searching for them is pointless. This was reinforced for me when I saw the off Broadway revival of Rent this fall. All new choices, but every bit as emotional and powerful. And fresh.

I have virtually no worry and angst during Hell Week anymore. If there are no right answers, then these are just our answers, right? Hopefully, audiences will embrace our choices and they will love our show. But if some folks don't, that's okay too. These are just our answers.

We've been working this way for a long time, and we sell out shows and collect rave review after rave review. We know how well our process works. Even if it makes some of our actors a little anxious once in a while...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We'll Live in Peace and Love and Rock & Roll Forever More

Cry-Baby rehearsals are going really, really well.

We're done blocking the show, everything's choreographed, and Tuesday night, we ran the whole show for the first time. And it was really great! Sure, there were bumps along the way, mostly just brain farts, but it had great energy, a great sense of fun, and some wonderful surprises...

For example... I had suggested to Mike Dowdy that it might be fun if his character Baldwin (the story's squeaky clean villain) starts to really lose his shit in Act II when everything and everyone is turning against him. I thought it would be fun if, by the end of the show, Baldwin was as batshit crazy as the self-mutilating Lenora. (I have to say, I sorta stole this idea from Sondheim's Passion.) And Dowdy fucking ran with it. And he's HILARIOUS as Baldwin slowly slips into musical comedy madness... Wait till you hear him bellowing at his mother to stop honking her car horn. We all crack up every time he does it.

I have the continual privilege of working with some amazing character actors, but Dowdy is truly one of the best character actors I've ever worked with. That he has a gorgeous, killer voice is just a bonus...

And holy shit, speaking of great character actors... Terrie has given Lenora not just a complete and total break with reality, but she also gives her this strangely endearing strength and optimism that eventually Cry-Baby will be hers. You gotta admire her tenacity. I sometimes wonder if Lenora would seem as deeply deranged if she were in love with someone who actually loved her back. Yeah, she probably would. I've got poor Terrie literally running around the stage throughout the show, getting continually pushed and shoved and generally manhandled, passing out on stage, screaming (one time with an awesome Exorcist voice), and then of course she gets what may be the funniest song in the whole show, "Screw Loose," the outrageously bizarre power ballad lovingly ripped off from Patsy Cline's "Crazy," but taken to its logical, comically terrifying extreme.

I heard someone say in an interview one time that the heart of all great comedy is desperation. I never thought about it that much until I the other night when I watched the remake of Once Upon a Mattress, with Carol Burnett, Tracy Ullman, Tommy Smothers, Matthew Morrison, and Denis O'Hare. It's really good! And in one of the bonus features, someone mentioned that every major character in the show acts out of desperation. And I immediately thought about Cry-Baby and realized it's true there too...

Our "Teardrops" -- Cry-Baby's girl gang -- are also doing such a wonderful job, and the three women playing them (Marcy, Sarah, and Chrissy) are obviously having as much fun with each other as they are with the show. I told them recently that I thought the only thing that we hadn't gotten at yet was these kids' childishness. A lot of John Waters characters act and talk really childishly. I think that's his way of showing us how socially and emotionally retarded his characters (and our country?) are, but it also points up how kids (and immature adults) will often attack first if they think an attack is coming. Kinda like George W. Bush, except nobody dies. I think it's also Waters' way of commenting on how childish we all really are a lot of the time, even though most of us usually hide it better. Usually. And also, I think a central point of the show is that these are kids; they're not bad and they're not hardened criminals, although I think we can bet they shoplift.

These girls are essentially innocents (though maybe not sexually), looked down upon -- and arrested and jailed -- for no real reason other than irrational prejudice. So the more childish their behavior is, the easier it will be for the audience to recognize them as kids and see through the lie that they're "bad." There's a kind of social tragedy here, but also real strength of character, I think. On the one hand, they're damaged, defensive, walled-off, 11-year-old girls, who aren't letting anybody near them because they know that always ends in abuse and/or pain. On the other hand, these are strong women surviving in a less hospitable world than a more generous god would have allowed. As both defense and offense, the Drapes essentially perform a caricature of the Squares' perception of them. Their sexuality (and Mona's face) is their weapon to scare people away. But notice how quickly they accept Allison into their ranks. The Drapes aren't reflexively judgmental like the Squares are.

Ryan is really finding Cry-Baby's voice and his physical style, and though most of his songs are really funny -- my favorite song title in the show is "Baby Baby Baby Baby (Baby Baby)" -- he's also finding that sincerity that's so important to his character. He's really starting to nail that tightrope walk between wacky and dead serious. It's that Bat Boy style that I can't seem to stop talking about -- "the depth of sincerity, the height of expression" -- and even though Ryan and several others in the cast have never explored that difficult style with us, they're totally finding their footing.

One thing Ryan and I have talked about a lot is this new male ideal that surfaced in America after World War II, which Cry-Baby represents, rejecting the "strong, silent type" like John Wayne and Gary Cooper for the more emotional, more openly sexual, more damaged, more socially subversive Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Montgomery Clift. World War II changed our country in subtle ways that most people didn't understand at the time. After the chaos of wartime, adults now wanted strict conformity. One of my favorite lines in the show: Mrs. Vernon-Williams says to Allison, "Now, darling, didn't I ask you never to have problems?"

Taylor is also really finding Allison. I think it was hard for her, first of all, to be playing the "normal" one (essentially playing herself to a large degree) amidst all these other crazy characters (although the more we work on the show, the more I realize Cry-Baby is "normal" too), and at the same time to be stylistically inside that old-school musical comedy style. But I think one comment from John Waters really helped -- that Allison is a good girl possessed by a bad girl... I love that image. Taylor and I have talked about Allison a lot. What I loved so much about this character in Waters' movie is that she's so completely open to new experiences, so completely lacking in judgment of others, so in love with the adventure of life -- most of which was lost in the original Broadway production of the musical. Allison is the audience's way into this story; she's our surrogate. She learns about the Drapes as we do. And she also learns about 1950s social hysteria once she joins the Drapes and all the fear and bigotry are suddenly directed at her too!

Not too long ago, I watched the 1955 film The Blackboard Jungle, a really great drama with Glenn Ford, Sidney Poitier, Anne Francis, Richard Kiley, and a very young Jamie Farr. It's about a young teacher, back from World War II and having just gone to college on the legendary G.I. Bill, who gets a job in a really tough, urban school. Some of it is melodrama, and early on, it feels like the poor kids are automatically the "bad kids" -- exactly as it is in Cry-Baby -- but as the story progresses, it gets a lot more complex and a lot less predictable. Released just one year after Cry-Baby is set, there are some really interesting sociological insights in the movie both about the teacher's generation ("the Greatest Generation") and also the "juvenile delinquents" that are at the center of Cry-Baby.

But at the same time that the musical Cry-Baby is an insightful social document, it's also a fascinating statement about this moment in the evolution of the musical theatre. I saw the national tour of Rock of Ages last week and had an absolute blast! It's much smarter and funnier than I expected, and how can you beat those tunes? And it made me think about how much fun it is watching our art form move towards creating a new, specifically 21st century American musical theatre. These new rock musical comedies, Rock of Ages, Lysistrata Jones, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (which we're producing this fall), Cry-Baby, and others are grappling with the old forms, experimenting with what to embrace, what to discard, what to deconstruct, and what to openly mock. Many elements of old-school, mid-century musical comedy are present in these shows, but in altered, often more self-aware forms, because much of what made those old shows tick no longer works in our current culture. But musical comedy is still an iconic piece of American pop culture, so that shared cultural reference forms the basis from some really funny tearing apart of the old forms. At one point in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Jackson says to the audience, "Uh-huh. Underscore, motherfuckers. That means it's our time. Time for the real people of this nation -- you and me -- time for us to take this fucker back!"

But what are we taking back? America? The American musical comedy...? And from whom? It's hard not to hear echoes of the Tea Party and current conservative politics in both BBAJ and Cry-Baby. And it's hard not to see in Cry-Baby's story of class oppression today's Republican members of Congress who declare that the people who are out of work in this recession are just lazy, and that getting unemployment insurance makes them lazier. Cry-Baby focuses social injustice down to the personal level, and we all feel it

There's so much depth and richness in Cry-Baby, though it's easy to miss it and get caught up in the surface wackiness. Now that we're done with the nuts-and-bolts part of the process, it's time to focus more fully on the artistic end, characters, relationships, motivations, the big emotional arcs, textual and musical themes, etc. Unlike most companies our size, we get eight or nine full run-throughs before an audience sees us. It's a wonderful luxury. And whereas a lot of directors like to polish each moment to a high gloss before putting the pieces together, we do the exact opposite. We put the whole show together fairly quickly, and then we polish it. I think it's easier and more effective to polish and shape the show as a whole than as separate pieces. It's easier to achieve real artistic unity and coherence, which makes the storytelling all that much stronger.

The hardest work is over for me, and the hardest work for the actors is just beginning. My job now is to keep us all on the road together while the actors play.

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott