Jerk It When You Work It, Baby

The more we work on this show, the more treasure I find there. And the more I read Bukowski, the more I can see how much the Bukowsical writers, Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green, really understand Bukowski and his work. This is the most literate R-rated show we've ever done...

One of the most interesting -- and in some ways, weirdest -- songs in Bukowsical is "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty." In this postmodern vaudeville number, four famous writers, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath give Bukowski advice and encouragement. And their central lesson to him is to Be Yourself.

Burroughs: With gluttonous voracity!
Faulkner: Sing of violence and pugnacity!
Plath: I wrote my stuff sardonic.
Burroughs: I wrote mine catatonic.
Williams: I liked my sex symbolic.
All: And we all were alcoholic.

That last line is funny but it also implies a question that pervades Bukowsical. Why are all these great writers, and Bukowski in particular, so fucked up? Is it the same thing that makes them great writers and also makes them fucked up? Would they be great writers if they weren't fucked up? I often tease my actors that "You have to suffer for your art." But maybe it's true. Maybe you have to. One lyric early in the show goes, "Life is rotten and art is pain." Wow.

"Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" ends with some playful rhymes that reveal genuine truth.

All: With candor and sagacity,
With fervor and tenacity,
We’ll drink to our capacity,
Williams: But please, sir… No mendacity!
All: Get down, get dark, and just get dirty...

Yes, they are all alcoholics, but they are serious about their work and they cannot stomach less than the truth. Williams' line is a comic reference to Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but it also speaks to these writers' artistic integrity. No mendacity. No lies. Fictions, sure, but not lies.

This is a song about artistic -- and spiritual? -- freedom, fearlessness, honesty. These four famous writers (as Stockdale and Green have incarnated them, at least) make the argument for telling the truth even when it's ugly, even when it's controversial, even when it's dangerous, even when it's about sex. As long as it's the truth. The last line of this song is, "Jerk it while you work it, baby, dirty it up!"

This show is about the relationship between an artist's life and his work -- in this case, a really fucked-up artist and his really fucked-up work -- a show about what it's like to be an artist. And right at the center of the evening is this song, which gets to the heart of the show. As rowdy and raunchy as it is -- and it really is -- this is a song about the moment when an artist learns to free himself, to reject the conventions and expectations of others, and to find his true voice, his authenticity.

This scene is more sophisticated than it might appear, with its old-fashioned vaudevillian style, and it's potty-mouth'd lyric. It does some important storytelling. In Assassins, all the American assassins from throughout history all converge on the Texas Book Depository in 1963 to convince Oswald to shoot Kennedy. It's a brilliant, chilling scene. But it doesn't suggest that Oswald was delusional; it's a dramatic representation of the influence on Oswald of those assassins who had gone before him. Suddenly, instead of a crazy loner, Oswald becomes part of a force of history, and that gives him the courage to shoot Kennedy. Likewise, in Bukowsical, in order to dramatize the influence of the other great American writers on Bukowski, Stockdale and Green present those writers in the flesh, to have a conversation (well, a vaudeville number) with Bukowski. It's a fun way to get at a somewhat abstract point, and it's utterly organic to the rest of the show.

And it's really funny. Wait till you see Robin's choreography for it...

It's a pretty potent group of ghosts who show up here. Williams S. Burroughs, one of the founders of the Beat movement, was one of the most politically and culturally influential, and most innovative artists of the 20th century, writing about drugs, homosexuality, and other controversial topics. Like other writers discussed here, Burroughs wrote a lot of autobiographical fiction. His most controversial work was his novel Naked Lunch in 1959, which included a talking anus. According to Wikipedia:

Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift," a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius."

Burroughs shot his wife Joan in 1951, playing drunken games, and he later wrote:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Kinda sounds like something Bukowski might have written.

We think of Tennessee Williams plays as "classics" today, but many of them were extremely controversial when he wrote them -- the prominent sexual content of many of his works, the only barely veiled homosexuality at the center of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer, the domestic abuse and sexual content of A Streetcar Named Desire, and of course, his works of dark autobiographical fiction, most notably, The Glass Menagerie.

His plays were R-rated enough that most of them had to be substantially rewritten for film. Like Bukowski, Williams suffered from depression throughout his life.

William Faulkner is considered one of the greatest of American writers. Like most of these other writers, Faulkner wrote in many forms, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, screenplays. To quote Wikipedia again:

Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.

Like Bukowski and Burroughs, Faulkner was fascinated by the American underclass.

Sylvia Plath is such an interesting choice to put in this group. Like Bukowski, she was very controversial, writing about the straitjacket of mid-century Western civilization for women -- from the inside -- in what was called "confessional poetry." Honor Moore of Boston Review wrote: "When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened. Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified." Like Bukowski, she also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel. And as Bukowski did, Plath and her husband traveled across the country. She later said that was when she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses."

In the book Morbid Curiosity: The Disturbing Demises of the Famous and Infamous, Alan Petrucelli titles one section Easy Off(ed) and writes, "Mother knows best. When noted bipolar poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) decided to take the final path, she made sure her two children would be safe. Before turning on the gas jets in her London kitchen, she left them bread and milk, cracked open a window in their bedroom, and placed wet towels at the foot of their door to prevent the toxic fumes from reaching them. Then Path, depressed over her husband’s infidelities, stuck her head deep into the bowels of the oven. The Plath passings didn't end there: On March 16, 2009, Path’s forty-seven-year-old son Nicholas Hughes hanged himself in his Alaska home – forty six years after his mother’s suicide and almost forty years to the day after his father’s mistress, poet Assia Wevill , killed herself and her four-year old daughter Shura in a copycat suicide. Assia gave her daughter some sleeping pills, popped some herself, sealed off the kitchen windows and door, and turned on the gas.”

Plath seems right at home among these others.

And even more writers get shout-outs over the course of the show -- Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Malcolm Lowry, Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Tom Wolfe, Rod McKuen, Erich Segal, Gore Vidal, and others. Not only are the literary references fun for those who catch them, they also subtly place Bukowski among the great writers of the 20th century.

And not just great writers, but great rebels. Shelley was an artistic, political, and social radical, so much so that publishers were afraid to publish his work for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy or sedition. Lord Byron was a bipolar hedonist, not unlike Bukowski in some ways. Keats was a sensualist, like Bukowski. Melville was a modernist. Hemingway was a hard-living, hard-drinking, ground-breaking minimalist. Steinbeck was the chronicler of the American underclass. According to Wikipedia, "Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism." Bukowski would take that experiment and make it even more personal with his autobiographical fiction. Malcolm Lowry also wrote autobiographical fiction, was an alcoholic, and may have killed himself with a barbiturate overdose. You can see how all these writers may have influenced Bukowski's work, and how much they all have in common. He'd be right at home among them.

Someone should write a play and put all these writers in the same room for two hours. With a fully stocked bar, of course.

It's likely that many of the people who see our show will not have read any of Bukowski's work, but that won't keep them from enjoying the wacky anarchy of this show. And I bet a lot of them will check out his books after seeing the show. And maybe they'll also check out some Steinbeck and Faulkner and Plath... Oh my!

I love art about art. The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Art is Pain

A big part of the fun of Bukowsical is the whimsical, cartoony way Stockdale and Green approach each of the relentlessly dark episodes in Bukowski's life, always in the "inappropriate" language of high-energy musical comedy.

Even for those who know nothing about Charles Bukowski, this dissonance is really obvious and really entertaining. For Bukowski fans, there's even more fun, as they'll realize we're essentially telling the truth about his sordid life. And that's what makes this deeply ironic musical so special -- it's both "wrong" and "right" at the same time.

In the show's second song, "Art is Pain," we get a glimpse into Bukowski's torturous childhood as an outcast in the 1930s, a period he wrote about in his novel Ham on Rye. As the song begins, a grade school teacher is asking the class about the Alien and Sedition Act, as a not-so-subtle reminder to young Bukowski that he is "foreign" (having been born in Germany) and therefore Other. The actual text of the act reads, "That it shall be lawful for the President of the United States at any time during the continuance of this act, to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof, to depart out of the territory of the United States." In other words, we can get rid of you anytime we want.

The structure of the song is interesting -- first the teacher's abuse, then the kids' abuse, then the father's abuse, then all three at once. This is Bukowski's hell.

With this song, the writers establish their pattern for the evening of using music ironically, here portraying Buk's youthful hellscape in the form of a children's song -- as Sondheim preaches, Content Dictates Form -- a very simple melody with a very small range, short percussive words, and lots of repetition. And it's really nothing more than mean, random, childish insults:

You're stupid, gross and ugly and we hate you.
You’re always at the bottom of the class.
We all wish we could find some kind of way to
Push you off a freeway overpass.

We don’t think you’re very nice.
And we’re sure that you have lice.
It’s time for someone to step up now
And kindly kick his fucking ass.

There are even some nyah, nyah nyah's. The extra horror here is that the teacher starts the torment, and later in the song, Buk's father invites the kids to help him physically beat Bukowski. It's both darkly funny and really brutal, and as you watch it, you wonder how he turned out as an artist instead of Norman Bates. This horror scene/song offers up the real-life truth about Buk's early years -- and probably invokes awful memories from many in the audience -- but it also trades in wacky, comic exaggeration. We laugh even though we're horrified. Just like Bukowski's writing.

But the song also has important structural significance. The opening number sets up the show's unique brand of humor and its perverse obscenity, but "Art is Pain" sets up the show's darkness and its central through-line. From this point forward, no matter how mean or vulgar Bukowski gets, we understand the psychic damage that got him here. This song acts as an explanation -- even an excuse? -- for Bukowski's behavior as an adult. For the rest of the show, we not only accept his assholery, we're on his side.

In the next song, the hilarious "Take Me," a teenaged Bukowski is introduced to alcohol by a waltzing, singing bottle of booze...

There’s a secret world
In the heart of a real poet,
But unless you get shitfaced,
You'll never know it.
So…
Take me, Take me,
Quaff and boilermake me,
Take me, I'm yours!

Take a little drink,
Take a little drink,
It will help you more than you know --
You'll be like Poe.
Sooner than you think,
You'll be on the brink,
Like Steinbeck and Papa and so,
Onward you go.
You'll be more adored than
Shelley, Keats or Byron.
Can't you hear me calling to you
Like a siren...?

What's so wonderful about this song is that it works as a traditional "Boy Gets Girl" musical comedy seduction number, like "Make Believe" in Show Boat, "I Could Write a Book" in Pal Joey, "They Say It's Wonderful" in Annie Get Your Gun, "I'll Know" in Guys and Dolls, "Metaphor" in The Fantasticks, and lots of others. This is the song in which the Hero convinces his Love that they belong together, and often they end up dancing (or at least, harmonizing) to show us how clearly they belong together. In Bukowsical, the writers subvert this standard song type in two ways, first, by having the woman sing it to the man (Gypsy also did this, with "Small World" and "You'll Never Get Away from Me"), and second, by making that woman into a waltzing, singing bottle of booze (I don't think any other show ever did that).

And even beyond the deconstruction of the song form, they've chosen standard 1930s musical comedy tools to tell this part of the story that takes place in the 1930s.

Sondheim deconstructed this song type with "Lovely" in Forum, and weirdly, because there have been so many rewrites of Anything Goes, there are three songs that function this way in that iconic show -- "All Through the Night" in the original 1934 production, replaced by "It's De-Lovely" in the 1962 off Broadway revival, and replaced again by "Easy to Love" (the first song originally written for the spot) in the 1987 and 2011 Broadway revivals. But they all work the same way. We see this song type less often these days, because more new musicals are telling Hero Myth stories rather than love stories. Here, with "Take Me," Bukowsical is operating both as a traditional musical comedy as an ironic, postmodern, neo musical comedy. That's some great writing.

Just a few songs later, we'll get another "Boy Gets Girl" song -- this time with an actual woman -- the Carpenters' inspired "Chaser of My Heart," almost exactly quoting the introduction to "Close to You." No musical has two of these songs, but in this case it points up the central conflict of Bukowski's personal life, the battle between booze and everything else. Plus, he'll soon learn that he writes better drunk, so that will tip the scales. In Bukowsical, Boy gets two Girls (and even more later in "Love is a Dog from Hell"), but we can all see how badly that will turn out...

Though I think you'll be surprised -- and amused -- at just how badly it will turn out...

During the 1940s Bukowski traveled, living hand-to-mouth, living the life of a "hobo." His novel about this time, Factotum, is translated for the stage into the song "Derelict Trail," a classic musical comedy "traveling" song, like "Getting Out of Town" in 42nd Street or "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" in Hello, Dolly! This big, upbeat, company number turns hobos, hookers, and Native Americans into cardboard characters out of a 1940s Broadway revue or Ziegfeld Follies, nothing more than sanitized travelogue props. America's very real economic woes (homelessness, unemployment, etc.) are presented as this charming, romanticized "subculture" that 1940s Hollywood films traded in, specifically the 1941 movie Sullivan's Travels.

In its meta-layer, the song makes us a little uncomfortable, reminding us that until a couple decades ago, no one even thought about the homeless, other than as punchlines and clowns. My older readers will remember comedian Red Skelton's hobo character Freddy the Freeloader, a name that makes most of us cringe in a time when the Republican party has divided us into "makers and takers," and "the forty-seven percent." People used to call them hobos and bums, dismissing them as somehow less than "normal" people. "Derelict Trail" takes on that shallow, midcentury social myopia, and the show's very politically incorrect presentation takes on an uncomfortable dissonance with the way we talk and think about this problem today.

Interestingly, when we hear the reprise of "The Derelict Trail" later in the show, the title phrase subtly changes its meaning. In the earlier song, the phrase means life on the road; in the later song, as Bukowski finally finds early commercial success, the phrase now refers to the life path Bukowski (the self-styled derelict) has chosen for himself, a path that will take him where he wants to go. In the earlier song, it's other people's path, which he joins; in the later song, it's his path.

Most of us would recognize the intro to "Gee, Officer Krupke," from West Side Story (1957) -- it starts with a short, quick little four-note run down to a "wrong" note (the tritone, known as "the Devil in music") that rings underneath a fun but dissonant vaudeville accompaniment (remember that in the 1950s, vaudeville wasn't all that long ago). That tritone pedal note also makes the key ambiguous. Long before the neo musical comedy emerged, this song worked the same way -- dark, ironic lyrics set to perky, subtly altered, old-fashioned music -- always with that "wrong" note starting every verse... Something's not right here...

Bukowsical's "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" borrows that wrong note and the older song's split personality, as it portrays Bukowski's evolution as a writer in the late 1950s. With everything in American culture changing rapidly and fundamentally (rock and roll, sex, drugs, movies, TV, the Beats), Bukowski finds himself visited by four great American writers -- Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath. These four fearless, groundbreaking iconoclasts offer Bukowski a lesson: if he wants to be successful, he must "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" --

Don't huddle in some hovel,
Trying to write the perfect novel.
Like some loser with a useless Ph.D.
Hit below the belt and you can never fail --
Get down, get dark, get dirty.

Don't be shy, the world is waiting --
Writing's like ejaculating.
Get down, get dark, get dirty.
Face the truth, you crazy bastard --
You write better when you're plastered!
Get down, get dark, get dirty.
Don’t sweat commas and conjunctions;
It’s your scatologic functions
That will guarantee your place in history.
Even Willy Shakespeare liked to tongue some tail...
Get down, get dark, get dirty.

It's such a fun lyric, partly because it takes these great writers down off the pedestal, and partly because they're right -- Shakespeare wrote tons of dirty jokes into his plays, because audiences love it. Most of what our culture calls "dirty" is really just human and natural, but it's treated as perverse and dangerous, thanks to our Puritan roots -- and never more so than in the pre-HBO 1950s. (I highly recommend the documentary Fuck.) But behind the comedy here is some serious truth -- great artists become great when they are freed from constraint. Which is why HBO shows are so much better than broadcast TV. This song is about freeing Bukowski to write about what he wants to write about. This is the moment when Bukowski becomes an artist.

Bukowsical's writers have dramatized the influence other writers' work had on Bukowski by physically placing four of them onstage with him, offering advice. But the larger point is not lost in all the laughs -- the times were changing and Bukowski was right in the middle of the revolution. He started writing poetry right around this time, in the mid-1950s, and his first poetry collection was published in 1960.

But Bukowsical's story stays in the 1950s and early 1960s for a while, as we move on to the cultural response to the revolution those great writers were leading...

The song "Slippery Slope" gives us a classic Disney villain's song, a companion piece to "Poor Unfortunate Souls," "Cruella DeVil," and of course "Hellfire" from The Hunchback of Notre Dame; but here the Disney villain is the real-world television personality, Bishop Fulton Sheen, the 1950s version of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Because Bukowsical is such a weird and unconventional Hero Myth story, it's hard to identify one antagonist -- this is more of a Man vs. Society story than a Man vs. Man story. In this song, Bishop Sheen represents the repressive 1950s culture that Bukowski, Williams, Faulkner, Burroughs, and Plath were raging against, the cultivation of a homogenous, even bland, national culture. And TV was a huge part of that effort.

So to musicalize that idea, the show's writers give us Sheen's telecast in the form of an Italian tarantella, the perfect ironic musical form for America's ultimate Roman Catholic. And as fundamentalist Christians often do, Bukowsical's Sheen seems to get perverse pleasure in cataloguing all our sins in lurid detail, which makes it all even funnier. And here's the weird part -- probably unintended by the writers -- the Italian tarantella was originally a frantic "medicinal" dance, once thought to be the only treatment for a tarantula bite, to literally dance the poison out of your system. How funny that this musical form becomes Bishop Sheen's apocalyptic warning of America's demise, as he tries to preach the poison out of the American culture, and as his singing turns the ever-so-earnest bishop into an Italian comic opera villain from a 50s TV variety show.

The whole score is built with this kind of wit and deft touch.

The song "Postal," about Bukowski's soul-crushing time working for the Post Office in the 1960s, is rendered as a driving, anxious, dissonant piece of music -- constantly setting two eighth notes in the vocal line against five sixteenth notes (on every beat) in the accompaniment. That gives the music a feeling of wrongness, of not fitting, of discomfort, a musical equivalent to Bukowski's struggle to fit in and conform (if only for a paycheck) versus his hunger for freedom.

The schizoid number "Through a Glass, Barfly" gives us a comic (and madly exaggerated) behind-the-scenes glimpse into the casting of Bukowski's 1987 film Barfly. To dramatize French director Barbet Schroeder choosing between his two possible leads, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, Bukowsical's writers give Schroeder a European waltz -- a French chanson, worthy of Maurice Chevalier or Charles Aznavour -- alternating with Rourke and Penn's aggressive 1980s rock and roll verses.

I think there's also another sideways reference to West Side Story late in the show, when the Bitch Goddess of Fame and the Bitch Goddess of Fortune get a twisted jazz vocal line in the song "Bitches" that's gotta be a nod to West Side Story's "Cool."

It's a whole score full of funny music, something you don't always get in a musical comedy...

And then there's the operatic "Elegy," but I don't want to ruin that surprise for you...

Maybe the biggest musical surprise (at least to me) is the song "That's Los Angeles to Me," a weird, comic interruption in the show that sounds a lot like "Look for the Union Label," both songs about pride and community and a demand for respect.

The central joke of the Bukowsical song is the dubious, questionable things they're bragging about, set to this proud, defiant music.

Maybe you've got Sardi's
And Tavern on the Green,
And maybe you've got restaurants
That don't close at 10:15.
Maybe you’ve got Sondheim,
But we’ve got Charlie Sheen.
And baby, that's Los Angeles to me.
. . .
We’ve learned to feel,
Not merely think;
And we’ve got Dianetics,
So we never need a shrink.

But even though "Los Angeles" interrupts the story, even though it seems like it doesn't "belong" in the show, the truth is that it gets at something fundamental about Bukowski's life and work -- Los Angeles is at the heart of everything for Bukowski (which is why it will be the central image in our Bukowsical set). The song is presented to us as not a part of Bukowski's story, but the authors are pulling a double-fake on us, because it really is.

This score is so smart, so clever, so subtle in such unexpected ways, and we're having such a blast digging into it.

The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Got the World Right By the Balls

So how do you stage a wild, even bizarre show like Bukowsical?

Good Question. I'm working on it...

Sometimes when I'm directing, I get lost in trying to find a "clever" way to stage something, or to avoid being "boring." But those are the wrong goals. The right goal is to figure out what this story and these writers are saying, then come up with the clearest possible way to tell that story. How can my physical staging make each moment as clear as it can be? If I'm working on good material, I don't have to add to it; I just have to reveal it.

I realized a while back that most New Line shows share a common trait -- they are sui generis, completely and fundamentally unlike anything else, original in the extreme. Just look at shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bat Boy, Love Kills, Assassins, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, Floyd Collins, Return to the Forbidden Planet, The Rocky Horror Show, Passing Strange, High Fidelity, A New Brain, The Robber Bridegroom, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Kiss of the Spider Woman... I could keep going...

So for every show, I have to start back at square one and figure out how this show works, what the rules are this time. The answers are never the same twice.

And of course, Bukowsical is also on that list. I've never encountered anything like it before. Its fundamental premise is so "wrong," so hilariously dissonant, that it feels like it could only have been born of copious amounts of incredi-weed. (I have no actual information on whether that's true.) Sure, there are other shows that are mash-ups of dissonant genres -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Catch Me If You Can, Urinetown, Forbidden Planet, and others -- but Bukowsical chose two forms that are even more dissonant, and surprisingly, also more revealing.

Bukowsical is a subversive, rule-busting musical about a subversive, rule-busting writer. It is "carnivalesque," which Wikipedia describes as a term used by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival, in which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the cassock." With Bukowski as the Lord of Misrule, a title he would have loved.

As always, Content Dictates Form.

Ask somebody if they like musicals, and if they don't, ask them why. Almost everything they say they hate about musicals is generally no longer true. Many contemporary musicals reject the love story for the Hero Myth. Most new musicals reject the awkward Fourth Wall "naturalism" of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Yes, characters still break into song, but there's no pretense of "reality" before they break into song, so it doesn't feel phony in the same way. After all, people break into song in music videos. It's not really the singing that bothers people; it's the "breaking" into song (think about that verb), the cracking of the "reality" we're asked to accept. I think it was largely the laughable Fourth Wall "lie" of mid-century musicals, coupled with their simplistic, faux romanticism, that has turned off so many people to the art form, at least since the 1960s.

Musicals used to be an incredibly popular, mainstream form, but for a big part of the later 20th century, the art form didn't keep up with the culture. But that's changing...

We sometimes joke that New Line produces musicals for people who hate musicals. The truth is we produce musicals for people who hate old-fashioned, phony musicals that traffic in shallow love, shallow morality, and superficial Happy Endings. I'm lookin' at you, Brigadoon. New Line shows are honest. Even at their most outrageous, they are about the real world as it really is, and they reject the lies of the midcentury musical. Almost none of our shows have a Fourth Wall, and those that do, violate it repeatedly.

Classic musical comedy and its latest descendant, the neo musical comedy, are fundamentally honest because they never pretend to actually represent reality. The actors often face front and sing directly to the audience. The actors can see the audience, even interact with them, in a way they never would have in the Rodgers and Hammerstein model. They sing in harmony and move in choreographic unison, without explanation; while in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the dance must be explained away as a party, a dream, a performance. In musical comedy, dance is part of the base language, not a device.

In neo musical comedies, there's always an ironic, self-aware, meta layer interacting with the story and the storytelling. For instance, in the finale of Cry-Baby, the meta layer of what the audience actually knows about America today comically contradicts the utopian America these characters in 1954 think they see coming, in the song "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again." The song is only funny because of the knowledge and information the audience brings to the performance. The audience completes the circuit.

Likewise, so much of the humor in Bukowsical comes from the raw, bleak content smashing up against a form once known for rose-colored escapism. By choosing the neo musical comedy as their form, Bukowsical writers Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green chose complexity and honesty, two things Bukowski cherished. Never does this show ask the audience to pretend this is something that it is not. It's a performance, right here, right now, in this theatre. Nor does it whitewash the horrors of growing up Bukowski, despite its absurdist tone. Bukowski himself seemed constitutionally incapable of bullshit, and though Stockdale and Green seemingly chose a form many people often associate with bullshit, the show's sly self-awareness reverses that polarity.

Which is kind of the whole point of the neo musical comedy. The audience's expectations about musicals -- and the subversion of that -- is part of the storytelling. But Bukowsical is so well-crafted, so carefully and intelligently wrought, that it works both as a straightforward musical comedy and a satirical meta-musical. The jokes are great; the music is really fun and interesting and surprising; the lyrics are clever, fearless, and technically impeccable. It's every bit as entertaining as Anything Goes, but with a rich layer of irony on top thick enough to choke Brecht.

But one thing bothered me when I first read the script. There was a framing device about this misguided, mediocre theatre company holding a backer's audition to raise money for their new show Bukowsical. Right away, the frame didn't feel right to me. It made the show seem more like sketch comedy than the smart, Brechtian theatre that I think it actually is. (The fake theatre company is called The Sacred Angel Fist Circle of Note Gang Theatre.) The framing device takes the audience off the hook by putting up a wall of "We Don't Really Mean It" between them and story -- so the audience doesn't have to grapple with any of what's onstage because it's just some silly musical.

I think my reaction was partly about the comparative dishonesty of that frame, in what is otherwise a weirdly honest show. Also, it seemed like the writers were giving themselves an "excuse" for writing this vulgar, fearless show, by putting its creation in the fictional hands of the clueless, nameless egotist, "The Founder," and his merry band of players. To me, that feels like a cop out. Why not just dive in? In 2013, in front of an audience who's seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Wild Party, there's no need for excuse or explanation. They can handle anything we throw at them. Luckily for me, the authors are very cool, and they're letting me cut the framing device.

So I've come to the conclusion that the way to approach this show is just to treat it like a rowdy, wacky, big-hearted George M. Cohan musical comedy, and let the dark, oppressive, vulgar, offensive content do its own work, supplying the "neo" that makes the show a neo musical comedy. The original production played more like sketch comedy, but New Line's production will be in what I call the Bat Boy style -- completely straight-faced, emotionally honest outrageousness. No winking at the audience.

That's what the neo musical comedy is -- serious comedy. After all, Bat Boy is about religious intolerance, Forbidden Planet is about the clash between morality and science, Cry-Baby is about class injustice, Urinetown and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson are about the shallowness and self-destructiveness of political movements, and Bukowsical is about the struggle between an artist's life and his work. All hilarious shows about very serious shit.

With Bukowsical, we give the audience storytelling that seems shallow but is actually really smart and insightful, and we give them a form that seems light and superficial, even as it tells a dark, complicated story. We depend on the audience to discover this dissonance and this irony, which is what makes it all so funny. Even more so than with most other shows we do, here the audience has to complete the equation. Great comedy requires two things -- surprise and truth -- and Bukowsical has lots of both. Despite the style, we are telling the audience the truth about the horrors of Bukowski's life. And every song is a surprise in its crazy dual personality, exploring Bukowski's alcoholism while he dances a waltz with a seductive bottle of booze, or putting four great American writers -- Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, and William S. Burroughs -- into the middle of a Vaudeville number about obscenity.

And wait till you hear "Elegy." You'll shit yourself.

In all these ways, Bukowsical is a companion piece to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which started off this season for us. BBAJ is angry and aggressive, while Bukowsical is warm and friendly, but they have a lot in common. I've been writing a lot lately about the New American Musical, but I'm not just writing about it. We're putting it onstage, show after show. We're letting our audience watch the evolution of this most American art form, right in front of their eyes, as it's happening. And to my delight, more and more companies around the country are following our lead, producing really challenging, original, new works of musical theatre. There is an audience hungry for that.

Just as we're seeing a massive realignment in American politics today, we're seeing the same thing in the American musical theatre. We're at an historical turning point, and it's pretty exciting to watch it happening all around us.

And Bukowsical is part of that.

We start blocking Sunday.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Amends Justify the Means

Why Bukowsical...?

Lots of reasons. It seemed like such a good fit for this season -- three really dark Hero Myth stories. It continues a theme I love exploring -- the relationship between an artist's life and his work -- in shows like Passing Strange, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Man of La Mancha, and Sunday in the Park with George.

One of the big reasons I wanted to do this show is the answer to a question I often ask myself when I'm thinking about producing a less mainstream show: If not us, then who...? Granted, not every show deserves producing. Still, there are a lot of shows that are really wonderful, but there's something about them that scares the people who produce musicals -- language, sexual content, moral ambiguity, stories about drugs or politics or religion. But the shows that fit that description are usually the best, most interesting, most exciting shows. Because those are the stories the best writers are drawn to.

I've already written here about why the adult language and the sexual content in Bukowsical are organic to the storytelling and not just there for shock value. This show follows the Sondheim Rule, that Content Dictates Form. But that language will keep many folks from producing the show.

So really, if not us, then who?

Maybe the biggest reason I wanted to do the show is the hipster intellectualism at the heart of the show's central joke. What better -- or funnier -- form to tell the story of Bukowski's fucked-up life onstage than an ironic, postmodern musical comedy? I think he would have found the idea both annoying and delightful. He'd rail against it, but with that big, sly smile that told you he couldn't help but appreciate the balls it takes.

The sheer intellectual audacity of it all blows me away. Each of Bukowski's autobiographical novels is represented by a song in the show, and like his novels, Bukowsical is a series of somewhat disconnected episodes that, taken together, paint a bigger picture. Bukowski's novel Ham on Rye becomes the song "Art is Pain." Factotum becomes "The Derelict Trail." The novel Women becomes the song "Love is a Dog from Hell" (which is also the title of a Bukowski poem and a collection of his poems). His first novel Post Office becomes the song "Postal." And Hollywood, about the making of the film Barfly, becomes "Through a Glass, Barfly" in the show.

(This last title is a joke on the famous Biblical phrase, "For now we see through a glass, darkly," meaning that humans can't fully understand the Big Picture while on earth. Though glass means mirror or lens in the Bible, here it means a bar glass, and the Biblical meaning of the phrase becomes a joke about Bukowski's alcoholism -- which is the subject of Barfly. See how smart this show is?)

You might even argue that Bukowski's collection of magazine columns, Notes of a Dirty Old Man is represented in the show by the song "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty."

Bukowsical celebrates everything our culture of Ironic Detachment embodies, from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to Scream and The Onion. And I think it's that meta irony that allows us to observe the horrors of Bukowski's life without getting emotionally caught up in them. But if we New Liners do our job right, the audience will find the humanity in Bukowski and they'll find themselves caring for him anyway, despite the seemingly bullet-proof layer of irony, just like they did for Edgar in Bat Boy, Barfée in Spelling Bee, and Queenie in The Wild Party.

That's because there's truth behind all that irony. As Al Capone says in The Untouchables, "We laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's true." And once we see the truth, we also feel a connection. The secret to Bukowski's success as a writer is that he is all of us. He was a genuine Everyman. And he spilled all his pain and addiction and fear and insecurity onto the page and when we read it, we know we're not alone. We are like him, more than most of us would admit.

Or in other words, we are all Bukowsical.

My favorite kind of show is the outrageous, crazy, even offensive comedies that have a really big heart --  Bat Boy, Urinetown, Cry-Baby, HIgh Fidelity...

Bukowsical is one of those. If you just listen to the cast album, you miss some of what's really wonderful about the show -- the way it's presented, the innocence of musical comedy. The form of the show and its crazy high spirits throw you off kilter, so that instead of condemning Bukowski's hedonism right away, as many people might, this approach knocks down your defenses and your judgment, and you meet Bukowski on his own terms.

Vulgar yes, often disgusting yes, but also smart, vulnerable, deep, romantic, urban, even kind of Zen-like. And a real artist, maybe even a genius, who experienced life in a way few of us have to; but our everyday failures and humiliations are washed away by Bukowski's far worse, far darker episodes. He's a Christ figure for anyone who ever got picked on, laughed at, or ignored. He takes our horrors on himself and as we read his books -- or watch this show -- we feel better. Not because he had it worse than any of us did, but because we understand that even our worst experiences are essentially universal. We are all the victims of our own fears and expectations, and we all have to learn the lesson Spelling Bee brought us -- "Life is random and unfair." Life's not out to get us. It just doesn't give a shit.

And while that might sound depressing, it's actually oddly comforting. We're all in the same boat, just trying to get through to tomorrow.

In his life and in his art, Bukowski knew the great lesson of the Hero Myth: You just have to stay on the road and keep moving forward. Bukowski had a much harder road than most of us, but he just kept plugging along and writing it all down. Like Bukowski, all we really need to know is to stay on the road. We each have our roadblocks and potholes, but we each learn to navigate around them as we continue on our journey. Just like Bukowski did.

We are all Bukowsical.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty

The subtitle of my blog says I'm a bad-ass culture warrior. I'm half-kidding of course. But only half. Though it wasn't consciously intended, I think I chose to produce our next show, Bukowsical, as an answer to America's Culture War.

This morning I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, one of my favorite political talk shows. And they started talking about how there's too much violence in movies and video games, and connecting that to recent mass shootings. I hear this a lot, and it always drive me nuts. First of all, these folks need to take a stroll through the very violent, very gory, original  Grimm's Fairy Tales. Or the Bible, for that matter. And then they need to read the book that sort of inspired Into the Woods, Bruno Bettelheim's brilliant The Uses of Enchantment, which I'm reading right now for the second time.

Bettelheim argues that fictional violence can be healthy because it's a safe way to work through the primal, violent impulses everyone has. Fictional violence doesn't cause real violence; it replaces real violence. Humans are innately violent -- just watch kids at play -- so as we have become more civilized, we have channeled those violent impulses into our storytelling, experiencing those impulses in a safe context. There are many recent studies about this. Whatever "common sense" may appear to tell you, it's not true. Video games and movies don't cause violence, and pornography doesn't cause sexual assaults. Yes, there are crazy people, and they will do crazy, horrible things whether or not they play a video game or see The Matrix. Crazy people have been doing crazy, horrible things since humans first showed up on planet Earth.

But the Culture War (and its imaginary red-headed stepchild, the War on Christmas) isn't about ideas or rationality. It's about emotion. It's about fear. (I will once again recommend the brilliant book, The Republican Brain.) Statistics and science and reasoned arguments won't change anyone's mind about this stuff. Why shouldn't we say the word fuck? Because it's bad. Why is it bad? Because it means sexual intercourse. Actually, most of the time it doesn't mean that. Much of the time it's just an intensifier. And when it's not, fuck can mean so many different things in its various forms today, very few of those meanings related to sex. I use it constantly. Seriously. I love it.

And really, so what if it means sexual intercourse...? Why do we persist in thinking this fundamental biological function is "dirty" -- or really, that it has any moral component at all...? I think it's because it reminds us of our animal nature, and we fear our animal nature. Bukowski accepted his animal nature without judgment, and that makes people uncomfortable. Luckily, organized religion is on the decline in America, so maybe there's still hope that we'll find our way out of this forest of moral hypocrisy and the pathological need to control others.

The truth is that fuck is a bad word because it's a bad word. No other reason.

According to the wonderful documentary Fuck, the word's origins go back further than recorded history. It's literally one of humanity's oldest words. And let's get real here, it's only a word. Just a sound to which we've assigned meaning. The intent behind this word can be playful, awestruck, angry, dismissive, resigned, violent, amused, impressed... It has almost limitless uses and literally limitless meanings. Why on earth would we want to fence this word off from all the others? Is it that dangerous? That appalling? And when my mom says, "Oh fudge!", isn't that a difference without a distinction? Doesn't she mean the same thing I mean when I say, "Oh fuck!"? In other words, shouldn't we be focused more on meaning and intent?

Or as the legendary George Carlin put it:

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large.  All of you, over here. You seven -- bad words! That's what they told us they were, remember? "That's a bad word." There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

One of the things that was so subversive about Bukowski was his "obscene" language. But today, when lots of literature and other storytelling forms regularly use that kind of language -- and yes, musicals too -- it feels less subversive. How do you give an audience the same feeling encountering his work in the context of today's culture?

Put it in an old-fashioned musical comedy, that's how. I think George M. Cohan would love this show. He would love its rowdy, aggressive, smartass tone. He would love the laughs and the energy of it. Musical comedy has been satirically commenting on American culture and values as far back as No, No, Nanette in 1925 (our relationship with money), Of Thee I Sing in 1931 (political populism), Anything Goes in 1935 (our celebrity gangster culture), Finian's Rainbow in 1947 (economic justice), and lots of others.

Though we are in a new Golden Age of musical theatre, the age of the neo rock musical and the neo musical comedy, people still think of musicals as either Oklahoma! or Hello, Dolly! So by choosing what is perceived as an innocent art form as their vehicle, Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green are doing with Bukowsical what Bukowski did with his writing -- challenging ideas of "acceptable," "appropriate," "good taste." If it's truthful, if it's authentic, then how can it be inappropriate or unacceptable? Should artists and storytellers wall off parts of reality in the name of good taste?

Many scholars say that Bukowski changed American poetry, both in his rejection of strict form and also in his "adult" language and content. Though Stockdale and Green are not the first to the neo musical comedy party, it's still early and they've contributed something quite wonderful to the movement with Bukowsical. The more I read the script and the more I listen to the L.A. cast album, the more I fall in love with it.

The story of Bukowsical is about survival -- like any Hero Myth story, I guess. But it's also about ambiguity, which was the hallmark of Bukowski's own work. He knew that people are neither good or bad, wrong or right, mean or nice, happy or sad. Most of us live in the gray areas. While a lot of storytelling simplifies characters and stories down to their essence -- and for legitimate reasons -- Bukowski was a different kind of writer. He said in one interview (in the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This) that he really wanted to be a journalist, and if he could have gotten hired anywhere, he would've been one. And you can see that in his writing -- it's almost like he's a reporter covering his own life.

And that life included lots of alcohol, lots of sex, lots of violence, and lots of four-letter words.

In the song "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" in Bukowsical, four famous writers, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath, tell Bukowski to embrace sex and obscenity in his writing. It's a very funny song. But what they're really telling him is to be authentic. To write in his true voice. To tell the truth about his life. It's a very funny way of getting at a very important truth.

And really, "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" would be a pretty accurate label for the American musical theatre in this new century, shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bat Boy, Urinetown, American Idiot, Next to Normal, bare, Love Kills, Passing Strange, The Wild Party, and lots of others. Dark times call for dark art, to make sense of it all.

Though Bukowsical pretends to be a silly, shallow musical comedy, it's not. It's a smart, serious-minded approach to telling a really interesting story in a way that's relevant to our ironic, Stephen Colbert, meta culture today. Sure, Bukowski's life could have been told in a dark Sondheim musical or a dark Kander & Ebb musical. But Bukowski didn't have a dark heart -- he just led a dark life. He may have said fuck a lot, but he also fell in love and got his heart broken. We think of Bukowski as really fucked up, but he wasn't Sweeney Todd. He's more the Elephant Man, and it's that fragile, frequently broken heart at the center of his writing that draws us in. When he lets us get a glimpse inside, we see how much we are like him. We see the ordinary in the extraordinary.

Just as Company forces us to look at marriage honestly, just as Next to Normal forces us to look at mental illness honestly, just as Spelling Bee forces us to look at our culture of competition honestly, so too does Bukowsical force us to look at language honestly.

Like all good stories, Bukowsical isn't about Bukowski as much as it's about us, individually and collectively. I'd like to think of Bukowsical as a cultural bull in a china shop, shattering biases, fears, judgments, norms, preconceptions. We may get a few walkouts, but I think the most common result of our performances will be spirited conversations in the car on the way home.

My favorite thing!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott