Lists/Songs

No actor loves a list song -- "Ain't Got No Grass" in Hair, "You're the Top" in Anything Goes, "The Museum Song" and "The Prince of Humbug" in Barnum, "La Vie Bohème" in Rent, and the king of them all, "Tchaikowsky" from Lady in the Dark. They're impossible to memorize because they're just lists, with no real logic to take you from one line to the next. All you've got to depend on is structure and rhyme. And sometimes the rhyme isn't coming for another ten or twelve words...

But other kinds of lists (the ones you don't have to memorize) are much less traumatic.

Por ejemplo... Over the last few years, I've created a bunch of lists for this blog. They're really fun to make and I hope you, Dear Readers, find them interesting/useful/fun. But there have been a few times recently, when I wanted to link to one of them and it was really hard to find it -- as you may have noticed, my post titles are often more whimsical than informational.

So for my own sake, but also for folks who are new to my blog, here's a list of the lists. You can see even more lists on my blog's index page.

"I Got the Musical Right Here" is a list of fifteen really cool, really original shows that New Line has produced over the years and that we'd love other companies and artists to produce, like High Fidelity, Love Kills, bare, The Cradle Will Rock, Cry-Baby, Bukowsical, and others, all accompanied by video clips from our productions. Nothing would make us happier than to see these shows get produced more often.
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-got-musical-right-here.html

"Songs for a New World" is a list of really wonderful, lesser known stage musicals (there's some overlap here with the list above) that every musical theatre fan should know. I created this list for people who love musicals but are only aware of the more famous shows. But people working in the musical theatre might also find one or two surprises here...
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2011/12/songs-for-new-world.html

"Top Ten Desert Island Musical Theatre Books" is the first list I made, of my favorite books about the art form, everything from behind-the-scenes, tell-all books, to history and analysis, to books about the business of the art form. All really cool books for people who want to dig a little deeper. And for even more cool books, stop by the New Line Bookstore sometime.
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2012/04/top-ten-desert-island-musical-theatre.html

"Another National Anthem" is a list I made right before Election Day, of my favorite political musicals, everything from Assassins and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson to Of Thee I Sing and Fiorello. It's so interesting to think about these shows in terms of the politics of when they're set and also when they were written. All of them have a lot of say about American politics today, even the older shows.
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2012/11/another-national-anthem.html

"Musicals the GOP Needs to See" is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek list of five musicals that celebrate the diversity of American life. After so many GOP gaffes in 2012 (and since) that insulted Americans in minority communities, this was my (not very sincere) attempt to crack open some conservative minds a bit... Then again, I can be pretty sure that the people who say those things will never buy a ticket to In the Heights...
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2012/11/musicals-gop-needs-to-see.html

"Magic Shows and Miracles" is a list of commercially released video recordings of live stage performances of musicals, including Pippin, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods, but also lesser known shows like Poe, Alice at the Palace, Tintypes,, and Taboo, among others.
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2012/12/magic-shows-and-miracles.html

"A Trip to the Library" is a list of novels that musicals are based on. One of my favorite pastimes is reading these novels, to see how they've been adapted for the musical stage, how the story or characters have changed, how a narrative is transformed into a fundamentally different kind of storytelling for a different art form. It's fun to explore that adaptation process, but it's also just fun to read these books -- they're all so great -- including Scenes de la Vie de Boheme (the source for Rent), and the amazing original novel 42nd Street, among others.
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-trip-to-library.html

"My Husband Makes Movies" is a list of really great, but lesser known movie musicals that I encourage everyone to check out, cool films like Colma, Absolute Beginners, Pennies from Heaven, Mack the Knife (a film version of the 1970s Threepenny Opera revival), and others.
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-husband-makes-movies.html

"Fellini, Fosse, Woody, Sondheim, and Stew" may be my favorite list. Kinda sounds like a really artsy law firm, doesn't it? While working on Passing Strange, I realized that it shares a lot with some other really wonderful works of what I'll call "existential autobiographical fiction," all of which explore the complex relationship between an artist's life and his work. So I created this list, a "film festival" of these great works by Federico Fellini, Bob Fosse, Woody Allen, Steve Sondheim, Stew, and John Waters. The parallels among them are really interesting...
http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2012/12/fellini-fosse-woody-sondheim-and-stew.html

And there are some other lists you might enjoy, too... The New Line website has a list of my background and analysis essays exploring individual shows (essays that eventually become chapters in my books). Our YouTube channel hosts something that is truly one of a kind -- a YouTube History of Musical Theatre, chronicling our art form through more than 250 YouTube videos (there are so many, we had to split it into two playlists) of original casts, original choreography, and lots more. (One caveat about this list -- we added notes to some of the videos, and many of those notes somehow got moved to other videos, and as I write this, there is no way to move them back or delete them. So some of the videos will have incorrect notes on them...)

Our website also hosts a list of all New Line's past shows over the last twenty-two years (and links to our show webpages), and we also have an online History of New Line, with cast, staff, and band lists, director's notes, reviews quotes, photos, etc., for every show New Line has produced. Feel free to leave comments on the show entries about your experiences doing or seeing these shows. You can also look at all our past shows on AboutTheArtists.com -- the cool thing on this site is you can click on actor and staff names, and see all the shows they've done.

As I've written about in other posts, our work goes beyond just producing shows. It's important to us to engage our community in exploring the art form, especially now at this amazing moment in the evolution of the musical theatre. This blog is just one part of that. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you'll tell all your musical theatre friends about it. The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Am Flame and I Am Fire

I just saw an interview with Broadway actor Aaron Tveit (pronounced t'vate) about his new TV show.

The interviewer asked him about the differences between stage and screen, whether he was more fulfilled by one than by the other. His answer was that performing onstage gives an actor something he cannot get anywhere else – the energy and instant feedback of a live audience.

Theatre artists talk about energy a lot. I can only assume it sounds kind of vague, kind of abstract, kind of New Agey, to most "civilians." So what does it mean?

Well, I'll start by saying you can't really understand what it is unless you experience it. It's really unlike any other human experience. But I'll try to explain it anyway.

Humans have evolved to have specialized sensitivity to other humans. We learn from birth to "read" people. We recognize emotion in facial expressions, we sense tension or distress, we feel connection or hostility, we notice the tiniest changes in facial features, posture, body language. And we do it all without realizing consciously we're doing it. Because of all that, acting on film and in small theatres can be really subtle. I often tell our actors that they don't have to show us that the character is sad; they just have to feel sad, and we'll read it on their faces. Not only is the audience naturally good at that, but that's literally why they're here – that's a huge part of being in the audience. And the actors can feel that engagement from across the footlights.

(A fun side note... I've noticed that some people do in real life what bad actors do onstage, "showing" us with their facial expressions what they think or feel – or what they want us to believe they think or feel –  literally performing those facial expressions in normal conversation. I've found that some people who've had abusive or otherwise fucked up childhoods almost always have their eyebrows raised, probably because that feels innocent or nonthreatening. But just as it is onstage, most of us recognize that kind of performance in the real world as phony, even if only on a gut level. Even though what they're saying may be sincere, we still register the phoniness of the performance.)

That said, an audience is even more actively engaged when it's theatre of imagination, when the show is asking the audience to fill in location, detail, walls – like Shakespeare did at the Globe, and like New Line does with most of our shows. Because of the kind of work we do, Many of our shows were written that way. And you can actually see that more active engagement in people's physicality. Often in our more intense shows, I notice a lot of the audience physically leaning forward in their seats. They are engaged. And the actors can feel that.

The result is that the collaboration among writers, director, actors, musicians, and designers expands to also include the audience. The audience participates in the storytelling. There's an old theatre cliche, that "without an audience, it's just rehearsal." But it's true. Art is communication, and you can't communicate with yourself. Theatre isn't theatre without an audience. To paraphrase Mr. Shorofsky in Fame, that's not theatre, that's masturbation. A show doesn't exist on the page – that's just its blueprint – and it doesn't exist without an audience. Theatre is live actors (and musicians) telling a story to a live audience. Or maybe that should be "telling a story with a live audience."

Director-producer Gregory Mosher says, "I have great faith in audiences. We only create problems when we treat them as customers instead of collaborators in an artistic process. . . We can let audiences down in all kinds of ways: by being dishonest with them, by betraying our own intentions and, therefore, betraying the audience's trust. All they ask the artists to do is what the artists want to do. Audiences say, 'I want to see what you want to show me.' "

Even beyond all this, there's a concrete, physical part, particularly in a small theatre like ours. Actors expend an incredible amount of energy – and therefore, heat – when they're onstage, far more than you'd think. That's why so many of them sweat so badly. Even standing still takes energy onstage – it's not the same as standing still in real life. Even when a character is at ease, the actor is holding themselves, controlling every muscle of their body. (Which is why I recommend that all actors take dance classes.) Actors can literally feel the heat coming off of each other, they can smell the sweat, they can feel the muscle tension when they touch.

And in a small theatre, the audience connects into that almost as powerfully as the actors do. And the actors can feel that. Every once in a while, we get a disconnected audience, and it really throws the actors, because one of their scene partners isn't holding up their end.

This is Reason #235 why live theatre will never die. Despite cable and Netflix and Hulu and iPads – or maybe because of all that – audiences will always crave the connection that comes only from live performance.

And while I'm on the subject, also live musicians...!

Live theatre isn't live theatre if all elements of it are not live. Companies that use recorded "tracks" instead of a live band are robbing the audience of part of that amazing energy that defines live theatre, that makes live theatre better than a movie or a CD. All that interaction I describe above also happens between the actors and musicians, and between the band and the audience. I recently declared (half-joking, but only half) that a theatre company producing a musical with recorded music is like selling tickets to Hamlet and then when the audience arrives, you roll in a TV and play them a video of Hamlet. It's sort of the same thing, but it's not what they paid for...

New Line has never and will never produce a show with recorded music. That's a line we won't cross.

And since I'm on a roll here... I also have no patience for giant video walls behind live performances. I hate that the Muny has installed one. Do they think audiences are no longer capable of imagining time and place? We are. Do they want their audiences entirely passive? Theatre should be live, not mostly live. I love all things high-tech, but not my theatre, not the one thing that is literally defined by its humanity. A video wall is a tool we don't need to tell our stories.

And the truth is, as much as the Muny holds a special place in my heart, I'll grant you that much of what makes live theatre wonderful gets lost in the 4,500-seat Fox or the 11,000-seat Muny, unless you're really close. No disrespect intended, but if you need binoculars, you're not connecting with the actors in any meaningful way. We accept this, because we can only see most big shows and Broadway tours in gigantic houses. But it's not the way theatre was meant to be. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre sat only about 1,500. New Line's current space seats 210, with only seven rows. Which we love.

The tours have to play those huge houses because theatre (particularly musical theatre) is really expensive to produce, because there is no economy of scale. There is no mass production. (Although Cameron Mackintosh has tried his best.) It is entirely, gloriously, fundamentally, and often irritatingly human and unreproducible. It is about the liveness of human existence. It cannot be mass-produced or mechanized without losing its soul.

Designer Robert Edmond Jones wrote in his brilliant book, The Dramatic Imagination, "The only theatre worth saving, the only theatre worth having, is a theatre motion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in eliminating from it every trace of the photographic attitude of mind, when we succeed in making a production that is the exact antithesis of a motion picture, a production that is everything a motion picture is not and nothing a motion picture is, the old lost magic will return once more. The realistic theatre, we may remember, is less than a hundred years old. But the theatre – great theatre, world theatre – is far older than that, so many centuries older that by comparison it makes our little candid-camera theatre seem like something that was thought up only the day before yesterday."

Amen, brother. Let's keep it live.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

The Dark I Know So Well

"Sometimes, audiences just want to escape."

Bullshit.

Let me expand on that...

I hear that so often, and I know a lot of theatre people believe it. But don't you be fooled. It's not true. The exact opposite is true. People want to connect. Escape is disconnection. People want to be reassured, even if only on a subconscious level, that they are not alone. That all their fears and insecurities and secrets are pretty much like everybody else's. That they're only freaks in the sense that everybody is a freak (which is the main reason Shrek has been so successful.)

I read not along ago about some university study in which most of the subjects said they think they're much worse people than anybody knows, and if their friends and family were to find out how bad they really are, they'd lose them all. That's fascinating to me. It makes me think of High Fidelity. One of its central points is that we all do horrible things to each other sometimes, even to those we love. Human relationships are very complex and human beings are fundamentally irrational, so how could the outcome be anything but messy and painful?

Not because we suck as human beings, but because it's really hard.

I like to think of Company and High Fidelity as companion pieces, about the struggle for human connection in a particular cultural zeitgeist. Why do our audiences respond so powerfully to these shows? (High Fidelity was one of New Line's all-time top sellers.) Because we all know firsthand about the complexities of relationships and our own shortcomings. We've all fucked up a relationship in one way or another. We've all been misunderstood. We've all done terrible things to people we care about. When we listen to Rob Gordon in High Fidelity tell us the ugly story of his and Laura's breakup, he becomes a Christ figure for us -- he takes on our sins -- and in the end, he is forgiven for those sins, and we are reminded that we can be forgiven for our sins too.

The same is true in Two Gentlemen of Verona -- if an asshole like Proteus can be forgiven, than anyone can be forgiven, right...? But in High Fidelity, we are also reminded that we are all "sinners," that this is something everyone in this room shares. As Rob is about to tell the story of their breakup, he starts with this:

Okay, before we do this, I need you to do me a favor. Just take a minute and think about the top five worst things that you have done to your partner.
          (He waits.)
Don't dress things up or try to explain them, just live with them for a moment.
          (A beat.)
Especially if your partner doesn't know about them.

It forces us to recognize how like Rob we all are, and it unites us with him right before he tells us the worse thing he ever did to Laura. So while we hear his story, we've got a story of our own in our heads now. We can't judge him as harshly as we would have, because we're connected to him now in our shame. That's really great writing.

I often tell people the theatre is my church. I don't think they know how seriously I mean that. The stories of the theatre nourish us and nurture us in exactly the same way as the stories in the Bible do. Through those stories and the rituals of theatre, we connect with something beyond ourselves, something bigger than this. To quote Hair, "My body is walking in space. My soul is in orbit with God, face to face, floating, flipping, flying, tripping." Good theatre is a spiritual experience every bit as real as religion, for both audience and artist. And we each get from it what we need.

We watch Passing Strange and we're reminded that searching for your place in the world is the wrong search. The point is to find your Real, your truth, your road, and let the rest take care of itself. That's a good lesson. When we watch Bobby in Company fail time after time to connect, each one of us realizes on an unconscious level that if this smart, charming, clever guy can't find The One, maybe my failure to find The One isn't entirely my fault. And maybe coupling isn't for everyone...

More than anything, audiences want the truth -- human truth -- either truth they don't already know or truth they need to be reminded of.

I know what some of you are thinking -- how do I explain Thoroughly Modern Millie or American Pie or Full House? Aren't dumb comedies about escape, about turning your brain off?

I don't think so. Or at least, not always. I think that there are dumb comedies and there are dumb comedies. I look at which dumb comedies connect to their audiences and which fail. The ones that connect all have what I'm talking about, something in their storytelling that fills a need in the audience. Millie, like all romantic comedies, reassures us that anyone can be loved. I think a lot of people feel fundamentally unlovable (or at the very least, unloved), and romantic comedy demonstrates time after time that even the most unlikely of people, even the seemingly unlovable (like Rob Gordon) can -- will? -- be loved.

Anything Goes, A Little Night Music, and Cry-Baby are all a variation on that -- about overcoming a series of obstacles to de-couple from the wrong person and re-couple with the right person. How many of us can relate to that, whether we've actually done it or just wanted to? These three shows could all be called "escapist," but they are all three a combination of Hero Myth and love story, and they deliver everything those two forms bring with them, stuff we need. They tell us that even if we're with the wrong person, there's still hope. On the other hand, Phantom of the Opera is the same story, but without the happy ending, and that serves a purpose too, to reassure us that even if we don't find true love, it's probably not our fault.

Every good story -- and every popular story -- gives us something we need. People may think they're seeking escape when they see Star Wars, but they're actually entering an incredibly carefully wrought Hero Myth story, which is a metaphor for a human life. You may think you're watching Luke Skywalker but you're really watching you. And whether or not you consciously know it, that Hero Myth is feeding you emotionally and spiritually. The same way the Bible does. The same way Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat does.

American Pie does what Rocky Horror and I Love My Wife both do -- they all tell the truth about sex in America at a particular moment, about our Puritanical, uptight, often perverse fascination with, and deep-seated fear of, Sex. And even though these stories are about really specific cultural moments, they are also timeless because this is one of those areas in which America advances reeeeeally slowly. America is totally fucked up when it comes to sex, but we're also terrified to talk about it. So we talk about it through our stories. These stories remind us that all of us are clumsy and crazy and awkward and make terrible decisions when it comes to sex. By letting us laugh at (or be horrified by) the neurotic behavior of our avatars onstage, these stories give us some self-awareness of our own unintentional silliness and hopefully they mute our inner recriminations a bit.

In the case of Full House, all the stories are about connection, almost exactly like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Barney Miller, Friends, Hair, I Love My Wife, Sunday in the Park with George, Assassins, High Fidelity, Rent, and of course Into the Woods, where that subliminal message is made explicit in the song "No One is Alone." We all have families -- whether they are biological or created, social, professional, artistic -- and these stories are a reminder to cling to those support systems and be aware of how they nourish us -- and also what our responsibilities are to them.

As Sondheim writes, "Careful -- no one is alone."

Kids' cartoons do the same thing as these other stories. All the Bugs Bunny cartoons are about winning/surviving with wits rather than muscle. Daffy Duck cartoons are about being clumsy and making mistakes, as we all do every day. The Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoons tell us that there are real dangers in the world, but we can avoid or escape them if we're smart. Same with Road Runner and the Coyote.

Scooby-Doo offers us the same thing [title of show] and Into the Woods do -- the reminder that we can accomplish seemingly impossible things if we work together.

(I'll carve out one category here, the ironic, postmodern cartoons -- Bullwinkle, Beavis and Butthead, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, The Venture Brothers -- which are intentionally about nothing. They wink at what other cartoons offer us and then reject it -- which can be funny. But they're not really storytelling as much as hipster meta-jokes.)

We know that art reflects the culture in which it's made. But think about that word reflects. We literally see ourselves -- a reflection of ourselves -- in Rob Gordon and Diana Goodman and the Brady family. You don't go to a mirror to escape -- you go to see. There's a reason that Dot asks George in "Move On," to "Give us more to see."

Once you realize that almost all storytelling -- well, all good storytelling -- offers us something emotional and/or intellectual that we need, it's pretty easy to recognize what those things are when you look at a story. It's really obvious, when you look closely, that people don't seek escape. They seek connection, reassurance, inclusion in the human story. They seek reflection.

President Obama said in 2010, "Over the years, musicals have been at the forefront of our social consciousness, challenging stereotypes, shaping our opinions about race and religion, death and disease, power and politics." That's not escapism.

Maybe what people really mean when they say they want escape is that they want to move out of the concrete world for a while and into a world of metaphor which explains that concrete world. We watch Dexter and Breaking Bad, knowing that we too have our hidden dark sides. We want to see each week that Dexter is still safe and still loved, because if a serial killer can be safe and loved, then we must be okay, right...?

Like Dexter, both bare and Spring Awakening are emotional roller coasters, letting us explore our darkest emotions and fears and questions, but in a safe place, a darkened theatre, where we're just one of many and nothing real is at stake. These two musicals do for teenagers and adults what the original Grimm's Fairy Tales do for children, letting us work through our blackest nightmares and impulses, but in the privacy of our own minds, with no concrete consequences. Those who think New Line shouldn't produce shows with a lot of sexual content don't understand what storytelling does for us. These are emotional horror stories. And we need horror stories.

So think about all this when you're watching a movie or TV show, seeing a piece of theatre, or reading a novel. What and where is that connection we all seek from storytelling? You'll be surprised how easy it is to see it, once you start looking. The more we all understand storytelling, the better storytellers we'll all be.

We storytellers have an important job. Ben Kingsley has said about actors, "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."

Amen, Brother Ben.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

And You're Shining Like the Brightest Star

I often declare, here and elsewhere, that we're in the midst of a new Golden Age of American Musical Theatre. My experience so far has been that most people under 30 accept that as true, once they think about it for a second. Most people over 50 immediately resist the idea; the idea even angers some of them.

At first, I enjoyed making this declaration because it was sort of provocative -- even when I didn't say it outright, it was implied that a new Golden Age necessarily means that Rodgers & Hammerstein shows are now museum pieces. And I honestly think that's the case. Musical theatre is changing in substantial ways.

I've been living inside this art form since before I can remember; going back to my very earliest memories, the only music I listened to was Broadway shows. So I think I have a special perspective. I was born the year Cole Porter died and the last successful R&H-style show, Fiddler on the Roof, opened; I came of age as the concept musical and the rock musical came of age; and I started New Line and started writing my musical theatre books at the same time this new Golden Age began.

I'm very cuspy. I was born on the cusp between old-fashioned musical theatre and modern musical theatre. I was born on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation X. I was born on the cusp between the Age of Conformity and the Age of Irony. I was even born on the cusp between Aquarius and Pisces.

And I've been watching the revolution. No, I've been living the revolution.

New Line was founded right around the same time as this new Golden Age began, in the early/mid-1990s. There weren't all that many new works in our early seasons, other than shows I wrote (which saved us having to pay royalties). After all, our first season was several years before Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Songs for a New World, Floyd Collins, or Bat Boy would appear...

So a lot of our early work was about reinterpreting famous shows (like Camelot), making them more intimate, more serious, more subtextual, and in some cases, returning them to what they were in the beginning, before they became summer stock and high school favorites (like Pippin). Though it wasn't conscious, in retrospect it seems we were assessing the State of the Art, before we could move forward into the revolution.

There were a few exciting new works back then -- we did Assassins in 1994 (and 1998 and 2008) and The Ballad of Little Mikey in 1997. But it was Songs for a New World, which first opened in New York in 1995 and which we produced in 1998, that seemed to mark the beginning of a real renaissance in musical theatre writing and a new direction for New Line. Soon we were doing Floyd Collins, A New Brain, Bat Boy, Hedwig, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, Love Kills, The Wild Party, bare, Passing Strange, Next to Normal... you get the idea.

And today, I feel like the art form is stretching itself even more than it has before, maybe reaching its highest level yet. There are so many exciting and varied new shows right now -- Lizzie, Dogfight, American Idiot, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Murder Ballad, Hands on a Hardbody, Here Lies Love, Big Fish, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County... I don't think we've had a period this fertile and this eclectic since the late 60s and early 70s.

And the writing talent the art form has right now is unbelievable -- Bill Finn, Stephen Schwartz, Jason Robert Brown, Andrew Lippa, Tom Kitt, Amanda Green, Lin Manuel Miranda, Adam Guettel, Bobby Lopez, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Larry O'Keefe, Steve Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, as well as so many rock artists, who can see at last what an interesting and powerful art form ours can be, artists like Bono, Elton John, Cyndi Lauper, Randy Newman, Trey Anastasio, Adam Schlesinger, Billie Joe Armstrong, John Mellancamp, Tom Waits, Edie Brickell... and there are more...

It's exciting to watch evolution happen from the inside.

When I was a kid, Rodgers & Hammerstein were the norm, and I did love those scores. Even though Hammerstein was already dead by the time I was born, Rodgers was still writing. I wish I had been more aware of the Sondheim Revolution and the emergence of the concept musical. I didn't discover Company till I got to college in 1982. I was later horrified to find out that the original cast of Follies had done the show here at The Muny, right after they closed on Broadway (on their way to L.A., I think), and I missed it. Granted, I would have been only about seven or eight, but still...

I was more aware of the emergence of the rock musical in the 70s, as I discovered Grease, Godspell, JC Superstar, and Rocky Horror; and by the 80s, I was closely watching the musical theatre (which still meant essentially just Broadway), buying lots of cast albums, subscribing to Playbill, Show Music Magazine, and The Firesign Theatre Book Club (the best!), anything I could get my hands on about musicals. I watched the British Invasion happen in the 80s, and though I liked some of the mega-musicals, they just weren't the same to me. They weren't rowdy and muscular and ironic, the way I had grown to like my musicals. And the mega-musical's monstrous economics put the American musical into an artistic full-body cast for a while.

But then I got to see, up close and personal, the rebirth of the American musical in the 1990s. As New Line was taking its first steps and discovering its process, the art form was being reinvented by a bunch of fearless and wildly creative artists, who were taking from what had gone before and creating something entirely new, the neo musical comedy and the neo rock musical.

These new writers rejected the manipulative sentimentality of the mega-musicals, offering in its place a post-modern minimalism, irony, black comedy, self-awareness, politics, sexuality, authenticity, artistry, powerful emotions, and above all, muscle. And every one of these incredible musicals was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, everything from raw, visceral drama to outrageous "serious comedy." These were shows that demanded and deserved respect. And because many of then were genuinely revolutionary, they did not all run on Broadway. Some of them never even ran in New York. But the art form was finally outgrowing its commercial constraints. New York was no longer the only place to produce new musicals. Now there were other paths. From now on, Broadway would just be the commercial arm of the art form, no longer the art form itself. That was important. Freed from economics, musical theatre artists began taking risks like never before.

The result was work like Songs for a New World, a brilliant, adult, abstract musical that will probably never have a commercial run. And yet the show has been produced all over the country for years. It doesn't need Broadway to survive. Though I doubt Jason Robert Brown intended it, his show's title announced the coming revolution. Musical theatre would be a new world from that point forward.

And then Rent took us the next step. For the first time, a Broadway musical had teenage groupies! Young people liking a musical? Jonathan Larson didn't live to see it happen, but he did what he always intended, to meld Broadway musical tradition with contemporary content and musical language, into the neo rock musical.

(I realized recently that this revolution in the musical theatre began around the same time as the HBO Revolution in television that began what many are now calling a new Golden Age of television. What was it about the 1990s that seeded these two amazing artistic movements? I think the answer in both cases has to do with artistic freedom. The audacious Cop Rock (1990) was just a few years too early and was strangled in its infancy by network executives.)

In the early days of New Line, it was sometimes a challenge to find three shows to fill a season, that all really fit New Line's philosophy. But we soon found that kind of show in the experimental 1960s and 70s, and we produced Anyone Can Whistle, The Robber Bridegroom, Cabaret, Jacques Brel, Company, Hair, Man of La Mancha, Rocky Horror, etc. But today we're doing more new shows than ever before. There are actually too many outstanding, exciting, new shows for the number of slots we have in our season.

But hey, that's a good problem to have, right?

The musical theatre is on fire. And it shows no sign of slowing down. And New Line is part of that.

The real thrill for me is that I get to talk to -- and sometimes meet -- my real heroes, the writers. And now thanks to social media and YouTube, a lot of us get to hear from these artists. Because there's now a "theatre press" on the web, we get a better glimpse into the creation process than ever before. Fans and artists across the country are more connected than ever before. And so many young writers, directors, and actors are creating really interesting new musical theatre, all over America.

I've been saying this for five or six years now, but every year it's more true than the year before -- repeat after me: We are in a new Golden Age of the American musical theatre. It began in the mid-1990s and it's still evolving. Our art form has never been more vigorous or more adventurous, and there are young writers just now beginning to write for us, who are going to blow open the possibilities of musical theatre even wider than they already have been.
Just listen...

And fasten your seatbelt...

This is Scott Miller, reporting live from inside the Revolution...

Long live the Musical!
Scott

I Got the Musical Right Here

I'm a man on a mission.

From the very beginning, twenty-two years ago, New Line has been about more than just live stage performances. Our mission statement says New Line was founded to involve the people of the St. Louis region in the creation and exploration of provocative, politically and socially relevant works of musical theatre.

To involve people.

The "exploration" part of that includes our newsletter (in the early days), the St. Louis Theatre Discussion Group we created back in 1999, our full service website (online since 1997!), my analysis essays about individual shows, the New Line blogs, our very active Facebook page, our YouTube channel, the New Line Bookstore, etc. It is sometimes hard for funders and others to understand, but New Line works to promote our own shows, and also to promote our local musical theatre community, and the St. Louis theatre community at large, and to promote the art form itself, especially by calling attention to all the amazing new writers and new work we see every day.

We never stop working to demonstrate that ours is a vigorous and thriving art form at the peak of its powers. Like The Group Theatre and The Living Theatre, but unlike most other theatre companies today, New Line has a fully developed philosophy, an artistic and intellectual framework that surrounds and informs all the work we do.

One of the most important parts of New Line's work is bringing attention to really wonderful shows that are lesser known (and therefore less produced) or that were treated badly in New York (and therefore less produced), so that those shows can have further life in regional theatres and colleges. It's one of the greatest joys in my life that we've accomplished that with a number of shows, most of which probably would not have had further life without New Line.

Here are some shows we've produced that we think other companies and/or schools should really consider. If you run a company or theatre department, see what you think. If you know someone who does, pass this along to them. We New Liners all loved working on these shows so much, and we so want to share these experiences...

High Fidelity is an outstanding example of our art form today. This is a smart, funny, touching, insightful, and wholly original musical, that makes up entirely new rules for itself, rules which come directly from the content of the story. Following the Sondheim Rule, content dictates form here. Tom Kitt and Amanda Green use songs in this show like no other theatre score does. There's so much more here than people first thought. When it's treated with respect, like the bitter-sweet, coming-of-age story that it is, rather than the wacky musical comedy love story its clueless Broadway director thought it was, it can be powerful theatre that connects powerfully with its audience. We were the first company to produce the show after its aborted Broadway run, and since we produced it, a bunch of other companies around the country have now picked it up. We literally brought this wonderful show back from the dead. Truly one of the greatest experiences I've ever had in the theatre. I love this show so much. And just look at the reviews we got...!

Cry-Baby was such a wonderful surprise for us. After its quick death on Broadway, I assumed it was a mess and we'd never produce it. Both assumptions turned out to be stupid. What we discovered is that Cry-Baby is a brilliant and big-hearted social satire, with a brilliant and laugh-out-loud hilarious score, a show that captures the twisted world of John Waters even better than Hairspray did. Its Broadway production team thought it was nothing more than a vulgar sex joke; but we knew that John Waters' world is subversive and confrontational, but also ultimately moral and deeply human. Again, no one would touch this show after its embarrassing run on Broadway, but New Line proved its worth. The authors even created new orchestrations for us, for a six-piece rock band, which is what they had wanted all along. And now other companies are producing the show. Again, we brought this beautiful, funny musical back from the dead and we could not be more proud of that. It's a perfect example of the neo musical comedy, a show using the devices and conventions of old-school musical comedy but retooled and updated for our ironic, self-aware, complicated, 21st-century culture. This might not be a show a high school could get away with (okay, maybe a really progressive one), but colleges and regional theatres should really consider it. It's wildly entertaining and endlessly funny, but also substantial and insightful. We had so much fun working on this show. And once again, the reviews were overwhelming...

Return to the Forbidden Planet is maybe the strangest and one of the most wonderful shows New Line has produced, a crazy mashup of 1950s science fiction, actual rock and roll classics, real Shakespearean dialogue (from a dozen of his plays), and also fake Shakespearean dialogue ("fakespeare"), all based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and also on the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, which is based on The Tempest. It was originally produced more as a rock concert, but we staged it fully, like any other musical, and it works beautifully that way. It's hilarious, fast-paced, high-energy, wacky, and every once in a while, emotionally really powerful. For high school drama departments, this would be an awesome introduction to The Bard, and for colleges and regional theatres, you will not find a more unexpectedly delightful show anywhere -- to our great surprise, tickets sold like crazy and we got tons of repeat customers. Audiences and reviewers were thrilled by it...

bare is the best crafted pop opera I've yet encountered, Yes, in my opinion, better crafted than Miss Saigon, Les Miz, and waaaay better than Phantom. The artistry and skill behind this work are really impressive, and yet it speaks so powerfully in the voice of today's youth in this very adult world. It's the very personal story of five high school students and their various demons, but it's also the story of the collapse of our institutions in America, in this case, the church, the educational system, and the family. This is a story about how our society is failing our young people. It's smart, it's powerful, it's sexy (too sexy for high schools and a lot of colleges, I think), and it's also really darkly beautiful. It didn't work in New York because bare is a show that works only if it's completely authentic. Any bullshit in the acting, direction, or design sinks it. Don't even get me started on the abominable revival off Broadway recently. This is not a show that wants "professional polish." It wants balls. And make no mistake, though the central characters are teenagers, this is an adult show with very adult content. It works precisely because every adult in that audience was one of these five kids in high school, and we all know exactly what they're going through. This is serious, thought-provoking theatre. When we did this show, people traveled to see us from across the continent. It's just that good. And the press loved us as much as our audiences did. They could see that this was something different and important and honest.

Love Kills was one of those shows I felt a moral obligation to produce. It's such a strong, powerful piece of writing, with so much to say about our culture. It's so challenging for an audience, and I knew that this show would never be produced widely, so it was up to us. As we often say, "If not us, then who?" And what a ride it was. The songs are raw and visceral and so nakedly emotional, almost uncomfortably so. The lyrics are so utterly organic to the characters, and just suffused with subtext. And the script is a master class in minimalism. Like the greatest American dramatists, Kyle Jarrow has written a script in which almost everything important is under the surface, in which what isn't said is often even more important than what is said. I've never worked on a better musical drama in my life. It's a tough piece because it does not judge these young spree killers, and it takes us more up close and personal than we might prefer. After most of our performances, many in our audience just sat there. They were literally stunned by it. It's one of our shows I'm most proud of. And the reviews were almost all raves. I really hope this ballsy show can have further life. It deserves that.

Bat Boy is perfect. It's just that simple. It's the very definition of a neo musical comedy. It's an intelligent, outrageous, big-hearted, darkly satiric, roller coaster ride. I'll always remember one line from Judy Newmark's review -- “So weird. So smart. So shocking. So entertaining.” This show is every single thing I want from a piece of theatre, a wildly entertaining, fast-paced story, with an incredible, endlessly interesting pop/rock score, and the most unpredictable plot I've ever found in a musical. You never know where this crazy ride will suddenly turn left and take us down an entirely new road. And both times we've produced it, we got nothing but rave reviews and sold-out houses. I really don't understand why more companies don't produce it -- it's one of those rare shows that is an artistic triumph and also a sure commercial hit. The only thing that hampered its original off Broadway run was the drop in New York tourism after the 9/11 attacks, which forced a lot of good shows to close. If I have to pick just one show that's my favorite, it's either Bat Boy or High Fidelity, depending on when you ask...

Two Gentlemen of Verona is a rowdy, wild, awesome musical comedy that will always have a very special place in my heart. It's a free-wheeling, sexy, rock musical adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy. Originally composer Galt MacDermot (Hair) was supposed to just set a couple songs in the play to music, but by the time he was done, it was a full-blown musical. And goddamn, is it fun! Fast-paced, funny, outrageous, sexy, silly, aggressive, with a little socio-political commentary along the way, all set to a Latin rock beat. Again, this would be a wonderful learning experience for students, since much of Shakespeare's dialogue is still there. The original play is one of Shakespeare's earliest and messiest, but MacDermot and playwright John Guare did some plot repair work as they musicalized it, and it really works. Again, tickets sold like crazy for us, and both audiences and reviewers fell in love with it.

I Love My Wife is probably too adult for most colleges and most regional theatres, but it's so cool. It's a rapid-fire musical comedy about two married couples who've been friends for years, and who decide in the midst of the tumultuous 1970s that they should try having a sexual foursome. Surprisingly, considering the story, it's ultimately a very innocent show, but the climax of the show (you'll pardon the pun) does put all four of them in bed together trying various sexual positions. If you can get past the content, it's an incredibly clever, sophisticated piece of theatre, with some of the most acrobatic, most literate lyrics you'll ever hear (by the late, great Michael Stewart), equal in every way to Sondheim and Finn. And Cy Coleman's music is like no other score I've ever worked on. I guess I'd call it "club jazz." With two pianos and a small combo. I think it's Coleman's best score, and certainly his most jazz-influenced. And like Company, the songs are all very Brechtian, never arising out of the action, but interrupting and observing it instead. It feels like a sex comedy, but it's really a concept musical, a bookend to match Company. The show is very 1970s, and that may have made it feel dated in the 80s and 90s, but today it's become a fascinating period piece, a really insightful snapshot of the end of the Sexual Revolution, and a rare look at those who didn't actually want to revolt. As with all these other shows, both audiences and reviewers were so delighted to see this "lost gem." As always, "If not us, then who?"

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party is a genuine masterwork, very nearly a jazz opera. If you only know the cast recording, you only know about half the score. Of all the shows discussed here, this is the most adult, and it would definitely be too adult for most theatres. During the run we used to joke, "Sure, there are three sex scenes, but only two of them are rape." This is the darkest show I've ever worked on, a story about jealousy, betrayal, revenge, and sexual violence. Strangely, it's also incredibly entertaining, with six big dance numbers, and some (incredibly dark) laughs. There's very little dialogue and almost continuous music. If there was ever a source novel that needed to be adapted for the musical stage, this is it, but very few companies will be able to produce it. If you can, you should. It's a wild, amazing ride. We were all so proud of our work on this show. Audiences and reviewers were both shocked and delighted by this fearless roller coaster of a musical.

Evita -- I know, I know, since when is Evita a lesser known show? Well, it isn't produced very often, and New Line's Evita wasn't exactly the Evita you might know. I had seen the original production on Broadway, but a few years ago, I heard the original studio recording, which is way more rock and roll. And way less cold. After listening to that recording for a while, I realized that while I liked the Broadway Evita a lot, I LOVE the original rock and roll Evita. I also realized that this isn't a story about an ice-cold superbitch. It's a love story -- ironic and complex, sure, but a love story -- about Eva and Juan, and about Eva and her people. The more I read about the real Eva, the more I saw how exactly right Tim Rice had gotten her, and how wrong Patti LuPone had gotten her. So with a smaller cast, a rock band, and rock singers as Che and Eva, we brought the show back to its roots. And our audiences and reviewers went crazy for it. People were thrilled by it, telling us they felt like they had never really seen the show until now. I even got an encouraging comment on one of my blog posts from Tim Rice himself. I really encourage people to let go of what they think they know about Evita (especially that awful, shallow revival) and come at it fresh. You'll be amazed how different it is and how contemporary it feels.

The Robber Bridegroom* is yet another show like no other. It's a wild and rowdy bluegrass sex comedy, folk tale, and sly commentary on sex in American culture. It's really funny, really provocative, and really insightful. As an example, the Act I finale, "Love Stolen," is the hero's moment to explain to us that he doesn't like his sex consensual. In the heroine's song "Nothin' Up," she laments that there are no men in the woods to force themselves upon her. When the Bandit of the Woods steals all of Rosamund's clothes, she doesn't run away; she does her best to seduce him, fully naked. The score's most beautiful song is "Deeper in the Woods," more loaded with sexual imagery than any other song I've ever heard -- but also gorgeous and haunting. Set in the 1790s, this is a crazy, amoral world that questions and challenges everything we've been taught about sex and love. But it's also about the joy of storytelling. It's such a wonderful show -- though definitely for adult audiences only -- and as with these other shows, our audiences and reviewers ate it up, sexual subversion and all.

The Cradle Will Rock is powerful theatre and one my favorite shows ever. Its creator Marc Blitzstein described it as “a labor opera composed in a style that falls somewhere between realism, romance, vaudeville, comic strip, Gilbert & Sullivan, Brecht, and agitprop.” Like Robber Bridegroom, it's very, very funny stuff, but with an incredibly dark edge -- this is serious, muscular, sometimes even angry, comedy. It's an amazing snapshot of a moment in time, the late 1930s, still in the Depression, and right at the moment when the American labor movement was exploding into action. This is nowhere near conventional musical theatre, but it's really exciting theatre, and our audiences and the reviewers utterly embraced it. On Cradle's opening night in 1937, the government shut the show down for its subversive content, so the entire production moved to another theatre, bringing the audience with them twenty-one blocks uptown. And for complicated reasons, the union actors were not allowed to appear onstage, so most of the cast performed the show from the audience. We recreated that experience when we produced the show in 2001.

A New Brain is an expressionistic masterwork. It's not traditionally linear in its storytelling, and it asks a great deal of an audience. Most of the show is spent inside Gordon's head, so it's very stream-of-consciousness. It's one of those shows that asks the audience to just go for the ride, without having to understand every moment. It's a series of snapshots that the audience assembles to form a larger picture. It's also William Finn's best work so far. I love Falsettos and Spelling Bee, but New Brain is his masterwork. It's a very challenging piece -- a genuinely experimental musical -- but it's so very worth it. Some of the audiences and reviewers loved this show, but some were really put off by the non-linear structure and they just couldn't surrender to the show's agenda. Still, it's one of the most beautiful, most emotional shows I've ever worked on. We will come back to A New Brain someday...

Bukowsical is so adult, so vulgar, so defiant, it makes these other shows look like Dames at Sea. Okay, I exaggerate. A little. It's absolutely the most R-rated show we've ever worked on -- not in terms of simulated sex (though there's some of that), but in terms of language, definitely the most vulgar you'll ever hear on the musical stage. But it's not a show that shocks its audience just for the hell of it. Bukowsical is another neo musical comedy that tells the story (fairly accurately) of the great American writer Charles Bukowski's extremely dark and damaged life and career. It's insanely funny, really fucking smart, and surely one of the most original pieces we've ever produced -- and we've produced a lot of really original work. The reviewers loved it, though it sold only moderately well, and it really freaked some people out. Still, if you've got a smart, fearless audience, it's an evening of musical theatre like no other.

Songs for a New World just may be the show that started this new Golden Age of American musical theatre, and it also was the New York debut for one of the great contemporary artists of our art form, Jason Robert Brown. This is an abstract musical, built not on story but on theme -- the "Do or Die" moments that we all face, over and over, throughout our lives. The music and lyrics are exceptional, the characters are complicated and real, and the emotions are powerful. When we produced the show in 1998, we realized that though each of the four actors plays multiple characters, each actor still has an emotional arc over the course of the show. It's a remarkable debut for a remarkable writer and composer. Truly one of the landmarks of the form. But if you produce this show, don't be fooled into thinking it's a revue of disconnected songs -- it's so much more than that. Our audiences loved this show, but several of the reviewers were baffled by it, perhaps because it was 1998 and New Line was quite a bit ahead of the mainstream of musical theatre back then. Today, the art form has caught up with us.

If I had the energy, I'd keep going, with Assassins, Jacques Brel, Hair, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and lots of other shows. I would have included the brilliant Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson on my list, but to my great delight, a lot of companies across the country are producing it already. In fact, I'd recommend 90% of the shows New Line has produced over the last twenty-two seasons. If you wanna read more about these shows, I've written chapters about many of them in my six books, which you can find on my Amazon author's page.

New Line is the proof, if you needed it, that audiences don't only like what they know, that audiences crave a great adventure when they go to the theatre, that audiences love seeing exciting new work as long as it's good, and that most audiences couldn't give a rat's ass about Rodgers & Hammerstein. Twenty-two seasons of proof, going on twenty-three...

But don't just take my word for it -- see for yourself. Produce these shows! 

The adventure Crusade continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

* I add this note in 2019 -- it's hard to justify Robber Bridegroom anymore, in the #MeToo era. As rich and interesting as it is, it's a musical comedy about rape, and it should probably be retired...

Simple

I was watching one of the videos on our YouTube channel the other day, a song called "Simple."

Way back in 2001, New Line Theatre produced Stephen Sondheim's flawed but awesome 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle. It's a show with a lot of problems, but that's not necessarily a disqualifier for us. If a show is significantly more interesting than it is flawed, we'll consider it. After all, we also produced The Nervous Set, probably the the most flawed show we've done, but also a really interesting one.

The basic story of Anyone Can Whistle, if you don't know it, is pretty crazy. We're in a town that has gone bankrupt because its only industry is manufacturing something that never wears out. In order to revive her town, the corrupt Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper and her town council fake a miracle -- water flowing from a rock -- to attract tourists. When patients at the local mental hospital, the Cookie Jar, escape and mix with the townspeople and pilgrims, chaos and hilarity ensue. Somehow, Sondheim and bookwriter Arthur Laurents also managed to shoehorn a love story in as well (their biggest mistake, I think), between J. Bowden Hapgood, a psychiatrist who nobody knows is actually a new patient, and Fay Apple, a nurse at the Cookie Jar who disguises herself as a miracle verifier sent from Lourdes -- and we find out Fay can only make love when she's in costume. Okay. Can they save the town? Will anyone care?

Whistle was not just breaking the rules of traditional musical comedy, it was thumbing its nose at them -- and, unfortunately, also at its audience. I think today's audiences would accept it much more willingly, though maybe still not on Broadway (we saw the fate of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson). This was a neo musical comedy, decades before anyone was ready for it.

But as I said, the love story still needs to go. In 1964, everyone thought a musical had to have a love story. Now we know better.

In addition to the outrageous subject matter and razor sharp political satire, the three-act show also included a ground-breaking, eighteen-minute integrated musical sequence, ironically called "Simple," that ended the first act, in which Hapgood is tasked at figuring out who in the line of pilgrims is sane and insane. We figure out pretty quickly that he has no intention of actually doing that. Hapgood isn't the preserver of order; he's an agent of chaos. My favorite.

Here is New Line's 2001 cast performing "Simple." Make sure you watch all the way to the end...

It's not so hard to imagine an audience in 2013 accepting this, even loving it. But in 1964, audiences weren't used to being so directly challenged in this way. Today, this scene and much of the show would sit comfortably next to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Spring Awakening, Bat Boy, Urinetown, American Idiot, and even Sondheim's much later show Assassins.

Part of what's so unusual about this scene -- and the show -- is that it's absurdist. The song plays very much like Ionesco's iconic absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros, but with a pronounced self-aware, meta-layer that gives everything a sly, smartass hint of irony. Just think about the song's title, after watching that crazy, eighteen-minute number. This song is anything but simple, and its content is anything but simple. And Hapgood's straight-faced promises that all this (race, politics, the Sexual Revolution) is simple, even as he demonstrates that it's not, makes it all even funnier. At the same time, 1964 audiences would probably have a cynical distrust of psychiatry, and this song subliminally confirmed their assumptions that it was all bullshit. Though the title is a joke, it's also got layers of meaning. Surely this is Broadway's most ironic song title ever.

... at least until "A Call from the Vatican."

Very few musicals have ever been absurdist. The only other exceptions I can think of are Promenade, Urinetown, Bukowsical, and my own musical, Johnny Appleweed. Because absurdism is such an intellectual form and musical theatre is such an emotional form, they don't usually fit together very well. So Whistle and the shows I just mentioned all have essentially unemotional scores. Music is used differently here, not for emotional texture. Whistle tries to "fix" that with its love story and some gorgeous Sondheim ballads, but in the end, we just get a Frankenstein's monster, neither emotionally fulfilling or intellectually coherent. The same might have been true of Cabaret, two years later, but that show found a way to better integrate its disparate parts, and the recent revivals have solved that problem even more fully.

Another part of what's so groundbreaking about "Simple" is its length and structure. It's a full scene, created back in 1964 when musical scenes were almost all Rodgers & Hammerstein love songs, almost always between the two leads. (Remember, this is also the year Fiddler on the Roof, the last of the R&H-style hits, opened.) "Simple" is something fundamentally different. Not only does the scene move the action forward in a big way, and tackle some Really Big Ideas (racism, gender roles, psychiatry, war, taxation, you name it), but it also uses music to a degree that few scores do. A big part of the comedy here comes from the music itself.

As groundbreaking as it was, its influence was minimal at the time because the show was such a flop. But we have learned its lessons today, and you can see scenes just like this -- and every bit as good -- in Bat Boy, A New Brain, Urinetown, Rent, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, Next to Normal, Lippa's Wild Party, and all throughout bare. Part of the reason we've learned all this is because Sondheim kept working at these ideas, and continued to explore them in Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park, and Passion. And other artists did too, in shows like Grand Hotel and Dreamgirls.

Here's another New Line clip, the act one finale of Cry-Baby, an arguable companion piece to "Simple," the hilarious but subtextually very serious (and very political) "You Can't Beat the System."

The writers accomplish so much storytelling in this scene, along with some foreshadowing, some killer jokes, a great plot cliffhanger, and a whole shitload of social satire.

And here's "You Don't Know" and "I Am the One" from New Line's Next to Normal. This is a more serious scene than "Simple," but notice how fully realized this storytelling is. Like "Simple," there's so much going on here. This isn't two lovers shyly working up to saying I love you; this is much more complicated. This is about parallels, relationships, textual and musical themes, foreshadowing, revelations, choices. This scene is a descendant of R&H but by way of Sondheim.

Can anyone doubt that we're in a new Golden Age of American musical theatre?

I don't think so.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

I love Shakespeare. I've read all the plays and seen most of them live or on video. I don't love every play he wrote -- I don't think King Lear really works unless you cut the shit out of it, and honestly, I never gave a shit what happened to that nasty old coot anyway -- but I love most of them.

Partly (I think) because so many of the conventions and devices of American musical theatre come from Shakespeare. I was lucky that my early encounters with Will were all cool ones, so it was easy to learn to love his work. And the more I've learned about and studied musical theatre, the more I can see the links. The soliloquy, the "interior monologue," was one of Shakespeare's favorite tools, and it's also a mainstay of musical theatre. Virtually every musical includes at least one song (often more than that) in which a character literally just tells us what he thinks and feels, usually just standing downstage and singing directly to us. Some directors try to concoct "naturalistic" staging -- usually in the form of wandering around the stage -- that tries to make a soliloquy seem natural.

But it's not.

It's a very artificial storytelling device. Shakespeare and musical theatre happily admit that. Rodgers and Hammerstein couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge it, so desperate they were to create naturalistic musical theatre.

Which is like trying to create a politician without an ego.

Of course, the most obvious similarity between Shakespeare plays and musicals is verse -- heightened, compressed, often rhymed language, often full of alliteration, metaphor, symbolism, and loaded with subtext. It's a very dense kind of storytelling, but audiences have lots of practice taking it in. Read out loud the lyric of & Sondheim's song "Now" from A Little Night Music, and you'll see what I mean. It sounds so much like a Shakespearean soliloquy...

Maybe the most important, most fundamental thing Shakespeare and musical theatre (and Brecht) share is that they don't really care all that much about the venerated "willing suspension of disbelief." They constantly remind their audiences that This Isn't Real. Almost all films and many plays without music try to convince the audience what they're seeing is real, but we all know it's not, right? Why try to hide the act of storytelling? This is the only time in human history we've felt like we have to hide our storytelling. It's so dishonest.

Shakespeare and musicals aren't afraid of artifice, or of asking the audience's participation in the act of storytelling. No audience at a good Shakespeare play or a good musical is passive. Just look at the beginning of Henry V, when the Chorus asks the audience to supply the sets and locations... Or the opening of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, when the actors ask the audience to place Jackson and the politics of 1824 in the present cultural zeitgeist, and to process the dissonance that creates...

Even when Will doesn't use actual music in his plays (though he does that a lot), his language is inherently musical, some of it like jazz, some of it like a bawdy folk song, some of it like an aria. I've found that a lot of musical theatre actors tend to do Shakespeare particularly well, once they realize that doing Shakespeare is a lot like doing a musical.

There have been lots of bad musicals based on Shakespeare plays (Swingin' the Dream, Music Is, Rockabye Hamlet, All Shook Up), and a few decent ones (Kiss Me, Kate, Your Own Thing, The Donkey Show), but there are some great ones too, like the landmark West Side Story, the totally awesome Bomb-itty of Errors, and the dated but fun and tuneful Boys from Syracuse. And a new musical version of Love's Labour's Lost opened in July 2013 at the Public Theatre in New York, written by the Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson team.

And then there are the three "Shakespearean" musicals New Line has produced, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and bare...

Return to the Forbidden Planet is a wacky but insightful mashup of 1950s sci-fi, classic rock and roll, and Shakespeare's final masterpiece The Tempest -- as well as bits of dialogue from a dozen other Shakespeare plays. In fact, since directing and studying this show, now almost every time I see a Shakespeare play, I hear quotes from Forbidden Planet. Which I love. The plot comes from both The Tempest and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (the first big-budget studio sci-fi movie), which is loosely based on The Tempest. The show's score is all actual rock and roll songs, like "Good Vibrations," "Tell Her," "She's Not There," "Great Balls of Fire," "Teenager in Love," and lots of others. Part of what's such fun about this show is how well the songs are integrated into the story; this is a big step above Mamma Mia! The show's dialogue is a crazy but surprisingly coherent mix of actual Shakespearean dialogue from a whole bunch of different plays (a lot of King Lear and Julius Caesar), plus a little bit of faux Shakespeare written by the show's creator Bob Carlton. (We dubbed it "fake-speare.") It's a smart, funny, original, well-crafted, and occasionally very emotional show, written by someone who clearly knows and loves Shakespeare. And it's a hell of a ride for the audience.

Two Gentlemen of Verona is a 1971 rock musical adaptation of the Shakespeare play, with music by Galt MacDermot (Hair). Originally, the idea was just to set a song that's already in the play ("Who Is Syliva?"), but it ended up being a full-blown musical, along the way editing the script down and eliminating the more awkward plot elements (it was one of Will's first plays, after all). Again, it's a wild, wonderful ride, full of crazy comedy, great songs, real human insight, and some complicated moral questions...

bare, the pop opera, is not really an adaptation of Shakespeare, but like other stories have done before, bare uses Romeo and Juliet as a plot device and as a parallel to the primary plot, this time though, making the central romance a gay story, but keeping the lovers' age consistent with the play. Composer Damon Intrabartolo sets several scenes from R&J in a musical style I call Elizabethan pop. It would be easy to fall into cliche using this most famous Shakespeare play in this way, but bare avoids that trap, partly because it's just so original, and partly because even though the primary plot is related to Romeo and Juliet, the two stories aren't directly parallel -- and the divergences between them allows bare to keep the audience guessing.

It was so cool working on all three of these shows, and I wonder now if I'd want to direct an actual Shakespeare play sometime. I think I might...

My early experiences with Shakespeare were all great. I saw my first Shakespeare play in high school, when we went to see a mind-blowing Richard III at the Rep -- it was so rowdy and violent and nasty and funny! I immediately fell in love with The Bard. Then in college, I took a year-long Shakespeare course under one of America's great Shakespearean scholars, Marjorie Garber. She really taught me to love these plays, how to catch all the dirty jokes and puns, and how to see inside these amazing works. About that same time, I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream on cable, a 1981 production by the New York Shakespeare Festival (unfortunately never released on video), directed by Jim Lapine, choreographed by Graciele Daniele, and starring William Hurt as Oberon and Christine Baranski as Helena. And once again, it blew my mind -- it was so high-energy, so crazy and chaotic, so sexy, so utterly hilarious -- everything I knew Shakespeare ought to be. I still have this production on video and I watch it about once a year. Pure genius.

There are two many productions of Shakespeare that are bland, timid, boring, safe, and all-round clueless. And when people see these productions, they conclude they must not like Shakespeare. But they're wrong. They just don't like bad theatre.

There are a few clips from Lapine's Midsummer on YouTube:

Later on, I saw the incredible documentary Looking for Richard, in which Al Pacino explores Richard III, with help from people like Kevin Kline, John Gielgud, Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, Vanessa Redgrave, and lots of other amazing theatre people. This is one my favorite movies ever and I watch it frequently.

Thanks to Netflix and Amazon, we can now see Kevin Kline's Hamlet, Ian Holm's King Lear, Patrick Stewart's Macbeth, and so much more. In the last few years, I've also discovered some wonderful Shakespeare documentaries. The outstanding four-part biographical documentary In Search of Shakespeare is so much fun, not only learning about Will, but seeing how his life and times influenced his work, and seeing actual places where he lived, worked, and played. Shakespeare Uncovered is a very cool series of one-hour episodes exploring one Shakespeare play at a time (sort of like Looking for Richard), with people like Trevor Nunn, Jeremy Irons, Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and Derek Jacobi. And Playing Shakespeare lets us sit in on nine intensive acting workshops with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with actors like Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen.

For anybody who's hesitant to jump into the world of Shakespeare, let me recommend an excellent book, The Friendly Shakespeare, a really clever, accessible, and insightful survey of the whole canon. And there's a cool series of books called No Fear Shakespeare, with the original text on the left side and a contemporary translation on the right side. It makes it easy to look up any difficult passages, and to get a clearer sense of more complicated or more poetic scenes. When we worked on Forbidden Planet, we kept a copy of the No Fear edition of The Tempest at rehearsals, and it came in handy.

I always feel bad when musical theatre artists tell me they don't like Shakespeare. I always assume it's because either they haven't seen a Shakespeare play, or they've only seen clueless, bland, and/or boring productions. I mean, how could someone not love Shakespeare?

But I also feel bad because not enough of us working in the musical theatre today know how much we can learn from Shakespeare and his plays. American musical comedy, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the rock musical, pop opera -- all of it stands on Shakespeare's shoulders, and we don't really understand our art form until we understand his work.

I always tell young musical theatre actors they should take dance classes, but I also tell them they need to see and read some Willy Shakes...

Brush up your Shakespeare,
And they'll all kow-tow...

Long Live the Musical! And The Bard!
Scott