Be a Rebel and a Scofflaw

I write about a lot of different things on this blog -- our creative process, analysis of the shows we work on, thoughts on the art form, lists of cool books, shows, movies. It's been really fun over the last six years to explore the blog form and to develop a "house style" for my blog. It really is a different form of communication.

Back in spring 2007 when I started this blog, the main purpose was to chronicle our creative process. Partly just because that seems like something I would've loved to read when I was in high school and college -- one of my favorite book genres is collections of interviews with directors. But also because our process at New Line is relatively unique. We've developed a process over the last twenty-two years that takes from both mainstream regional theatre and also the experimental theatre movement in New York in the 1960s. In 2007 New Line was already in its sixteenth season, and I was realizing that our continued success was making a strong case for a non-commercial, "art" musical theatre. We were proving that it works, that there's an audience, and that there's plenty of brilliant, original work to produce.

And now there are other companies following in our footsteps -- The Music Theatre Company in Highland Park, IL; Minneapolis Musical Theatre in Minnesota; Kensington Arts Theatre in Kensington, Maryland; Factory Edge Theatre Works in Baltimore; Dreamlight Theatre Company in New York; Musically Human Productions in New York; Slow Burn Theatre Company in Fort Lauderdale; Little Radical Theatrics in Westchester, New York; Not Your Mom's Musical Theater in Derry, New Hampshire; and others. Only a couple of these companies even existed ten years ago; some are just a few years old. The American musical theatre is changing, and it's mostly happening outside of New York City.

Bukowsical has been such a wonderful experience partly because I know very few other companies are ballsy enough to produce it, and partly because I dearly love musical comedy. I had my infatuation with Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a long love affair with the Sondheim musicals, but my real love is musical comedy. The first musical I was ever in was Anything Goes, still one of my all-time favorite shows. A couple years ago, I started writing about the neo musical comedy, the new 21st reboot of the classic form. I've had such fun the last few years really diving back into musical comedy, with I Love My Wife, Cry-Baby, and now Bukowsical. Even in the form's latest evolution it still has everything that made me fall in love with musicals in the first place, their fundamentally American personality, comic, high-energy, aggressive, vulgar, muscular, rowdy, ironic, and almost always big-hearted. Even with our serious shows, I use so much that I learned from musical comedy.

And I've learned that comedy is a great way to make a serious point.

Bukowsical is one of those shows that makes me laugh just thinking about some random moment. I burst out laughing in the car last night on the way home from rehearsal, at least five or six separate times, just remembering how funny something in the show was, or how funny it will be to watch an audience react to this wild ride...

We're almost ready to open. Saturday afternoon we had our lighting cue-to-cue, where we move slowly through the show, moment by moment, so the lighting designer can see his lights and make adjustments or changes. Sunday afternoon, we had our sitzprobe, where the cast sings with the band for the first time and also with mics for the first time. It's just a few hours when the sound designer, the musicians, and the actors get a sense of each other's work before we run the whole show.

Each night this week, we run the show, full tech, band, lights, sound, costumes, props, the whole shebang. If the actors really have the show in hand before this, then these few nights -- we call it Hell Week -- aren't too bad. If the show is precarious at all, Hell Week can be hellish. But honestly, our Hell Weeks are almost never hellish anymore, partly because we get eight on nine full run-throughs of the show before Hell Week -- and most of them on the set -- a luxury we are very grateful for. The best part of this week is that the actors get to run the show, no stopping, with all the elements in place, for three nights in a row -- you'd be amazed how many problem get fixed and how much important fine tuning can happen in those last few rehearsals.

Bukowsical is in great shape, so the fine tuning is very subtle this week, mostly asking actors to move a foot this way or that, to be more fully in light, or to make sure a prop gets moved at the right time, or to correct a word in a lyric, small stuff like that.

Thursday we'll have a preview -- no critics and a small-ish house. The show really isn't finished until you add the audience, and it sucks to add that final element to the show in front of critics who are judging your work. The Rep and Stages get several previews, but one is enough for us. Every time you add an element to the show, it changes everything -- and the same is true with the audience. They change the show. So we love having a performance to orient to that before anybody's writing about us.

Friday night we'll open the show. In the last few years, we've started making a bigger deal out of opening night, encouraging all the New Liners to come that night if they can, and we have an after-party to which we invite the whole audience. It's a fun way to celebrate the opening of another wonderful adventure. And it gives us a great house on opening night, which gives us an awesome launch and gives the critics our best possible show. Also, because we have essentially no money for advertising, we rely a lot on word-of-mouth, so the more friends we get there that first night, the better the rest of the run will probably sell.

I love this show and I love this cast and, as I often do, I feel incredibly lucky that we get to do this kind of wild, adventurous, audacious work. New Line is very special and as we close our 22nd season with Bukowsical, I'm more grateful than ever to our audiences, the press, and the writers who keep writing this wonderful stuff and trusting us with it.

The adventure continues!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Expose Yourself for All the World to See

I used to worry, at this point in our process, whether I have made all the right choices. It's a little hard to tell right now, because the cake just isn't baked yet. But I learned a number of years ago I was worrying over nothing. There really are no right choices. There are only choices. There are only this road we're on and other roads we've left to others. We just go where the show takes us. If I've picked a great show for us to produce -- and I have -- it'll take us somewhere great.

You gotta just trust it.

And I have some remarkably kick-ass traveling companions on this journey with me. Luckily for me, my traveling companions have courage, heart, and brains. And an unerring sense of comedy, and a buttload of fearlessness.

I love actors. I love watching them create. I love helping them find that key that unlocks everything for them. I was a performer in high school and college, and I'm glad I've had that experience so I understand the process, the fear, the vulnerability of an actor onstage. But now, I couldn't do what the New Line actors do. I couldn't be that fearless, that open, that willing to jump off the cliff and hope you'll fly.

I'm really lucky. I get to work on many of the greatest works of the musical theatre ever written, and I get to do it with the most extraordinary theatre artists. Let me brag on this cast a little...

Zak Farmer is one of the two funniest people I've ever worked with -- and believe me, I've worked some incredibly funny people. The word that first comes to mind when I think of Zak is subversive. He lives to violate the social contract, to offend, to disorient, to leave you speechless. He's the Lenny Bruce and George Carlin of New Line. But he's not just funny. He can play anything from fiercely interior drama to the driest irony to the wackiest farce, and he can sing pretty much any style of music. You never know where he's gonna land with a character, but it will always be interesting, it will always make sense, and it will always be full of complexity and layers. I love working with this guy. He's been in seventeen New Line shows since summer of 2007 when he first joined us for Urinetown.

Nick Kelly is the other of the two funniest people I've ever worked with. Nick is like Robin Williams, literally overflowing all the time with ideas, really good ideas. Because of the sheer volume, I have to reject some of them, but that doesn't stop Nick. He always has thirty more waiting. I know I can give him pretty minimalist staging and then just let him play. I think working with Nick must be what working with people like Bert Lahr and Jonathan Winters was like. Overwhelming but really entertaining.

Joel Hackbarth is this incredibly sweet, decent, low-profile guy who we've got cussing like a drunken sailor with Tourette's in this show. I mentioned in my last post how hilarious it is to see this nice, unassuming guy singing lyrics like, "When you're fucking a whore, after downing a case, and you shit on her face..." It's funny no matter what, but it's even funnier if you know Joel. And I think he enjoys the obscenities more than he'd let on...

Kimi Short is the current New Line champion, having appeared in nineteen New Line shows, going back to Songs for a New World in 1998. Kimi's a trip -- one of the odder members of our odd family -- but she has a voice from God (she just played Diana in Next to Normal for us), and she's also great at both serious drama and quirky comedy. Watching Kimi and Zak sing the drunken love ballad "Chaser of My Heart" in this show makes me laugh like an idiot every time. It's tough to hold your own opposite a master comedian like Zak, but Kimi's got the comedy chops to do it.

Marcy Wiegert has done only three shows with us, but she's so a part of New Line that it feels like it's more than that. She's a consummate professional, a strong actor, and a powerhouse singer with a belt most women would die for. She sang the sweet lament "Frank Mills" in New Line's Hair and also belted out "Watch Your Ass" and "A Whole Lot Worse" in Cry-Baby. Merman may be dead, but she left her voice to Marcy. Wait till you see her as a singing and dancing bottle of beer in Bukowsical.

Chrissy Young is a relative newcomer to New Line, but she's become part of the family. In real life, she's this quiet, unassuming woman, but onstage she can be as rowdy and raunchy as the rest of the New Liners. Her portrayals of the depressive, suicidal writer Sylvia Plath and the horrifically abusive grade school teacher in Bukowsical are really dark but really funny.

Ryan Foizey joined us last season when we gave him the lead in Cry-Baby, which he was perfect for, finding that delicate balance between sincerity and irony that marks every John Waters story. Ryan has also been a record store customer in High Fidelity and the mysterious son Gabe in Next to Normal for New Line. He also plays guitar and trumpet, and directs, and he's just started his own theatre company, Theatre Lab. He's a busy boy.

Chris Strawhun is the baby of the cast, currently getting a graduate degree in theater at Lindenwood. Chris started off with us in the ensemble of Evita and then graduated to a Whiffle in Cry-Baby, and we were all impressed at how far he came in that short period of time. He just played Nathan Detroit at Lindenwood, and though this is his first larger role with New Line, we think he's ready. And he's really doing a great job.

With most of our shows, we aim for a cast that's half newcomers and half New Line veterans. This time, everyone in the cast has worked with us before. That's true partly because no one had ever heard of Bukowsical so we didn't have a large turnout at auditions, but also because this is such a tricky piece of theatre, and I know I can trust all these people -- to follow the road I've laid out for us, to "play" together to find all those wonderful moments that make a show like this come alive, and also to be utterly and completely fearless. If there's one thing New Line shows require, it's fearlessness.

We open Bukowsical next week, and I'm sleeping great. No worries here. The show is hilarious, it moves like a freight train, and it gets quirkier and more interesting every night. I really trust the people into whose hands I've put this very special, very unconventional musical.

I can't wait to share it with you.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Will Strap on Mine

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Just Pull Your Nuts Out

The ending of Bukowsical is as unconventional as the rest of Bukowsical.

The last big number is "Twelve Steps of Love," in which Bukowski goes to an AA meeting and is convinced to turn his life around. Except that never happened. There is a grain of truth here -- after treating a bleeding ulcer, Bukowski's doctor did tell him he'd die if he didn't give up alcohol. But he didn't, and he didn't.

So why this AA number? Probably mostly because it's a giant Fuck You to narrative convention and structure, and also to the recent string of bio-musicals. Bukowski wasn't interested in narrative structure and neither is Bukowsical. You could argue that narrative is far less important in Bukowsical than the act of storytelling itself. Like Bukowski himself would, this show and this song both sneer at the kind of happy resolution classic musical comedies required. Bukowsical gives the audience a musical comedy ending, then immediately takes it back -- right after "Twelve Steps," the narrator says, "This didn’t really happen to Charles Bukowski." And then they finish the show with a reprise of the uber-vulgar, confrontational opening number.

As the American novelist Willa Cather said, "The end is nothing; the road is all."

But this song does represent a kernel of truth, that the mainstream world was applying its worldview and values to Bukowski's life and pushing him toward the safe and conventional. Like Assassins, Bukowsical doesn't get historical fact right (and isn't trying to), but it does get essence right. It's a representation of how Bukowski perceived the world around him. "Twelve Steps of Love" presupposes that alcohol is a problem for Bukowski that must be solved, to "save" him. But none of that was actually true, as far as he was concerned. And Bukowski didn't stop drinking.

Both Bukowski and Bukowsical up-end our traditional ideas of morality, health, culture. ambition. The lesson we get from Bukowski's life and his work -- and his musical -- is that you can do everything "wrong" and still succeed. He might argue you must do everything "wrong." He wrote, "The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart." In other words, fuck the rules; follow your instinct.

But like the rest of the show, this song works on two levels at once. There's the surface level, the clueless earnestness of the do-gooders who think they know Bukowski's road better than he does. And there's also the meta-layer that comments on that surface sincerity, opening up an ironic distance between us and this AA meeting. It's a great lyric, that does more than it appears.

It starts off innocuous enough, pretty much what you'd expect, though it drops a shit pretty early on...

It takes
Twelve Steps of Love,
Twelve Steps of Love.
First admit your life is shit,
And you know you just can’t quit
Without the Man above.

You need
Twelve Steps of Love -- 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9...
Twelve Steps of Love.
Give your name and tell your story;
Make that moral inventory
Of all you’re guilty of.

Suddenly it's sounding a bit oppressive. And there's something a little off, like not having time to count all the way to twelve. Now it gets a little less sweet, a little more vulgar... dare I say, a little more Bukowsical...?

This is what it will take
To make you spill the beans.
Don’t make the same mistake
As Elvis and James Dean.
Don’t just puke your silly guts out;
Come on, Buk, just pull your nuts out --
The amends justify the means!

That last line is one of my favorite jokes in the show. And really, how often do you get a good AA joke in a musical, anyway? Then it gets a little more aggressive, and we get an even funnier rhyme in the next verse, which also subtly subverts AA's central tenet, "Let go and let God," with the sairical punch of replacing God with  the name of AA's founder.

It takes
Twelve Steps of Love.
It’s a hug, then a fucking shove.
Although booze and drugs still trouble you,
Just let go and let Bill W.
Show you
What to do!
Let those Twelve Steps of Love.
Twelve Steps of Love,
Twelve Steps of Love,
Step all over you!

And we end with this ironic punchline -- this love and support will trample you! Or maybe more in tune with Buk's fears, it will trample his artistic output. His process is a completely organic one, so adding an outside, arbitrary control might strangle it, right? And if he's enjoying all this success, writing while he's drunk, why would he want to change that? We see by the end of the song how wrong this advice is for him. Buk and the audience can see this isn't his road.

It'd be like someone telling me to write my blog posts without smoking weed first...! Can you imagine...???

And maybe all this is a self-reflexive comment on how bad an idea it is to make a musical comedy out of Bukowski's story, how impossible it seems to musicalize his life, how much his story does not conform to musical comedy conventions. Then again, Bukowsical itself argues the same thing for its entire running time. That's the whole point. The fact that this show shouldn't exist to begin with is the whole reason it exists. If it had sounded like a good idea, Stockdale and Green probably wouldn't have been interested. It's the dissonance, the irony, the mismatch between story and storytelling, that's interesting and fun here.

We live in a world of The Daily Show and Robot Chicken now. Our culture has changed. And despite the wails of the traditionalists clinging to their vinyl cast albums, our art form is changing with the times. The American musical comedy is evolving, and that's really exciting.

Bukowsical is something of a Rorschach Test. Some people who see it will love it merely for the defiant way it hurls obscenities at its audience. They'll love the sheer moral and artistic anarchy of it, the same reason I first fell in love with Rocky Horror and Grease. Others will love it for its pointed irony. Lots of new musicals today are ironic, but this one is dripping with it. Probably both these groups will love the joy and rowdy chaos of it all. And some will probably love it precisely because it is on some level an old-fashioned musical comedy -- it both challenges us and comforts us. It's a neo musical comedy.

After I first listened to the LA cast album and after I first read the script, it really stayed with me, and I wasn't exactly sure why. Yes, I love four-letter words; I use them regularly and enthusiastically. But I don't like four-letter words in a musical just for the shock value (I'm looking at you, Silence!). So yes, Bukowsical is raunchy and R-rated, but that wasn't what I loved.

Having worked on it now for several weeks, having seen the whole show for the first time at our last rehearsal, I think I know why I love it. Bukowsical is a perfect example of what I call Stupid Humor for Smart People, a category which also includes The Daily Show, South Park, The Ricky Gervais Show, Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, you get the idea... It's the best of both worlds, and I think it has ancestors in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In. It's dick jokes and fart jokes, but also politics, literature, psychology, and existentialism.

Cheap laughs that raise interesting questions. Childish jokes that get at the nature of art and the relationship between an artist's life and his work.

And also the word "fuckhole."

It's a very dark piece of theatre. But these are dark times. And what better way to fight the darkness than to face it and laugh at it?

I can't wait to share this show with our audiences!

Long Live the Musical (Comedy)!
Scott

You've Got Sondheim, But We've Got Charlie Sheen

About halfway through Bukowsical, a lawyer stops the show dead in its tracks. He says, "I represent the estate of Charles Bukowski and have been retained to halt this unauthorized production. There can be no fictional or non-fictional representations of Charles Bukowski and/or the events of his life, nor can there be any discussions or references to his novels, poems, short stories, songs, slogans, or screenplays based on or inspired by the events of his life."

It's a really weird meta-moment in the middle of an already weird meta-musical.

The conversation goes on. The narrator says to the lawyer, "But we're not representing his life so much as capturing the essence of his being." That sounds comically pretentious, but it's also true. That is what this show is doing. The lawyer responds, "There can be no fictional or non-fictional representations of the essence of the being of Charles Bukowski and/or the events of his life, nor can there be any discussions or references to his… all right, let’s cut to the chase. This performance must stop now or you will all face legal ramifications."

It's such an interesting moment on several levels. First of all, it brings up the issue of art made from other art, and the rights of artists to control their work. Should hip-hop artists be free to sample other artists' work in their own work? Should visual artists be able to use Disney images in their work, without the Disney legal department descending upon them? Should video artists be able to use other people's film and video clips to create new work, a question brought to the fore in recent years by YouTube? Where do the First Amendment and "intellectual property" law collide? In 2013 do we have to completely rethink ideas of copyright, intellectual property, and the "ownership" of ideas and art?

Also we realize, as we listen to this conversation between the lawyer and the narrator, that this show hasn't quoted any of Bukowski's work. The closest it comes is the song "Love is a Dog from Hell," which takes the phrase from one of Bukowski's titles. And presumably, the Bukowsical writers know you can't copyright a title. What's fun about all this is it's both fictional and real at the same time. This lawyer is just one of the actors and the audience knows that. But it's also true that Stockdale and Green don't have the rights to Bukowski's work.

Bukowsical works on two (or occasionally more) levels of reality. The actors at New Line are playing a troupe of actors in Los Angeles, who are playing the people in Bukowski's life. Without the show's original framing device of the backer's audition, this idea is more subtle during the first part of the show, but it becomes more explicit when the "performance" is interrupted by the lawyer. When this New York lawyer takes a swipe at people in Los Angeles, the "actors" respond with the song "That's Los Angeles," a charmingly clueless tribute to the city of angels, chock full of very funny back-handed compliments. The audience knows this song is scripted, that it's been rehearsed and staged, but it's also "spontaneous" within the world of Bukowsical.

If the audience didn't consciously register this double layer of reality before, they do now. And it will pay off at the end of the show, after the song "Twelve Steps of Love."

We New Liners have dealt with this kind of double-reality before. It's written into some shows, like Man of La Mancha and Reefer Madness, and it was part of our approach at New Line to some other shows, like The Robber Bridegroom and Evita. It's always hard for the actors to figure out how to play this, if they haven't dealt with it before, but they always eventually get comfortable with the idea. And we've found that as long as the actors are comfortable with it, so the audience will be too -- whether they recognize the double-reality consciously or not.

The show's writers help the audience with this double-reality by mentioning two other fictitious musicals this troupe is working on, and letting us hear songs from both of them -- "an all-African-American musical version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters set during the Watts Riots of 1965" and a show called Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts. We get just a taste of the black Three Sisters with a fragment of the gospel-flavored "Sistah Sistah Sistah," and then we're told that the next song, "That's Los Angeles," was cut from Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts (about which we find out nothing more), giving this troupe of players a little more backstory, a little more reality. But just for a second, before this freight train of a show barrels on, we wonder what on earth Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts might be about, and how on earth "That's Los Angeles" would fit in a show with a title like that.

But in the midst of all this craziness, this song also gets at something fundamental about Bukowski's work -- almost all of it is set in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life. But it's not the Los Angles we see in movies. Bukowski's L.A. is dark and seedy and dangerous. So here's this anthem to Los Angeles, but everything in the lyric undercuts itself --

Maybe you've got concerts
At Alice Tully Hall,
And other high-class venues packed with
Snobs from wall to wall.
Well, we've got sitcom tapings,
And they're absolutely free!
And baby, that's Los Angeles to me.

Not only are they comparing Lincoln Center's classical music venue to sitcom tapings, but the big selling point here is not that they're good, but that they're free. It's a reminder that this is a city not of culture but of commerce, at least according to this song. It's a comically cynical (and arguably accurate) picture of Los Angeles that Bukowski would have appreciated, but it's delivered with such aggressive sincerity that it becomes even funnier.

Before the cast sings "That's Los Angeles," the lawyer says, "I’m a lawyer, I’m from New York, I’m a Jew. I know musical theatre. And there’s no way that this is ever going to make it on Broadway." The lawyer lives inside a false reality but he's getting at a real truth -- Bukowsical, even as clever and funny as it is, could never be produced on Broadway, where audiences aren't always eager to be challenged and almost never ready to be offended, both reasons why Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson couldn't survive in New York. The Bukowsical writers are acknowledging what everyone in the audience is thinking.

But it also brings up -- if only subliminally -- a more interesting point, particularly here in its production by New Line. No, Bukowsical could not survive the commercial theatre, but commercial theatre isn't the only game anymore. Since the early 1990s, when New Line was founded, there has been a growing nonprofit musical theatre movement across America, an alternative to the commercial musical theatre of New York and Broadway tours. Musicals no longer have to be designed for the (often non-English-speaking) tourists and families who go to Broadway shows.

Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen writes in her book Directors and the New Musical Drama, “After the pioneering efforts of theatres such as the Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York, the idea of the serious nonprofit musical spread to theatres across America during the 1990s. While these shows met with varying levels of economic and critical success, the very existence of this alternative home for the art form began to redefine the musical, offering an alternative to both the traditional Broadway musical and the new West End shows. As the economics of the commercial theatre became increasingly forbidding, the nonprofit theatre became vital incubators for musical drama and nurtured a new generation of musical theatre writers.”

And Broadway is usually playing catch-up these days. The times, they are a-changing'.

Both Cry-Baby and High Fidelity died quick, humiliating deaths on Broadway at the hands of the chronically clueless, but New Line resuscitated them, produced them, demonstrated how outstanding both shows are (without rewriting them), got rave reviews and sold-out houses, and now other companies around the country are producing both shows. We hope the same thing will happen with Bukowsical. We don't need no stinkin' Broadway...

I know, easy for me to say...

When I was a kid, I guess I cared about Broadway. But now all I want is to work on amazing pieces of theatre with amazing artists and share it with amazing audiences. And that's what I do. The truth is I'm living exactly the life my four-year-old self always wanted. I'm making musicals. Although now that I think about it, my four-year-old self wouldn't be allowed to see New Line shows...

Ah, fuck him.

I realize as I work on this show that I have a lot in common with Charles Bukowski. Like Buk, I refuse to follow convention in my art and I don't care much about money. I make the kind of art I want to make, and people can like it or not. Like Buk, my art is often vulgar, often uncomfortable, often confrontational, but always suffused with truth. Because life itself is often vulgar, uncomfortable, and confrontational. We don't make art that allows you to escape from your road in life -- we make art that helps you understand and navigate your road.

Because that's what art is for. Bukowski understood that better than most. And in a weird way, so does Bukowsical.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Think I've Got Crabs

There are a lot of very funny musicals, even more now that we've moved away from the bombast of the (musical theatre) British Invasion and back toward the original form of the American musical -- the musical comedy. These neo musical comedies (Cry-Baby, Spelling Bee, Shrek, Lysistrata Jones) are more self-aware, more political, more ironic, and more vulgar, but they capture the joy, the chaos, and the muscle of classic musical comedies. It's a perfect blend -- a uniquely American blend -- of innocence and irony, idealism and cynicism.

Maybe the funniest aspect of Bukowsical is its perversely good-natured, sunny tone. It's not Bat Boy or Urinetown. It's Anything Goes and No, No, Nanette. But with the irony turned up to eleven.

The musical comedy has always had this kinetic tension, but it used to lean more toward the innocence and idealism, and now it leans more toward the irony and cynicism. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen wrote in her book, Directors and the New Musical Drama, "Rather than finding order through chaos, or offering the sense of resolution that even the more political Broadway musicals often give their audiences, some newer shows imply that emotional confusion is a reasonable response to the contemporary world. Just as social playwrights have been doing for years, today's musical writers choose to raise more questions than they answer, and to reflect the world around them rather than trying to interpret it through a simplistic lens."

There is a self-awareness and a defiance about the neo musical comedy. Broadway composer-lyricist William Finn says, "Musicalizing something inherently nonmusical seems a very dramatic action -- arrogant, humorous, whimsical, yet serious. It says, 'We are in the business of making the world sing.' It's almost revolutionary."

You mean, maybe something like an arteriovenous malformation, Bill...?

One of the differences between the classic musical comedy and the neo musical comedy is that the new form quite often uses funny music. That's not something Cole Porter or Jerry Herman even tried to do. Traditionally, the music has always done the emotional work, but today it does more. And it takes a special kind of composer -- and maybe a special kind of lyricist -- to make the music itself funny. Bat Boy does it a lot, toying with the musical devices of horror movies and thrillers, so in tune with its mock serious tone. Shows like Urinetown and Cry-Baby use music comically, mostly in the dissonance between style and content -- in other words, Cry-Baby's mash-up of John Waters craziness with old-school musical comedy music, or Urinetown's mash-up of its silly story with agitprop music in the style of Kurt Weill.

Bukowsical does get many of its laugh from that kind of stylistic dissonance -- the perky musical comedy style matched to Bukowski's dark, vulgar, freaky life story. But Bukowsical goes further and finds small moments in which the music references something outside the world of the show, to reveal an ironic dissonance, to establish the ever shifting style of the show as the story races through the 20th century, and to connect the bizarre experiment that is Bukowsical to other iconic works of musical theatre. That last use of music does two things -- it makes a meta-joke about the intentional, faux cluelessness of the show itself, and  it also comments on the history of the art form that Bukowsical is deconstructing in front of our very eyes.

Here are some examples...

In the opening number and also in its reprise at the end, the narrator leads us into the final chorus with the words, "Come on now, everybody..." in the same rhythm, in the same structural place, and with almost the same accompaniment as a similar moment in the song "Side by Side by Side" in Company. It's a funny reference for those who catch it, but it also suggests a comically presumptuous parallel between Bukowsical and Sondheim's masterwork of concept musicals. But this meta-self-awareness is part of the joke too.

Later, in the middle of the song, "The Derelict Trail," composer Gary Stockdale uses some faux Aaron Copland in brief instrumental sections, for this fucked up American travelogue, but when the third instrumental comes up, it's the theme from the classic western The Magnificent Seven -- which was also the the theme for the "Marlboro Man" cigarette commercials in the 1960s, featuring the solitary "quiet man" cowboy. It's a perverse and funny choice for a dance break after the Indian's solo verse...

The wacky, vaudevillian "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty," cribs its intro from "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story, ending on a "wrong" note (the tritone) that holds, while a conventional accompaniment foxtrots beneath it. It invokes vaudeville and musical comedy, but it also tells us there's something wrong here. It's a fun choice because it's a similar kind of song -- a bunch of guys fucking around, being funny about pretty dark shit. Also, biographically, this is the 1950s, the decade in which West Side Story was taking the Broadway musical back into the darkness, leading to Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, Fiddler on the Roof, and other dark shows

There's also a tribute, if not a quote, from West Side Story's "Cool," in the vocal lines of the song "Bitches/Bestsellers."

The gleefully disgusting love duet, "Chaser of My Heart" starts with an almost direct quotation of the intro to The Carpenters' "Close to You." Once again, the mash-up is so much fun, matching the saccharine sound of 70s soft pop with lyrics like:

You're more than just a fuckhole,
You're a different breed.
You drink more than I do;
That is very rare indeed.
Though I'm covered in scabs,
And I think I've got crabs,
We're a match like rosé and chablis,
The chaser of my heart.

In the rousing number "Slippery Slope," set to a jaunty Italian tarantella, mid-century TV star and creepy moral arbiter Bishop Fulton J. Sheen scolds us about our sins and our failings -- in comic opposition to the opening number, which celebrates and accepts our sins and failings. Not only is Sheen presented as a cultural obstacle (standing in for the whole of conformist 1950s America) that Bukowski must overcome, but also as the yang to Bukowski's yin. We see in this very clever lyric that Sheen (and by extension, religion) is about control, repression, censorship; while Buk is about honesty, openness, complete freedom of expression.

This juxtaposition is announced ironically in Sheen's entrance music, the famous hymn, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." Where Bukowsical's opening number encourages us to make peace with our dark side, this hymn tells us to run from our dark side. (We don't actually hear the lyric in the show, but it's such a famous hymn that many in the audience will register its content anyway.) While Bukowski accepts what life throws at him, Sheen tells us our inherent badness brings on life's obstacles. It's Zen versus the Old Testament. Like Cry-Baby, this show's villain wears the costume of Good, while our real Hero wears the costume of Bad -- outcast, rebel, despoiler. In another context, this intro music might suggest goodness or hope, but in this context, it suggests hypocrisy and artistic peril.

About halfway through the show, a lawyer shows up to stop the show. After his scene, as he leaves, he tells the company that this show will never make it on Broadway, and that people in Los Angeles don't know anything. Of course, he's just saying what everyone in the audience has been thinking all night -- this crazy, vulgar show could never get a commercial run. But that's also a big part of its subversion. Like Bukowski, this show just doesn't give a shit.

In reply to the lawyer's put-down, the cast sings the slyly ironic "That's Los Angeles," a very funny anthem, full of mock solemnity and comically dubious claims of L.A. pride, set to martial music that just begs for the Les Miz march. (And we answer that demand.) It's a song of pride and defiance, with more than a modicum of pop opera pomposity thrown in for fun. It's "One Day More" from Les Misérables, without the class. The music takes itself so seriously -- too seriously -- while elevating the intentionally trivial, dubious content. And it's really funny.

There are even more bits of funny music, but you get the idea.

This is a show that started as nothing but a joke, but perhaps even despite themselves, Stockdale and Green have written a musical with lots of truth, occasional depth, real wit, and a score that's far more sophisticated than it seems. It's not just funny; it's really good theatre.

Yes, there is method in their madness.

We've finished staging the show and now we just run it. This is the fun part!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Even Willy Shakespeare Liked to Tongue Some Tail

I often end my blog posts with "The adventure continues..."

But some shows are more of an adventure than others. Sometimes it's an adventure because the show is really hard (Sweeney Todd, Floyd Collins, Next to Normal, The Wild Party). Sometimes it's because the show is just so weird that none of us really knows what the end product will be (Forbidden Planet, Robber Bridegroom, The Nervous Set). Sometimes it's because we know where we're headed, but we have no idea what kind of reception we'll get when we arrive (Love Kills, Two Gents, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), in that last case, usually because a show is exceptionally dark or vulgar, or both.

Bukowsical is in that last category. (The title of this post comes from the lyric of "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty.") I've figured out how this show operates, I know what our destination looks like, and I know how to get there. But what are people going to think of a musical with lyrics like:

What's the feeling you get
When you're coughing up blood
And your liver is crud?
Bukowsical!
When you’re fucking a whore
After downing a case
And you shit on her face?
Bukowsical!

I've already told my mother not to come to this one...

When I first started talking about this show, some folks said, "But do people know who Charles Bukowski is?" Well, the answer is that some do, but it doesn't really matter. After all, most people didn't know who Floyd Collins or Sam Byck were.

Almost every season we choose one show that we know may lose a lot of money. To be honest, every New Line show loses money, which we make up for with donations, grants, etc. But some shows lose a lot of money (Johnny Appleweed, Passing Strange, Love Kills). But that's okay -- we build that into our budget. Of course, some shows that we think may do poorly at the box office end up selling like crazy, like Return to the Forbidden Planet, Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, and The Robber Bridegroom.

Nobody knows how Bukowsical will do in sales. But it's still worth producing because it's so smart, so funny, and so interesting. And the form the writers have chosen for their story, the neo musical comedy, is at the vanguard of the art form in 2013.

Part of the fun for me working on his show is the research. I love research. The more I can learn about the world and characters of a show, the richer and fuller our storytelling will be. In this case, I'm reading all of Charles Bukowski's autobiographical novels (which are AWESOME, by the way), reading about the cultural influences that the show explores, finding video of the real people who show up in Bukowsical, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs, William Faulkner, etc. It's such a blast.

Judy Newmark, theatre critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote in her review of New Line's I Love My Wife:

New Line has done well with Hair, which it has mounted several times. It’s also staged strong productions of Grease and Chicago, the Beat musical The Nervous Set, the slacker musical High Fidelity and Return to the Forbidden Planet, set either in the 1950s or the future, maybe both. Put them all together, and it's an era-by-era look at changing American mores. Miller’s anthropological twist on musical theater gives New Line a distinctive point of view, brainy and bold.

I loved that so much, partly because it's true. I am -- and by extension, New Line is -- exploring American culture and politics throughout the 20th century, through the shows we produce. That's why my last book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals is organized by when the shows are set, starting with The Wild Party in the 1920s and going up through the present, chronicling the changes in American culture and politics as I explore these musicals.

I'm one of those people who just doesn't understand the point of making theatre that doesn't explore the issues and ideas of our times. I agree with playwright Arthur Miller, who said, “I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world.” I also agree with the great Stella Adler, who said, "Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger – better – do not act."

It's only been the last ten years or so that I've fully understood the power and necessity of storytelling and the obligation of storytellers. As actor Ben Kingsley has said, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you." Yes!

Bukowsical is wild and silly and vulgar and outrageous. But it's also really smart and insightful. And I think audiences are going to love it. Well, the ones who don't walk out after the opening number...

It's so exciting working on a new piece, but particularly a fearless, original show like this one. Sometimes, people ask me if I would like to be as "successful" as Stages St. Louis is. Well, no, not if we'd have to produce State Fair and The Sound of Music. As Michelle Obama argued during the last campaign, success doesn't have to mean money. New Line is in our 22nd season of daring, alternative musical theatre, having produced dozens of regional premieres and a handful of world premieres. We're in the best financial shape in years, we're doing the best, most exciting work we've ever done, and we've got a loyal, growing audience who love being challenged and love going on an adventure.

We've already got two incredibly cool regional premieres planned for next season...

That's success.

So plan to join us for opening night of Bukowsical on Friday, May 31, and help us get word-of-mouth jump-started. I promise you've never seen anything like this, and I also promise you'll laugh your fuckin' ass off. I'll leave you with one of the funniest, most jaw-dropping moments in the show, when Bukowski stands over the body of his one true love, and sings operatically:

Fu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uck!
Why did you do this, you goddamn motherfucking…fuck!
Oh, cocksucking motherfucking fuck!
Oh, goddamn motherfucking fuck!
Oh…fu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uck…!

Yes, you can be Bukowsical too!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott