Hold Me, Bat Boy

Often after a show closes, I get all philosophical.

I also get sad and bored. And stoned a lot. But for the purposes of this blog post, let's just focus on the philosophical.

I've been thinking since we closed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson about New Line and the work we do and the company's improbably long life, having just opened our twenty-second season. I didn't set out to be "alternative" when I started New Line Theatre in 1991. I was working with a community theatre called CenterStage that I had co-founded, but I was looking to be more adventurous than others in the company wanted to be. Though it wasn't conscious at first, when I left CenterStage I was choosing an "alternative" path, away from Hello, Dolly! and No, No, Nanette, and toward shows like Assassins, Anyone Can Whistle, and Floyd Collins. I had been studying -- and loving -- the classics all my life, but I was ready to expand my horizons and challenge both my skills and my preconceptions.

I didn't suddenly hate older, more conventional shows; I just didn't want to work on them anymore. I had learned from them what I could and wanted to move forward to new adventures. Though I hadn't yet started writing my books, I knew instinctively that I was done exploring the past of my art form and wanted to turn toward the future.

That's not to say New Line never produces older shows -- we often do, especially shows from the experimental 1960s and 70s, because those shows (Cabaret, Hair, Jacques Brel, Man of La Mancha, Two Gentlemen of Verona, I Love My Wife, Company, Pippin, Chicago) were moving (or at least, pointing) the art form forward toward the amazing new work that would be done in the 1990s and after, when everything would change -- and the real Golden Age of musical theatre would begin -- and I would fall in love all over again with my art form.

We didn't know it at the time, but New Line was literally at the vanguard of a whole new era in the American musical theatre, when the art form would no longer depend solely on the commercial theatre scene in New York. We New Liners weren't aware of everything going on across the country at the same moment New Line was getting underway (no internet yet), but we were a part of it. The same impulse that drove me and my cohorts toward a new vision of musical theatre was also driving others like us across the country. No one else built a company entirely based on that new vision the way we did, but lots of other artists and companies were part of the movement. Though St. Louis has always been a big musical theatre town, thanks to the Muny and Stages and the Fox, local audiences had rarely seen anything but the most mainstream musicals.

New Line changed that.

We also discovered early on that we weren't going to work like more conventional companies work. From the beginning, we have operated more like the experimental companies in New York in the 1960s, and only a little like today's mainstream regional theatres. That has made it impossible to work with union actors (we tried to make a deal with the union, but they would not bend to accommodate our process), but it allows us a more leisurely, more playful, more analytical, more intellectual, and more artistically pure approach to our work, which in retrospect seems tailor-made for the kind of shows we produce.

Unlike it is with most companies, I direct every show at New Line. It never occurred to me to work differently than we do, partly because there aren't any other directors in town who specialize in the kind of work we do, partly because ours is a company built on a very specific, somewhat unconventional vision and philosophy that comes directly from my own understanding of our art form, and also partly because I literally spend my life thinking, talking, and writing about this kind of musical theatre. New Line shows are more aggressive, more physical, more vulgar, more relevant, more fearless, more emotional, more confrontational, louder, darker, wilder, funnier than the work of most companies in the region.

I'm not saying we're better, but we are different.

One of our specialties, I think, is taking extremely unconventional shows (Passing Strange, The Wild Party, Assassins, Forbidden Planet, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and making them fully accessible to audiences while still being true to the material and to the creators' intentions. We don't dumb down our shows or pander to our audiences; we just focus like a fucking laser on good, clear storytelling. Nothing is more important. Humans use storytelling to communicate all the most consequential information and ideas, and there's nothing an audience appreciates more than good, clear storytelling.

None of this is to say that our kind of musical theatre is the only kind. In fact, I'm saying exactly the opposite of that. I'm trying to argue instead that the more mainstream, conventional kind of musical theatre most people are used to is not the only kind of musical theatre either. People sometimes tell me they don't like musicals, but I know most of them really mean that they don't like Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musicals. And I agree with them. Rodgers and Hammerstein shows are about as relevant today as buggy whips and dial telephones. And Broadway hasn't been the center of the art form in decades. Far more people see musicals in theatres across the country than in New York. Far more. That's where the coolest work is being done and where many of the new shows being born. New Line has birthed quite a few world premieres and we have also brought back from the dead shows that died an unnatural death in New York, like High Fidelity and Cry-Baby.

My only real point with this blog post is that there is more than one path. Broadway is not musical theatre any more than Family Matters is television. From the beginning of New Line, some folks have tried to define and/or judge us based on old-school conventions that were already outdated when I was born. Musical theatre is a serious American art form, worthy of respect and deserving of the same thoughtfulness one would give to Shakespeare or Mamet or Albee. Several reviewers got angry emails from me in New Line's early days, chastising them for turning their brains off during our shows just because they're musicals. Maybe that was an understandable bias in the 1920s and 30s, but not today. Not anymore.

Just as television evolved into a much more serious art form with the advent of cable TV and the creation of shows like Oz, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Carnivale, and Dexter, so too has musical theatre as an art form evolved beyond the simplistic, mid-century morality of Rodgers and Hammerstein, with shows like Passing Strange, High Fidelity, bare, Bat Boy, Next to Normal, Spelling Bee, and The Wild Party.

I'm a lucky motherfucker. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when my art form was the most interesting, most adventurous it had ever been before, when the rock musical was finding its voice, when it was finally okay for people in musicals to talk the way people really talk, fucks, shits, and all, and to talk about things that matter. All the things people hate about old-fashioned musicals were fading away just as I came into this world. The last big hit of the so-called "Golden Age" (i.e., the Rodgers and Hammerstein era) was Fiddler on the Roof, which opened the year I was born. Just as I'm on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, I'm also on the cusp between old-school musicals and contemporary musical theatre.

And it's a very cool vantage point.

Some theatre people think making theatre is just a job, and that it should deliver job security and a middle-class paycheck. And they get resentful when that doesn't happen. Which it usually doesn't. They call the theatre "show business." But I believe -- and I think many of the New Liners believe -- that making theatre is a calling, a privilege, a responsibility, and only lastly, a job. Being an artist is a difficult, misunderstood, and often thankless job. The pay is low and the work is hard. But we know that we have been favored by the gods, not short-changed. We are lucky beyond all reasonable expectations to get to do what we do. Even if we didn't make any money, we'd be lucky. We are the shamans, the keepers of the flame, the storytellers. Do you know how many people wish they could do what we do?

Long Live the Musical!

Scott

Why Don't You Just Shoot Me in the Head?

Shakespeare loved the soliloquy. These days, most theatre people just refer to a soliloquy as an "interior monologue." It's just the character thinking out loud. Think of "To be or not to be" in Hamlet or that amazing opening monologue in Richard III. (I still think that play needs to be a rock musical.)

Opera turned the soliloquy into the aria. American musical comedy turned it into the "I Want" song -- like "My White Knight" in The Music Man, "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" in Grease, "Being Alive" in Company, or "The I Love You Song" in Spelling Bee. And at about the same time the musical comedy was first blossoming, Bertolt Brecht was in Germany working on surprisingly similar devices, including fourth-wall-ignoring monologues.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson borrows from both these more recent traditions, old-school musical comedy and Brecht. The BBAJ song "The Great Compromise" is a prime example. It functions as a pure "I Want" song for Rachel, and in telling us what she wants, she also tells us who she is, what her relationship with Jackson has become, what she thinks of his politics, and lots more. But it also functions as a Brechtian, split-screen illustration of Jackson's fractured life. The song alternates between Rachel's lament and dialogue between a couple who met and fell in love at a Jackson rally, representing two opposing perceptions of Jackson. And they're light years apart. Rachel sees only the private Jackson and finds him selfish and immature. The couple sees only the public Jackson and they see him as essentially perfect. The last line of the dialogue inside the song is the woman in the couple concluding that "Jackson is love." And yet his wife is miserable and alone. Jackson creates love in the one case and destroys it in the other.

As I've written before, sometimes our heroes are assholes.

The centerpiece of the show is the driving "Rock Star," and like the rest of the score, it works on several levels at once. In the scene leading up to the song, Rachel gives Jackson an ultimatum -- if he runs for office again, they're through. And the last line before the music erupts is Van Buren's "So what're you gonna do?" It's time for a choice. A big one. But as any general knows, you have to assess the battlefield first.

A soloist appears who acts as Jackson's inner thoughts, as he works his way through his dilemma. From the point of view of the singer -- and Jackson -- all the previous Presidents tried to be rock stars, but they all failed. They just weren't up to it.

Washington crossed the Delaware river.
Washington acted like a rock star.
Washington made America deliver.
Washington tried to be a rock star.

But all the fame that he had won,
It wasn't really any fun,
And soon the people started turnin'.
Whoa, whoa, whoa...

That boy who couldn't tell a lie,
Two terms, and then he said goodbye,
And Georgie went back to Mt. Vernon.

Only Jackson can pull it off! Or so says Jackson. Not even Washington could do it. Of course, the truth is Jackson will also fail in many ways, just like the others, because it's an impossible job. But he can't see that. The chorus of this song is brilliantly conceived. Like the show's other songs, it never comes at its subject straight on, but instead from around a corner, through a different lens. Jackson's mind (and lyricist Michael Friedman's lyric) comes at the idea of the Presidency through self-righteous outrage -- outrage, you'll notice, over an offense not yet committed -- or is he still talking about the 1824 election that was stolen from him...?

Why don't you just shoot me in the head,
'Cause you know I'd be better off dead,
If there's really no place in America
For a celebrity of the first rank!

In other words, an America that wouldn't elect Jackson to the Presidency is an America not worth living in. Wow. We see here again that Jackson's ego is considerable, and that will be his tragic flaw. He can't see his own limitations and inadequacies. He has no self-awareness.

The first part of the song is Jackson's inner thoughts, but halfway through, when the soloist introduces Jackson, he is reborn -- "That's right, mothafuckas! Jackson's back!" He has made his decision. He will run again. (Rachel who?) He know he's better than all those other guys. The song transforms itself from interior monologue to stump speech, and in that transformation it moves the story forward, like any good theatre song should. This is the show's obligatory moment, the point toward which everything before it leads, and from which everything after it flows. If Jackson makes a different choice here, his life goes down a different path. Rachel might even live longer (at least in this version of the story). But his decision is based on a self-assessment that is not a serious one.

Now as the song continues, it's Jackson himself singing. He has found his voice and his confidence, he has put Rachel out of his mind, and he's ready to kick some Republican ass. But notice how shallow and simplistic his views of his predecessors are...

John Adams tried to be an American Idol,
Jefferson tried to be a rock star,
Madison tried to make the Presidency vital,
And James Monroe was a douchebag!

The story always ends the same,
It's hard to handle all that fame
If you don't really have it in ya.
Whoa, whoa, whoa...

There's no place in democracy
For your brand of aristocracy,
So take that shit back to Virginia
(Or Massachusetts, Biatch!)

Note that last dig at his incumbent opponent John Quincy Adams, who's from Massachusetts. Jackson might as well be holding a sign that says, "We are the 99%!"

And as he repeats the chorus several times, The People join him. It becomes not just Jackson's opinion, but The People's opinion as well, that the American Presidency should be able to accommodate a superstar. (It's hard to ignore parallels to Obama here.) But as they sing, we hear two melodies in counterpoint to the chorus. One is a variation on the earlier bridge:

You thought you were just a Founding Father,
But everyone wants you to be their father.

And the third counterpoint melody is also one we've already heard, but set to a new lyric:

But all that fame can take its toll,
The people force you into a role,
And soon the tables will be turnin'.

Yes they will...

These three melodies and lyrics bounce off each other, then finally, everyone comes together on a driving, climactic unison repeat of the chorus. The People are with him! This is not only great music and lyric writing, but it's great storytelling. The song starts inside Jackson's head, as pulsing, pounding rock, like a musical migraine in Jackson's brain, throbbing, almost exploding out of him. Then the song moves from the surrogate inner voice to Jackson's own voice, then to the voice of The People, alongside but also at odds with Jackson. This is complicated psychology, politics, and storytelling, all rolled into one seriously kickass rock song.

That's how good and how smart this show is.

We closed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson Saturday night, but I can't stop thinking about it. I always miss our shows when we close them, but this one is different. It's such a unique piece of theatre, so aggressive, such fun, so powerful, and sitting here with two weeks till the election, it's so fucking timely.

And all the music is totally stuck in my brain. I can think of worse problems.

What a wild, wonderful ride it was. Thank you to everyone who came to share it with us.

Long Live the Rock Musical!
Scott

Populism, Yea, Yea!

Most people who see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson don't consciously notice the incredible craft and skill in the show's writing. They see lots of wacky comedy, including some pretty sophomoric gross-out humor, they hear very raw language and driving rock and roll, and it doesn't even occur to them that this deceptively complex theatre piece is operating on a much deeper, more sophisticated level than it appears.

Though we don't recognize it in real time, the obscene language and the gross-out humor actually contribute to characterization, to getting at the socio-political zeitgeist of the Jacksonian Era, to the show's central metaphor, and to the show's rejection of Rodgers and Hammerstein that is the lifeblood of this amazing piece of neo musical comedy.

But nobody thinks about all that stuff while they're watching it. It's totally subliminal.

I've already blogged about how the character of Andrew Jackson is more a construct than a representation of the real guy, about how he is a metaphorical stand-in for America as a nation and as a people, about how Jackson and America and the show itself all share the same character arc, evolving from angsty 'tween to sober, self-aware adult, about how even the way the show is narrated has meaning both in the story and also in the context of the evolution of the art form. Yes, all that stuff is in this rowdy, crazy musical.

And more.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a hybrid of the two new forms in the American musical theatre. On the one hand, it's a Neo Musical Comedy, using the tools of old-school musical comedy melded to the irony, moral ambiguity, and socio-political content of our current Age of Irony (which arguably started in the 60s but took over pop culture in the 90s). But it's also a Neo Rock Musical (and our next show Next to Normal is too), using the tools of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model but jettisoning R&H's ponderous mid-century morality for a more complex -- and more real -- look at human emotion and interaction.

(And on a side note, that's all politics is -- human emotion and interaction -- and that's why politics is inherently dramatic.)

One of those R&H tools that this show retains is the reprise. When our art form was still young, musicals used reprises (a repeat or approximate repeat of a song we've already heard) to remind the audience of the hit tune the producers wanted them to buy (recordings or sheet music) after they saw the show. Or sometimes a reprise gave the secondary leads another musical slot in Act II that they wouldn't otherwise get.

But Rodgers and Hammerstein changed that. Well, really Hammerstein changed that, most famously with Show Boat in 1927, but even more regularly and confidently in his shows with Rodgers. Since Hammerstein, reprises have been more functional and less decorative. In shows built on the R&H model, a reprise revisits an earlier moment, but in a new context, with (sometimes only subtextually) new meaning. A reprise refers back to the first hearing of the song, but it doesn't just repeat it. Either the lyric is different to fit the new circumstances, or the lyric is the same but it means something substantially different in this new context. Probably the clearest example is "Let Me Entertain You" in Gypsy, a song literally designed for its reprises. The first time we hear it, it's an intentionally bland kiddie song; later on, it becomes an ironic symbol of the maturing girls being trapped in their childish roles; and at the end it become Louise's strip number and the lyric takes on a much darker, more complex meaning about sex, objectification, power. This one seemingly simplistic song goes from kiddie number to sexual invitation. Bravo, Sondheim!

And Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson handles reprises with equal intelligence.

The show's aggressive opening number, "Populism, Yea Yea!," operates on so many levels, both sincere and ironically Brechtian at the same time. These characters think this inarticulate cheer means something, but the writers are also telling us at the same time that the characters are shallow and trivial, that they are to be dismissed. And that tells the audience a lot about how this show will operate. And it also immediately sets the debate for the evening -- is populism good or bad? Of course, the answer is it's both. And we see that it is both as we hear the song reprised throughout the show. It returns, really more as a leitmotif than a reprise, marking moments of populism throughout the story, as commentary, counterpoint, even as an acknowledgement of its own dark side when Rachel quotes it in "The Great Compromise." She's sees what's wrong with populism here, but Jackson still doesn't.

The whole score plays with the idea of a leitmotif/reprise. "I'm So That Guy" starts as a new song, but after only one verse, it bursts into counterpoint, with Jackson singing a reprise of "I'm Not That Guy" and the rest of the cast singing the first verse of "Populism, Yea, Yea!" And the counterpoint of these two songs subliminally suggests the immaturity and shallowness behind Jackson's confidence and ambition. While Jackson's vocal soars over the rest, they shift back and forth between the first verse of this number, and the chorus of "Populism, Yea, Yea!" It's a crazy, irrational, passionate mess. Just like Jackson's emotions. Content dictates form.

"Public Life" is another example of this same device. It begins as a new song, an emotional ballad for Jackson, as he mourns for his wife. But by the second verse, his focus is already moving from his wife to his People. Soon the People join him, reprising "I'm Not That Guy," the song Jackson sang the last time he was faced with a major life choice and started off on a new path. The chorus is his inner voice. Suddenly the song bursts into three-way contrapuntal life. On top, Jackson takes on a new melody, with a lyric about "change" that could have come out of an Obama speech. Half the ensemble continues with the reprise of "I'm Not That Guy," and the other half of the ensemble picks up a campaign ditty that we heard in the background of Rachel's "The Great Compromise."  This third lyric -- "Jackson's back! He's got it going on!" repeated over and over -- reminds us of the vapidity and mindlessness of populism in general and Jackson's followers in specific. There is no there there. Jackson may be the voice of the People, but the People aren't really paying attention. By the end of the song, Jackson is singing, "The path is clear and I've made my choice. I'm gonna listen to the people's voice," more empty words, as the rest of the cast returns to the chorus of "Populism, Yea, Yea!"

This number is a remarkable piece of writing. It moves us forward in the plot, it takes us through several different emotional states in Jackson, and it provides a funny but straight-faced, socio-political context for it all, which sets up the complex obstacles ahead for him in later scenes.

The only true reprise in the show is "Crisis Averted," which bookends the first section of the Oval Office scene towards the end of the show, functioning both as commentary and as Jackson's inner voice. This song frames the biggest turning point in the story. It's a peppy little tune, more like They Might Be Giants than an emo band. In "Crisis Averted #1" it's all about optimism, immortality, invincibility. In this first version, they sing:

Crisis averted!
He's taking a stand
And the best part is
Everything he says is right.

I really think
That this will work.
We're young.
We'll live forever.
At least for one more night.
My luck will hold this time,
It always has before.
So I  think, I think it just might work.

Then the cheerleaders leave (more about that in a second), and in "Crisis Averted #2" it's all about the end, mortality, failure. This time they sing, still to the same peppy music:

Crisis averted!
I'm going alone
And the best part is
Everything I say is right.

Did you really think
That this would work?
You're fucked.
You won't live forever.
Your luck won't hold this time.
It won't be like before.
It's never, it's never gonna work.

The perky music accomplishes so much. First it tells us that even the narrators -- the band soloist and the other actors -- don't care what happens to our hero. We've gone from hero-worshipping narrator (the Storyteller) at the beginning, to the band soloist as narrator, to shallow girls (in "The Corrupt Bargain") and later random actors, as the most disinterested narrators of all. But these two songs also bracket the moment when the Good Times turn Bad. It's when Jackson's personal cheerleaders leave the Oval Office because "this isn't fun anymore" and "direct democracy directly applied is totes lame" that the tone changes.

Up till now, the cheerleaders in the Oval Office seem like a cheap running joke. But here we see they represent the public, the voters, us; and the relationship between them and Jackson takes on fascinating, much more complicated colors. When the cheerleaders turn on him, we have turned on him, just as American liberals did to some extent to Obama in 2010. And when Jackson loses the people, he loses everything. He feeds on them. (As I typed that last sentences, I got a great idea for a Zombie Jackson musical...) His whole persona is wrapped up in his populism, his status as the People's President, but can he still be the People's President when the people don't want him anymore? As the song says, "You're fucked." (Notice that the first version of "Crisis Averted" contains no obscenities, but the second version does.) Things are different now, these songs tell us. "It won't be like before."

This turning point (the cheerleaders leaving) is really important, but because it's subtle, these two matching songs underline it for us. Just the way Brecht liked it. And they're funny songs too. And that's great writing.

I expect no less from this brilliant piece of rock theatre. I fall more in love with it at every performance. There's truly nothing else like it.

Just three more shows!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Corrupt Bargain

One of my recent blog entries was about how the authors of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson used obscene and vulgar language to create a theatrical parallel to the lawlessness and chaos of those times in our early history. But the show uses another parallel to the wild, untamed world of the frontier -- the show itself.

Just as the show matures along with Jackson and our young nation, it also fully embodies a rejection of rules and conventions that parallels a similar rejection of the rules of New England by Jackson and the frontiersmen. Stephen Sondheim famously believes that Content Dictates Form, that the story dictates the kind of storytelling. In almost every way, this show's creators, Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman, have created a show that is its story.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson careens from style to style, from serious to wacky to darkly ironic, from introspection to ironic detachment, from the Marx Brothers to Brecht. It keeps us off balance. There are no conventional signposts to grab onto here. And that's part of the point.

One great example of this is the scene-song "The Corrupt Bargain." We get to Jackson's first real defeat and the show stops the story cold to explain the politics of what just happened. Brecht would love it. So would Sondheim. This song purposefully breaks every rule of musical theatre. It describes action instead of showing it. It offers commentary, but it's unreliable commentary. It's literally embodies the absurdity of the politics it describes in its mindless, comically pointless dance breaks. The song uses both direct narration to the audience and dialogue, but there's something wrong with these narrators, and as this reveals itself over the course of the song, it once again throws us off course. We can't trust the narrators?

Who is the narrator in this show, by the way? It starts out being the Storyteller, but once she's removed from the story, the bandleader takes over. But sometimes the actors narrate. There's no consistent voice to the story's narration and once again, that's a conscious choice. There is no objectivity in American politics, TImbers and Friedman are telling us. Everyone has a different perspective and that colors what they see and how they talk about it. And this lack of a consistent narrative voice is also subtextually a commentary on storytelling itself, on bias, on narrative agenda, and on our current struggle to talk about our world in a time when the two opposing sides of American society (liberal and conservative) can't even agree on what is objectively true and what is not.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson fully and consciously embodies this moment when facts have become a matter of opinion, and the show plays around (a lot!) with how that affects the retelling of history.

And even within this one song, whose voice do these girls represent? They're not The People here, and they're not on Jackson's side or his opponents' side. But they're also not omniscient or objective like conventional narrators. On top of that, they're both shallow and bad historians. Every time the girls seem to be invoking the perspective of an historical figure for a little extra insight, they also short-circuit that reference at the same time. For example...

Alexis De Tocqueville says something in French
That none of us can translate...
. . .
James Madison said something prescient about this
But he was kind of a dick...
. . .
I'm sure Michel Foucault would have an opinion
But he hasn't been born yet...

You get the idea.

These girls are objective only in the sense that they don't much seem to give a shit about any of this. On the other hand, they sorta seem to agree with the Washington elitists. Just look at how they describe Jackson: "Do you really want America run by a man from Tennessee?" And even more potent, "Do you really want the American people running their own country?" -- that was a real debate at the time! Who is 'worthy" of voting rights? John Quincy Adams had written to a friend, “Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state.” What? Women and poor people VOTING???

Adams would have been right at home with the GOP's 2012 campaign of voter suppression. Notice how the conservatives talk about the American people in this song, satirically but powerfully putting 2012 audiences in mind of Romney's infamous "47%" comments, even though those comments had not been made yet when the show was written.

Adams: The people are stupid.
Clay: They can all go rot.
Calhoun: They're lame.
Adams: They suck.

Inside all this silliness, satire, dancing, and jokes, the song actually paints for us a very accurate and accessible picture of how Adams, Clay, Calhoun, et al. literally stole the 1824 election from Jackson. By the end of the song, we really do understand the infamous Corrupt Bargain. And for modern-day liberals, it's hard not to see a parallel to the controversial Bush v. Gore decision by the Supreme Court in 2000.

Like the rest of the show, this song delivers on plot, satire, entertainment, and contemporary political commentary. It contains the three elements of good art -- Poetry, Popcorn, and Politics, or in other words, artistry, entertainment, and substance. The song is incredibly well-constructed and deceptively subtle in its agenda. Like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, this song (and the whole show) is both hilarious and serious at the same time (though I think the original production short-changed the serious side). Brecht would have been very proud.

We have only one week left of our run and I continue to find amazing buried treasure in this script and score, incredible craft and skill and intelligence. Like many of the shows we produce, this is one that no doubt will be given lots of shallow productions by people who don't realize all the wonderful things hidden inside this rowdy, vulgar, outrageous show.

I'm already working on my next book, an exploration of the New American Musical in this new millenium, and there will be a chapter on Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson so people can see what's so genuinely brilliant about this under-rated, freakishly original, and surprisingly powerful work. It has been a real privilege exploring it and sharing it with our audiences. It's been such fun to read the rave reviews that each found different treasures in our show. For people who thinks musicals are all old-fashioned and trivial and simplistic, this powerful piece of rock theatre will disabuse of them of that ridiculous notion.

This is a show about important, consequential things, about America, about our politics and how we choose to live together in this experiment we call American democracy, about the dark side of populism (Sarah Palin, anyone?), about the complexity of morality and the impossible choices our leaders face every day.

In short, like almost every show New Line Theatre produces, this is a show about the real world and about us. And that's what makes thrilling, potent theatre.

It's been an amazing ride. Thank you, Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Bloody and Cursed

Some people might find it hard to believe, but the vast majority of musicals New Line produces have the word fuck in them. You wouldn't think there'd be that many musicals that use that word, but there are. You wouldn't think that because most people hear the word musical and think old-fashioned musical. Which they probably hate. Ask an average person on the street to name a musical and I bet you get a Rodgers and Hammerstein title before you get something written in the last ten years. But almost all the really interesting new shows have very adult language.

Because that's how people talk.

Musicals we've done that use the word fuck include High Fidelity, Passing Strange, bare, Hair, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Grease, Assassins, Sunday in the Park with George, Rocky Horror, Best Little Whorehouse, A New Brain, and others. As far as I know, the New Line record is the fifty-two fucks in Johnny Appleweed.

But Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson might provide Appleweed with some competition. Certainly, BBAJ is one of the most vulgar shows we've done. (And true to form, we're doing the even more vulgar Bukowsical in June.) Jackson throws around fucks with complete abandon. When I first saw the show, I really didn't register that -- I hardly notice what we call "adult language" in shows anymore, because it's both common now and realistic. It never stands out in my ear. Imagine how silly the characters in Rent would sound if they never cursed. They'd seem phony to us. We expect our storytelling to reflect our world.

One review of our production of BBAJ said that the obscene language revealed lazy writing. I disagree. Now having worked on the show for a while, and having seen it with audiences, I've been thinking about the language even more. And I realize it's a very strong and -- surprisingly enough -- very subtle narrative device that accomplishes two important jobs.

First, as I've written about before, in BBAJ the character of Jackson matures as America matures -- and as the show itself "matures," from sketch comedy to adult drama. And the language is part of that. Jackson curses all the time because he fancies himself a rebel. He doesn't follow rules. His language is an act of aggression. He assaults people -- including the audience -- with his words. When he first enters at the beginning of the show, he interacts briefly with the audience and engages in what can only be called (fake) sexual harassment. It seems like a naughty "throw-away" moment, but it's actually an important establishment of the tone and agenda of the evening. Jackson uses his language to bludgeon and to flamboyantly reject the "polite society" he associates with New England and John Quincy Adams, and also to wage an assault on those "higher classes" and their more "refined sensibilities." (Forgive all the ironic quotes.) Jackson is a frontiersman and there are no rules on the frontier. A prime example of all this is his first campaign speech in the show, as music starts underneath:

Uh-huh. That's right. 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. We're gonna walk right up to President Momoe's house and we're going to show him that the name Ol' Hickory doesn't only pertain to the length and girth of my penis. No, it also pertains to the inflexible and unyielding brand of populism that we're gonna shove four-and-a-half inches up his ass!

Language as a weapon. Even the title of the music that accompanies this speech is obscene -- "Underscore, Motherfuckers."  The audience doesn't know that, but it tells the actors and musicians something. In this retelling of his life story, Jackson is Johnny Strabler, Jim Stark, Danny Zuko, Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker, the tough guy with the emotional boy inside, rejecting the world that's already rejected him. And all that gets expressed in Jackson's obscenities.

The other reason for the language is about time and place. David Milch, the creator of the brilliant HBO series Deadwood talks in one of the DVD commentaries about why he used such pervasive obscenity in his dialogue, and his answer is purely artistic. He wanted his audience to feel the lawlessness and wildness of that time and place. Most of us could never imagine a world like that, with no laws, no authority, no social compact, no rules beyond survival. So Milch decided to use extreme, "lawless" language to get at that danger and chaos. The joke among Deadwood lovers is that the complex, poetic dialogue often sounds like Shakespeare wrote it, and every other word is cocksucker or motherfucker. (And now that I think about it, if Shakespeare was writing today, he'd probably use those words too. He loved his dirty jokes and obscene insults.) Milch admits that many of the curse words he used in Deadwood weren't even invented until later, but they're not there for historical authenticity; the words are there for the sense of that world that we can feel viscerally no other way.

The same is true of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. The obscene language creates a world of verbal and moral anarchy -- which underlines and connects subliminally with Jackson's own lack of a moral code, his massacre of Native Americans and his other immoral -- amoral? -- acts. It gives us a sense of what the Washington establishment thought of this vulgar frontiersman invading their insular, tightly controlled little world. He horrified them, just as he (comically) horrifies us when he says he'll fill us with "popula-jism."

As Van Buren would say, Yuck.

There are shows that use obscenities gratuitously (Silence!, The Book of Mormon), but Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson isn't one of them.

But maybe we should take a step back here. I mean, why not use curse words? People use these words. I use these words. Why shouldn't characters in our storytelling use these words? One reason so many of the shows we produce contain the word fuck is that we do a lot of fairly new shows, and younger writers are no longer afraid to use that word in a musical, if it's organic to the character and situation.

So yes, I guess I'm saying that the obscene language is there in BBAJ for a reason and also that we need to relax about it. After all, they're just fucking words.

Our production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is going incredibly well, we're getting great audiences, and so far we've had ten rave reviews! Come join us for this amazing, smart, fearless piece of modern musical theatre. Two weeks left!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Underscore, Motherfuckers

Sometimes there are things about a show I don't discover until we put it in front of an audience.

When we did Hair the first time, none of us truly understood it, me included, until the audience provided the final missing piece. Then it all made sense.

We opened Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson Friday night, and what a great opening it was! We had a big, rowdy, smart audience, and the cast and band were all at the peak of their powers, just absolutely on fucking fire. We also had live Tweeters for the first time, and that turned out really cool -- you can read their tweets here. Everybody seemed to love the show. It is a wild ride, that's for sure, and that was even more obvious to me, watching with audiences for the first time.

And seeing our production in its finished form, I saw something about the show I hadn't seen before, even when I saw it in New York.

I've written on this blog before about how the character of Andrew Jackson in this show (as distinct from the actual guy) goes from rowdy, vulgar, angsty teenager to darker, more self-aware adult. In that process he stands in for America as a country, crossing over from national childhood through adolescence. But now I can see that the show itself does the same thing.

The evening starts off with some off-color sex jokes (from a  2012 perspective, we might even say Jackson sexually harrasses the audience), followed by lots of angsty whining in the first song, then a silly and shallow version of Jackson's early biography. The show itself is juvenile here.

But the evening ends with the complexity of real world consequences short-circuiting Jackson's swagger and ambition, followed by an assessment of Jackson's atrocities against Native Americans, even going so far as to call him "an American Hitler." By this point, the show is about the weight and weariness of being an adult, about the consequences of a (collective?) life lived recklessly. In the last thirty minutes, the show becomes serious, adult storytelling. And then in the final moments of the show, as the last great irony in an evening chock full of ironies, the band strikes up a driving punk version of Jackson's real-life campaign song, "The Hunters of Kentucky," letting its shallow, folk storytelling bang up uncomfortably against the very sophisticated, nuanced story and the moral ambiguity we've just been left with. But where it's placed in the show, as a kind of epilogue, "The Hunters of Kentucky" also makes a final, subliminal point about the nature of storytelling itself, its construction, its bias, its agenda, its place in the culture, and by turning this folk song into a driving punk anthem, Friedman and Timbers marry the two storytelling forms and reinforce one last time the double time-frame of the show.

The audience leaves feeling "up" from the rowdy rock music but also conflicted about all the darkness they've just seen play out. It also reminds us, perhaps subconsciously, that Jackson's greatest triumph was made by his younger, cockier self, long before he was President, long before he had to settle The Indian Question and argue with Congress about tariffs.

After all, it's easy to be a bully. It's hard to be President.

Even the length of the scenes increases as the show unfolds, progressively taking more and more time to go deeper, to explore contradiction, self-delusion, complexity. Bookwriter Alex Timbers and songwriter Michael Friedman drop hints all through the show about the central theme of maturing -- backstage at the political rally when Jackson asks why he can't live both the lives he wants, Rachel answers, "Because you're an adult." It's the first time we come up this explicitly against Jackson's tragic flaw. Emotional teenager Jackson is not equipped for the problems and complexity of the real world, and this moment foreshadows his unraveling later on in the Oval Office. (I can't help but see George W. Bush in this aspect of the character.)

The Bloody Bloody score also "grows up" in this same way. It starts with the wild, heavy, driving emo rock of "Populism, Yea, Yea!" a lyric consciously swimming in angsty shallowness, with a chorus that really contains only one word until the last line:

Populism, Yea, Yea!
Populism, Yea, Yea!
Populism, Yea, Yea!
Populism, Yea, Yea!
This is the age of Jackson.

This lyric tells us almost nothing, other than just nakedly announcing one of the show's themes. But it also tells us a lot. It tells us about the point of view of the show, its tone, its humor, its political satire. It presents us with an ironic swipe at the often mindless over-simplicity of American politics; and it sets up the double-time-period device, as it tells us this is the Jacksonian Era but set to driving rock and roll. In a (probably intentional) break from conventional musical theatre rules, this opening number doesn't do all the plot and character setup that most openings do, in shows like High Fidelity, Bat Boy, Company, Assassins, Jesus Christ Superstar, Songs for a New World...  Instead it defiantly refuses to do those things on the surface, while sort of doing some of them anyway subtextually and musically.

And really, one could argue that America is the main character of this story as much as Jackson is, so maybe this opening song does some important character work after all. And if you really want to dig down deep, 19th century America isn't the character we're talking about here -- this is a show about America in 2012. Which is why rock and roll is the musical language.

And the verse of "Populism, Yea, Yea!" returns later in the show as counterpoint, now standing in as a metaphor for Jackson's emotional state.

As the score progresses, it moves from rowdy to nuanced. "Rock Star," halfway through the show, is the last fully rock number. (One might argue that "The Saddest Song" is pretty driving rock and roll, but it's also essentially a waltz -- that's really interesting, melding the two periods musically, but it does make the song less than fully rock and roll.) The next two songs, "The Great Compromise" and "Public Life" start smaller and quieter,  and then are taken over by rock and roll by their ends, as the score goes through a musical transformation. After that, the last four songs in the show (not counting the epilogue) abandon the rock beat. And they also begin to have more ambiguous endings, leading the audience less certainly toward applause -- and since applause is often an emotional release, keeping the audience from applauding builds tension. Both "Crisis Averted #1" and "Crisis Averted #2" end very abruptly, without a musical "button" on the end, which cues applause. "The Saddest Song" doesn't end at all -- it stops mid-phrase and segues directly into the last big dialogue scene between Jackson and Black Fox. It's a brilliant move because it takes us directly from inside Jackson's chaotic emotions straight into the powerful dramatic tension of his final one-on-one negotiation. And likewise, "Second Nature" does not resolve itself harmonically at the end of the song, making it sound like it doesn't finish -- and maybe that's part of the message of its lyric. Our "taking" continues...

The turning point for the entire show is when Jackson's resident cheerleaders leave the Oval Office, saying, "This isn't fun anymore." Exactly. One cheerleader says, "Direct Democracy directly applied is like totes lame." (She doesn't know it but she's said something really smart there.) The Cheerleaders represent The People, who now turn on Jackson -- and they're all he really had. And that's followed by the second of the two versions of "Crisis Averted." The first is peppy and optimistic, but this second one is cynical and defeatist. The show has turned from Marx Brothers to Brecht. Likewise, the character of Black Fox turns from punchline to formidable opponent.

We have a rare luxury here at New Line Theatre. We've never, in twenty-two seasons, chosen a show for commercial appeal. We produce only the most exciting, most original, most well-crafted works the art form has to offer, and we've developed an audience over the years who want to see that. As I learned many years ago, audiences don't like only what they know; they like what's good. None of us working at New Line make very good money, but we get to do really amazing work.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson may not have done all that well financially on Broadway, but I believe it's one of the genuinely great works of this new Golden Age. Timbers and Friedman are at the top of their games, and I can't wait to see what they each do next. Our art form has never been more vigorous or more alive than it is right now. The nonprofit musical theatre wave of the 1990s and the creation of the internet have democratized the musical theatre. Just as Jackson wrested away power from the political elite, today we have wrested away power of the musical theatre from New York commercial producers. And all of us together across the country and around the world are moving the art form forward every day.

It's so exciting to be part of that.

Come see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson -- details on our website. As Faulkner (and Judy Newmark) said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Yes, there is actually an instrumental number in the show called "Underscore, Motherfuckers," over which Jackson says to the audience, "Uh-huh. That's right. Underscore, motherfuckers." You gotta love a musical like that.