Sigh and Shudder with Pleasure

I used to feel so out of control at this point in our process of putting a show together. There are so many moving parts to a musical, so many artists working on it, and only really working together at the very end, i.e., this coming week. But I realized a while back that I've never really been in control of our shows. They aren't mine to control. They belong to all of us who work on them. I'm just the leader of the expedition. I set us on our journey and make sure we stay together and no one gets lost. But I'm not really in control of it.

Believe me.

A director who thinks he's in control of his show will make a less interesting show.

It was when I realized all this, when I understood the massive contribution a good actor will make if you let them create (and the same is true with designers and musicians), when I began to see us all as equal collaborators, each with a job to do, that I started having the most fun. Call it the Tao of Musical Theatre. Wikipedia says, "Tao is not a 'name' for a 'thing' but the underlying natural order of the universe whose ultimate essence is difficult to circumscribe." Sure sounds a lot like making art.

In the early days of New Line (how crazy is it that New Line has "early days"?), a show (particularly the kind of show we do, like Songs for a New World, Floyd Collins, Passion, Assassins, Jacques Brel) felt like a bipolar tiger with a toothache that I was trying to ride. But these days, a show feels more like just an awesome adventure. I think part of that is because I started reading as much as I could about the experimental theatre movement of 1960s New York -- there's so much to learn there! One book in particular, Playing Underground, really opened my eyes to both their methods and philosophy. And so New Line has evolved over time into a hybrid of a regular, small regional theatre and a 1960s New York theatre collective.

It's an awesome place to be.

And part of that aesthetic comes from rock and roll, the American language of rebellion. Most of the shows we produce now are rock musicals. This whole season has been. Mostly because that's where our art form is heading. But you don't work on a rock musical the same way you work on a Sondheim musical. Sondheim is a genius and I love all his shows (and we've produced most of them), but his music is about control. Rock and roll is about wildness and freedom. And unlike non-rock shows, rock musicals are always part rock concert, sometimes more obviously (Passing Strange), other times less so (Next to Normal).

I've been thinking a lot about rock musicals lately and the changes our art form is going through -- all good ones -- and how that affects New Line. Allow me a tangent...

I finally got to watch the season finale of Smash. (Fun side note: Will Chase, who plays Michael Swift on Smash, was the original Rob Gordon in High Fidelity.) I have mixed feelings about Smash. The songs are great, the choreography is great, the cast is great... the plotting and dialogue are serviceable...

But I found myself getting really emotional during the finale -- and that always surprises me when that happens. (Like every year at the end of the Tonys, yes I'm that gay.) But this time I wasn't quite sure why it hit me so hard. The show's plotting was so clumsy. We could see so many plot developments coming a mile away. And we knew from the first episode that Karen would end up being the overnight-star because Katharine McPhee is the name that brought all the American Idol and Glee fans over in the beginning. After all, Megan Hilty is "only" a Broadway star (or at least on her way).

But I knew, watching Debra Messing tell us after the finale that Smash will be back in the fall, as Bombshell goes to Broadway, I knew how much I love that there's a network TV show about making musicals. I love that in the last episode, when Eileen wants Derek to switch Marilyns, he refuses, saying "I am an artist. I am a storyteller." And he isn't being ironic. These characters -- at least some of them -- take quite seriously the act of creating a piece of musical theatre.

It wasn't always like this. Nobody used to take musicals seriously.

I'm not a big fan of Wicked, but I owe that show something. And Hairspray and High School Musical and Legally Blonde, and now Bring It On. For the first time in my lifetime, musicals are becoming mainstream again. Back in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, show tunes were our popular songs. That only changed when rock and roll became America's popular music and the people writing Broadway shows refused to move forward with the rest of the culture. So theatre music and pop music split. Some people (including me, I must confess) thought it was because theatre music was getting more and more sophisticated -- the work of Sondheim, et al. -- and pop music was, by definition, simple, repetitive, primal (which is not to say bad). But the result of this fissure in American music was that I spent much of my life as a musical theatre freak, only occasionally listening to the music all my friends listened to. I was a pop cultural misfit.

But now rock and roll is finally becoming the default language of the musical theatre, and theatre music and pop music are coming together again. And musicals are becoming mainstream again. And young people are in love with musicals again, because the art form now seems relevant to them at long last!

And New Line happens to be exactly in the right place at the right time. While Stages and The Muny continue producing Rodgers and Hammerstein, we produce bare, Passing Strange, Love Kills, Cry-Baby, and coming in the fall, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

How does all this relate to where this post started? It's the rock and roll -- as distinct from Sondheim -- that has given me freedom from perfection and opened me up to the Tao of Musical Theatre. Perfect rock and roll is bad rock and roll. And perfect rock musicals, polished to within an inch of their lives, mass-marketed and commodified, are bad rock musicals. Our goal is truth and authenticity, neither of which is found in perfection because real life is never perfect.

I've always been incredibly proud of the work we've done at New Line over the past twenty-one years, but I am prouder now than I've ever been. I think we often hit home runs these days. And the secret is you don't hit a home run by calculation; you have to feel it. We don't just entertain people; we make them feel something. New Line shows are everything I think our art form has to be to survive and evolve -- adventurous, fearless, ballsy, self-aware, truthful. In a week we open High Fidelity, one of the greatest and purest of the rock musicals. I can't wait to share it with everybody -- this cast is so outstanding and the show is already in amazing shape!

High Fidelity is everything that New Line is about today, all in one show. Maybe that's why I love it so deeply and why I wanted to return to it. Championship Vinyl and New Line Theatre are kindred spirits. When Rob sings about the quirky little store he calls home, I really understand what he's talking about...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nothing Can Touch This

This is one of my favorite moments in our creative process.

Everything up to now has been hard work. First off, I hate teaching music, but somebody's gotta do it, right? And we really don't have the budget to hire someone else to do it just because I don't want to. And then once that's done, blocking the show is the hardest part of my job as director, the most intensely creative. With some shows, a lot of the blocking is really obvious, but other shows take decoding and deconstructing to figure out how they should look and move. It's by far the hardest mental work in the process. And during that time, it's very hard for me to focus on anything else, even outside of rehearsal. It's like the blocking just takes over my brain, and it exhausts me mentally and emotionally.

It's a little better than it used to be because I figure the show out over a long period of time now (and let's be honest, I figured out High Fidelity in 2008). This is my process... I make a copy of the script as soon as we decide we're definitely doing it, I read it over a few times, and then I let it just percolate in the back of my brain. And every so often, an idea or a solution pops into my brain, and I grab the script and write it down. So I end up solving many of the big problems over the course of six to eight months. I live with the show in my head for so long that the style and tone and so forth often become very obvious, without a whole lot of conscious effort on my part. Just instinct, training, and percolating. Not always, but often.

We've now run both acts of High Fidelity separately three times. Last night, we had a dance review on the set for the first time, and tonight, we start running the whole show at every rehearsal. Unlike a lot of companies our size, we have the great luxury of two and a half weeks in the theater before we open and also nine full run-throughs, including three tech run-throughs.

As of this week, my hardest work is over. There will be problems to solve and I'll have to come up with new ideas to replace the ideas that don't work like I thought they would. But now the actors do their most important work, taking the pencil sketch I gave them and making it come to life.

Some directors spend tons of time on each moment in the show as they block. They work on two- or three-page sections and shape it and sharpen it till it's exactly what they want. Then they move on to the next moment. I work in the opposite way, sort of like the way that Jim Lapine works. We move pretty fast at first. We block 12-15 pages in each three and a half hour blocking rehearsal. I give the actors all the basics, entrances, exits, important character or plot info, the essential idea of what's going on, etc. But we don't polish it at all. We'll work through several pages, then we run through that section (usually only once, but sometimes twice), and then we move on. We won't return to that section until we're running the whole act. For me, blocking is the equivalent of the artist who draws the pencil sketches for comic books. He's providing all the essential information, but the inker and the colorist bring it to life, adding depth, detail, shadow, weight, intensity.

Many directors think the actors are their tools to bring a script to life. I think the actors are my collaborators and only together are we going to create something really wonderful. They don't work for me; they work with me. Long ago, I saw an interview with Hal Prince in which he said that he thinks being a director is being an editor. His job, he said, was to set everyone on the right road, make sure they all stay on that road, and then edit what they've created when they all arrive. I love that metaphor.

For the next two and a half weeks, I get to watch these fifteen amazing actors ink and color these fascinating, complicated characters, and like any good editor, I get to work with them to find the greatest insight and emotion and, above all, clarity. Sondheim once said he worries less about whether people like his work, as long as it's clear, as long as the audience understands what he's trying to say. If they get it, but don't like it, he can't control that. But if they don't get it, that's his fault.

I always remember that...

My job now with High Fidelity is problem solver, so my focus is on finding what's out of sync or unclear so we can fix it. But I also try very hard to remember to tell the actors when they're doing something wonderful. This is the most vulnerable part of the process for them, as they put themselves and their ideas out in front of us all (some of which will fail), and whether we mean to or not, we judge them. It's the nature of the beast.

Hopefully I can convince them that when I reject an idea, it's not because the idea is bad, but only because the idea isn't part of the fabric of the universe we're creating. The play is the thing, after all.

So now I get to enjoy the easiest and most fun part of the process for me. And the work we've already done is so cool, so much beyond our last production of High Fidelity, that I know the end product is going to be truly a thing of wonder. This cast and this show are just that good. It's so wonderful to work with artists this talented and this hard-working. I'm truly a lucky fucker...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Could Make the Chicks Dance

I often rave about our choreographer Robin Berger's work – and so do the critics – but I rarely get the chance to talk about why she's so great and why her work fits New Line so perfectly.

Robin has been choreographing for us since The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 2003. She's also choreographed New Line's productions of Reefer Madness, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, Urinetown, High Fidelity, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Spelling Bee, The Wild Party, Evita, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cry-Baby.

What makes her work special, and distinct from most of the theatre choreographers in the area, is that it always comes from character and story first. Always. Robin never – and I mean never – just puts steps together. Like Bob Fosse did, she approaches choreography as a storyteller more than as a dancer. Every move, every turn of the head is about something. She knows when the dance should look less polished and more spontaneous. She knows when everyone on stage should be in perfect sync but also when everyone on stage should be moving in their own individual way. She can get as vulgar as I can (and we both love doing that) and every bit as funny. But she can also create beautiful, wonderful moments that can take an audience's breath away. I'll never forget "Jackie's Last Dance" in The Wild Party. Really stunning. She can be both incredibly subtle and monstrously outrageous – the memory of the Reefer Madness dance number with Jesus and the nuns will forever make me giggle. Likewise the Indian orgy in High Fidelity. And significantly, she knows how to make men look masculine doing choreography, something many choreographers just don't know how to do.

Unlike too many other choreographers, Robin understands when dance is primary, when it's secondary to some other element, and when it's just background or atmosphere. In High Fidelity, most of the choreography Robin has done for us is essentially rock and roll back-up moves; in several cases, the people dancing are not the focus of the song. And Robin has no ego about that – she understands exactly how and why the dance fits. She serves the story.

She understands that it should always look like these characters are dancing, not like dancers are doing a show-off piece to convince you what a genius the choreographer is. Part of what delighted me about Robin's six numbers in The Wild Party was how brilliantly she can choreograph big, wild, thrilling numbers with very few trained dancers. With only occasional exceptions, when we're casting a show – even one with a lot of dance – we don't look for dancers. Hopefully, we end up with two or three, but we mostly want actors who move well, who can learn a combination, etc. We almost never want to create Leads and Chorus; we want to create a true ensemble. If there are fifteen people onstage, none of them is unimportant. And people like Madelaine True and the D'Armano Brothers (in The Wild Party) would not be trained dancers, so if they look that way on stage, that diminishes the reality we're trying to create to tell this story. Sometimes, Robin will literally tell the actors that she doesn't want precision, that a dance should look loose, spontaneous, even messy. I remember with Grease, it was really important to her that the Burger Palace Boys did not look like dancers when they did "Greased Lightning." It was exactly the right choice.

There are two revivals on Broadway right now that don't understand that, two shows in fact that Robin choreographed for New Line. These new Broadway productions of both Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita are just chock full of big, impressive, high energy dance numbers that look like they came out of a TV variety show, rather than being the language of this particular story. The dances don't advance the storytelling or reveal character; they just stop the show to impress us. Yuck! If I wanted that, I could go see Riverdance.

Which I would never do.

What Robin knows that too many choreographers working in New York don't know is that it's not about the choreographer. It's about the storytelling. Robin never gets in the way of the storytelling. And I mean never.

In short, she's just a really fucking good choreographer. And while all of the conceptual things above are important, it's also true that her dance numbers always look great. As good as she is at storytelling, she's also a hell of a entertainer. Here's what the critics think...

On Cry-Baby – Mark Bretz of the Ladue News said, “Cry-Baby rocks the room with an effervescent energy, exploding across the stage through an array of dazzling moves choreographed by Robin Michelle Berger.” Judith Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Berger's jailhouse romp, which sends the men rushing helter-skelter through the small theater, proves you don't need a big house to create a big effect.” Bob Wilcox at KDHX said, “Robin Michelle Berger's choreography peaks magnificently with the riotous ‘A Little Upset’ number for the men.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld wrote, “It’s wonderfully directed, smartly choreographed, and marvelously acted.”

On Two Gentlemen of Verona – Steve Callahan at KDHX said, “And the dancing! It's the best I've seen in a long while at New Line. Choreographer Robin Michelle Berger does wonders.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld, wrote, “Robin Michelle Berger's choreography enlivens the proceedings while bringing in the little bit of the Age of Aquarius that it demands.” Mark Bretz at the Ladue News wrote, “Robin Michelle Berger contributes the upbeat choreography, which adds to the show’s allure.”

On Evita – Mark Bretz at the Ladue News wrote, “Aided by the delicious support of choreographer Robin Michelle Berger, who accentuates the array of musical motifs with an eclectic mix of terpsichorean moves, the result is an engaging and absorbing account of not only one man’s interpretation of a time and place but a riveting theatrical experience.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld wrote, “Robin Michelle Berger's playful choreography livens things up considerably.” Joe Pollack of St. Louis Eats and Drinks, said, “Robin Michelle Berger's choreography is splendid.”

On High Fidelity (in 2008) – Judith Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Robin Michelle Berger, the canny choreographer, invests [the ex-girlfriends] with more spirit than Rob could have handled.” Richard Green of TalkinBroadway wrote, “Choreographer Robin Michelle Berger keeps the dancing simple and believable, though a girls' chorus busts a move every now and then with free-spirited ferocity.” And Mark Bretz at the Ladue News referred to the “winning choreography by Robin Michelle Berger…”

On Urinetown – Calvin Wilson at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said, “The cast is first-rate, and Robin Michelle Berger’s choreography is gloriously in step with the story.” Kirsten Wylder at KDHX said, “The choreography by Robin Michelle Berger is side-splitting.”

You get the idea...

It's hard to find a choreographer who is as good, as smart, and as committed as our actors, musicians, and designers; and even harder to find one who is in sync with my approach to musical theatre storytelling. I cannot stomach dance numbers in shows that are nothing but dance steps strung together, with no structure, no point of view, no arc, no storytelling. And I think Robin hates that as much as I do. We're amazingly in tune with each other. Only two other choreographers ever delivered what I need, John Ricroft (who choreographed several early New Line shows) and Michelle Collier (who helped me stage the very first New Line show). But as good as they both are, Robin is the best I've ever worked with. I've never seen anyone else's work locally that compares. And I've seen a few shows on Broadway that could have learned something from her...

I'm very lucky. I love my job -- and a big part of that is how much I love my collaborators.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

louder, faster, funnier, deadlier, more, more, choices upon choices...

People often ask me why we repeat shows. We've done it several times in our twenty-one seasons -- Assassins (1994, 1998, 2008); Hair (2000, 2001, 2008); Bat Boy (2003, 2006); and now High Fidelity (2008, 2012). When I get that question, I always respond, "Would you ask the Symphony why they repeat Beethoven's Ninth? Would you ask a classical theatre company why they repeat A Midsummer Night's Dream?"

We repeat shows because we think there's more to discover there. And High Fidelity is proving my point for me yet again.

Initially my plan was to recreate my staging from 2008 with the knowledge that some things would probably change, since we have two-thirds of a new cast this time. But as I blocked the show (stoned) on my living room couch, and also in rehearsal (not stoned), we strayed much further from our original production than I expected. Not only has a lot of the staging changed now (I bet less than a quarter of my 2008 staging remains), but we're also finding so much new depth and nuance in these characters and in this rich dialogue and lyrics.

Monday night, we were staging the first part of Act II and we got to this amazing monologue Rob has listing the Top Five things he loves about Laura (a list that eventually swells to ten). Jeff was so great with that monologue last time we did the show; he totally had the audience eating out of his hands every night. But as we worked on it this time, I suggested a couple things to think about, and Jeff found a whole new level of depth and truthfulness in these words. One thing I suggested was that Rob has not made this list before, that as he moves through the list, he discovers each one of these things as he says them, that they occur to him in real time, rather than reporting back to the audience on something he had already worked through. I thought that was a pretty minor note to give Jeff, but it must have opened a door for him, because instantly the monologue came to life in a way it hadn't before. It became more emotional, funnier, sadder.

It functioned as character development last time, but Jeff's new reading also now allows it to work as plot development. Now, Rob realizes as he talks to us how much he has lost, how deeply he regrets everything, and that propels him forward in the plot. We actually get to see him learn in real time now.

And yet I have to be careful. There are a lot of ways a director can fuck up an actor's performance, and the easiest way is to overwhelm them with fine tuning when they're just trying to get comfortable with the dialogue and staging. Expect too much too early, and the actor will feel either bullied or incompetent. Neither is good. Expect profound depth at this relatively early point, and the actor may just shut down. The kind of emotional and character depth we're dealing with in High Fidelity takes some time to find and figure out, even for those of us who've done the show before...

My job is to make sure we're all on the right road, and heading for the same destination, but then I have to let the actors work. I have to get out of the way as much as I can and let them create their brilliant performances. I've learned over the years how to do what I think of as "minimalist" directing, specifically for this point in the process. When an actor is having a hard time turning the emotional or comic (or both) dial up to eleven, I try to find really evocative words or phrases that will sound like fun to a good actor, that will open a door for them, like joy, adventure, rowdy, shattered...

In a couple weeks, I'll start tweaking and nitpicking, but for now, we just run the show and the actors get to play and experiment. They must have the freedom to fail without consequences. Otherwise, no one will take any risks. And risk-taking is where all the coolest shit comes from...

It's important for all of us who've already done the show to remember that we're creating a new show now. Some of the staging may be the same (although a lot less than I expected), but since two-thirds of the cast is new, that makes almost every scene and every song new in some way. Aaron is finding Ian now and he's so different from our Ian in 2008, that it automatically changes every scene he's in. The same is true of Dowdy playing Dick. Plus we're all four years older and wiser -- that may not sound like much, but you'd be surprised how differently I see this story this time around. It's kinda cool...

This is such fun work we're doing! Partly because the show is AWESOME and the songs are AMAZING. But also partly because we can already see how much our head start (from doing the show before) is paying off. Several of us already did all the heavy lifting four years ago; now we can sort of skip ahead to the more subtle, artistic work that usually isn't happening till later. Jeff and Kimi (as Rob and Laura) are finding very different, very powerful moments in their scenes together. Together Jeff and I are really discovering that "rock bottom" that Rob has to hit before his redemption. His fight with Liz late in Act II is really a fight now -- as in yelling at each other -- and it takes Rob to a much darker rock bottom. More so than we did last time, we are absolutely shattering Rob, and I think that makes him much realer, his story much more emotional, and his redemption that much richer.

All the blocking is done. There's just one piece of choreography left to do on Sunday, and it's really easy. Then we do nothing but run the show. Next week, we'll run the acts separately and do our best to work out the major kinks. Then we move into the theatre and start running the whole show at every rehearsal. That's the most fun part for me...

The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. In case you're wondering... I always title my blog posts with lyrics from whatever show I'm working on. And this post's title comes from the "tone poem" that opens High Fidelity's finale, "Turn the World Off (And Turn You On)."