What Are You Doing in My Electricity?

As I've written here before, I'm taking a somewhat different approach to staging Next to Normal. Not radically different, but different. I'm aiming for a more dreamlike atmosphere rather than fairly naturalistic scenes alternating with rock concert style numbers.

We've already staged all of Act I, but I was really stuck on Act II. I kept putting off working on it, and I know that's always a sign that I'm lost. In the off Broadway production, in a song (later cut) that's called "Feeling Electric," they did a trick with a hospital gurney up on its end and Alice Ripley standing up against it, so it seemed like we're were looking down on her from above. That's a cool effect that I've also seen in Into the Woods, The Capeman, and Hairspray, but it works, it's clear, and it's always a fun bit of stage trickery.

On Broadway -- using the new song "Wish I Were Here" in that spot -- they brought out a Diana double on a gurney while the real Diana sang from another part of the stage. And that worked too, but it didn't feel exactly right to me, at least, not in the context of the production we're putting together.

Then it finally hit me why I was stuck.

The gurney was getting in my way. That's how they had showed the audience that Diana is in the hospital. Except the opening of Act II doesn't really take place in the hospital; it takes place inside Diana's anesthetized mind, in a hallucinatory dreamscape. Though Diana is on the table and Natalie is at a club, the two meet here in Diana's dreamscape, and Diana says to her daughter, "Sweetheart! What are you doing in my electricity?" Even Diana has the self-awareness to know that she's inside her own head as it's being zapped.

So if we're inside Diana's head, do we really need a gurney? I don't think so. And that realization totally freed me.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, the Next to Normal team realized during the development process that they had been writing a musical about an idea (ECT) and a musical should be about people. The original Act II opener "Feeling Electric" was a song about ECT, and as they developed the show they realized the Act II opener had to be about Diana, not her treatment. So they wrote "Wish I Were Here" to replace the earlier song, and this new song isn't about the hospital, it's about the chaos in Diana's mind, as it's under assault by the shock treatment, as her memories are being annihilated, as the electricity blasts away at her past and her very identity. After all, our sense of self comes from the accumulated experiences and understanding we've picked up along the Road of Life, so destroying memories -- whether temporarily or permanently -- means the destruction of self as well.

From that perspective, the whole show becomes about Diana's struggle to save her own life.

This is a song about an existential threat to Diana's very existence. It's about Diana's consciousness and the violence done to it, represented by the throbbing rock beat in the music -- Diana's heartbeat, her lifeforce, in the voice of electric guitar. It's a powerful and subtle use of music as storytelling, something of which Tom Kitt is a master -- just listen to High Fidelity.

So the gurney is gone in our production.  But then the question becomes, how do we make it really clear to the audience how this dreamscape works? Or do we need to...?

When I staged this number with the actors earlier this week, I saw on some of their faces that same mix of bewilderment and skepticism that I often see on actors' faces when we're doing weirder shows. And I did something that some actors love and other actors hate. It goes like this, more or less -- "So we're in Diana's dreamscape, but we're also at the hospital where she's getting the ECT, but it's also a little bit musical comedy since you're singing backup, but not too musical comedy -- it shouldn't look choreographed or tightly staged -- it should feel fluid and dreamlike and abstract, just moving around the stage, like Diana's life and memories and sense of self are all swirling around her, her family and the hospital staff melding together, but it's also sort of Brechtian and presentational... So just fuck around and see what happens organically... Just let yourselves play and see where that takes us..."

I've tried this approach before in a number of shows, and it always works. In a show like this, some moments need precise staging, and other moments would be sucked dry by that. Some things need to be carefully worked out in detail, while other things will be far cooler and more interesting if we allow them to develop organically. We have the luxury of a somewhat leisurely rehearsal process.

We don't open for a month yet, and playing and exploring can yield really wonderful results, if you have the time. Some actors love time to play, but some actors don't like not having The Answer. I subscribe to the Jim Lapine school of directing -- get a "first draft" up on stage pretty quickly, and then tweak and shape it over time, as the actors create their performances. I compare it to creating comic books -- first you do the pencil drawings, then you ink it, then you color it.

My job is to give the actors a pencil drawing and then let them ink and color it.

Twenty years ago, that would have terrified me to be so casual and free with staging, but I've learned over time, working on shows like The Wild Party, Hair, Cry-Baby, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and Passing Strange, that sometimes a musical should not look too stagey or too controlled, that it should look more organic, more loose, more like an indie rock concert. After we ran "Wish I Were Here" a couple times, I suggested a few, slightly more specific ideas to the actors, but I was still careful to keep my comments largely abstract and nebulous...

I know our designers are happiest when I talk about our shows in abstract terms, in terms of emotion, feel, impact, themes, etc., and then allow them to translate those abstract ideas into concrete sets, costumes, sound, and lighting. But that same process works with actors too -- if you're working with really great actors, which I am.

The whole show is dreamlike to some degree, but a few moments in the show are very dreamlike, disorienting, disturbing, and revealing in ways that more naturalistic writing or staging would not be. I realize as we work on the show that one of the reasons the show has such resonance for audiences is that Diana sort of stands in for America at this moment in our history -- confused by competing versions of reality, unable to rely on authority figures or long-established institutions (government, education, religion, capitalism, etc.).

We like Hero Myth stories like Diana's because the Hero's Journey is just a metaphor for a human life. But it's also a metaphor for collective journeys, like the evolution of a society. "Wish I Were Here" represents the part of the Hero Myth in which the Hero must journey to the Underworld and do battle with the Evil Wizard. Here the underworld is the fractured personal reality of Diana's electrified mind, and the ECT is the Evil Wizard's magic spell. I'm still trying to figure out if Gabe is her magic amulet (i.e., light saber, ruby slippers) or if he's the antagonist. Or both.

But Diana's Underworld easily stands in for America's current darkness, in which competing parties can't even agree on what is factually true anymore, in which opponents compare each other to Hitler, in which one side rewrites school textbooks to comport with their belief system (and, let's be honest, in order to indoctrinate the next generation), in which so many of the rules of "polite society" have been tossed aside. How do we navigate this new, altered, dangerous landscape?

As we watch Diana navigate her own Underworld, perhaps we gain a little understanding of our own personal and collective Underworlds. And that brings me back to our staging. Instead of making the opening of Act II about this damaged woman undergoing a scary medical procedure, this scene in our production will be about Finding Your Way in the Dark.

Which is kind of the point of the whole show. How do we find our way when we have no map to guide us?

We use art.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You Find Some Way to Survive

I was watching a documentary about Woody Allen and the term "agent of chaos" came up in one of the interviews. That really stuck with me, and it's been swimming around in my head for a few days. Now I'm working through how this relates to Next to Normal. And I keep seeing Heath Ledger...

And I realize how often an agent of chaos has shown up in the musicals I've directed, sometimes as a side character, sometimes as the protagonist. Think of Barry (or even Rob!) in High Fidelity, both Cry-Baby Walker and Lenora in Cry-Baby, Jackson himself in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, pretty much every character in Assassins, Matt and Jason both in bare, Queenie in The Wild Party, Dr. Prospero in Return to the Forbidden Planet, Edgar in Bat Boy, Mr. Bungee in A New Brain. Even Harold Hill in The Music Man, Joey Evans in Pal Joey, Billy Bigelow in Carousel, Anna in The King and I, and Maria in The Sound of Music.

And of course, Diana in Next to Normal.

Now that I'm more aware of this, I see it everywhere. Think of Richard in Richard III or Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Or Jack on Will & Grace.

The agent of chaos is often a misfit. In Next to Normal, Diana is a misfit, but only psychologically. On the outside, she's an average suburban wife and mother, and yet on the inside she is broken. And that brokenness makes it very hard -- impossible? -- for her to fit in the world. In Act II, as the family surveys old photos, we catch references to multiple embarrassing incidents in Diana's past. This has been going on a long time. But in Diana's case, she's not an agent of chaos because she is Id run wild, as with many agents of chaos, but because Ego and Superego are largely dysfunctional. She is an unwilling, "accidental" agent of chaos.

I saw a cool interview recently with the Next to Normal creative team, composer Tom Kitt, lyricist and bookwriter Brian Yorkey, director Michael Greif, and producer David Stone. They talked about how the show was originally called Feeling Electric, partly because the original impetus for writing the show was the issue of ETC (shock therapy), and partly because the show originally had a snarkier, more smartass tone. But one of the lessons the writing team learned as they developed the show over several years, was that they had to write about a person, not an idea (a mistake I made to some extent with my own show Johnny Appleweed). Musicals are the most emotional form of storytelling, so the reason to tell a story as a stage musical is because that story is primarily about emotion -- often love, but not always.

As they rewrote the show, it became more personal and more sincere. In its earlier versions, it was about ETC. Now it's about a woman and her family grappling with mental illness. Big difference. And the new title, apparently chosen more by gut instinct than by reason, reflected this new tone. Interestingly, they chose this title before the title song had been written, so they built that song around their new title.

"Next to Normal" is an unusual phrase that grabs your attention, and though we're all so used to it now, if you think about it even for a second, you see that it packs a lot of meaning. In most shows, the misfit doesn't end up fitting comfortably into the community. Once a misfit, always a misfit. (Two exceptions are Harold Hill and Maria Von Trapp, although you might argue that Meredith Willson's River City is a whole town full of misfits.) So in Next to Normal, instead of taking Diana on a journey from misfit to normal, the writers gave her a more modest, more honest, more nuanced goal, of finding a place next to normal. In the show's finale, Diana sings:

You find some way to survive,
And you find out you don't have to be happy at all
To be happy you're alive.

This is not a Rodgers and Hammerstein bromide like "You'll never walk alone." This is real life. Here, Diana chooses to walk alone. And notice that Diana's lyric is in the second person -- you find some way to survive -- as a reminder that this is not just her journey, but all our journeys. This song is sort of a companion piece to the equally ambiguous finale of Sondheim's Company. There is no happy ending here because there are no happy endings in real life; there's always a next chapter (so we all learned from Into the Woods). What's fucked up today may be fixed tomorrow, but it's equally true that what's fine today may be fucked up tomorrow. We know at the end of Next to Normal that Diana has made a decision, but we have no idea how it will turn out. As the song says, they will go on...

The show's secondary story (and parallel Hero Myth journey) between Natalie and Henry, both mirrors and intersects with the primary story. Like Diana, Natalie is also a misfit, but lucky for her, so is Henry. Structurally, Natalie and Henry are more serious, more integrated versions of Ado Annie and Will Parker. Throughout Next to Normal, there is an underlying tension as we slowly realize the friction between Natalie and Diana comes from Natalie's fear that she will grow up to be über-misfit Diana, that she is as broken as her mother. This fear permeates and shapes Natalie's relationship with Henry. Yorkey underlines this by setting these two couples together at one moment in Act I, when they actually say lines together in unison.

And while Diana takes her own Hero Myth journey, Natalie takes one too. Natalie's goal throughout the show is to find normality. But by the end, she has learned that she has the wrong goal. Instead of trying to be normal -- in other words, like everybody else -- Natalie finally understands that her real goal should be to figure out who she is and what her road is, just like the Youth in Passing Strange. We know Natalie has grown up -- or is growing up -- near the end of the show when she sings to Diana:

I don't need a life that's normal.
That's way too far away.
But something next to normal
Would be okay.
Yeah, something next to normal,
That's the thing I'd like to try,
Close enough to normal
To get by...

She's freeing Diana of guilt and expectations, and in the process, she's letting go of her own neuroses as well. Maybe Natalie has finally realized, with the help of Stoner Zen Master Henry, that normal is artificial, that it is a construct. They're not like other families because everyone's road is different. There is no such thing as normal in the real world, just as there is no such thing as average. Those labels are are about statistics, but our story is about complicated, ever-changing individuals. Normal has no meaning here.

And if there is no such thing as normal, can someone really be a misfit? Or are all of us misfits? Also, isn't life itself fundamentally chaotic? And if it is, doesn't that make all of us agents of chaos?

Probably depends on the shit you're smokin'. As the kids in Spelling Bee remind us, "Life is random and unfair." Neither good or bad, wrong or right. Just chaos. You can be scared by that or you can embrace the adventure. Diana and Natalie have been scared by that and must both learn to embrace the adventure.

The show's title even seems to invoke (though probably unintentionally) the new American musical, in which love stories and Hero Myths are as complicated as real life, in which there are no easy answers or endings, in which we can see ourselves and our own lives much more clearly than we can see them in simplistic shows like The Sound of Music or Brigadoon. This isn't a "normal" musical (if there is such a thing anymore), but it does use devices from both the R&H model and classic musical comedy (as in "It's Gonna Be Good"), so it's fair to say that Next to Normal is "next to normal"...

This story is not neat, tidy or easily wrapped up in a nice little narrative package, the way many musicals did in the old days. I think that's part of what some people hate about the New Golden Age of Musical Theatre that we're in now, but it's what I love most about it. And it's what I love most about Next to Normal.

Normal is boring.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

A Light in the Dark

I saw Next to Normal on Broadway with the original cast, and I loved it.

But now that I'm working on it, thinking about it, writing about it, I realize I want to come at this story in a slightly different way. The original production and the tour were fairly conventionally staged and the scenic design was very cool but was a relatively concrete representation of Diana and Dan's house. I think we're gonna go in a slightly different direction.

I've already blocked Act I, and as I worked on it, I realized that this show is a lot more surrealistic than the original production suggests. The story's narrative is so fractured, sometimes linear, but often detouring into fantasy, delusion, flashback, lots of time telescoping. Following Sondheim's rule that Content Dictates Form, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey have written a show as fragmented and deconstructed as Diana's world. It seems to me their intention is to make the audience understand Diana's mental state by making them literally experience her broken perception of reality. Scott Schoonover's very cool set for New Line's production will suggest a house, but will not represent one in any concrete way. Here's a rendering...

I'm working on letting scenes overflow into each, cross each other, become background for each other. Rather than just watch a story, I want the audience to feel Diana's disorientation, her inability to reliably hold on to reality, her confusion when her delusions take over.

When I wrote my last show, Johnny Appleweed, a very strange stoner political satire, I realized as we worked on it, that I had written a show that made the audience feel stoned, even if they had never smoked pot. The show repeatedly veered off into stoner surrealism, into fucked-up flashbacks, even a piece of slam poetry, not to mention a Jesus puppet. It wasn't a show for everyone, but my experiment worked. The audience felt stoned.

When we did High Fidelity, we realized that the show places us squarely inside Rob's head. He narrates his own story and we hear everyone in his life in the musical vocabulary of Rob's favorite recording artists. We get the story only from Rob's point of view, which is totally organic to the novel the show was based on. Content Dictates Form.

With Next to Normal, we're not really inside Diana's head, since we see parts of the story that Diana is not present for. But we are inside her world, a world where things don't make sense as often as they do. When Diana suddenly hallucinates her new doctor singing like a rock star, we share that hallucination. When Diana slips into delusion, we experience that delusion with her.

One of the show's central points -- at least what I think it is, at this early moment in our process -- is that mental illness affects not just the person suffering from the illness, but also everyone around them. The paired songs, "You Don't Know" and "I Am the One," halfway through Act I, get at that point most directly. And the story's other central point, an existential view that it shares with Passing Strange, is that everyone has his own road and his own destination -- or as Passing Strange puts it, his own Real. You can't follow someone else's path, because their Real is different from your Real.

Diana has to find her path, but throughout much of the show, everyone else is telling her what that path should be. It's only at the end when she takes control of her own life, that we think she may find her Real. Of course, like Company, the end of Next to Normal is ambiguous. Diana is taking action, but we have no idea what the results of that action will be. Will she be better? Worse? Those answers aren't the point of this story. The point is that Diana finds her path. Just like Bobby in Company.

Like many of our shows, Next to Normal is a Hero Myth. Actually, it's a double Hero Myth, because Natalie travels through her own Hero Myth as well. Each of them are forced into their journey, encounter obstacles, pick up companions along the way, do battle with the Evil Wizard (in this case, themselves -- just like Luke on Dagobah), and they each find new wisdom to point them forward. The title song near the end of the show points up the parallels between Diana and Natalie, but we see as the show ends that their paths are different. As it should be.

This is a complicated, adult story. It's not adult because the characters say fuck a lot, but because this is a story about things usually only adults experience -- a disintegrating marriage, regret, emotional scars, weariness, big existential questions...

Like most of the shows New Line produces, Next to Normal is endlessly rich and complex and brutally honest. As I've argued many time, people don't go to the theatre (or movies) for escape, despite what the shallow types will tell you; they go for connection. To make sense of the world around them and their own lives, to be reminded that we all go through essentially the same trials, that we are not alone.

We don't all have bipolar disorder, but we do all deal, in one way or another, with the same challenges and questions Diana faces. 

It's the same reason humans told stories around the camp fires in our earliest days. As the show reminds us,

Day after day...
We'll find the will
To find our way,
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done,
There will be light.

Sondheim says the point of art is to make order out of the chaos of our world. I couldn't agree more. Art selects from life, focuses, juxtaposes, reveals, magnifies, all in the service of telling a meaningful story that helps us navigate the rough terrain of being human in the 21st century.

You don't have to be bipolar to see your own daily struggles in Diana's more extreme struggles. And that's why storytelling is important to the culture. And why I make theatre. And why people are going to find Next to Normal genuinely powerful and incisive.

Last night we had our read-through-sing-through, and tonight we start blocking the show. It's been a great ride so far and it's just going to get better. The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!

Scott

Next to Normal

How did you get there from here, Mr. Shepard? 
What did you have to go through? 

I was watching the new PBS documentary, Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy (which is really great!), and I suddenly saw so clearly the direct line through the entire history of musical theatre leading straight to Next to Normal.

At the turn of the last century, the legendary George M. Cohan invented the American musical comedy. He was the guy who put the muscle and the rowdiness into the American theatre. He put onstage for the first time American slang, American pop music, the American immigrant experience, the wild, aggressive, chaotic vibe that is the American experiment. Almost everything we do in musical theatre today is built on the shoulders of Cohan.

In the early 1940s, two veteran musical theatre writers joined forces and created the Rodgers and Hammerstein Revolution, which in retrospect was as much a detour as an evolution. With the twenty-twenty hindsight of the twenty-first century, we can see now that the R&H model was really an outlier in the evolution of the art form. R&H tried to impose the rules and devices of the 1930s "well-made play" and the "social problem play" onto the musical theatre and it was an uncomfortable marriage, unable to meld naturalism and the fourth wall with the inherent Brechtian artificiality of musicals. And this artistic Frankenstein's monster unintentionally stopped the art form from further evolving during the 1950s. Yes, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first few shows did move us forward, but their later shows did not, and the weird restrictions of the model they created tied the hands of musical theatre artists for a while.

In the 1960s and 70s, Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim rejected the R&H model and started (also probably unintentionally) the Prince-Sondheim Revolution, creating (well, more accurately, perfecting) the Concept Musical, shows in which a central metaphor or theme takes precedence over linear narrative. They changed everything again, but this time, they created such a free and open new form, that it opened countless new artistic doors for writers and directors.

We're opening doors,
Saying, "Here we are!"

To use a fairly tortured metaphor, Rodgers and Hammerstein were like alcohol -- they shut down the possibilities like alcohol shuts down the mind. Prince and Sondheim were like marijuana -- they opened up possibilities like pot opens up the mind. Rodgers and Hammerstein were trapped in midcentury conformity and morality, but our country was changing in massive, fundamental ways. Prince and Sondheim's work was born out of the rebellious, dangerous, open 1960s.

Parallel to the Prince-Sondheim revolution was the birth of the rock musical. Expresso Bongo in London was the first real rock musical, but Hair was the first rock musical on Broadway and it was the show everyone else tried to imitate for years afterward, with shows like Godspell, Grease, The Me Nobody Knows, and others. The rock musical struggled for a while to claim its place in the art form's evolution, but by the mid-1990s, the rock musical was on track to becoming the dominant musical theatre form, which has now happened fully.

Meanwhile, back in the 1980s, the British Invasion hit Broadway and shaped musical theatre tastes for a while with its new "mega-musical," in which the physical production and orchestrations became more important than the music and lyrics, rather than serving them. Most of the time, there was no book. This was also a detour in the art form's evolution, because these shows are built on very old European forms, even though they use the musical vocabulary of rock and/or pop. When rock musicals took their rightful place at the front of the art form in the mid-1990s, the effects of the British Invasion lessened considerably. Today, though the most popular mega-musicals are still with us, that's no longer the dominant form.

During the early and mid-1990s, the American musical theatre began a new era, a new Golden Age, in which two new forms -- well, sort of new -- now drive the evolution of the art form: the neo musical comedy and the neo rock musical. Collectively, I call these two forms the New American Musical. The neo musical comedy takes the form, structure, and devices of the Cohan musical comedy, but layers on them the ironic, self-referential humor of today's culture, along with much darker, much more substantial narrative content. Just look at A New Brain, Assassins, Spelling Bee, Bat Boy, Urinetown, The Wild Party, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Bukowsical, or Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

The neo rock musical melds together some of the more serious narrative devices and forms of the R&H model, with the (inherently Brechtian) modern rock concert, to create a new hybrid that speaks to our current cultural zeitgeist in a powerful way. Think of Rent, Hedwig ad the Angry Inch, The Capeman, Spring Awakening, Love Kills, Passing Strange, American Idiot, bare, High Fidelity...

And Next to Normal.

I've written a lot in the last couple years about what an amazing time this is for our art form. The American musical theatre has never been more vigorous, more alive, or more forward-looking. We New Liners are very lucky that we get to work on so many of these truly transformational pieces, that we get to watch the art form evolve, in real time and from a front row seat.

We started working on Next to Normal last week and as I listen to our amazing cast singing these remarkable songs in rehearsal, I am repeatedly reminded how special and how unique this show is -- and how much the show represents the forward motion of our art form.

I was asked to be a guest yesterday at the Musical Theatre Educators Alliance conference, and it was so cool being in a room with a whole bunch of educators who agree with me about the present and the future of our art form. Sometimes I feel like a lone prophet, trying to convince the world that musicals aren't stupid and silly, that they are powerful, relevant, and vital to the health of our society. Sometimes I feel like I'm arguing climate change -- even though tons of evidence is on my side, there is often such firm conviction that I'm wrong.

Maybe the very existence of New Line over the last twenty-one years is just my elaborate way of proving my own point. We'll certainly be proving it with Next to Normal. More so than with anyone else I know, my earliest memories from childhood all pointed directly toward where I'm going today. I was born the same year most people cite as the end of the Rodgers & Hammerstein era, the same year Sondheim's first great experiment Anyone Can Whistle opened (and closed), launching the Prince-Sondheim Revolution. And I just happened to start a theatre company right when the New Golden Age was beginning. It's not just that the history of musical theatre draws a straight line to this moment; so does my life. Mother said, straight ahead, not to delay or be misled.

I'm so full of gratitude and joy and responsibility. I already can tell that working on Next to Normal is going to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

The adventure begins.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Happiness, Pleasure, Contentment, Serenity, Joy, Bliss, and Glee

Usually I do a Year-in-Review blog post at this time of year, looking back on the cool work we've done; or sometimes a Looking-Forward blog post, about the cool work ahead in the coming year...

But this year, I want to look back on just one thing: Cry-Baby.

We New Liners get some amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities from time to time, and this was one of them. The show was such a commercial failure in New York that no one would license it for further productions. I think the writers assumed it would never live again. And I almost got trapped by that same mindset. I remember thinking one day, What a shame that Cry-Baby sucks. That would've been such a fun show to work on.

And then it hit me -- all the shows we've produced over the years that New York thought were shitty but which blossomed under our care, to adoring audiences and rave reviews. Nobody ever thought High Fidelity could be reborn after its Broadway debacle, but we did it anyway, and now it's being produced around the country. What if Cry-Baby is actually really good?, I wondered.

It took some effort but I found one of the Cry-Baby songwriters David Javerbaum and got the script and score. A friend of mine found me a bootleg audio recording of the score. And I discovered that not only were the songs both really great and really funny, but the script was brilliant. The stage writers strayed from John Waters' original film a fair amount, but they did with the show what so few musical stage adaptations do. Instead of just trimming the screenplay and adding songs -- the usual adaptation process, but one that almost never works -- the Cry-Baby team translated the show for the musical stage, finding musical comedy equivalents for Waters' film devices. They found the moral center of the Waters' story -- Hairspray is about injustice based on race, but Cry-Baby is about injustice based on class -- and everything else radiated out from that, commenting as powerfully on these times as it does on our past. They used contrasting period music styles to delineate social class, and so the score was constructed as a battle between musical comedy and the rock musical, paralleling the literal action of the plot.

These guys wrote a serious show that's full of laughs and wacky physical comedy. But underneath it all, it's a serious story. That's what the production team in New York didn't understand. After we had decided to do the show, another friend found me a bootleg video of the Broadway production and I was astounded at how bad it was. The production team really didn't understand it, but I could see underneath the clumsy direction and over-produced sets this satiric gem that just needed some care and respect.

The writers were delighted that we wanted to produce the show and I had the great fun of meeting all four of them -- Javerbaum, his co-songwriter Adam Schlessinger, and bookwriters Tom Meehan and Mark O'Donnell -- at what was without doubt the funniest brunch I've ever had. Because we were essentially starting from scratch with the show, it was really helpful for me to talk to them before starting work. They were all so supportive through the whole process.

They also told me two things at the brunch that were very cool. First, they told me they would leave it to me how to trim their script to reduce the cast from 26 to 15 (though we ended up making almost no cuts). Second, they told me that they were gonna have the score re-orchestrated for us. It had originally been scored for a full Broadway orchestra, but none of them had wanted that, so now they could get the sound they had always wanted -- a six-piece rock band.

We got an amazing cast for the show, and as often happens at New Line, a new guy named Ryan Foizey walked in off the street and got the lead. (I love how much that happens at New Line!) Surrounding him were some of the best actors I've ever worked with, most of them our New Line regulars. And this was one of those shows that I really understood in my gut, so it was a breeze to stage it. Maybe the biggest surprise was that as we worked, we kept discovering dozens of tiny details that confirmed for us what a carefully wrought, beautifully built, and utterly original piece of writing this show is. Cry-Baby is a neo musical comedy, using the tools of old-school musical comedy but with dark, ironic, serious content, much like Little Shop of Horrors, Bat Boy, Urinetown, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

As weird and aggressive as this show is, none of us were sure what audiences would think of it, but we were having a blast. So we opened the show and audiences and critics alike fell in love with it. Adam Schlessinger even flew in to see it and was very happy. We got rave review after rave review, big houses, and just in the last week, lots of year-end accolades from the press. What an awesome end to the story. And the secret to our success is a simple one -- trust the material. There are a lot of people working on Broadway today who have not yet learned that lesson. But it seems to me, when you've got material this strong, it should be easy to trust it.

It was truly one of the coolest theatre experiences I've ever had. And even though our other shows this year, High Fidelity and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, were similarly awesome and critically acclaimed, Cry-Baby was something special. I was proud not just of our outstanding production but also of our service to the art form, in bringing this genuinely brilliant work of art back to life. Because we did the exact same thing the first time we produced High Fidelity in 2008, I have great confidence that Cry-Baby will now have a long, healthy life. We've already gotten emails from ten companies asking how to get production rights. And that's pretty fucking cool.

2012 was a tough year in a lot of ways. But it was also the year Cry-Baby was reborn. And I will always be grateful for that experience.

Rehearsals for Next to Normal start in less than a week. The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott